ABSTRACT
Léontine Cooper’s intellectual leadership of the women’s movement, primarily through her acerbic writing in the mainstream press, the radical Boomerang, and Louisa Lawson’s pre-eminent feminist Dawn, helped inspire the formation of the short-lived Women’s Suffrage League 1889–1891. Arriving in the early 1870s with closer settlement, she was a teacher and novelist. Her writing and manifestoes highlighted the conditions underpinning the position of women, notably the lack of property rights but also working conditions and why the vote was important. Consisting of distinguished community leaders, newspaper proprietors, leading businesswomen, and inspired young women, the League lobbied successfully for a Married Women’s Property Act in 1890. In part because of the vitriolic attack on ‘bourgeois’ women by charismatic socialist William Lane, the League collapsed. In the early 1890s with the widespread shearers’ strikes and economic depression, the labour movement began to mobilise. With the turn to the women’s unions, May McConnel was appointed the first woman organiser. Six women, the first time in the Western world women were appointed to an official inquiry, sat on the Royal Commission looking into working conditions. Women advocates were gaining experience, ready to take up key leadership positions in the suffrage campaigns.
