1909: Anna Stout’s Reasons
November 14, 2022
By AHNZ
Anna Stout got her voice back during a holiday to England after 11 years serving as wife to the Chief Justice of New Zealand. Prior to the New Zealand left-wing power couple of Anna and Robert being promoted to this post they had advocated for all sorts of Progressive, Feminist, anti-vice, Social Justice causes all in aid of climbing the slick pole to high political office. Robert had been Prime Minister of New Zealand and in the 1890s was scrapping with Richard Seddon to become so again when a compromise was struck. Seddon would keep his political power if Stout would take the glittering prize of being Chief Justice along with the provision that he would retire from politics. As the wife of the Chief Justice this would apply to Anna too so for those 10 years she had to put a sock in it. That must have been harder for her as a woman than it was for Robert who at least got to bang his gavel and pronounce judgement from on high.
So, the 1908 holiday to England must have been like a re-birth for Anna because now she was outside of New Zealand she could enjoy free expression again. Robert had to go back to work in Wellington but Anna stayed on for 3 more years in the thick of it with the Pankhurst Feminists of the Women’s Social and Political Union. Chasing votes for women this militant group would turn to bombings, suicides, hunger strikes, and arson all in the name of their cause. I think things got too hot in the end for the Kiwi Suffragette but before then came her famous letter to the London Times of 19 November, 1909. It is reproduced in the Hawera & Normanby Star of 1910 and often cited but seldom explored. Let’s take a dive in to what Anna has to say to London in defense of the changes she (image, LHS) and Kate Shepphard (image, RHS) made to our country.
Votes for Women
Anna writes to the Times editor, “Sir, — Since landing in England last April, I have hoard many misleading statements as to tho results of the women’s franchise in New Zealand.”
1. That women would adopt masculine habits
Anna tells us only women of the “most abandoned class” ever enter a hotel bar in New Zealand and that she has never seen one of our women smoking. Good Maori women don’t smoke and even the ignorant ones are quitting. Anna’s prime concern about ‘masculine habits’ here has long been a lost cause. She has been proven wrong because women do have those habits now, especially Maori women. If that’s corruption by Stout’s standards then it certainly has settled in now.
2. That women do not take a broad view of the Empire
Anna assures the Times that voting New Zealand women lead the way in being bloodthirsty for the Second Boer War and of forcing men into training camps to become trained killers. Such are the priorities of our Suffragettes!
3. Women would be treated with discourtesy if they descended from their pedestals as domestic angels and mixed in tho rough and tumble of political life.
This charge is absolutely true. By making women equal we open them up to being jeered at, hounded, hated, pushed around, and eggs thrown at them, yelled at. We have long since traded off the position women once enjoyed as being placed above that sort of treatment by virtue of their femininity. This might be for the best but let’s not pretend it wasn’t a trade-off as Anna is. She goes on to say that “Women preside at political meetings, and their ruling is never questioned; they sign nomination papers for candidates, and move votes of confidence, etc” as if New Zealand by 1908 had become some gender-neutral utopia. This story-telling suited the English audiences addressed from Anna’s platform but the Colony knew better. Besides, if she were telling the truth then Second Wave and Third Wave Feminists would have little to say for themselves!
There was an age where women were treated differently, where men raised their hats to women in the street. Men opened doors for women or gave them other day-to-day privileges to help them meet their needs. Never hit a woman. Don’t be rude to a lady. We can hardly imagine what life was like on the other side of Stout’s lifetime because people like her ended it for better or worse. But here she was saying that wouldn’t happen.
4 That women do not want the vote and do not exercise the privilege
Anna says that the petition never exceeded 30,000 names but plenty of women came out at election time. This petition, unlike many others, has elevated to the status of a national treasure because it is Politically Correct where others are not (eg. the Opium Petition (1900) or Extermination of Te Reo Petition (1876.)) But it’s interesting Anna concedes 30,000 or less names since only 24,000 are on file but mainstream State history says there are 39,000. We are encouraged to believe this number and quote this number even though “further reserch is required” to back this claim up (Ref. NZ History.gov) and that there are duplicate pages and other “discrepancies.” What did Anna and her colleges get up to? Was the petition a fraud?
