'For the ten years from 1902, when Australia’s suffrage campaigners won the vote for white women, the world looked to this trailblazing young democracy for inspiration.
'Clare Wright’s epic new history tells the story of that victory—and of Australia’s role in the subsequent international struggle—through the eyes of five remarkable players: the redoubtable Vida Goldstein, the flamboyant Nellie Martel, indomitable Dora Montefiore, daring Muriel Matters, and artist Dora Meeson Coates, who painted the controversial Australian banner carried in the British suffragettes’ monster marches of 1908 and 1911.
'Clare Wright’s Stella Prize-winning The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka retold one of Australia’s foundation stories from a fresh new perspective. With You Daughters of Freedom she brings to life a time when Australian democracy was the envy of the world—and the standard bearer for progress in a shining new century.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
Dedication: To my grandmothers Alice, Sally and Sara
'In the early twenty-first century, the word ‘suffragist’ is stuffy and obscure. There is more currency in ‘suffragettes’, especially the British women who resorted to civil disobedience in their mission of votes for women, years after their colonial sisters had succeeded peacefully. Clare Wright bridges and complexifies the difference between suffragists and suffragettes through the story of five Australian feminists who went on to be active in the United Kingdom: Dora Meeson Coates, Vida Goldstein, Nellie Martel, Muriel Matters and Dora Montefiore.' (Introduction)
'Clare Wright seems a born story‐teller. This is a big book that has already won high praise. Much has been written on the breakthroughs with women's suffrage in Australasia and the attempts to export this success to the “home country”, but never as engagingly as here. Wright tells the story through interwoven biographies of the key actors; she excels at setting scenes, keeping the complex plot under control and pushing the story forward. Although the book is well referenced, Wright does not slow down the action by locating her work in relation to existing historiography, at least until the final chapter where she engages with the construction of national narratives. Instead, she begins with her discovery of Dora Meeson's “Trust the Women” banner hanging in Parliament House in Canberra and her determination to unravel “its matted threads”.' (Introduction)
'This is big-picture history. The fundamental right to citizenship is about as big as history can get. In a year that witnessed the conclusion to the commemoration (more often verging on celebration) of the centenary of World War I and its accompanying literature, it is invigorating to read a book that so eloquently and subtly challenges the weary emphasis on the Anzac legend as the defining moment of the first two decades of twentieth-century Australian history. Instead, we have an account of the engrossing struggle of Australian women to win the vote in their own country and the crucial role they played in the British suffrage campaign.' (Introduction)
'In 1911, while visiting London, Australian suffragist Vida Goldstein was embroiled in a heated debate with a male correspondent to the British Anti-Suffrage Review about the relative merits of British and Australian women voters. The British man was exasperated by Goldstein’s claims to parity. Australian women, voting as they had been since the early 1900s, voted only on provincial matters. If women were to vote in England, they would have a hand in directing the affairs of a vast and troublesome empire. Surely, he said, ‘not even the most enthusiastic Australian would dream of suggesting that the Imperial Parliament was not far more important than the Commonwealth Parliament’. It is precisely this enthusiasm – through which Australian women voters counselled their British ‘cousins’ to adopt their progressive democratic practices – that directs the narrative in Clare Wright’s recent book, You Daughters of Freedom: The Australians Who Won the Vote and Inspired the World.' (Introduction)
'Australian suffragettes played a sometimes flamboyant role in the fight for the vote, at home and in Britain'
'In 1911, while visiting London, Australian suffragist Vida Goldstein was embroiled in a heated debate with a male correspondent to the British Anti-Suffrage Review about the relative merits of British and Australian women voters. The British man was exasperated by Goldstein’s claims to parity. Australian women, voting as they had been since the early 1900s, voted only on provincial matters. If women were to vote in England, they would have a hand in directing the affairs of a vast and troublesome empire. Surely, he said, ‘not even the most enthusiastic Australian would dream of suggesting that the Imperial Parliament was not far more important than the Commonwealth Parliament’. It is precisely this enthusiasm – through which Australian women voters counselled their British ‘cousins’ to adopt their progressive democratic practices – that directs the narrative in Clare Wright’s recent book, You Daughters of Freedom: The Australians Who Won the Vote and Inspired the World.' (Introduction)
'Clare Wright seems a born story‐teller. This is a big book that has already won high praise. Much has been written on the breakthroughs with women's suffrage in Australasia and the attempts to export this success to the “home country”, but never as engagingly as here. Wright tells the story through interwoven biographies of the key actors; she excels at setting scenes, keeping the complex plot under control and pushing the story forward. Although the book is well referenced, Wright does not slow down the action by locating her work in relation to existing historiography, at least until the final chapter where she engages with the construction of national narratives. Instead, she begins with her discovery of Dora Meeson's “Trust the Women” banner hanging in Parliament House in Canberra and her determination to unravel “its matted threads”.' (Introduction)
'In the early twenty-first century, the word ‘suffragist’ is stuffy and obscure. There is more currency in ‘suffragettes’, especially the British women who resorted to civil disobedience in their mission of votes for women, years after their colonial sisters had succeeded peacefully. Clare Wright bridges and complexifies the difference between suffragists and suffragettes through the story of five Australian feminists who went on to be active in the United Kingdom: Dora Meeson Coates, Vida Goldstein, Nellie Martel, Muriel Matters and Dora Montefiore.' (Introduction)
'Australian suffragettes played a sometimes flamboyant role in the fight for the vote, at home and in Britain'
'When Clare Wright’s new history, You Daughters of Freedom: The Australians who won the vote and inspired the world, landed in my mailbox, I opened it with some trepidation. It was big, a fact I now realise I should have expected but nevertheless a somewhat disheartening one – arriving as it did at the beginning of our lambing season on the farm. It sat on the kitchen table, slightly out of place beside tractor catalogues, long-term rainfall predictions (depressing), and pamphlets advertising ram sales.' (Introduction)
'This is big-picture history. The fundamental right to citizenship is about as big as history can get. In a year that witnessed the conclusion to the commemoration (more often verging on celebration) of the centenary of World War I and its accompanying literature, it is invigorating to read a book that so eloquently and subtly challenges the weary emphasis on the Anzac legend as the defining moment of the first two decades of twentieth-century Australian history. Instead, we have an account of the engrossing struggle of Australian women to win the vote in their own country and the crucial role they played in the British suffrage campaign.' (Introduction)
