Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

Elizabeth Webb Nicholls.
Image courtesy of the
State Library of South Australia
(1985).
Unbridling the tongues of women
Temperance Union, president of the Social Purity League,
succeeded Stirling as president of the Women’s Suffrage
League in 1892. Elizabeth Webb Nicholls, president of the
Women’s Christian Temperance Union from 1889, was
also on the council of the Women’s Suffrage League, and
became superintendent of the Temperance Union’s Suffrage
Department in 1893. By the early 1890s, these links,
together with Mary Lee’s persuasive platform oratory and
the spread of branches of the Temperance Union throughout
the colony, had made the South Australian Women’s
Movement and its campaign for female suffrage a political
force in the public sphere which was too strong for anyone
to ignore. 49
The terms on which the suffragists
were demanding the vote had diverged considerably
from Stirling’s beginning. One of Stirling’s supporters
in 1886, Robert Caldwell, had introduced his own female
suffrage bill in 1888. That abolished the distinction that
Stirling had drawn between married women and single
women and widows, but it had retained Stirling’s property
qualifications, and it raised the minimum age for the
franchise to twenty-five. The Women’s Suffrage League
took only two meetings to determine that the age limit
should be abolished, along with the property qualifications.
Caldwell kept trying, but he would not drop the offending
property qualifications. By 1891 the bill that he
proposed to introduce, yet again, was so distant from the
demands of the Women’s Suffrage League and its support-
ers that the League disowned him. Mary Lee sought an audience at a meeting of
the United Trades and Labour Council to explain that ‘the League did not approve
of Mr Caldwell’s Bill and still demands women’s suffrage without any qualifications
whatever’. 50 Reassured, the Trades and Labour Council reaffirmed its support. By
the beginning of 1894, the democratic temper of the suffrage campaign had won for
it, as well, support from the radical Reform Movement. 51 Since allegiance from the
newly-formed United Labour Party and the more widespread agitation for sweeping
152
Mary Lee.
Image courtesy of the
State Library of South Australia
SLSA: B70647.