ABSTRACT
In the early years of the twentieth century, Australian men entrusted Australian women with the vote. Viewing the intensifying suffrage campaign in the British imperial centre, enfranchised women in the Australian peripheries counselled their imperial ‘cousins’ to do as Australian men had done and grant their women the right to vote. Anti-suffragists in the centre of the British Empire rejected the appropriateness of any comparison between conditions in Britain and those in Australia. Antipodean woman voted on provincial matters, those concerning the operation of relatively unimportant former colonies. A woman voter in the imperial centre would have a say in the affairs of a vast and increasingly troublesome empire. To equate the relative positions of British and Australian women was an embarrassing oversight. Australian women—loyal to the Empire as they were—should have known better. This chapter examines British anti-feminist attitudes towards the embarrassment of the Australian woman voter. It also elaborates on the theme of vicarious embarrassment, in this case, the feeling of embarrassment that the more knowledgeable British were forced to experience on behalf of their naïvely aberrant colonial cousins.
