How Australia LED the Way

Soon after its foundation in 1901, the Commonwealth of Australia gave women the vote and the right to sit in parliament. Women’s suffrage was in fact a major aspect of the new nation’s progressive and international thinking. With great vigour, Australian women, including the Melbourne-born artist Dora Meeson Coates, ably involved themselves with the women’s movement in Great Britain. And with astounding presumption, the Australian parliament sent a Resolution to its lofty Westminster counterpart recommending that women’s suffrage be adopted. Here, Myra Scott vividly describes the increasingly violent women’s movement in England, the opposition to it by menfolk generally, the British Prime Minister’s personal bias against it, Australia’s part in this scenario, Meeson’s creative activism - and her rousing Suffrage Banner, which has pride of place in Australia’s parliament house.