Women's suffrage in Victoria

Women's suffrage in Victoria, when women gained the right to vote in the state, was the result of many years of campaigning before Federation of Australia in the Colony of Victoria, and for eight years after in the State of Victoria. It was connected to the wider push for Women's suffrage in Australia. And yet while Victoria's campaign started earlier than other states, early lobbying culminated in the formation of Australia's first suffrage group, the Victorian Women's Suffrage Society (VWSS) in 1884, it was the last to grant state suffrage to women in 1908.

Decades before the formation of the VWSS, women landowners, such as Fanny Finch in the colony identified that they were technically enfranchised in local election through their status as rate payers and attempted to lodge their votes. However, they were blocked from exercising this right by electoral administrators. In 1865 the legislators in the Colony removed the technicality by changing the language of legislation to explicitly exclude women from the vote. It would take another 43 years, of women agitating and campaigning before white women of Victoria were allowed to vote in state elections. Furthermore, it would take would take another 40 years, when federal legislation changed in 1949, for those voting rights to be extended to Aboriginal people.

As the turn of the century drew closer, the suffrage campaigning picked up, with more suffrage groups forming, such as the Australian Women's Suffrage Society and other groups with broader agendas, such as the Woman's Christian Temperance Union of Victoria (WCTU), deciding to focus on the cause. In 1891 the groups worked together to canvass for women's signatures, with the resulting Monster Petition of nearly 30,000 signatures being presented to Victorian Parliament, which eliminated the myth that only a fringe group of women wanted to have the vote. The suffrage groups coordinated their campaigning in 1894 by creating the United Council for Woman Suffrage, led by Annette Bear-Crawford. After Bear-Crawford's unexpected death in 1899, Vida Goldstein took up the leadership of the movement.

The legislative Bill that finally passed through Victorian Parliament successfully in 1908 was the 19th that had been brought forward. The first had been put forward 20 years earlier by William Maloney in 1889.