The amazing thing about reading Clare Wright’s You Daughters of Freedom is the switch from reading the wholly unfamiliar story of Australia’s history of suffrage to the familiar story of English suffragettes in Part III. How has this happened? How come we all know the story of the English suffragettes, but we don’t know about the Australian women (and men) who led the world into modern democracy with votes for women??
Well IMO there are two answers to that and only one of them is that until comparatively recently Australian history took a back seat to British history in the school curriculum. The other reason is that the mayhem and violence of the British suffragette campaign makes a more dramatic story than the story of the Australians who achieved votes for women with principles and logic and strategic nous. Hopefully You Daughters of Freedom will put the tabloid version in its place.

What will help with that, is Clare Wright’s pop-hist-doco style. This history is written with an eye to a young audience. She uses metaphors with jaunty panache, describing, for example, the 1902 Federal Parliamentary debate about who would qualify to vote as

like a game of citizenship Kerplunk: pulling out democratic planks and watching which marbles might fall through the gaps. (p.117)

Senator Pulsford, in the same debate, thought that WA and SA might in their wisdom consider it to drop woman suffrage (which SA had granted in 1894, and WA in 1899). This female franchise was causing trouble because SA was threatening to derail federation if their women were to lose it. Human rights had to be uniform across the nation, but the Parliament could hardly legislate that the enfranchised women of SA and WA could vote in the forthcoming first federal election, but not their sisters in the other states. So yes, as Clare Wright says, the senator was dreaming.

Much later, when the indomitable Australian women were over in England helping Englishwomen with their struggle to achieve the vote, Wright uses a pop term to describe the strategic savviness of the Australians:

The intransigence of the Liberal government had provided fertile ground for activism. Soon there was the Actresses’ Franchise League, with Cicely Hamilton at the helm, and the Writers’ Suffrage League. The WSPU [Women’s Social and Political Union] said that what was needed to wake up the nation was propaganda. Information and posters and badges, banners and essay and plays. A speech was one thing, and lord knows the suffrage leaders had made hundreds of those. But something to hold in your hand, or wear at your breast was another. They needed merch. (p.215)

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2018/10/02/you-daughters-of-freedom-by-clare-wright-boo... ( )