Distant Sisters: Australasian Women and the International Struggle for the Vote, 18801914

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The book tells a regional and international history of the Australian suffrage campaigns between 1880-1914, uncovering the networks of suffragists built to win the vote and sell its merits abroad. Situated at the nexus of feminist and imperial history, it examines the limits of cross border connection in turn-of-the-century social reform movements.

In the 1890s Australian and New Zealand women became the first in the world to win the vote. Buoyed by their victories, they promised to lead a global struggle for the expansion of womens electoral rights. Charting the common trajectory of the colonial suffrage campaigns, Distant Sisters uncovers the personal and material networks that transformed feminist organising. Considering intimate and institutional connections, well-connected elites and ordinary women, this book argues developments in Auckland, Sydney, and Adelaidelong considered the peripheries of the feminist worldcannot be separated from its glamourous metropoles. Focusing on Antipodean women, simultaneously insiders and outsiders in the emerging international womens movement, and documenting the failures of their expansive vision alongside its successes, this book reveals a more contingent history of international organising and challenges celebratory accounts of fin-de-sicle global connection.

This book is relevant to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 5, Gender equality.

Reviews

'Distant Sisters is fresh and necessary, a razor-sharp collection of messy stories that warn against simplistic readings of the past to the suit the imperatives or trends of the present.'
Dr Yves Rees, Sydney Review of Books

'Distant Sisters [is a] meticulous account of Australasian womens international activism in support of womens suffrage between 1880 and 1914'.
Professor Marilyn Lake, Australian Book Review

'Distant Sisters is a seamlessly and beautifully written, as well as rigorously researched, account of the intersecting ambitions, aspirations, endeavours, successes and failures of political women connected by virtue of their place in the Australasian region. It is a masterful recount of the messy stories both underpinning and arising out of Australasian suffrage success.
Sharon Crozier-De Rosa, Womens History Review

'Meticulously researched this careful study allows us to see both the excitement of women who wished to be the first to achieve the franchise and the disappointments that followed. Through his thorough engagement with a range of sources Keating has illustrated the importance of cross-border connections'.
Professor Barbara Brookes, History Australia

'James Keatings Distant Sisters is an important book It is meticulously researched, elegantly written and skilfully organised, building on international as well as local research and eschewing simple celebratory conclusions about Australasian womens global engagement. Thus, while acknowledging the positive achievements, it emphasises contingency, contradictions and limitations, especially in imagining an Australian identity and forging trans-Tasman cooperation.'
Emeritus Professor Judith Smart, Victorian Historical Journal

'In this welcome new addition to suffrage historiography, Keating delivers a portrait of the Australasian suffrage campaign that is far from traditional. It moves the reader away from a focus on the mere mechanics of the campaign, or indeed a spotlight on its key figures, to view instead a picture that is more detailed and complex. It helps the reader understand why the history of this movement and its activists has not taken a centre-stage in the global narratives of the womens franchise, while also highlighting the roles of some of the almost unknown or forgotten figures weaving through its history. By using a methodology that privileged spatial concepts we understand why regional issues mattered so greatly and also why Indigenous voices were absent from the Australian campaigns.'
Womens History Review

Author Bio

James Keating is a historian of suffrage, feminism, and internationalism in Australia and New Zealand