Sprinting towards suffrage
A century ago, New Zealand women voted for the first time
After battling more than 20 years for women’s suffrage, the ladies of Greymouth turned it into a sprint finish to the voting booth.
No doubt ruffling their anklelength Victorian skirts, Carrie McPherson and Flora Benyon vied to be the first woman to cast a vote in Greymouth in the parliamentary elections on November 28, 1893.
Next Wednesday is the 125th anniversary of that historic day when New Zealand women became the first in the world to vote for parliament.
Newspapers, including the Grey River Argus, watched closely in 1893.
“. . . polling set in briskly as soon as the poll was opened,” the Argus observed, “two ladies running a neck and neck race to see who should be the first woman to record a vote for the general election in Greymouth.
“Mrs McPherson, we believe, secured the honour, with Mrs Benyon second.”
Women gaining the vote was a revolution, yet knowledge of the McPherson-Benyon competition was lost in their families — until Victoria University historian Professor Charlotte Macdonald began poking around.
She noted the sprint finish in a Suffrage Day article last year to mark the September 19, 1893 passing of the women’s franchise law. That was picked up by Judi Mears, a teacher at the Shantytown Heritage Park near Greymouth, who turned to Papers Past and found the Argus article.
Armed only with the two racers’ surnames, Mears sought help from a genealogy group and studied the historic suffrage petitions, electoral rolls, grave sites and family records to identify the women.
Next she embarked on the difficult job of finding descendants. And now she and an informal Greymouth committee set up to organise 125th Suffrage anniversary celebrations have arranged a re-enactment of the race.
A descendant of Benyon’s, Jacilyn Miller, and possibly one of McPherson’s descendants will today dress up in period costumes to recreate the dash for the polling booth.
The event will also be marked by the planting of a white Kate Sheppard camellia outside the Greymouth library, followed by a march down Mackay St with the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and other groups, and speeches by leading West Coast women, including the sole female member of the Grey District Council, Tania Gibson.
Benyon descendant David Miller, Jacilyn’s father, said his family hadn’t known of the election day race.
Flora Benyon’s husband James was the Mayor of Kumara, a town south of Greymouth, and he owned the Kumara Times newspaper. They were friends of the Premier, Richard Seddon, the local MP.
Seddon, who had been a Kumara store keeper and publican, had tried to prevent women’s suffrage before the bill passed in the Upper House of Parliament, but became one of its greatest advocates, after his Liberals won a landslide in the 1893 election.
Before the suffrage bill passed in the Upper House, opponents had said women didn’t want the vote and wouldn’t enrol. They were wrong.
“From the day of the final passage of the Franchise Bill, suffragists had only six weeks before the rolls were closed in which to prove the allegation incorrect,” wrote Patricia Grimshaw in Women’s Suffrage in New Zealand. “Before the registrars’ doors were opened on the very first day queues of women formed to enrol, and, once enrolled, suffragists were able to register their fellow electors themselves.”
Sheppard and the franchise leagues were inundated with requests for more forms. By the close of enrolment, more than 100,000 women had registered, about 80 per cent of the adult female population.
Macdonald said all the suffrage organisation of the preceding years — gathering etition signatures, running public meetings and having franchise leagues and branches of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union — turned to enrolment organisation.
“Of course it then had to be done at such speed because there was so little time between the end of September and the election.”
“It’s another indicator of how energetic and active and effective that particular political mobilisation was. It underlines again that New Zealand women were not given the vote — that obnoxious phrase — they fought hard to achieve it, including to become enrolled in that September-November period. ”
A persistent theme of women’s suffrage opponents was how delicate ladies could cope with the bruising treatment they might receive from men in the polling booth, where drunkenness wasn’t uncommon. And there were fears women’s household work could restrict their getting out to vote. But on the day these fears proved unfounded.
Women’s franchise groups provided babysitters and polling booth attendants to assist women voters. Newspapers remarked on the absence of drunkenness and how orderly and good-humoured voters had been, although over-zealous political activists — men and women — were removed from outside one Wellington booth by the police.
In Christchurch, the Press noted women got out to vote early. “. . . the ladies took possession of the polling booths immediately on their opening … Ladies filled the side walks leading to the various polling booths, and streamed over into the middle of the road … The pretty dresses of the ladies and their smiling faces lighted up the polling booths most wonderfully …“
Following women’s first parliamentary voting, it would be another 26 years before women could be elected to Parliament, 40 before one was, 100 before one became Opposition leader, and 104 before one became prime minister.