NZHistory, New Zealand history online - suffrage

Mabel Howard

In 1947, 14 years after Elizabeth McCombs had become the first woman MP, and more than half a century after women had won the vote, Mabel Howard became New Zealand’s first woman Cabinet minister.

First elected to Parliament for Christchurch East in a by-election in February 1943, Mabel Howard was to become a ‘high-profile and sometimes flamboyant’ minister in the first Labour government. She won the new electorate of Sydenham in 1946 and held the seat until her retirement in 1969. Following the death of Dan Sullivan in April 1947, she was appointed minister of health and minister in charge of child welfare, becoming the first female Cabinet minister in any Commonwealth country.

Coming from a strong trade union background, Howard declared her concern for ‘women, the aged, the sick and the unfortunate’. She had a forthright manner and a reputation for saying what was on her mind. She caused a fuss in September 1954 when – during a lacklustre debate on the Merchandise Marks Bill – she waved two pairs of bloomers in front of an astonished House. She was trying to illustrate that although clothing sizes were supposed to be standardised and correctly labelled, much variation existed. The ploy worked. While clothing manufacturers criticised the stunt, she also received much support (including from within the National Party) and standardisation was soon legislated for.

In the Walter Nash-led second Labour government (1957–60) Howard became minister of social security, minister in charge of the welfare of women and children, and minister in charge of the Child Welfare Department. Her reputation for lacking tact and having been unnecessarily antagonistic towards departmental officials and doctors apparently contributed to Nash’s decision not to give her the health portfolio she had previously held.

Howard was re-elected with large majorities in 1963 and 1966, while Labour was in opposition. She stood down in 1969 after the Labour Party introduced a mandatory retirement age. Her health was deteriorating and she was in the early stages of dementia. She was committed to Sunnyside Hospital, Christchurch, where she died in June 1972.

By Neill Atkinson

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Iriaka Ratana

The first Māori woman to be elected to Parliament, Iriaka Matiu Rātana was a passionate advocate for the welfare of her people.

She was born Iriaka Te Rio at Hiruhārama on the Whanganui River in 1905, and had connections to Te Āti Haunui-a-Pāpārangi through both parents. A talented singer, at 16 she went to live at Rātana Pā, joining and later training the young people’s cultural groups that accompanied prophet Tahupōtiki Wiremu Ratana on his tours around the country. In 1925 she became Rātana’s second wife and after his death, in 1939, she married Matiu, his son by his first marriage. By then, she was one of the most influential women in the Rātana movement.

Matiu Rātana won the Western Maori seat in 1945 but died in 1949, and Iriaka decided to step into his place. Despite vehement opposition from some, she became the Labour Party candidate and was comfortably elected. After giving birth to her seventh child in December 1949, she entered Parliament.

Iriaka Rātana accepted the desirability of Māori integration into Pākehā society, and was optimistic about the future of race relations. These attitudes assured her of a respectful hearing in Parliament. Distressed by the poverty and powerlessness of many Māori, she looked to the Department of Maori Affairs and organisations such as the Maori Women’s Welfare League (to which she belonged) for answers. She worked ceaselessly to represent the interests of her constituents, and in the 1950s successfully fought for the upgrading of services at Rātana Pā. In 1969 Iriaka Rātana retired from politics. She died in 1981, survived by nine children and many grandchildren.

By Angela Ballara; adapted by Nancy Swarbrick

Read full biography of Iriaka Rātana (DNZB)

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Iriaka Matiu Rātana

With fellow Labour MPs, Iriaka Rātana speaks to supporters of the Rātana political movement on Manukorihi marae, Waitara, in 1966. She was the first Māori woman to be elected to Parliament.

Henry Fish

An able but controversial politician, Henry Smith Fish is best remembered for his aggressive attempts to prevent women getting the vote.

He was born in London in 1838 and travelled with his family to Melbourne as a child. In 1863 he came to Dunedin, where he worked for the family painting and glazing business and in 1867 became a city councillor. He soon gained a reputation for being conceited, rude and untrustworthy, but was also a skilled tactician with a talent for electioneering. As well as serving for more than 20 years on the city council, six as mayor, Fish was elected to the Otago Provincial Council in 1870 and again in 1873, and was a member of the Otago Harbour Board for six years.

In politics Fish switched allegiances often, and rumours of dubious morality and petty corruption dogged him. Nevertheless, he had a faithful following among the working men of South Dunedin. He was elected to Parliament in 1881 and after being voted out in 1884 returned in 1887. Fish soon fell out with the Liberals and became notorious for insulting behaviour. He resisted extending the vote to women and organised two petitions against this, but his credibility was tarnished when it was discovered that he had paid people to sign them. In 1892, women ratepayers helped tip the balance against him in the Dunedin mayoral race, and his failure to be re-elected to Parliament in 1893 was also attributed to female voting power. He won back his seat in 1896, but died the following year.

