Two Hundred and Seventy Metres

On 28 July 1893 the clerks of the New Zealand House of Representatives took a paper roll and walked it down the floor of the debating chamber, unwinding as they went. It reached the far end and kept going.

It was two hundred and seventy metres long. More than five hundred separate sheets had been pasted end to end, and on them were the signatures of nearly thirty two thousand women, which was close to a quarter of every adult European woman in the country.

Sir John Hall presented it. It remains the largest petition ever put before that parliament, and it was gathered on foot, in a country of scattered settlements, by women going door to door.

Who collected it

The organising work ran through the New Zealand branch of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, whose franchise department Kate Sheppard had led since 1887.

The temperance connection is worth pausing on, because it explains both the strength of the campaign and the strength of the opposition. The union's original cause was drink, and its members had concluded that they would never get anywhere on it while they had no vote and the liquor trade had members of parliament. The trade drew the same conclusion in reverse, and funded and organised against women's suffrage for exactly that reason.

So the campaign had a machine behind it, with branches in every town, run by women who already knew how to gather signatures. Three petitions went in over three years, each larger than the last. The 1893 one was the third.

The Premier

Richard Seddon, the Premier, was against it.

By September 1893 the bill had cleared the House of Representatives and was in the Legislative Council, the appointed upper house, where it was expected to be close. Seddon counted the votes and worked out that he needed one more to kill it.

He found one. Thomas Kelly, a Liberal councillor, had decided to vote in favour. Seddon reached him by wire and obtained his agreement to switch.

That should have been the end of the bill.

What it cost him

Two other councillors found out how the vote had been obtained.

William Reynolds and Edward Cephas John Stevens were, in the plain word used since, incensed. Not necessarily converted on the merits. Incensed at the method, at a premier wiring a member of the upper house to turn a vote on a question of that size.

Both changed sides and voted for the bill.

On 8 September 1893 it passed the Legislative Council by twenty votes to eighteen. Seddon had bought one vote and lost two, and the arithmetic of his own manoeuvre is the reason New Zealand women got the franchise that year rather than some later one.

Governor Lord Glasgow gave assent on 19 September. Every woman in New Zealand aged twenty one or over could vote, and that included Maori women, which most later suffrage laws elsewhere did not manage for their own minorities for decades.

What happened at the election

The general election was held on 28 November 1893, ten weeks after assent. The electoral rolls had to be rebuilt at speed to add tens of thousands of new voters, and the predictions of chaos were loud.

Women turned out in large numbers and the election passed without incident, which sounds like nothing and was the entire argument. Every objection raised in the debates had been a prediction: that women did not want the vote, that they would not use it, that it would coarsen them, that families would be split, that the business of government would be degraded. The election tested all of them at once and none of them happened.

New Zealand was the first self governing country in the world to do this. The news travelled to every suffrage campaign on earth, and its value to them was not moral, it was evidential. Somebody had run the experiment.

Why the petition itself matters

The document is now on the UNESCO Memory of the World register, and the reason to keep the physical object rather than a list of names is visible the moment you look at it.

A number in a report can be argued with. A quarter of the adult European women of the country is a statistic, and statistics were disputed in that chamber as they are in every chamber. Two hundred and seventy metres of paper unrolling past the desks of the men who were about to vote is not an argument. It is the same fact, made unignorable, using the only medium available to people who were not allowed to speak in that room.

Sheppard and her organisers understood exactly what they were doing when they pasted the sheets together instead of submitting them in a bundle.

The part that is usually left out

Suffrage in 1893 was the right to vote, not the right to stand. New Zealand women could not be elected to parliament until 1919, and the first woman was not elected until 1933, forty years after the petition.

That gap is the ordinary shape of these things. A right is conceded at the point where refusing it has become embarrassing, and the next right along is left for the next generation to fight for on the same ground.

Seddon, who tried to stop it, remained Premier for another thirteen years and is remembered as one of the country's most significant. Kelly changed his vote against it. Reynolds and Stevens changed theirs for it. The roll of paper is in an archive in Wellington, two hundred and seventy metres of names, most of them written by women who never held office and were never going to.

Sources

• Wikipedia, "1893 Women's Suffrage Petition" (the nearly 32,000 signatures on over 500 sheets forming a roll of 270 metres, or 890 feet; its presentation to Parliament on 28 July 1893 by Sir John Hall and the unwinding of the roll across the debating chamber by parliamentary staff; Kate Sheppard's leadership of the New Zealand Woman's Christian Temperance Union franchise work from 1887; and the support of John Hall, Alfred Saunders and Premier John Ballance).
• Wikipedia, "Women's suffrage in New Zealand" (Premier Richard Seddon's opposition and his need for one more vote to defeat the measure in the upper house; his obtaining by wire the consent of the Liberal councillor Thomas Kelly to change his vote; the reaction of councillors William Reynolds and Edward Cephas John Stevens, who were incensed and changed sides to vote for the bill; the passage of the bill by 20 votes to 18 on 8 September 1893; the assent of Governor Lord Glasgow on 19 September 1893 giving all women aged 21 or older the right to vote; the general election of 28 November 1893 at which women voted for the first time; and the petition's signatures amounting to almost a quarter of the adult European female population).
• UNESCO Memory of the World, "The 1893 Women's Suffrage Petition" (the inscription of the petition on the register and its significance as the record of the first successful national campaign for women's franchise in a self governing country).
• Archives New Zealand, "The women's suffrage petition" (the physical composition of the roll, its preservation, and the campaign that produced it).
• Ministry for Women, New Zealand, "Women's suffrage in Aotearoa New Zealand" (the sequence of petitions across successive years, the extension of the franchise to all women aged 21 and over including Maori women, and the delay until 1919 before women could stand for parliament and until 1933 before the first was elected).