Mid-morning in Winter and the sky already looks like this. New Town. August 2010.
Crikey Moses, it is Theme Thursday yet again, and – all things being EQUAL – it was forty years ago today that Betty Friedan lead a US-wide Women's Strike for Equality. This strike was held to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment, which effectively gave women the right to vote in the United States.
This timing inevitably causes raised eyebrows to those of us down here at the arse-end of the world.. Unrestricted women's suffrage in terms of voting rights was granted in New Zealand in the 1893!
The [then] self-governing colony of South Australia granted both universal suffrage and allowed women to stand for the colonial parliament in 1895. Upon Federation, the Commonwealth of Australia provided this for women in Federal elections from 1902 (except, of course, Aboriginal women).
So that puts us Antipodeans a good twenty years ahead!
Spare a thought for the bon Mademoiselles of the home of Liberté, égalité, and fraternité. They had to wait until 1945 to piss about and moan about how they had no-one to vote for and that elections were all a load of rubbish!
22 comments:
i always thought New Zealand was much much cooler than the US.
when do sheep get the vote though? ~ wink wink ~
New Zealand is like a younger brother that always wears a knitted vest and picks his nose.
Tasmania trumps New Zealand.
if you are that far ahead, can you send me back the lotto numbers for next week?
sheep...now that is sufferage...smiles.
I feel like I've been to school reading your blog. I learned something I was not aware of. Interesting.
PG
Great facts there. Didn't know that.
That is certainly a dramatic and striking picture!
Wow...Betty's gig was 40 years ago. Hard to believe. And I didn't know that New Zealand was 20 years ahead of the US in giving women the vote. Yay, NZ!
New Zealand rocks. I didn't know that NZ women got the vote before the US women. Great TT post and I love the photo.
I can't think of the stupidity of keeping women from voting without equating it with the current battle(s) in the US about whether gay marriages should be allowed. Fifty years from now, I truly hope people will say "Did this even have to be debated?!?" when discussing the current issue.
Brian Miller, I see the numbers 23, 19, 28 and 7, but can’t make out the rest!
Prayer Girl, just like school!
Anthony, well you do now! ;)
Merrytait, very romantic (in a nineteenth century way…)
Janice, it’s been some time…
Leeuna, they are very bolshy down there.
The Silver Fox, my philosophy on gay marriage is: “if you don’t like it, don’t marry a gay person”.
Good line!
And I've always figured that gays should have just as much right to screw up the so-called "sacred institution of marriage" as the heterosexuals have always been able to do!
Let's be honest, they're the only group these days clambering to GET married, and yet the supposed proponents of marriage want to lock them out. There's a failure of logic right there.
Ha! So true.
I think anyone should be allowed to marry anyone they choose... as long as I can stay single!
I might be one of very few people who actually knew New Zealand was the first country to allow women to vote, mostly because Finland was the first country to grant full suffrage to all women and we've always been a little annoyed that New Zealand beat us to the halfway point. ;) Great post!
Fat lot of good the vote did us this time round, who's running the country again?
The Silver Fox, no-one should do anything that they don’t want to do, and mind their own business.
Ziva, Finland is always an interesting model for us who work in public policy to look at, whatever the policy! The Finns have never been afraid to try things.
Baino, I believe that is the mining companies.
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