By F. R. J. Sinclair; adapted by Nancy Swarbrick

Read full biography of Henry Fish (DNZB)

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Henry Fish

Henry Fish c1881.

An able but controversial politician, Henry Smith Fish is best remembered for his aggressive attempts to prevent women getting the vote.

Harriet Morison

Dynamic and determined, Harriet Morison helped establish trade unions for female workers and was one of the leaders in the campaign to get votes for women. Born in Ireland in 1862, she came to New Zealand with her family in 1874 and was employed as a tailoress. She became vice-president of the Tailoresses’ Union of New Zealand in 1889, and in 1890 took over as its secretary. She tirelessly pressed for higher wages and better conditions for tailoresses, and also lobbied for representation of other groups of women workers, such as domestic servants.

Believing that equality was fundamental to the Christian message, Morison was involved in the WCTU and helped found the Dunedin Women’s Franchise League. Both organisations campaigned for voting rights for women, and Morison helped convert many working women to the cause, gathering signatures for the suffrage petitions that circulated nationwide in the early 1890s.

In 1896 Morison left the Tailoresses’ Union under a cloud, accused of embezzling funds – she had naively deposited fundraising money in an account under her own name. However in 1906 she was appointed inspector of factories for the South Island, and in 1908 took charge of a Department of Labour Women’s Branch (essentially a labour bureau for female domestic servants) in Auckland. Her public service career was stormy, possibly because of her tendency to be forthright. She was forced to resign in 1921 when the Women’s Branches were disestablished.

Harriet Morison died in Auckland in 1925, after a life of successful activism on behalf of all women, but especially working women.

By Melanie Nolan; adapted by Nancy Swarbrick

Read full biography of Geoffrey Alley (DNZB)

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Harriet Morison

The conditions of women’s work were an enduring concern for Harriet Morison, secretary of the Dunedin Tailoresses' Union from 1891 to 1896. After leaving the union, she worked for the Department of Labour as a factory inspector. In this 1911 photo of staff from the department's Auckland district office, Morison is seated at front left.

Kate Sheppard’s House

Kate Sheppard’s House (1888)

A suffrage pioneer

In the 1890s ‘first-wave feminism’ made significant gains for New Zealand women. Traditionally, the highpoint is the attainment of women’s suffrage in 1893, when New Zealand, starting its long tradition of patting itself on the back for being a social laboratory, claimed credit for being the first nation to let women vote in national elections. The picky might observe that we were still a colony and historian James Belich cautions against over-emphasising the suffrage elite, replacing Great Men with Great Women, as it were. Suffrage has to be seen in context with late Victorian women’s other gains. Elizabeth Yates of Onehunga became the British Empire’s first elected female mayor, women's organisations proliferated and women began to enter some professions. The Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act of 1894, the Married Women’s Property Act of 1884 and the Divorce Act of 1898 also improved their lot.

But no amount of revisionism can dethrone Liverpool-born Kate Sheppard (1847-1934) and her supporters, who included former premier Sir John Hall. Kate Malcolm, who had arrived in Christchurch as a young woman, married merchant Walter Sheppard and, like Rutherford Waddell’s supporters, came to the franchise campaign through church-based activities such as the temperance movement.

Walter and Kate moved into their new house at 83 Clyde Road, Fendalton, early in 1888. It would be Kate’s home during those eventful years, a comfortable, slate-roofed wooden villa set well back from the road in what was then a more rural suburb.

Still privately owned, the house and gardens are now also used for public functions. Sheppard adorns the $10 note and a street near Parliament was renamed after her, but her most impressive public memorial is Margriet Windhausen’s massive bronze Kate Sheppard National Memorial, unveiled at Oxford Terrace beside the Avon in 1993 by New Zealand’s first female governor-general, Dame Catherine Tizard. Here, as resolutely as Iron Curtain icons, suffragists Sheppard, Amey Daldy, Meri Te Tai Mangakahia, Ada Wells, Harriet Morison and Helen Nicol step fearlessly into the future, behind their electoral petition.

Further information

This site is item number 66 on the History of New Zealand in 100 Places list.

Websites

Books

Judith Devaliant, Kate Sheppard, Penguin, Auckland, 1992
Jill Pierce, The suffrage trail, National Council of Women, New Zealand, Wellington, 1995

Credit:

Text: Gavin McLean, 2013

Images of the house: Schwede66 (Wikimedia)

Memorial image: Christchurch City Libraries (Flickr)

Historic image:

Alexander Turnbull Library
Reference: 1/2-041798-F
Permission of the Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand, Te Puna Matauranga o Aotearoa, must be obtained before any reuse of their images.

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Date established:

1888

About the suffrage petition

First page of 1893 Suffrage petition

The database on this site is a digitised version of the main suffrage petition submitted to Parliament on 28 July 1893. It contains the names and addresses of about 24,000 women aged 21 years or older. The original petition comprised more than 500 individual sheets, which were signed in various parts of the country. These were glued together to form a single roll that stretched more than 270 m.

