Celebrating the Great Achievement of White Women’s Suffrage in 1902

Clare Wright’s new book “You Daughters of Freedom” is published today by Text. It covers the active lives of Dora Montefiore; Nellie Martel; Muriel Matters, Dora Coates Meeson and Vida Goldstein, five feminists who came out of the Australian suffragette movement of the late 19th century. Clare’s book “recuperates a forgotten age of exuberant nationalism, one that has been overtaken by the contemporary Anzac myths of World War I. Reactionary politicians and media jocks, claiming to defend Australian history against the unpatriotic critique of academics rushed to diminish it by finding nothing, in the riches of Australia’s social and political past, to compare with the defeat and death of a handful of soldiers in a far-off land.”  (not even our land but by invading the sovereign territory of another country WfaAR adds). “Wright aims to wrest Australians away from their prolonged obsession with Gallipoli as the ‘founding moment’ of nationhood by reminding readers that before WWI, there was something much more to celebrate ie the political rights (principally the vote) that an idealistic, young and forward-looking nation granted to its non-Indigenous female citizens.” (extended to Indigenous women in 1962). Quotes from a book review: “The women who paved the way” by Penny Russell, Bicentennial Professor of Australian History at the University of Sydney, in the Fairfax press 27 October 2018.