Kate Sheppard's Suffrage Petition

On July 28, 1893, a heavy paper roll arrived in the New Zealand House of Representatives chamber. Two clerks started unspooling it down the central aisle, past the desks of men who had voted against women's suffrage for six years, and towards the Speaker’s chair. This roll was made of over five hundred sheets glued together, stretching the length of the room when fully extended. It carried the names and addresses of nearly thirty-two thousand New Zealand women, all asking for the right to vote.

The woman who put it all together wasn't there in the chamber. She was likely at her home in Fendalton, at 83 Clyde Road. For months, she had been pasting these sheets onto strips of wallpaper to keep them flat. Her name was Kate Sheppard. She was forty-five, a Christchurch grocer's wife, a Sunday-school teacher, and a choral society soprano. She was also an editor and a careful logician, and one of the first women in her city to routinely ride a bicycle. This was the third petition she had organized in three years, and it was twice the size of her previous one. That one, in turn, had been twice the size of the one before it. The men in the chamber had run out of reasons to refuse.

Six weeks later, on the evening of September 19, the Governor signed the Electoral Act of 1893 into law. New Zealand became the first self-governing country where adult women, including Māori women, could vote. In the November 1893 election, 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 ran for office. She never led a rally with revolutionary fervor. Instead, 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. Her father died when she was about fourteen, and she was sent to live with an uncle, a Free Church of Scotland minister in Nairn. Biographers believe she absorbed Christian socialism from him, seeing the gospel as practical justice. She arrived in Lyttelton at age twenty on February 8, 1869, after an eighty-eight-day sea voyage from Gravesend. On July 21, 1871, she married Walter Allen Sheppard, a Christchurch City councillor and grocer, at her mother's house.