The information reproduced on this site is based on a transcript of the original petition produced by volunteers from the Society of Genealogists in 1993 as part of the suffrage centenary commemorations. The Suburb/Town and City/Region fields have been added to provide consistent information about the signatories’ location. Every effort has been made to make these location fields accurate, but some gaps and errors inevitably remain.

Further research is required to discover what happened to the other 1500 or so names that are supposed to be on this petition (see below). We have also found some discrepancies in the petition, including almost identical copies of some sheets (sheets 103 & 109 and 365 & 387 have been discovered so far).

Thirteen petitions

This petition was by far the largest of 13 separate petitions collected by women’s suffrage supporters in 1893. When pro-suffrage MP Sir John Hall presented them to the House of Representatives on 11 August, he noted that they contained the signatures of 31,872 women, almost a quarter of the adult (voting age) European female population of New Zealand.

Mary J. Carpenter and 25,519 others
Kate Baldwin and 2765 others
(Mrs?) Gerald L. Peacock, of Devonport, Auckland: 2301 names
Elizabeth M. Eyre Kenny and 601 others (probably collected in Nelson)
Caroline Anderson and 393 others
Mrs J. Irwin Wilson, of Whangarei: 83 names
Marian Kirker and 49 others
Clara M. Birch and 40 others
Sophia James and 34 others
Lizzie F. Rattray, of Auckland: 31 names [see the DNZB’s biography of Lizzie Frost Rattray ]
Harriet Win: 23 names
F. Nightingale, of Nelson: 16 names
Sarah Lurchin and 15 others

Little is known about the 12 smaller petitions, which do not appear to have survived. It is likely that they were compiled in specific regions, which would help explain some notable gaps in the geographical coverage of the Carpenter petition (see table below).

Sources for petition information: Appendix to the Journals of the House of Representatives, 1893, I-1 and I-2; Journals of the House of Representatives, 1893.

1892 petition

We also have a transcript of the 1892 suffrage petition which has more than 17,000 names, including some from places missing on the 1893 petition. You can download a transcript of this 1892 petition as an Excel file here.

Regional breakdown of the petition database

As this table shows, Canterbury and Otago were particularly strongly represented on the main suffrage petition. Areas such as Bay of Plenty, East Coast and Nelson are hugely under-represented, and it is likely that some of the separate, smaller petitions referred to above were compiled in these regions.

Region	Signatories
Northland	211
Auckland	2142
Coromandel	141
Waikato	79
King Country	2
Bay of Plenty	3
East Coast	4
Taranaki	269
Volcanic Plateau	0
Whanganui	1119
Manawatū/Horowhenua	1270
Hawke’s Bay	1763
Wairarapa	607
Wellington	1260
Nelson	1
Marlborough	203
West Coast	272
Canterbury	4432
South Canterbury	1312
Otago	7471
Southland	1430
TOTAL	23991

Kate Sheppard

Kate Sheppard was the leading light of the New Zealand women’s suffrage movement. In recent years her contribution to New Zealand’s identity has been acknowledged on the $10 note and a commemorative stamp.

Born in Liverpool in 1847, Kate Malcolm migrated to Christchurch in her early twenties and in 1871 married merchant Walter Sheppard. In 1885 she joined the new WCTU, which advocated women’s suffrage as a means to fight for liquor prohibition. For Kate Sheppard, suffrage quickly became an end in itself. Speaking for a new generation, she argued, ‘We are tired of having a “sphere” doled out to us, and of being told that anything outside that sphere is “unwomanly”.’

Sheppard travelled the country, writing to newspapers, holding public meetings and lobbying members of Parliament. Opposition was fierce. As Wellington resident Henry Wright wrote, women were ‘recommended to go home, look after their children, cook their husbands’ dinners, empty the slops, and generally attend to the domestic affairs for which Nature designed them’; they should give up ‘meddling in masculine concerns of which they are profoundly ignorant’.

In 1893 Kate Sheppard and her fellow suffragists gathered the signatures of nearly 32,000 women to demonstrate the groundswell of support for their cause. A 270-m-long petition – then the largest ever presented to Parliament – was unrolled across the chamber of the House with dramatic effect. Despite the opposition of Premier Richard Seddon, the Electoral Act 1893 was passed by both houses of Parliament and became law on 19 September. The news took New Zealand by storm and inspired suffrage movements all over the world.

Kate Sheppard continued to work at home and abroad for women’s rights – from contraception to freedom from the corset. She became president of the National Council of Women of New Zealand (NCW) and editor of The White Ribbon, the first newspaper in New Zealand to be owned, managed and published solely by women. In 1909 she was elected honorary vice-president of the International Council of Women.

Sheppard outlived two husbands, her only son, and her only grandchild. She died on 13 July 1934, a year after the first woman MP, Labour’s Elizabeth McCombs, entered Parliament.

Emma Brewerton

See also biography of Kate Sheppard on the DNZB website

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