5. That women would neglect their homes and children
The New Zealand housewife had some generations to go yet before this process of sexual monomorphism caught up with and ended her. Anna was wrong in the long run because after the Baby Boomers the Nuclear Family was indeed replaced. We now have duel-income families to the neglect of household and children. We have an unmarried Prime Minister in the 2020s in Jacinda Ardern who has a young child but mathematically cannot parent her or run a household. Ref. 1964: Nuclear Mother, AHNZ
No wonder Ardern is promising to transfer more parenting away from mothers and fathers toward The State. Ref. Half of children to get subsidised childcare under Jacinda Ardern’s big Labour conference promise, Stuff (2022)
Stout argues against herself by pointing out the The State in her own day is taking over maternity and childcare by the expansion of Truby King’s eugenics program. Why would anyone need that except that mothers are being usurped or are not performing their role in the 15 years of post-Sufferage? Ref. 1907: Plunket, AHNZ
Grandparents, too, have been selected against thanks to Social Engineeirs like Anna Stout. Ref. 1990s: Bye Grandma, AHNZ
6. That women would be priest ridden
Stout assures her readers that New Zealand women are Godless or at least takes the opportunity to offer a false dichotomy between being educated and suffering from sectarian strife. Basically just a hit-and-run comment attacking the church which is something no Lefty like Stout can resist dropping in.
7. That the vote would cause discord in domestic life
Anna essentially admits this but says it is “good for the soul.” As for the example of her own domestic life, as Anna was about to discover, politics was directly keeping her from her husband and the children from their father for half a decade. Her Comrade Kate Sheppard herself cuckolded her husband, becoming the mistress of a married man and getting up to her neck in politics. Her young son died absent from Sheppard due to these circumstances. Sounds a little bit discordant to me.
8. That women’s votes would be influenced by their emotions
Anna says everyone knows women have keener insight into character than men and are less influenced by charisma or Group Think (“party feeling”) than men. I think she has that 180 round the wrong way, don’t you?
9. That women are not so loyal to their sex as men
An argument that men know brotherhood loyalty to their country and vote not ‘selfishly’ but out of common interest. And, that women don’t. Stout’s counter-argument is that women didn’t rise to stop the Suffragettes so, ergo, women have ‘sisterhood’ affinity too. That’s a weak reply to a serious concern. And just because women didn’t lead a counter-revolution to the Suffragettes doesn’t mean this can be construed as support or that the so-called support proves woman-to-woman loyalty!
I think it’s true that men will generally fight and die for their family or their tribe or country whereas women, again, generally, will be quick to flip-flop to whatever side seems to be winning. Usually, whichever side has the most violent display is the one that women’s baser instincts respond positively to. That is why women like Megan Lovelady Converted to Islam after the Mosque Attacks. It’s why American Patty Hearst or the female followers of Charles Manson were characteristically influenced to flip into criminal life. Why serial killers are attractive to women. Why the Mongrel Mob put on a violence display after the Mosque Attacks. Liberal women, in particular, like to have a buck each way because in Social Evolution their tribe may be defeated and they’ll need to get along with the victor in any conflict or else be killed. There is room for women after the fighting but not for men so in this brotherly way the men look out for each other and their country to the death whereas women are watching to invest their ‘loyalty’ with whoever comes out on top.
We need to be aware of those drives so as not to be hostage to them. Anna Stout is brushing it away without recognising this legitimate concern and so opening up her country and her culture to being invaded and replaced. It would be interesting to know what she thought of outsider men such as Te Kooti in her own time or Ahmed Zaoui (c.2000) or Behrouz Boochani (2020s.)
We have no class of men who are effeminate in dress or intellect or degenerate in morals, as in older countries.
This seems a bizarre thing to say given the class of people Stout must have been spending time with, the Fabian Socialists. William ‘Aotearoa’ Reeves among them. Ref. 1896: Reeves Resigns, AHNZ
Ensures a strong industrious, and enterprising race, with high ideals of the duties of citizenship and loyalty to the Empire.
Just an interesting comment from our First Wave Feminist to remind us that there was a way to go yet before ‘race’ and ‘Empire’ became dirty words. She’s appealing to them.
Stout winds up by saying that nobody who knows New Zealand would disagree with her and then, cheekily, the Hawera & Normanby Star follows up her letter with one from Another New Zealand Woman which proceeds very well to do just this.
—
Ref. Votes for Women, Hawera & Normanby Star (1910,) Papers Past
Image ref. Anna and Kate just before the big NCW blow-up of 1896. Zoomed in; Alexander Turnbull Library
Image ref. Stout and others taking the women’s suffrage fight to England in 1910; Auckland Weekly News, Auckland War Memorial Museum; nzhistory.govt.nz
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