Women get the vote

Visited Parliament this morning.  

In September 1893, the Governor-General, Lord Glasgow, signed the Royal Assent that brought women's suffrage in New Zealand into law.    It had been a hard-fought fight!     Brought to the House of Representatives, this petition (which eventually amounted to 32,000 names) was presented in the form of a long continuous roll of sheets pasted together, wrapped round a broom handle, and cast along the floor of the House by its supporters.  

This made New Zealand the first democracy in the world to extend the vote to women.

Suffrage opponents had warned that delicate ‘lady voters’ would be jostled and harassed in polling booths by ‘boorish and half-drunken men’, but in fact the 1893 election was described as the ‘best-conducted and most orderly’ ever held. According to a Christchurch newspaper, the streets ‘resembled a gay garden party’ – ‘the pretty dresses of the ladies and their smiling faces lighted up the polling booths most wonderfully’.       NZ Govt Website.