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'A Fair Field and No Favour' - On Margaret Home Sievwright

© Maxine Throll

'A Fair Field and No Favour'

********************************************************** NOTICE to EPICENE WOMEN

ELECTIONEERING WOMEN

ARE REQUESTED NOT TO CALL HERE

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They are recommended to go home, to look after
their children, cook their husband's dinners, empty the
slops, and generally attend to the domestic affairs for
which Nature designed them.

By taking this advice they will gain the respect
of all right-minded people an end not to be attained
by unsexing themselves and meddling in masculine
concerns of which they are profoundly ignorant.

HENRY WRIGHT.

103, Mein Street
Wellington
1270G-Alex Ferguson, Printer, Wellington, New Zealand

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In 1893 New Zealand was the first country in the world to enfranchise women. It was a truly remarkable feat given the prevailing attitudes of the time. The Franchise Bill was presented to Parliament eight times before it became law. It was merely the beginning. Margaret Home Sievwright, a tireless campaigner for women's rights, fought on to ensure that women used their vote wisely.

"New Zealand had granted her women the franchise. Did these women consider, as apparently some men did, that the concession should be embroidered into some sort of ornamental badge and worn, perhaps, on the left breast until further orders or was it to be used, as Lord Coleridge recommended and as it had been usually recognised the suffrage was intended to be held, as a legitimate means of repealing unjust and barbarous legislations?"

As vice president and latterly president of the National Council of Women, a national body formed from 11 women's associations, she embarked on a public debate which saw her reputation as an agitator and a radical growing rapidly - in direct contrast to her 'shy and retiring nature'. Men and women alike spoke out against some of her more far-reaching reforms.

She challenged issues such as; equal pay for equal work, more humane divorce laws, full sex instruction for women, removal of all disabilities preventing women from standing for parliament and parental responsibility in the rearing of children. She maintained that prostitution would exist as long as women lacked opportunity in employment, and she fought to have the stigma removed from the word illegitimate. Her knowledge on the law as it related to women was unsurpassed.

Margaret Home Sievwright grew up on the outskirts of Edinburgh in relative comfort compared to the masses of people she saw around her, living in abject poverty. Her role models were Maud Pember Reeves and Emmiline Pankhurst, active campaigners for reform, Barbara Bodichon, a petitioner for the rights of wives to economic independence, Francis Power Cobbe a campaigner for the Matrimonial Causes Act and many, many more.

The copyright of the article 'A Fair Field and No Favour' - On Margaret Home Sievwright in Women's History is owned by Maxine Throll. Permission to republish 'A Fair Field and No Favour' - On Margaret Home Sievwright in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.