The feminist activists of the Petition

Embedded content: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NY5aMwxQ594

"The lesson of the women's suffrage movement was it was actually a movement of all ordinary women."

Speakers

Dame Ann Hercus, Prof Katie Pickles, Jenny Harper, and Hon Lianne Dalziel.

Transcript

Dame Ann Hercus, DCMG: The lesson of the women's suffrage movement was it was actually a movement of all ordinary women. Invisible voices, cones of silence over the lot, even the leaders started off as ordinary invisible women and they developed a passion surrounded by strategy and ideology and values for a goal that was a single easily described goal of votes for women.

Prof Katie Pickles: They were quite staunch and believed in themselves and they were being treated, they wanted to be treated, with respect and that also is quite fascinating how you had Queen Victoria and people go well she was an exception, she was the moncarch but she was also the figurehead and the mother of empire and there's lots of evidence that women did take on her mantle and they thought well if she's ruling the roost I'm going to rule my family roost and why not the country as well, have a say in it.

Dame Ann Hercus, DCMG: Because I would love to think that my feistiness in fact is in my DNA and that I did have grandmothers and great grandmothers and great aunts and uncles who somewhere along the line signed that petition. I'd be very surprised if they didn't and grumpy if they didn't, actually.

Prof Katie Pickles: I've found evidence a lot of women dressing up as her so they'd actually dress up and not just white middle class upper class women but indigenous women in different parts as well and called themselves Queen Victoria after her.

Jenny Harper: She wrote this book called Petticoat Pioneers which was a lovely book and it had various chapters on women who'd made big contributions to New Zealand and Mary-Anne Muller was among them.

Prof Katie Pickles: It happens in Canada too yeah, a lot at the time, quite interesting that some of the research I've done and it keeps on happening all through the first half of the 20th century, dress up and walk around like her, quite crazy.

Jenny Harper: She was my great great grandmother so I never knew her and my grandmother never really spoke that much about her. In a way it was my a great aunt who wrote about her first and told us we were related to her.

Hon Lianne Dalziel: The women who played leadership roles in the suffrage movement, you know, they grew sons and daughters who did play an active role in civic life later on.

Jenny Harper: But unknown to her husband she wrote under the pseudonym Feminar and wrote for the Nelson Evening Mail and it's fascinating that she, her, the writer herself, wasn't revealed until after his death so things were not all that good even then but she was a strong strong voice for vote, for the women and women suffrage, and wrote this beautiful open letter, an appeal to the men of New Zealand which is lovely Victorian English just setting out the questions why is it that women can be educated, can own property, can do business, can pay taxes but they can't vote just because of their gender. I

Hon Lianne Dalziel: Well actually one of the leaders of our relationship with China is Rewi Alley and it's a Canterbury story. He was born in Springfield and went to school up in Amberley, and here in Christchurch, so we all claim him, he's part of our history.

Prof Katie Pickles: It might be called suffrage but it really symbolised a whole number of issues that we might call colonial feminist endeavours and they centered around equality.

Hon Lianne Dalziel: When President Xi from China came here a couple of years ago he mentioned him, the strength of the relationship between China and New Zealand based as it is on this one man. Well his mother, she was an activist in the suffragette movement alongside Kate Sheppard you know back in the 1890s so I mean it's just a fantastic story that his own mother played such a role so Clara Alley, her image is on the relief on the Kate Sheppard memorial statue, so it's great.

Jenny Harper: I was certainly a feminist activist in the 60s and 70s and I can remember feeling extremely proud of this forbear of mine, I've got her sewing box now, which is amusing isn't it, but it's a lovely Victorian box so she, she must have been obviously like a lot of other women, very domestic and home based but had that strong sense of entitlement which translated into being active about it.

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