Passions of the First Wave Feminists

This work offers a new view of suffrage-era feminism in Australia, located in rich cultural, social and political context, which also presents a new view of the decades around federation.

This book reveals an outstanding generation of radical reformers who not only led the world in achieving votes for women, but imagined a new deal between the sexes that can inspire us still. First Wave Feminists have been called 'wowsers', 'moralistic', 'spoilers of men's pleasures'. These women of the later nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth have been dismissed as fearsomely respectable, crushingly earnest, socially puritanical, politically limited and sexually repressed. Passions of the First Wave Feminists is a radical re-appraisal of the God's Police history of Australian feminism. It offers a new view of suffrage-era feminism in Australia, and therefore a new view also of politics, nationalism and culture in the 1890s. It shows First Wave Feminists as passionate, challenging convention on every side, visionary, and centrally preoccupied with sex.