Mary Lee, energetic power behind world-leading vote for South Australian women in 1894, lately recognised
A bust of Mary Lee, sculpted by Patricia Moseley for North Terrace, Adelaide city, gave her belated public recognition in 1994 on the centenary of the passing of laws for South Australian women to get the vote and stand for parliament. Denise George's 2018 biography (at right) on Mary Lee also gave valuable insights into the energetic campaigner.
Images courtesy Monuments Australia and Wakefield Press
Mary Lee was officially thanked by the government for South Australia’s women achieving the world-leading right to vote in 1894 “mainly due to your persistent advocacy and unwearied exertions”. Yet Lee died impoverished and almost forgotten, after a bout of influenza, in 1909.
Exhausted but jubilant after the South Australian parliament in 1894 granted women the world-first double of a right to vote and to stand for election, Lee received congratulatory letters from the South Australian premier Charles Cameron Kingston and chief secretary J.H. Gordon. In 1895, two trade unions nominated her to stand for parliament. She declined, preferring to work “on the side of right … unfettered by pledge or obligation to any party whatever”.
On Lee's 75th birthday in 1896, at Adelaide Town Hall,Kingston handed her a purse of 50 sovereigns, publicly donated through the Mary Lee Testimonial Fund, with a “handsomely bound and artistically engrossed” address that praised her efforts for women's suffrage.
At public meetings before the March 1896 elections, Lee advised women on their voting duties. That year, the government appointed her the first female official visitor to the lunatic asylums and she performed that role with courage and compassion for 12 years. In 1898, she backed the medical superintendent on the issue of lawyer Paris Nesbit’s release from Parkside Lunatic Asylum, maintaining that special provision should be made for such brilliant and disturbed patients. Lee also visited the destitute asylum in Adelaide city regularly as a friend of residents and loaned them books from her personal library.
By 1902, Lee also was under financial stress. Congregational minister J.C. Kirby, whose Social Purity Society first involved Lee in the women’s rights campaign, initiated an appeal for her relief in the Express and Telegraph and the Australian Woman's Sphere. It had a poor response. Kirby observed that many had benefited from Lee's work but her advanced views and outspokenness hadn’t made her widely loved.
As her finances dwindled, Lee asked eminent legal figure Josiah Symon to arrange the sale of her library. Although her daughter Evelyn worked in the telegraph department, Lee's last years were blighted by poverty. She complained bitterly to New South Wales women’s right activist Rose Scott that her public work had all been at her own expense.
Lee died in her North Adelaide home in 1909 and was buried in the Wesleyan cemetery, Walkerville, with her son Ben, whose tuberculosis had brought her to South Australia. Her tombstone, a small white marble scroll, engraved “Late Hon. Sec. Women's Suffrage League of S.A.” remained her only memorial and her work unrecorded until 1980.
The centenary in 1994 of the constitution amendment granting South Australian women the right to vote and to stand for parliament brought some public reognition with a bust of Lee, sculpted by Patricia Moseley and sponsored by the women`s suffrage steering committee, unveiled on North Terrace, Adelaide city. In 2017, the City of Adelaide named Mary Lee Park (Park 27B) to honour her and, in 2019, some of Lee‘s descendants in Adelaide took part in the 125th anniversary reenactment in 2019 of the passing of the women's suffrage law. This was staged in the lower and upper houses of the South Australian parliament house.
But, significantly, to make up for disappearance of Lee's journals and most of her letters, Adelaide author Denise George made exhaustive searches in Armagh, Monaghan, Cambridge and London to gather material for the 2018 biography, Mary Lee, and produced a compelling story of a woman who took on the South Australian establishment and conservatives and won.
