Distant Sisters

The book tells a regional and international history of the Australian suffrage campaigns between 1880-1914, uncovering the networks of suffragists built to win the vote and sell its merits abroad. Situated at the nexus of feminist and imperial history, it examines the limits of cross-border connection in turn-of-the-century social reform movements.

In the 1890s, Australian and New Zealand women became the first in the world to win the vote. Buoyed by their victories, they promised to lead a global struggle for the expansion of women's electoral rights. Charting the common trajectory of the colonial suffrage campaigns, Distant Sisters uncovers the personal and material networks that transformed feminist organising.

Considering intimate and institutional connections, well-connected elites, and ordinary women, this book argues developments in Auckland, Sydney, and Adelaide — long considered the peripheries of the feminist world — cannot be separated from its glamorous metropoles. Focusing on Antipodean women, simultaneously insiders and outsiders in the emerging international women's movement, and documenting the failures of their expansive vision alongside its successes, this book reveals a more contingent history of international organising and challenges celebratory accounts of fin-de-siècle global connection.

This book is relevant to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 5, Gender equality.