Keeping track of each story,though,takes some effort,and there were times when I wished Wright had settled for telling them separately. Instead the book progresses via a series of sideways leaps from one narrative arc to the next,generally landing in the middle of some dramatic vignette and then providing several pages of backfill to bring the story up to date. (It takes seven pages to find out what Montefiore was actually doing on her balconette in Hammersmith). Engaging as the stories often are,it's easy to get lost.
Wright has chosen to present a narrative-based,people-focused history,allowing her sources to speak for themselves wherever possible. She invites us to share her subjects'delight in their own role as experienced leaders and representatives of a progressive young nation,and as literal embodiments of possibility. Courageous,enterprising,passionate and generous,they were also just a wee bit smug about the rights and privileges they so exclusively enjoyed. They revelled in their role and played shamelessly to their fans.
Following so closely on their heels,it can be difficult to assess just how significant their stories really were to the wider struggles of the British suffrage movement. It's not surprising that Australians supremely conscious of their nation's youth should cast their achievements in nationalist and even self-aggrandising terms. But by allowing her subjects'interpretation of their role to stand unchallenged,Wright appears to adopt their perspective as her own.
In a prefatory note,she Wright us that in 1902 the Australian franchise was extended only to white women. This should take the gloss off"patriotic gloating",she warns,and her book"should not be read as a celebratory nationalist narrative". Salutary advice,but impossible to follow – because it has been written as one.
Wright sets out to tell"for the first time"the story of Australia's part in the"epic drama"of the British suffrage struggle,a story of"how the world's newest nation became a global exemplar". She tells it first as a feminist but then,resoundingly,as a national story,a triumphal recuperation of Australians strutting on a global stage,a celebration of leadership,inspiration,education and sheer individual cheek.
The celebratory tone may grate,but it has a purpose. Monumental in both size and intent,Wright's book does more than recuperate a forgotten age of exuberant nationalism. It reminds us of a period when democracy mattered,when Australian citizens fought vigorously to defend and claim it. It was a period of"idealism and experimentation",soon to be blasted into the shadows by the advent of war.
Or so Wright says – but when I trained as a historian in the 1980s,that period of feminist,socialist,labour and liberal reformist movements seemed to be the very heart of Australian history. We celebrated its achievements and,increasingly,critiqued its limitations.
Its overshadowing by World War I is of more recent date,a product of the reinvention of the Anzac tradition that began to burden popular memory in the closing decades of the 20th century. Reactionary politicians and media jocks,claiming to defend Australian history against the unpatriotic critique of academics,in reality rushed to diminish it,finding in the riches of Australia's social and political past nothing to compare with the defeat and death of a handful of soldiers in a far-off land.
Wright's nationalism,even at its most unreflective,is more constructive than this. She aims to wrest Australians away from their prolonged obsession with Gallipoli as the"founding moment"of nationhood by reminding us that in the years before the war there was something much more important to celebrate – the political rights that an idealistic,young and forward-looking nation granted to most of its female citizens.
That's a history worth remembering,and even celebrating – albeit with caution. Triumphalist adjurations to be"proud"of our nation's history are too often defensive gestures,designed to affirm and protect the privileges of the privileged. But even while we recognise the exclusions and limitations of white women's suffrage,we may choose to be inspired,even invigorated,by the spectacle of Australia as a young nation,cockily leading the world towards a progressive future.
It certainly beats the spectacle offered by our present lamentable government,as they desperately shield their eyes against a terrifying future and trying to drag the world backwards into a fossil-fuelled,unsustainable past. At least we now can vote. Ladies,I suggest you break the windows...
Penny Russell is Bicentennial Professor of Australian History at the University of Sydney.