Women's Suffrage: How New Zealand Voted First
On 19 September 1893 the governor, Lord Glasgow, signed a new Electoral Act into law, and New Zealand became the first self-governing country in the world in which all adult women had won the right to vote in parliamentary elections. Britain would not follow fully until 1928; the United States until 1920.
The victory was not handed down. It was organised — through a decade of campaigning led by Kate Sheppard and the Women's Christian Temperance Union, and through a series of petitions culminating in 1893 with the signatures of nearly 32,000 women: close to a quarter of the adult female population, pasted into a roll that unfurled dramatically down the aisle of the House.
Law signed |
19 September 1893 (Electoral Act 1893) |
First vote |
General election, 28 November 1893 — 82% of enrolled women voted |
The petition |
1893: 31,872 signatures — the largest yet gathered in NZ |
Key leader |
Kate Sheppard (WCTU franchise superintendent from 1887) |
Left undone |
Women could not stand for Parliament until 1919; first women MPs 1933 |
The Campaign
The organised campaign grew from the Women's Christian Temperance Union, founded in New Zealand in 1885, which saw the vote as the means to social reform. Kate Sheppard, who led its franchise work from 1887, proved a formidable strategist — pamphleteering, lobbying sympathetic MPs, and above all petitioning. The petitions escalated: more than 9,000 signatures in 1891, almost 20,000 in 1892, and 31,872 in 1893, gathered door-to-door by hundreds of volunteers.
Inside Parliament the cause had a persistent champion in Sir John Hall, who presented the great petition by unrolling it down the centre aisle of the chamber. Suffrage bills had passed the lower house repeatedly, only to die in the appointed upper house — which is where opponents expected the 1893 bill to die too.
Eleven Days in September
The 1893 bill's passage was high drama. The liquor trade lobbied hard against it, fearing women's votes meant prohibition; Premier Richard Seddon, no friend of the measure, manoeuvred to stop it in the Legislative Council. His interference backfired: two opposed councillors, affronted by his tactics, switched sides, and on 8 September the bill passed the upper house by 20 votes to 18.
For eleven days suffragists wearing white camellias waited on the governor while opponents petitioned him to withhold assent. On 19 September he signed. Ten weeks later, at the general election of 28 November 1893, women went to the polls for the first time — 82 per cent of those enrolled voted, confounding predictions of indifference and disorder alike.
What 1893 Did and Did Not Change
The Act enfranchised all women aged 21 and over, including — unusually for the era — Māori women, who voted in the Māori seats. It did not let women stand for Parliament: that took until 1919, and no woman entered the House until Elizabeth McCombs in 1933. The gap between voting and governing took another century to close, by which point New Zealand had had women premiers, governors-general and chief justices simultaneously.
The suffrage victory became one of the country's founding stories about itself — the "social laboratory" of the 1890s — and Kate Sheppard its most recognisable face, printed on the $10 note. The white camellia remains the campaign's emblem, and 19 September is marked each year as Suffrage Day.