Women who owned property allowed to vote in South Australian council elections from 1861
Wealthier citizens at a Government House, Adelaide, garden party during the 1870s. The few South Australian women who owned property could vote in local government elections from 1861.
Image by Samuel White Sweet courtesy State Library of South Australia
Propertied women in South Australia were allowed to vote in local council elections (but not parliamentary elections) in 1861. The Municipal Corporations Act permitted landowners and occupiers to vote in local government elections and didn't exclude women.
This hardly opened the floodgates, with married women having to forfeit their right to property when they married. This was only changed by the passing of the Married Women’s Property Act in the early 1880s.
Although it amused some parliamentarians, the few eligible women voted pragmatically in Adelaide municipal elections. This precedent was used when women’s suffrage in parliamentary processes became an important issue.
Women weren’t considered in 1850s discussions about eligibility to vote for parliamentary elections during the drafting and developing the first constitution of South Australian (1856-57). This granted the right to vote to all male British subjects (including Aboriginals) 21 years or over in South Australia. It also allowed secret ballots; one vote, one value; no property qualifications to vote for members of the House of Assembly; and three-year parliamentary terms.
The one-man-one-vote rule would be important later in South Australian’s women’s campaign for the vote.
In other Australian colonies, up until the 1890s, plural voting was allowed for men who owned property in more than one electorate. South Australia’s 1894 bill for women’s suffrage gained full support from trade unions, the United Trades and Labour Council and the United Labour Party once the property limits of earlier female suffrage measures were removed.
Support from the labour movement was denied to suffragists in other colonies because of their own campaign to abolish plural voting. The Australian constitution in 1901 included a ban on plural voting, replacing it with one man, one vote.
