The Inviolable Woman: Feminist Conceptions of Citizenship in Australia, 1900-1945

Abstract

What did the promise of citizenship mean to the first women in the world to be granted the right to vote and stand for election to the national parliament? Australian feminists in the early post-suffrage decades forged an understanding of citizenship that equated independence with the inviolability of women's bodies. Feminists were thus especially concerned about the anomalous position of the citizen wife, economically dependent on her husband and subject to his claims of conjugal rights. Just as sexed embodiment informs claims for political rights, so political discourses are themselves constitutive of the meaning of sexual difference.