This Suffrage Day, September 19, we remember Kate Sheppard as a heroine of the movement. But we should also remember others who paved the way, even if they don’t have a banknote to their name.
We now know how the father of New Zealand’s suffrage pioneer died, and it raises fascinating questions about what drove her morally and politically.
After winning the right to vote in 1893, New Zealand’s suffragists kept up the battle, but the unity found in rallying around the major cause had receded.
Jim Henderson/Wikimedia Commons
New Zealand was the first nation to grant women the vote in 1893, but during the pre-war years enduring prejudice against women in politics outweighed any support for women to stand for parliament
A memorial by sculptor Margriet Windhausen depicts the life-size figures of Kate Sheppard and other leaders of the Aotearoa New Zealand suffrage movement.
Bernard Spragg/Wikimedia Commons
125 years ago today women in New Zealand were the first to win the right to vote. Why did this global first happen in a small and isolated corner of the South Pacific?