Victorian Women's Suffrage Petition

The Victorian Women's Suffrage Petition, also known as the Monster Petition, was collected, collated, and presented to the Victorian Parliament in 1891 by groups seeking women's suffrage in Victoria. It was one of the largest known petitions from the 19th century, and it demanded the right to vote for women in the Colony of Victoria, Australia. It contains nearly 30,000 Victorian women's signatures. It was gathered in a six month period 1891 by women's suffrage activists and was organised by a coalition of groups such as the Woman's Christian Temperance Union of Victoria (WCTU), the Victorian Temperance Alliance, the Victorian Women's Suffrage Society, and the Australian Women's Suffrage Society.

While the petition failed to win the suffrage bill that it supported in 1891, the petition had a lasting impact because it proved that a large proportion of women in Victoria wanted the vote, rather than just a fringe group of women as women's suffrage critics suggested.

The petition is held at the Public Record Office Victoria, and was transcribed and made available as a searchable digitised database by the Parliament of Victoria website. In 2008 the Victorian Government, Arts Victoria, and the City of Melbourne commissioned a sculpture of the petition called the Great Petition, located at the Burston Reserve, near Parliament House.