Handkerchief, Woman's Rights "1981"

Produced by the Glasgow muslin manufacturing company Carslaw & Henderson in 1881, this handkerchief depicts a future in which women’s rights are granted and they are able to serve in the army and navy, work in science or the law, and run for political office. The men, meanwhile, are left to scrub the floors, do the laundry, nurse the children, and make the tea. It materialises nineteenth-century opposition to campaigns for women’s rights, and demonstrates the fears many opponents had about what would happen if supposedly ‘natural’ gender roles were disrupted.

In the late nineteenth century a broad movement for women’s political rights developed in Britain and its colonies, the United States, and northern Europe. As Sandra Coney explains, suffragists in New Zealand ‘were not isolated, but were fully conscious of their part in a worldwide movement of women’ (Coney 1993, 13). They corresponded with campaigners all over the world, and drew on shared rhetoric inspired by the writings of English philosopher John Stuart Mill and the missionaries of the American temperance movement.

This movement for women’s rights created intense public interest and in New Zealand, as elsewhere, there was vociferous opposition. One of the main arguments against womanhood suffrage was that women and men occupied separate spheres, and women were naturally more suited to domestic work than to public affairs. It was felt that women would be ‘unsexed’ by participation in the ‘grubby’ world of politics, would neglect their duties in the home, and would upset their husbands with their political opinions. Allowing women to participate in politics was thus a disturbance of the natural order and, according to opponents, would lead to the breakdown of society (Atkinson 2003, 87).

Scathing characterisations of the ‘shrieking sisterhood’ were circulated in newspapers and other public forums, including cartoons which depicted downtrodden men being ordered around by shrewish ‘he-women’ (See for example, New Zealand Mail, 29 September 1893, pg 17; The Observer and Free Lance, 28 May 1887). This handkerchief, although not produced in New Zealand, is therefore representative of a shared language of opposition. The New Zealand debate, suggests Patricia Grimshaw, was not unique in its poverty of social understanding, but was in fact a ‘remarkably faithful replica of the debate which was in progress throughout the world’ (Grimshaw 1972, 85).

Despite the antagonism of anti-suffragists the suffrage campaign continued to gain momentum, and in 1893 women in New Zealand were granted the right to vote. Although discrimination on the basis of gender continues in a number of overt and covert ways, women now work in all branches of the law, hold positions of political power, and have the right to bear arms in defence of their country.

References

• Atkinson, Neill. 2015. 'Voting rights - Votes for women'. Te Ara - the Encyclopedia of New Zealand. https://teara.govt.nz/en/voting-rights/page-4
• Atkinson, Neill. 2003. Adventures in Democracy: A History of the Vote in New Zealand. Dunedin: University of Otago Press in association with the Electoral Commission.
• Brookes, Barbara. 2016. A History of New Zealand Women. Wellington: Bridget Williams Books.
• Coney, Sandra. 1993. Standing in the Sunshine: A History of New Zealand Women Since they Won the Vote. Auckland: Viking.
• Grimshaw, Patricia. 1972. Women’s Suffrage in New Zealand. Auckland: Auckland University Press.
• Museum of London. Commemorative handkerchief, 'Woman's Rights and what came of it 1881.' Collections Online. https://collections.museumoflondon.org.uk/online/object/76749.html