Settler anxieties, indigenous peoples, and women's suffrage in the colonies of Australia, New Zealand, and Hawaii, 1888 to 1902

Abstract

This article examines the history of women's political rights in the alte nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in three sites of recent white settlement in the Pacific. In two of these, Australia and New Zealand, women were enfranchised at a comparatively early date while in the third, Hawai'i, the reform was proposed unsuccessfully. The women who promoted the vote in these new white societies were heirs to a tradition of evangelical humanitarianism through the platform of the World's Woman's Christian Temperance Union, an organization that was influential in suffrage campaigns across the Pacific. While suffragists eschewed the racism of many fellow colonists, they nevertheless were part..