up, there is less difficulty in expressing it
through the ballot-box than in matching a ribbon, and the one act is not
considered more unfeminine than the other. Our freedom has not developed
a class of political women, we have no "shrieking sisterhood," but we
know and use our power. We can do a great deal toward securing members
of good character in the Parliament and influencing their votes, and are
generally content with the results of our enfranchisement.

"I have described the conditions in my own State thus fully because,
though it is one of the smaller States in the Australian Commonwealth,
in this matter it is further advanced than most of the others. When
federation came, adult suffrage was the law only in South Australia and
Western Australia; it has since been adopted in New South Wales and
Tasmania, but it has not yet been granted, so far as the State
Legislatures are concerned, in the other two. The Federal Parliament,
however, had to make its own electoral laws, and to establish uniformity
was obliged to adopt the broadest existing basis, because the
constitution forbade the outrage and anomaly of disfranchising persons
by whom some of its members had been elected. Accordingly, the women of
New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, and Tasmania were somewhat
suddenly placed in the same position of political equality, so far as
the Commonwealth is concerned, as their South Australian and West
Australian sisters. They were legally qualified to act in the Federal
elections of last December, and as they had not been allowed a similar
privilege at elections for their legislatures, of course the event
produced considerable sensation and wore an air of strangeness and
novelty. The newspapers gave special attention to the new voters, and
teemed with exhortations as to the way they should go, and it was
amusing to observe how some candidates who had fought against woman's
suffrage with all their might tried to show their supreme regard and
esteem for the voters whose rights they had previously refused. By the
time polling day arrived, the average woman was probably as well
prepared to discharge her electoral duty as the average man.

"Three women offered themselves as candidates, Mrs. Martell and Mrs.
Moore, in New South Wales, and Miss Vida Goldstein in Victoria. The
candidature of the two former was not unanimously approved by the
Women's Association of their own State, and their defeat was a foregone
conclusion;