Suffrage Day Reflections
Kate Sheppard memorial, Friday 19 September 2014. Photo by Donna Robertson. Some rights reserved CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
GWC Trust Board Chair, Megan Clayton shares her thoughts as to how the work of the Women’s Suffrage Movement impacts on the work the women of GWC are focused on: to assist women in their ongoing education opportunities.
Near Ōtākaro | the Avon River in central Ōtautahi | Christchurch is the Kate Sheppard National Memorial, a bronze relief of Sheppard and five other leaders during the Women’s Suffrage Movement of the late nineteenth century. Since its unveiling on the Suffrage Centennial Day, 19 September 1993, it has been a modest hub for commemorations of the struggle for the rights of women, including the historical moment in which, as Sheppard wrote, “civic freedom [was] granted to the women of New Zealand”. It was an event that cast a throughline to a present in which, as a protestor’s sign put it in 2017, “Kate Sheppard sent me”.
The suffragists and campaigners for the rights of women and girls who are depicted in the memorial are gathered round a barrow bearing some the rolls of the suffrage petition as it was presented at parliament. Although the artist and the community imagine them together, they themselves may not necessarily have assembled in this way.
The Temperance Union had in 1888 written of how “women are affected by the prosperity of the Colony, [and] are concerned in the preservation of its liberty and free institutions”. At the same time, the focus of one of the women depicted in the memorial, Meri Te Tai Mangakāhia (Te Rarawa, Ngāti Te Teinga, Ngāti Manawa, Te Kaitutae), was on the Kotahitanga | Māori parliament, to which she proposed the suffrage of women members.
During its decade of existence, the Kotahitanga would seek to resist some of the encroachment of the colonial state on the self-determination that was protected by te Tiriti o Waitangi. Though the principles of suffrage were common, the structures were different, and the inclusion of wāhine Māori in the franchise did not on its own offset the ways in which “the prosperity of the Colony” came at the expense of mana wāhine, of Māori women and girls.
At the same time, the temperance movement from which many of the suffragists came was notable for crossing class lines, with middle- and working-class women organising together to oppose the alcohol lobby and to campaign for suffrage as a right for women more broadly. When the aims of the Union are read alongside the aims of Ngā Kōmiti Wāhine, which Mangakāhia established in the Kotahitanga in 1893, we readily see the shared elements, and find ourselves again on common ground:
One of the reasons why the WCTU wanted to reduce alcohol consumption was because it often led to the physical abuse of women and children.
[Ngā Komiti Wāhine] addressed issues confronting Māori women and their whānau. Domestic violence, smoking, alcoholism, religion, single mothers and the retention of traditional skills were all on the agenda.
To be part of a movement, especially one that crosses generations as the women’s movement does, we need to hold these tensions lightly without seeking to efface them, and recognise the common and opposing forces within. This journey from a colonial past to the present is not linear, and through the lens of women’s suffrage we find both continuity and discontinuity of ideas, often within the same communities and even the same women.
This is important for an organisation such as GWC, which centres equity as a successor to equality but has its roots in a historical time – 1921 – much closer to the colonial era than the present. In this regard, Kate Sheppard did send us, but so did Meri Mangakāhia, and all the women grouped in the memorial relief, and those that followed, critiqued and organised their way to the present.