Kate Sheppard - A Canterbury Heroine

(image created using Pic Collage)

Katherine Wilson Sheppard, also known as Kate, (10 March 1847 – 13 July 1934) was the most prominent member of New Zealand's women's suffrage (the movement to allow women to vote in New Zealand) movement, and is the country's most famous suffragette. She also appears on the NZ ten dollar note. Because New Zealand was the first country to introduce universal suffrage, Sheppard's work had a considerable impact on women's suffrage movements in other countries.

Born in Liverpool in 1847, Kate emigrated to Christchurch in her early twenties. In 1885 she joined the new Women’s Christian Temperance Union, which advocated women’s suffrage as a means to fight for liquor prohibition. For Kate, suffrage quickly became an end in itself. Speaking for a new generation, she argued, ‘We are tired of having a “sphere” doled out to us, and of being told that anything outside that sphere is “unwomanly”.’

Kate travelled the country, writing to newspapers, holding public meetings and lobbying members of Parliament. Opposition was fierce. As Wellington resident Henry Wright wrote, women were ‘recommended to go home, look after their children, cook their husbands’ dinners, empty the slops, and generally attend to the domestic affairs for which Nature designed them’; they should give up ‘meddling in masculine concerns of which they are profoundly ignorant’.