Mary Lee a prime mover in campaigns for social purity, better working conditions, women's vote in South Australia
The diminutive Mary Lee at her North Adelaide home in the 1880s. At the centre of major social and policial movements in late 19th Century South Australia, expecially giving voting rights to women, she absorbed abuse from her opponents.
Image courtesy State Library of South Australia
Mary Lee was an important founding force of the Social Purity Society, the Women’s Suffrage League (1888) and the Working Women’s Trade Union (1890) in South Australia. Lee became the most passionate campaigner in late 19th Century South Australia for women who had few legal rights, poor working conditions and restricted public life.
Lee, born in 1821 in Monaghan, Ireland, married an organist and vicar choral of Armagh Cathedral. They had four sons and three daughters. Lee was a boarding school principal in London where her husband went into debtors prison and may have absconded to the Americas. In 1879, as a 58-year-old and possibly a widow, Lee sailed with daughter Evelyn for Adelaide to nurse her son Ben who had tuberculosis. When he died the next year, Lee stayed in “dear Adelaide”.
Lee transformed gradually from “once the slip of an old red-hot Tory stem” to pushing singlemindedly for political and social reform, encouraged by progressive elements in South Australia. Initially interested in helping Jewish migrants, she became ladies' secretary of Congregational minister J.C. Kirby’s Social Purity Society, working for legal changes in women's sexual and social status. The society's intense lobbying brought big changes, including raising the age of consent from 13 to 16. Kirby credited Lee for this.
Lee and other Social Purity Society members, recognising that women getting voting rights was essential, started the South Australian Women's Suffrage League in 1888. As secretary, with Edward Stirling as president, Lee steered the league’s campaign skilfully. She regarded female suffrage as “the pivot on which turns the whole question of the moral, social and industrial status of women”.
In many speeches, newspaper articles and letters, Lee made her case, using historical, literary and biblical allusions; absorbing opponents’ “abuse” and “obloquy”. She spoke eloquently in the city, suburbs and country, at league meetings and socials, at Democratic clubs and, despite disliking total abstinence, at Woman's Christian Temperance Union meetings. She planned the league's wider strategies, collected shilling subscriptions and organised petitions and deputations.
A practical Christian, she adopted the social reformist ideas of Primitive Methodist minister Hugh Gilmore at North Adelaide. Concerned at working women's conditions, Lee also proposed women's trades unions at a public meeting on sweating conditions in 1889. She was secertary for two years of the Working Women's Trades Union founded in 1890. Her visits to clothing factories and workshops has some success in having employers adopt the union's log of prices.
Lee was on the ladies' committee of the female refuges at Adelaide city and Norwood. She helped abandoned women rise from poverty and prostituting themselves by teaching them skills and finding them work in homes of the Adelaide wealthy such as the Barr Smiths, Bonythons and Samuel Way.
On the wider women's suffrage front, Lee corresponded with New Zealanders and women in other Australian colonies, organising the Womanhood Suffrage League of New South Wales on South Australian league principles, through activists such as Rose Scott.
After Edward Stirling put an 1885 resolution for female suffrage to the South Australian parliament in 1885, six of seven suffrage bills failed to pass. Lee joined suffrage league deputations to premiers Thomas Playford II, Frederick Holder and John Downer and, from 1889, worked on many parliamentary petitions. With United Labor Party backing from 1891, premier Charles Cameron Kingston’s education minister presented a female suffrage bill in 1893. An attached referendum condition caused its failure. Lee’s patience snapped and Quiz weekly deplored her hot temper when she called the Labor Party “a lot of nincompoops”.
Kingston’s government, bowing to public demand and political pressure, presented an unencumbered female suffrage bill in 1894. Lee organised a petition – 400 feet long with 11,600 signatures – presented to the House of Assembly in August. The Constitution Amendment Act passed in December, making South Australian women the world’s first to gain both the right for a parliamentary vote and to stand for election to parliament.
