Lucinda Sharpe on One-Women-One-Vote ("The Worker", Brisbane, 1891)

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(The Original “Lucinda Sharpe”, really Annie Lane, championing women's rights, before it was fashionable to do so!)

                                   

Just why one woman shouldn't have one vote as well as one man – you can take this any way you like – is one of those things which this particular woman could never make out. P'r'aps I'm a blue stocking and ought to have a moustache and be as flat as a board for holding such opinions. But then, you see, I haven't a single visible hair on my face, barring eye-brows and eye-lashes, and I'm as presentable-looking as most of us and never wear blue stockings except when that's the fashion and blues are cheap. Yet I want a vote just the same, and so do most women and if there are any who don't then they ought to be ashamed of themselves.

I've just had the pleasure of reading a “proof” of a very furious article on one-man-one-vote which is going to appear in this next issue of the Worker, the same that this epistle of mine is to be in. It was that started me. Of course a very pretty allusion is made to the right of one-woman to one-vote, for which I suppose a properly-minded woman should be properly grateful. Nevertheless it seems to me that we are left out in the cold and that one-man is nursing himself as usual over the fire and leaving one-woman, also as usual, to bring in the wood. It might not be very wise but it would be very much nicer if one-man put his arm round one-woman's waist and said out straight they'd have one-vote together or not at all. Now, wouldn't it? One-a human being even if the maternity which should be her crown and glory has been turned into something very like a curse.

Don't tell me! It has so. It is because working women wear themselves out for their children that they are old and haggard when they ought to be in full bloom. It is just because of the helpless little ones that women submit to ten thousand things they

would never submit to if they had only themselves to think of. And it's for no other reason in the world but because mothers who are poor haven't a moment to spare or an ounce of energy to waste that they can't gabble politics like men and can't make out how very important it is to keep the moon from standing still by having M'Ilwraith and Griffith in office instead of M'Ilwraith and Donaldson. We have stayed at home and minded the children and haven't turned out to shoot the shearers and have shown how little sense we have by trusting to the men to see that things were run right in Parliament. I don't know much about Parliament myself but I'm very sure of this that it's worse than bad and that it'll never be any better so long as men go rolling about drunk in it. And I'll undertake that no drunken candidate would stand much show with woman-one-vote.

 

 The author, circa 1893

Mind the children! Ah, isn't that just why one-woman should have one-vote, that she may? We've stayed at home and slaved and thought of very little else and what's come of it all? The poor little children! It makes my heart ache to think of them. Must they have the time that most of us have when they grow up? Just to think of what is before our little baby boys, their sweet little faces getting hard and brutal-looking, their innocent little souls getting soot-black because everything is against them, working when they ought to be at school and wandering about looking for work when they are men, no better than their parents, no happier, and worse, probably, far worse, for things get worse in new countries, not better, you know, for the poor. We dream about them, poor fools as we are, when they are at our breasts, and persuade ourselves because we wish it so that they'll be something better than us – but they won't, likely. How can they be? It is working women's babies who grow up to be working men and to go to prison often and to be hungry and wretched and struggling at the best, ninety-nine out of a hundred. How can the little babies help it? They have no chance and the men who have votes and rule the country will not make them a chance.

Of the girl-babies I won't speak. How can one speak of it? The lives in front of them we know. Every mother in the land knows , if she's been brought up to work, the dangers ahead of the little darlings, the insults, the pitfalls, the aching heart and head and limbs, the weeping for very weariness, the dull, hopeless patience that comes at last. What will our girl-babies do, most all of them, but be in the next generation what women are in this? And it isn't good enough. Do you know I could kiss the dead face of that poor mother who drowned herself with her babies the other day because she was afraid for them? If I weren't such a coward I believe I'd like to do that myself supposing I didn't feel any hope.

But I have hope. There must be an end to this somehow. It cannot be that we mothers are going to let it go on always – always. Surely women will say some day that either things must be different or they will not let the little babies come to suffer so. And surely if one woman had one vote she would get things altered some how for it is the laws that are wrong, only the laws, and the way things are managed.

LUCINDA SHARPE.