Raindrops on Rose Leaf

Another rainy day. In two days we have had over 40mm of rain, more than a month’s worth. This has been a very wet winter.

My blip should be a white camellia, the symbol of the women’s suffrage movement in New Zealand. Today is the 124th anniversary of women gaining the vote in the general elections. As in other countries it had been a hard won battle, but New Zealand women were the first to be successful. They had their first chance to vote a couple of months later in November 1893.

With my new interest in genealogy I wondered how many of my fore-mothers took advantage of their new freedom and I searched the voting rolls. Alas, no familiar names appeared on the 1893 roll. One great grandmother was on the 1896 roll, along with her sisters and sisters-in-law, one of whom had signed the petition that did the trick. By the 1905 election my great grandmother had obviously influenced some of her younger relatives, and before the WW1 my grandmothers had enrolled. This was my mother’s side of the family. My father’s side, who liked to think they were a cut above the rest, didn’t take part until well after the War.

I felt a little sad they had not enrolled sooner, but they were hard working wives of farmers or farm workers and they had large Victorian families. They lived in isolated places. Perhaps they had more pressing things to think about.