AustLit

'In the early twenty-first century, the word ‘suffragist’ is stuffy and obscure. There is more currency in ‘suffragettes’, especially the British women who resorted to civil disobedience in their mission of votes for women, years after their colonial sisters had succeeded peacefully. Clare Wright bridges and complexifies the difference between suffragists and suffragettes through the story of five Australian feminists who went on to be active in the United Kingdom: Dora Meeson Coates, Vida Goldstein, Nellie Martel, Muriel Matters and Dora Montefiore.' (Introduction)

'Clare Wright seems a born story‐teller. This is a big book that has already won high praise. Much has been written on the breakthroughs with women's suffrage in Australasia and the attempts to export this success to the “home country”, but never as engagingly as here. Wright tells the story through interwoven biographies of the key actors; she excels at setting scenes, keeping the complex plot under control and pushing the story forward. Although the book is well referenced, Wright does not slow down the action by locating her work in relation to existing historiography, at least until the final chapter where she engages with the construction of national narratives. Instead, she begins with her discovery of Dora Meeson's “Trust the Women” banner hanging in Parliament House in Canberra and her determination to unravel “its matted threads”.' (Introduction)

'In 1911, while visiting London, Australian suffragist Vida Goldstein was embroiled in a heated debate with a male correspondent to the British Anti-Suffrage Review about the relative merits of British and Australian women voters. The British man was exasperated by Goldstein’s claims to parity. Australian women, voting as they had been since the early 1900s, voted only on provincial matters. If women were to vote in England, they would have a hand in directing the affairs of a vast and troublesome empire. Surely, he said, ‘not even the most enthusiastic Australian would dream of suggesting that the Imperial Parliament was not far more important than the Commonwealth Parliament’. It is precisely this enthusiasm – through which Australian women voters counselled their British ‘cousins’ to adopt their progressive democratic practices – that directs the narrative in Clare Wright’s recent book, You Daughters of Freedom: The Australians Who Won the Vote and Inspired the World.' (Introduction)