The woman behind the signature
In neat dark cursive, Mary Jane Carpenter carefully wrote her name on the first page of the 1893 suffrage petition. The unwieldy document would eventually hold the names of more than 30,000 women. But who was the woman behind that first signature and how
It’s a cold, wintry Christchurch day when Peter Aitken and his wife Margaret take me on a drive to Yaldhurst. We’re visiting the cemetery where his great grandmother, Mary Jane Carpenter, and her husband, George, are buried.
Back when Peter visited the cemetery as a kid, it was overgrown and a great place for acorn battles. But today, the site is neatly kempt, insofar as the headstones are well looked after and the cemetery isn’t overcrowded.
It’s only as we draw closer, making our way over frostcovered grass, that I realise Mary Jane’s headstone has toppled to the ground.
That’s when it hits me. This is history right at our feet. Because while the name may not be instantly familiar to you, Mary Jane Carpenter of Yaldhurst holds a special place in the story of this nation.
The stately headstone is almost a century old. But perhaps due to its substantial size it wasn’t able to withstand the shock of the Christchurch earthquakes.
We’re at the cemetery is to record an interview for RNZ podcast Beyond Kate, which explores women’s suffrage in New Zealand, both 125 years ago and today.
Carpenter is one of the more than 30,000 women who signed the 1893 petition that successfully went through Parliament and granted women the right to vote. That was a quarter of all adult Pa¯ keha¯ women in New Zealand at the time.
The petition comprises of around 500 sheets of paper that together measured 270 metres. They were glued together, rolled up on a segment of a broom handle and presented to Parliament. What make Carpenter’s name special is that her signature is the one right at the top of page one. The very first.
‘‘There was a group of women who first signed up and they came from Yaldhurst, Riccarton and Hornby,’’ says Aitken.
Mary Jane lived first in the Christchurch suburb of Yaldhurst and later, Riccarton, where all the action was taking place around the petition.
Kate Sheppard led the campaign, along with a group of women who were members of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. The sheets were mailed out around the country to other members of the WCTU, who circulated them door-to-door to households across the country.
‘‘Formidable, that’s how I’d describe her,’’ says Aitken. ‘‘To be proactive on women’s rights or seeking women’s vote . . . you had to have a fair bit of guts to stand up and [make] those sorts of propositions.’’
Mary Jane Carpenter arrived in New Zealand in 1870, with her parents and two siblings.
She was in her early 20s and is noted on the ship’s records as a domestic servant.
‘‘I think single women in the 1870s coming out to a maledominated colonial society were snapped up fairly quickly,’’ Aitken says.
Mary Jane married a George Frederick Carpenter, whose first wife had died. The pair had seven children and ran a 260-acre (105-hectare) farm.
Aitken is unsure whether Mary Jane could read or write, but despite a lack of education and arriving as a servant, the proof of Mary Jane’s hard work and elevation in social status is visible in a beautiful old colonial house that still stands today on Oak Farm. It was the Carpenter family home.
One thing of which Aitken is certain is that Mary Jane was a staunch Methodist. And for many women who supported suffrage, religion and temperance were the driving force behind the movement.
Stefanie Lash, of Archives NZ, has been involved in researching the suffrage petition housed at He Tohu, the National Library. ‘‘The temperance cause was part of people’s lives in a social fabric kind of way,’’ she says.
‘‘It was described as a nice middle-class hobby cause [and] temperance was involved in a lot of social situations.’’
Members involved in the Methodist and Anglican churches held temperance picnics, and balls that encouraged young people to have fun without alcohol.
But there was no single driving force behind why people signed. ‘‘I think everybody agreed on a basic level that [it was essential for women] to vote and participate [in society].’’
She adds that, when the petition was circulated, many women signed with a shaky X because they weren’t used to writing their names, or holding a pen. ‘‘The [person] gathering the signatures would write the woman’s name [next to it],’’ Lash says as we pore over the petition
in a darkened room with something akin to reverence.
On the petition, there are around 500 of these marks.
And it was important that the petition was circulated quickly; it was a race to get the bill passed before the election that same year. The law that got over the line was the third attempt, after earlier efforts were stopped in the Legislative Council – the upper house – in 1891 and 1892.
‘‘Kate Sheppard and her colleagues, and the women from the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, knew that they needed to act really fast if they wanted to keep up the momentum,’’ Lash says.
The campaign for the vote grew out of the temperance movement, while temperance in turn grew out of the unregulated liquor consumption in 19thcentury New Zealand. Alcohol had become the scourge of colonial settlement and, due to the harsh and isolated conditions of early life in New Zealand, many men resorted to the comfort of alcohol.
In 1879, New Zealand was recorded to have had one hotel or drinking establishment for every 287 Europeans, which contributed to major social issues – men would drink the week’s wages, which had serious flow-on effects for women who were financially and legally dependent on men. That’s not to mention the increase in domestic violence.
Charlotte McDonald, professor of history at Victoria University, says a franchise section was set up within the WCTU because women knew they needed the vote in order to influence the political process and change the drinking laws.
Otago University history professor Barbara Brookes says that, while today we might see Christianity as conservative, in late 19th-century New Zealand it was a galvanising force for women and encouraged them to move forward in a quest for social change.
‘‘Certainly the women campaigning for the vote were really driven by the idea that they should be out there doing the Lord’s work.
‘‘Women were taxpayers [and] therefore citizens. They should be in Parliament . . . they should be making policy.’’
But although women had few rights, not all women supported the bill.
In archival audio from Nga Taonga Sound and Vision, suffragist Hilda Kate Lovell Smith said she witnessed women who were against the vote.
‘‘My mother asked if the lady of the house would like to sign the petition [and] one time a woman slammed the door in [my mother’s face] and told her to go home and mind her children.’’
But the one house women needed support from was Parliament, and getting past members of the House of Representatives who opposed the bill was to be the biggest challenge.
In Beyond Kate, we look at the life and times of those far-sighted women who signed the petition 125 years ago and to talk to women in similar walks of life today to see how far we’ve come and how far we have to go.
Many men feared their lives would turn to chaos if women got the vote, and the world of politics was seen as a masculine domain, as illustrated by one antisuffrage MP:
‘‘I ask this House to pause before it curses the women of this community by giving them this vote. They are bringing them down to a level whereby they will lose their charms and beauty . . .’’
Another mocked the idea of a nursing mother one day, ridiculously, ending up as an MP, somehow being expected to address the House. If only they knew then what we know now.