Photo of a sculpture in a park. The sculpture is made of metal and replicates a large piece of paper folded over making loops.
Great Petition is a sculpture near the Victorian State Parliament Building, in Melbourne, Australia. Credit: Ellen Coates, CC BY-NC-SA.

The Women’s Suffrage Petition – The Monster Petition

By ,

Introduction

The 1891 Women’s Suffrage Petition, known colloquially as the ‘monster petition’ was a landmark document in the history of Victoria.

Australian women were the first in the world to get both the vote, and the right to stand for parliament. These rights came to Australian women nationally with federation.

The right to stand for parliament came through a quirk in a South Australian bill, where a conservative politician added a rider that women could stand for parliament as an amendment effectively to slow the bill down. It passed, however, and because South Australian women had this right it had to be extrapolated federally with federation.

In Victoria women did not have the right to vote at a state level until 1908, the last of any Australian state.

This did not mean, though, that there wasn’t a strong campaign in Victoria for women’s suffrage. The bill that did pass Victoria’s Parliament, giving women the right to vote, was the 19th such bill that had gone before the parliament since 1889. This delay was mainly due to a conservative Legislative Council made up of the old bastions of the squattocracy. 

It’s worth pausing here to acknowledge that this was white women being given the right to vote. First nations women didn’t have the right to vote till 1962 at state and federal level.

As you can see from the number of attempts, this was not a passive sit back and wait for the lawmakers issue. This was an active campaign, across the whole state, and the monster petition reflects this. 

The Petition

The petition is deserving of its name. At an astounding 260 meters in length and roughly 200mm wide, it was the largest petition of the 19th century, and it bears 30 000 Victorian women’s signatures.  It’s made of hundreds of individual sheets of paper that were passed onto a fabric backing and rolled around a spindle. It takes three people about three hours to unroll it.

It required multiple attendants to carry it into the Legislative Assembly.

In fact, when it was carried in a journalist described the scene as “In the gallery, tier upon tier of bonnets stretched across the chamber, and beneath the bonnets were scores of eager faces, smiling and nodding to members below. Upon the table was a huge roll of paper, which completely obscured the desk.“

The petition is now held in the collection of the Public Record Office of Victoria. 

How did the Petition come about?

But how did it come about in the first place? In 1891 James Munro, the Premier of Victoria, said he’d introduce a women’s suffrage bill if it was demonstrated that ordinary women wanted the right to vote. This gauntlet was taken up with gusto by Victorian suffrage campaigners 

The push was led by the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and the Victorian Women’s Suffrage Society as well as sister organizations that grew up around the state.

It was the most orchestrated move in Australia to secure women’s rights and shaped the future as far as advocacy was concerned.

Who Signed the Petition?

The collection of the signatures themselves was a significant undertaking, remember this was a time when the state was still coming together as an entity.

Suffrage campaigners, led by early activists like Vida Goldstein and her mother Isabella, travelled all over Victoria and convinced women from across the social spectrum to sign.  In fact, the second signature was Jane Muro, the Premier’s wife. 

The statewide nature of the petition is absolutely fascinating, because it means that regional communities have a claim to the history and have their own stories about the women who signed the monster petition. Some of these stories can be found in the collection of the PMI Victorian History Library. 

For example, Pioneers and Suffragists by Merrill O’Donnell and Stephen Brooks explores the stories of the 362 women from the Colac region who signed the petition. 

One such was 58-year-old Mary Richardson, who signed on page 90, line 2. She arrived from Nottingham, where she’d worked in a lace mill, with her husband and three children in January 1858. The family moved to a remote station in Caramut where Mary’s husband Seth was employed. Their four-year-old son John died only 23 days after their arrival and Mary found the isolation of the station very difficult. The family moved to Yeo, which is near Colac, where Seth started a broom making business. Mary and Seth were both staunch members of the Salvation Army and Seth played in the band. When Mary signed the petition, she was 58 and had seen an immense amount of change in the state. Mary died in 1924, having been a widow for 24 years. 

Another signatory was Ann Brooks, who signed on page 299 line 23. Ann was born in Bradfield in 1834. At the age of 16 Ann made her way to the goldfields of America where she apparently found gold and hid it in a secret compartment of her suitcase. She left for Australia, and on the ship in Hawaii she met and married Thomas Brooks, she was 17 and he was 33. They landed in South Australia, where their first child was born in 1851, and travelled overland to Purnim near Warrnambool, where they used Ann’s gold to buy a farm. Ann became the local midwife and went on to have another five children. Thomas died from malaria in 1866 and several years later Ann relocated to Colac having buried one child as well as her husband, and with another one contracting polio. When Ann signed the petition in 1891 she was 57, and it was only twelve months later than another daughter died leaving ‘Grannie Brooks’ to raise her four grandchildren. Ann died in 1912 at the age of 78. 

Mary and Ann are only two examples of the 30 000 women who signed the monster petition. These were ordinary women from all over the state, who signed for better rights.

While ultimately the monster petition was not successful in securing the right to vote for women at the time of its issue, it was the foundation on which all further suffrage attempts were made in Victoria and as a coming together of Victoria’s women to advocate for themselves, it is unparalleled.

It is well deserving of the commemoration it received in sculpture form in 2008 by artists Susan Hewitt and Penelope Lee, which you can see in the photo. 

Did your Ancestor sign the Petition?

If you want to find out if your ancestor signed the petition – you can search for them in the Victorian Parliament’s database.

References

Explore Further

Share Resource

Share on LinkedIn

Topics:

Tags:

Format:

Language:


image Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike CC BY-NC-SA

Contact a Commons librarian if you would like to connect with the author

Topics