Account of suffrage campaign

One of New Zealand's claims to fame and an enduring source of pride to New Zealanders is that this was the first country in the world to give women the vote.

LEADING THE WAY
How NZ women won the vote
Megan Hutching
HarperCollins, $39.99, pbk

Reviewed by Oliver Riddell.

To commemorate this the likeness of the leading suffragette of the time, Kate Sheppard, now appears on our $10 note.

Thanks to the great increase in historical writing about late-19th-century New Zealand, much more is known about the time when suffrage was a major issue.

This is a timely reworking of the suffrage campaign and its consequences.

It was not easy.

These pioneering women and the public men who helped them deserve to be remembered.

There are chapters on the campaigns, who led them, who vehemently opposed them (including Richard Seddon, and Henry Fish, whose political career was wrecked by angry women when they did get the vote), why getting the vote did not lead to women being elected, and the eventual success of women getting into Parliament.

Biographies of the leading women suffragettes reinstate their fame - Kate Sheppard herself, Margaret Sievwright, Annie Schnackenberg, Marion Hutton, Helen Nicol, Kate Edger, and others.

What interesting and capable women they were.

Their success also owed a great deal to prominent and supportive men already in public life - Alfred Saunders, John Hall, John Ballance and Robert Stout - without whom the empowering legislation could not have passed through Parliament.

After the law had passed in 1893, it was to be nearly 30 years before any woman actually stood for Parliament, and more than a decade before one (Elizabeth McCombs) finally succeeded, and there are biographies on them too.

New Zealand's leading historian of the early 20th century, William Pember Reeves, who was a cabinet minister at the time and an opponent of suffrage, and who had first-hand experience of these events, claimed women getting the vote was an accident due to a mistake by Seddon and his friends.

Megan Hutching disputes this, but it is an interesting argument.

The success of the New Zealand suffrage campaign here undoubtedly facilitated the worldwide campaign.

How far women have come in public life in the last century.

These terrific women had a major impact on the future of their country.

• Oliver Riddell is a Wellington writer.