Distant Sisters: Australasian women and the international struggle for the vote, 1880–1914

The book tells a regional and international history of the Australian suffrage campaigns between 1880-1914, uncovering the networks of suffragists built to win the vote and sell its merits abroad. Situated at the nexus of feminist and imperial history, it examines the limits of cross border connection in turn-of-the-century social reform movements. Distant sisters offers a new history of the connections women in Australia and New Zealand made with one another, and the rest of the world, first in their pioneer pursuit of the vote and then in their struggle to sell its merits overseas. Although the Australasian suffrage campaigns occurred side-by-side and shared a commitment to international outreach, this book is the first to take these parallels seriously. Recovering a forgotten regional suffrage history, it uses their stories to explore the rise of suffrage internationalism in the late nineteenth century and, importantly, to chart its political, geographic, and racial limits. Covering the period 1880-1914, the book charts the development of an international consciousness among elite and ordinary suffragists alike. Following the conduits that allowed them to think and act across borders, it shows how Australasian suffragists positioned themselves within the emerging international women's movement and shaped organisations like the International Woman Suffrage Alliance and World's Woman's Christian Temperance Union. Distant Sisters simultaneously unveils the intimate dimensions of internationalism, showing how sentiments ignited by the exchange of letters, newspapers and photographs, and preserved in scrapbooks, briefly led the Australasian suffragists to grace British and American concert halls. While often fraught and frustrating, their attempts to forge meaningful intercolonial and international connections complicate both insular national histories of suffrage and the orthodox Euro-American narrative of fin-de-siecle feminist internationalism. Written in an approachable, case-study driven style, this book will appeal to undergraduates and academic specialists in the fields of feminist history, British imperial history and Australian and New Zealand studies alike In the 1890s Australian and New Zealand women became the first in the world to win the vote. Buoyed by their victories, they promised to lead a global struggle for the expansion of women's electoral rights. Charting the common trajectory of the colonial suffrage campaigns, Distant Sisters uncovers the personal and material networks that transformed feminist organising. Considering intimate and institutional connections, well-connected elites and ordinary women, this book argues developments in Auckland, Sydney, and Adelaide—long considered the peripheries of the feminist world—cannot be separated from its glamourous metropoles. Focusing on Antipodean women, simultaneously insiders and outsiders in the emerging international women's movement, and documenting the failures of their expansive vision alongside its successes, this book reveals a more contingent history of international organising and challenges celebratory accounts of fin-de-siècle global connection. Front matter Dedication Contents List of figures and tables Acknowledgements List of abbreviations Introduction: Leading the empire, leading the world? For God and home and every land: Suffrage internationalism in the World’s Woman’s Christian Temperance Union ‘My heart ... yearn[s] for a genuine voting Australian woman!’: Australasian suffragists and the international suffrage movement The business of correspondence: Politics, friendship, and intimacy in suffragists’ letters Shaking hands across the seas: The Australasian women’s advocacy press Suffragists on tour: Exporting and narrating the female franchise Conclusion Bibliography Index