THE MYTH OF ONE
On June 30, 1893, Alfred Broad, a brush manufacturer who had nine children, boarded a ship in Dunedin with the Otago women’s suffrage petitions – one for the House of Representatives, the other for the Legislative Council, the old Upper House.
His 39-year-old wife, Martha, was an executive member of the Women’s Franchise League, and he went to meetings himself. Dunedin had huge pro-suffrage public meetings, in which both men and women spoke from the stage. We can get a feel for them because they were covered in great detail in the newspapers – with “laughter” and “applause” in brackets.
The league was the only purpose-built suffrage organisation in New Zealand. It formed in Dunedin in April 1892, although the women behind it, including Harriet Morison and Helen Nicol, had held a big public meeting for suffrage the previous July.
Broad was going to a prohibitionist gathering in Wellington, but the league asked him to stop off in Christchurch and deliver the petitions to Kate Sheppard, the franchise superintendent of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), who had administered petitions in the previous two years as well.
The Women’s Franchise League, whose strongholds were Dunedin, Auckland, Napier and Whanganui, with another half dozen groups in smaller centres, generated most of the signatures for the 1893 petition to the House of Representatives, the only one to survive. When the league formed, Sheppard worried they might send their petitions separately, but they did not.
League working president Marion Hatton (Anna, Lady Stout was the nominal president) telegrammed Sheppard and told her to meet Broad in central Christchurch. Sheppard probably picked up the Otago petitions on July 1. She sent the finished petitions to Wellington on July 6. So, in five days, and apparently working alone, Sheppard formed the petition around the roll of Otago forms that were already stuck together.
Today, the petition is on display in Archives New Zealand’s exhibition, He Tohu, as one of New Zealand’s founding documents. Archives says this is the WCTU’s petition, and that Sheppard stuck it together in the order that she received the forms. But if you look at the digitised petition, the WCTU’s name is not on it – and the Otago roll that Broad brought forms pages 28 to 175.
Sheppard put three Christchurch forms first, with the one she signed at the
