1993: Suffrage Day

September 19, 2022

By AHNZ

Today in history, 19 September, 1893, the Governor of New Zealand, Lord Glasgow, signed off a law for woman’s suffrage. State history records that “women had won the right to vote” and “New Zealand is the first country in the world” to give women their political rights. State history, as per usual, is wrong.

New Zealand women had been voting for quite some time by 1893 and this is especially true at the local level. “Women ratepayers’ voting rights in municipal elections, already recognised in Nelson and Otago, were extended to all the provinces in 1875.”¹ Our newspaper archives are full of “lady voters” as full participants but this counter-narrative is not mentioned as it would disrupt the ‘Suffrage Day’ narrative like so many other facts.

We will see that to save ‘Suffrage Day’ as a World First and as a recognition of the rights of women  requires many contortions which, in the end, are unsuccessful.

Firstly, women could and did vote. But we can try to save the claim by a cut back to ‘First time women could vote in General Elections.‘ But, even then, I don’t find this to be true because women had been voting in General Elections before anyway! We just need to prove it but nobody’s giving out any article space or funding dollars for anybody to look for that information are they?

Besides this, it was a long time yet before women really got to vote in the General Election. Women on the Chatham Islands were not allowed to vote until 1922² and Chinese women not until 1952³ (same for men.)

Let’s try to forget about the definition of what it was we’re supposed to be “first” at. At least we were first at it. Right? Well, provided we exclude Wyoming, Utah, Washington, Montana, Colorado, Cook Islands, Isle of Man, Sweeden, Pitcairn Islands, Norfolk Island, Hawaii, South Australia, Victoria,…

“NZ dishonours true women’s suffrage pioneers by plagiarising their achievements. Kate Sheppard acknowledged NZ not the first…why are we lying about it now? NZ has spent four decades claiming credit for something we didn’t do. NZ was not a ‘country’ when women got vote in 1893. We were a colonial state, like Wyoming in the US which gave women universal voting rights in 1869…four years BEFORE New Zealand men got the vote!” – Ian Wishart, Facebook (2018)

“Hmm time to rewrite the history books and stop misleading with fantasy. Nothing wrong in saying New Zealand closely followed the examples of other territories.” – Murray Simpson, ibid

“If you want to be really pedantic, New Zealand was not even a sovereign country in 1893, merely a self-governing British colony. It was actually similar in status to Wyoming or Utah or, for that matter, the Isle of Man where women who owned property (and thus paid tax) were given the full vote back in 1881. No matter how you slice and dice it, New Zealand’s claim to have been the first country to enfranchise women is rapidly falling into the ‘legend in your own lunchtime’ category.” – Suffrage Day reality check: NZ not the first to give women the vote, Ian Wishart, Investigate Magazine (2017)

OK so we’ve got some big problems. But the fable of female empowerment must be saved and those invested are not ready to yield to truth just yet! We were the first country? No. First sovereign nation? No. First self-governing nation? No. First self-governing nation to give most white people the vote in the Pacific where the Kiwi is an indigenous animal?

The value of shifting the goalposts from ‘first country’ to ‘first [enter qualification here]’ is that it saves our reputation by re-defining reputation. The problem is that there’s no re-jiggering of that sort that doesn’t let other countries/nations/groups in the door too and at a far earlier time.

The New Zealand social fiction of being a ‘votes for women’ ‘first’ serves an ego need for certain sectors of our population. Generally, Feminists and bourgeoisie women and their hangers on. This need enjoys no fidelity with historical fact. This need appears to have originated during the Satanic Pannic Victimhood Culture era of the early 1990s. It crystalised around a state-funded womans’ group called the Suffrage Centennial Year Trust (1992-1994) which was “responsible for organising the activities to celebrate the centennial over a period of three years. Dame Miriam Dell was the Chair.”⁴

The millions spent by the Centennial Year Trust needed something impressive to crow about and propagandise people about so that’s where this modern mythology comes from. One of the things the Trust splurged on was to congratulate themselves and their friends with an award of 544 bronze medals. They were supposed to go to men and women but as the list shows the ones recognised with vestments are all women along with the Prime Minister of the time Jim Bolger and his associate Jim McLay.

eg. Vicki Buck, Silvia Cartwright, Helen Clark, Sandra Coney, Whina Cooper, Sonja Davies, Miranda Harcourt, Marian Hobbs, Annette King, Sue Wood, Margaret Wilson, Fran Wilde, Marilyn Waring, Sukhi Turner, Judith Tizard, Catherine Tizard, Jenny Shipley, Margaret Sparrow, Ruther Richardson.

Apart from the medals and propaganda the other lasting thing from 1993 is the monument at Khartoum Place in central Auckland (image, left.) Nothing much was done really apart from retrofitting an existing structure with mosaic tiles remembering 1893. Maintaining it has cost further millions over the years yet it remains a cheaped-out, drab, 1990s-in-a-hurry idea of 1890s women. Attempts were made to remove it during our Outragious Honor Culture era of the early 2000s. Instead it became protected and was ‘gifted’ a new Aotearoa New Zealand Maori name at the start of the Millennial Victimhood Culture era in 2016.

—
1 The Suffragists, Dorothy Page (1993)

2 Ref. 1922 New Zealand general election, Wiki

3 Ref.  Ethnic inequalities, Te Ara

4. Suffrage Centennial Year Trust, National Library

Image ref. NZ $10.00 note, slightly modified. AHNZ

Image ref. Khartoum Place, Wiki

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