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Our Centenary of Women’s Suffrage

The Electoral Process and Women’s Suffrage

The granting of women’s suffrage was one of a number of significant changes to the electoral process made prior to the 1903 election. From the 1890s through to the 1920s, there were many major changes to the operation of electoral systems in Australia. The Commonwealth Franchise Act (1902) not only granted Australian women the right to vote and stand in election, it also required voters to be British subjects,* over 21, and cemented the idea of ‘one adult one vote’. The Commonwealth Electoral Act (1902) established the machinery and requirements for Federal Elections, including laws in regard to postal and plural voting. These changes form the basis of the institutional context for women’s suffrage in Australia. In many cases, such as plural and postal voting, these changes were linked to the development of women’s suffrage.

Before the 1903 election, new federal electoral rolls had to be created and then checked by electors to ensure their names were on the list. The Electoral Act specified that all persons qualified to vote were entitled to have their name placed on the Electoral Roll for the Division in which they lived, but not on more than one Roll. Voting more than once was declared an electoral offence punishable by a ‘penalty not exceeding Fifty pounds [sic], or imprisonment not exceeding three months’.

Prior to either of these Acts, the Australian Constitution (1901) included a ban on plural voting, replacing it with ‘one man, one vote’. Up until the 1890s, with the exception of South Australia, plural voting was allowed for men who owned property in more than one electorate. South Australia had led the way, enjoying manhood suffrage and also one man one vote since 1856. The state’s 1894 bill for women’s suffrage gained full support from trade unions, the United Trades and Labour Council and the United Labour Party once the property limitations of earlier female suffrage measures was removed.1 Support from the labour movement was denied to suffragists in other states because of their own campaign to abolish plural voting.

*Australian Citizenship was not established until 1948. In Australian colonies, a British subject was a person born in any part of the British Empire or who had been naturalised. 2

Plural voting was a contentious issue in the 1890s: Alexander Forrest was reputedly entitled to vote in almost all of the forty four electorates of the Western Australian Legislative Assembly in 1899. 3

The provision of postal voting was another change which had a particular connection with women’s suffrage. The Constitution (Female Suffrage) Act 1895 (SA)** which gave women the vote in South Australia had a more generous provision for absent voting by women than by men; women could get an automatic postal vote if they were more than three miles from the nearest polling booth or if they felt that the state of their health prevented them from voting on the day. Postal voting had been introduced in South Australia in 1890 and Victoria in 1899.

(**While this bill granting women the right to vote and stand for election was passed by the South Australian parliament in 1894, the bill could only be enacted with Royal Assent, which was given by Queen Victoria in 1985.)

The basis for the allowance of postal votes was the capacity to attend polling booths, and it has been argued that postal voting was largely devised in order to facilitate women’s voting.4 Under the Commonwealth Electoral Act, postal votes were granted to any person more than five miles from a polling place on the day of voting, or for any elector ‘who being a woman believes that she will on account of ill-health be unable on polling day to attend the polling place to vote’. ‘Ill-health’ in this instance is a veiled reference to pregnancy, as distinct from the more general ‘serious illness or infirmity’ which is given as the third justification for a postal vote application. As the reference to ill-health is unclear – given that it could refer to a range of ‘women’s problems’ – it created difficulties for the evaluation of the system. The Select Committee on Electoral Act Administration was set up in 1904 to investigate and report on the manner in which the 1903 election was conducted.

The committee revealed considerable concern over the abuse of the postal voting system. Evidence was given by William Maloney that ‘80 per cent of postal ballot papers issued to women were unjustly obtained, inasmuch as the applicants were not ill in the sense of being enceinte [pregnant]’. The committee responded by asking: ‘It was understood that when women applied for a postal vote they were in that condition?’ ‘I do not want to say that.’ The officer was further questioned thus:‘It seems that the Act gives a wider scope for the use of the postal ballot papers than you allow?’ He replied: ‘It gives far too wide a scope for their use.’

The administrative problems caused by the lack of clarity regarding the meaning of the second clause reveals some of the assumptions about women’s character and the‘age-old identification of voting and polling day as rough, male occasions attended only by loose women’. 5 Unease about postal voting also related to broader anxieties over the effects of women’s suffrage.

Prior to the 1903 election there was much debate about the character of women voters, specifically the degree to which they might affect the existing political and social relationships. The cartoons of the period demonstrate these anxieties acutely; women were either characterised as fanciful, dim-witted voters, or as fierce quasi-masculine figures finally able to ‘wear the pants’ as signified by The Bulletin’s ‘breeches’ sketches. That the female voter was lampooned as rough and brutish is particularly interesting given the concern about the polling booth as a masculine place that was too rough for woman’s delicate sensibilities. As the Sydney Morning Herald reported, however, the women who turned out to vote on 16 December 1903 cast a welcome and civilising glow over the proceedings:

‘As a rule, the woman voter rose to the occasion, and set an example to many of the stronger sex by the smart and business-like way in which she did what was necessary, and gave way for the next comer. As one returning officer said:- “To my surprise, they proved quiet and business-like electors.” Even the most bitter and uncompromising and inflexible opponent of womanhood suffrage, had he visited some of the booths yesterday, would have had to admit that the advent of the woman voter had lent something of picturesqueness to the aforetime sombre and depressing process of vote-recording.’ 17 December 1903

  1. Magarey, S 1994, in Suffrage and Beyond: International Feminist Perspectives, C Daley and M Nolan (eds), Auckland University Press, Auckland, pp. 70-71, State Library of South Australia 2001, State Library of South Australia, Adelaide, viewed 29 May 2003, www.slsa.sa.gov.au/women_and_politics/sa3.htm. pp. 70-1.
  2. Australian Electoral Commission 2002, Australian Electoral Commission, Canberra, viewed 29 May 2003, http://www.aec.gov.au/_content/how/education/fact_sheets/fact3.pdf.
  3. Trinca, M 1997, ‘Launching the Ship: A Constitutional History of Western Australia’, The Constitutional Centre of Western Australia, Perth, viewed 29 May 2003, www.ccentre.wa.gov.au/html/res01_11.htm.
  4. Bourke, P 2002, ‘Women and Electoral Politics: Cases Before Suffrage (US 1850s) and After Suffrage (Australia 1894-1930)’, in A Hundred Years of Women’s Politics, Marian Simms (ed), Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, Canberra, pp. 82-107. p. 90.
  5. ibid

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