Kate Sheppard was a leader of the women’s suffrage movement in New Zealand.
In 1847 Kate Malcolm was born in Liverpool, England and migrated in her twenties to Christchurch Otautahi where she married Walter Sheppard, a merchant. In 1885 Kate Sheppard joined the fight for liquor prohibition by becoming a member of the new Women’s Christian Temperance Union, where she quickly realised that women’s suffrage was an end in itself. The rest, as they say, is history. Kate became an advocate for suffrage, presenting petitions to parliament, one of which resulted in a change to electoral law in the country, and working to increase the knowledge and understanding of the unjustice of prevailing thought; that women …”attend to the domestic affairs for which Nature designed them”.
Kate Sheppard led a fascinating and influential life and outlived her two husbands, her son and her grandchild. Her portrait is on New Zealand’s ten dollar note, but her work inspired movements across the globe.
When Kate moved to Christchurch she lived in a house on farmland. Nowadays that house is in town, the city having encroached, and is owned by the University of Canterbury. It is a museum. Although filled with replacement furnishings and recreated wallpapers, the originals having been sold when the family moved back to England in 1894, it is a charming home with beautiful light coming through its windows and an English country garden filled with flowers (and a few native plants). It is possible to visit the house and, for a few minutes, to understand a little more about the local, national and international context in which women’s suffrage in New Zealand Aotearoa was achieved and to be the rooms where that history was made.
Leave a Reply