Such a right was debated by the founding fathers and rejected, largely because it might have hindered the implementation of the White Australia policy and the new nation's ability to discriminate against the Chinese and the Kanakas. The importance of such a right throughout Australian history is self evident, not least now as the Parliament contemplates the passage of a racially discriminatory Native Title Amendment Bill. Without exempting white women in any way from their complicity in the oppression of Aboriginal women, one wonders whether their experience of disenfranchisement and exclusion might have favourably altered the exclusion of Aborigines from the new Constitution - it was only in 1967 that the sections of the Constitution excluding Aborigines from the census and from the exercise of Commonwealth powers, unlike other ethnic groups, were removed. So at first glance our history books suggest that women played no role in fashioning an Australian nation one hundred years ago. But when we dig a little deeper, as have Irving and feminist historians, we discover evidence of women's involvement.
Women feature in limited instances in the imagery of citizenship.
Consider the appeal of Queen Victoria to suffragists as an example of women's political potential. Rose Scott was an outspoken anti-Federalist who asserted that Federation was doomed unless the first Treasurer were a woman. The last decades of the 1800s coincided with the creation of women's organisations - discussions groups, suffrage leagues, organisations for 'good works'. The beginnings of my own organisation, the YWCA, date from the late 1880s. One of the most active women's organisations was the Women's Christian Temperance Union which focussed on suffrage, temperance and God.