Kate Sheppard's Suffrage Petition

Nearly thirty-two thousand names and addresses were on the petition that arrived in the debating chamber on July 28, 1893. Two clerks of the New Zealand House of Representatives took hold of one end of it and started walking down the central aisle. The paper unspooled behind them past the Treasury benches and the desks of men who had spent six years voting against what it represented. It stretched the length of the room, made up of more than five hundred sheets glued together end to end.

The woman who put it together wasn’t there in the chamber. She was likely at home in Fendalton, at 83 Clyde Road, where she had spent the previous summer months pasting those sheets onto strips of wallpaper. She was forty-five, the wife of a Christchurch grocer, a Sunday-school teacher, and a choral society soprano. She was also an editor, a careful logician, and one of the first women in her city to routinely ride a bicycle. Her name was Kate Sheppard, and this was the third petition she had organized in three years. It was twice the size of the previous one, which itself was twice the size of the one before that.

Six weeks later, on the evening of September 19, the Governor signed the Electoral Act 1893 into law. New Zealand became the first self-governing country where adult women, including Māori women, could vote. In the 1893 election that November, 82 percent of newly enrolled women turned out, a figure no general election in the country has matched since.

Sheppard never gave a parliamentary speech or stood for office. She wrote pamphlets, kept ledgers, tracked MPs on postcards, and answered every letter. She was born Catherine Wilson Malcolm in Liverpool on March 10, 1847, to Scottish parents. Her father died when she was around fourteen, and she was sent to live with an uncle in Nairn. Biographers agree it was there she absorbed a strain of Christian socialism, a conviction that the gospel was practical justice.

The wider family later settled in Dublin before her mother decided to move five children to New Zealand. Kate’s eldest sister, Marie, had married George Beath in Christchurch in 1867. Kate, aged twenty, arrived in Lyttelton on February 8, 1869, after an eighty-eight-day journey from Gravesend.

Christchurch in 1869 was a grid of timber buildings. Most of the Malcolms joined the Trinity Congregational Church on Worcester Street. On July 21, 1871, Kate married Walter Allen Sheppard at her mother’s house. Walter was a Christchurch City councillor and owned a substantial grocery business.