AustLit

'When tasked with teaching a class on South Australian women's suffrage some years ago, Catherine Helen Spence was the name I associated most with the campaign. What did I know about Mary Lee? Only that she was a mother of limited means. Thankfully, I had Susan Magarey's wonderfully readable Passions of the First Wave Feminists (2001), which devotes four pages to Lee's work, but it was still difficult to get a handle on who Lee was. Magarey included Spence's observation, on the eve of the crucial vote in 1894, that Lee seemed ‘miffed that she, Spence, should be gaining so much attention in this moment, a moment for which Mary Lee has campaigned with all her considerable skills and energy’. In 1986, Helen Jones remarked in the Australian Dictionary of Biography that Lee's work had gone unrecorded until 1980. It seems in death she was overshadowed by Spence, as she had been at crucial moments in the life of the suffrage campaign.' (Introduction)