South Australian women make a 66% turnout for their first chance to vote in the colony's 1896 elections

The big crowd outside the Register newspaper office in Waymouth Street, Adelaide, looking at voting tallies in the South Australian election on April 25, 1896 – the first allowing women to vote.
Image by Ernest Gail, courtesy State Library of South Australia

Premier Charles Cameron Kingston described giving women the vote as South Australia's  “greatest constitutional reform” but Queen Victoria called it a “mad, wicked folly”. She signed assent in 1895, making South Australia the first jurisdiction in Australia and one of the first in the world to grant universal suffrage alongside the right to stand as candidates for parliament – rights that extended to Aboriginal women.

About 66% of eligible women embraced the right to vote at the 1896 South Australian general election. Ironically, South Australia was the last state to elect a woman to parliament, 65 years later.

In 1897, Catherine Helen Spence became the first female political candidate for political office, unsuccessfully standing for election in South Australia as a delegate to Federal convention on Australian federation, in Adelaide. South Australian women could also vote in the 1901 federal election but the turnout by women for the non-compulsory (as with the state) voting 31%, compared to 49% for men.

For the 1903 federal senate elections, 24% of eligible women voted, compared to 42% men – but overall turnout was only 33%. Some voters in the five uncontested seats in the House of Representatives that year may have decided not to bother with the elections at all.