The best mistake
The Australian state of Victoria was the first place to give women the vote - yes before South Australia and even before New Zealand did. The reason why you don’t know about this little fact is because Victoria gave women the vote by mistake.
The Parliament of Victoria accidentally gave (some) women the right to vote in elections for the Victorian Legislative Assembly in 1863 by passing the Electoral Act 1863. This Act allowed all of the registered ratepayers on local council rolls of electors to vote for members of the Parliament’s lower house.
When the Constitution of Victoria was drafted (yes- we have a constitution) in 1853 there was no intention to give the vote to women- any woman- because of the stupid view that women belonged at home and not the very public sphere of government and governance.
From the time the Constitution of Victoria was drafted Victoria was worried with how the vote would take place and with safeguarding the integrity of the voting system. Newspapers reported that fraud by impersonation would or could take place and expressed (racist, very racist) alarm that even Aboriginal people might vote. The Parliament’s answer was the Electoral Act 1863
The Act was trying to fix the very real and expensive problem of how the registration of voters on rolls would be done and how the integrity of the system would be protected. The Act allowed for the municipal rolls to be used for putting together the state electoral roll. In drafting the Electoral Act, Mr Ireland the Victorian Attorney-General, used the words “all persons” to decide who on the municipal rolls would be counted for the Victorian roll.
One of the ways to get onto the municipal roll of electors was to own property in the corresponding municipal district. What Mr Ireland overlooked is that (some white) women were property owners in their own right and eligible to be on their municipal roll which would make them eligible to vote in the Victorian election of 1864- and they did. The Argus newspaper (now called The Age) reported that:
At one of the polling booths in the Castlemaine district a novel sight was witnessed. A coach filled with ladies drove up, and the fair occupants alighted and recorded their votes to a man, for a bachelor candidate – Mr Zeal… at the Sandhurst election also the fair sex to the number of ten or a dozen exercised the franchise and recorded their votes for their favourite candidates.[17]
A coach! Full of ladies! Gasp!
Outraged by this happenstance the Victorian government amended the Electoral Act in 1865 restricting the vote to male ratepayers only. It then took another 43 years before most Victorian women would be granted the right to vote in Victoria again. It was hard fought too, a total of 19 Bills proposing women’s suffrage were rejected by the Parliament of Victoria from 1889 until most Victorian women were granted the vote in 1908.
Because of racism, colonial violence, disenfranchisement, attempts to destroy culture and language, genocide, and land dispossession, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women were not allowed to vote until 1965, 100 years after the Electoral Act was amended.
In truth, it’s probably not fair to say that Victoria granted the right to vote before anywhere else because that right was not granted intentionally and freely and it wasn’t to even to most women, just some. The Electoral Act was more a wrong that made a right.
