Henrietta Dugdale and women's suffrage

1880s. The Victorian Women’s Suffrage Society founded in 1884 was the first women’s suffrage society in Australia. A key woman in its formation was Henrietta Dugdale (1827 – 1918) who lived in Queenscliff from July of 1853 possibly until the late 1860, moved to Melbourne but died & is buried in Point Lonsdale & Annie Lowe from Melbourne. Henrietta became its president. She also founded the YWCA in Geelong. A letter she wrote endorsing the franchise of women was published in The Argus, & this was the first occasion that an Australian woman discussed suffrage in a public forum. She wrote A Few Hours in a Far Off Age, published in 1883. Henrietta made all of her own clothes, grew her own vegetables & was adept in carpentry. She was also an excellent chess player.

The aim of the Victorian Women’s Suffrage Society was to obtain the same political privileges for women as now possessed by male voters, with the restriction of an educational test by writing legibly the name of the candidate on the ballot paper. By July 1886 membership of the VWSS had reached 257. A major proposal was to work towards the introduction of a women's suffrage bill annually into Parliament until successful.

Henrietta was first involved in women’s rights, from 1869, when she was a pioneer of the Woman’s Movement in Victoria . In 1884 she was president of the first Victorian Woman’s Suffrage Society. She was also a member of the Victorian group of radical, free thinking women who believed in temperance, birth control, & “applying the surgeons knife to rapists”. Henrietta believed that only through the use of reason, & equality of the sexes, could mankind accomplish perfection.