Kate Sheppard (1847–1934)

Three labels are used:

• established: supported by primary records, official bodies or several independent reliable sources.
• shared: the core fact is sound, but sources disagree on details, dates or interpretation.
• traditional: widely repeated but not traceable to a primary or independent source.

The main source is Tessa K. Malcolm's entry in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography (1993, updated 2013), which is careful about what is known of Sheppard's early life. The suffrage campaign is well documented in parliamentary papers, the petitions themselves (held by Archives New Zealand and displayed at the National Library in Wellington), WCTU records and the White Ribbon. The Ministry for Culture and Heritage's NZHistory site, Christchurch City Libraries and Archives New Zealand add details.

The weak point is her early life. Her birth date is "probably" 10 March 1847, and even the year has been given as 1848. The first Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, edited by G. H. Scholefield in 1940, said she was born on Islay in 1848 and educated in Scotland. The modern dictionary corrects this to Liverpool, 1847, with a childhood in London, Nairn and Dublin. Little is known about exactly where in Scotland her parents came from. The card treats her Scottish parentage and her years in Nairn as established, and any more specific Scottish birthplace for her parents as unknown.

A Liverpool birth and a Scottish family

established Birth. Tessa Malcolm's entry in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography gives her birth as Catherine Wilson Malcolm, in Liverpool, Lancashire, "probably on 10 March 1847". She was known as Katherine or Kate. Her father, Andrew Wilson Malcolm, was a clerk; her mother was Jemima Crawford Souter. The dictionary describes them simply as Scots. Christchurch City Libraries says the same and adds that the family moved from Liverpool to London and back to Scotland, where Kate was educated. The Liverpool museums, which hold a New Zealand $10 note in their collection, describe her as born in Liverpool.

shared Where in Scotland? None of the modern sources names the towns her parents came from. Her own surname, Malcolm, and her mother's, Souter, are common Scottish names, but that settles nothing. G. H. Scholefield's Dictionary of New Zealand Biography (1940) gave her birthplace as Islay and the year as 1848. No modern source supports Islay. It may come from a family connection with the island, or simply from error; nothing now available shows which.

established Nairn and the Free Church. Her childhood was divided between London, Nairn and Dublin. Her father died in 1862. The modern dictionary attributes her religious upbringing, including an interest in Christian socialism, to an uncle who was a minister of the Free Church of Scotland at Nairn. The Free Church had broken from the Church of Scotland at the Disruption of 1843 over the right of congregations to choose their ministers. In Christchurch she worshipped at Trinity Congregational Church, not in a Presbyterian church. The Scholefield entry of 1940 also traced her devotion to the Free Church and her sympathy for social causes mainly to an uncle.

established Emigration. In 1868 her mother took the family to New Zealand. They arrived at Lyttelton on the Matoaka on 8 February 1869: her mother, two brothers, a sister and Kate, aged about twenty-one. Her older sister, Marie Beath, was already in Christchurch. Canterbury was then a young settlement, planned in 1850 on Edward Gibbon Wakefield's principles. Marjory Harper, in Adventurers and Exiles (2003), notes that New Zealand was generally better regarded than Australia by emigrants thanks to the planned colonisation of Otago and Canterbury.

Christchurch

established Marriage. On 21 July 1871 she married Walter Allen Sheppard, a grocer and general merchant, in Christchurch. Their only child, Douglas, was born on 8 October 1880. In 1888 they built a house at 83 Clyde Road, Christchurch, where they lived until 1902. It became a regular meeting place for suffrage workers, and is now known as Kate Sheppard House. Her sister Isabella and her brother Frank lived nearby.

established Temperance. The American temperance organiser Mary Leavitt toured New Zealand in 1885, and the New Zealand branch of the Women's Christian Temperance Union was founded that year. Sheppard was a founding member. In 1887 she became national superintendent of the union's franchise and legislation department. The union had a practical reason for wanting votes for women: women voters could support the prohibition of liquor. NZHistory notes that for Sheppard, suffrage became a goal in its own right.

The petitions

established Earlier efforts. Votes for women had been argued in New Zealand since the late 1860s. Mary Ann Muller wrote an appeal to the men of New Zealand under the name "Femmina", and Mary Ann Colclough, "Polly Plum", gave public lectures. In Parliament, Robert Stout, born in Lerwick, Shetland, and later premier, and others proposed women's suffrage measures in the 1870s and 1880s. All failed.

established 1891 and 1892. Under Sheppard's direction, WCTU branches gathered signatures across the country. In 1891 eight petitions with more than 9,000 women's signatures were presented to the House of Representatives, and Sir John Hall's Female Suffrage Bill won a majority there before being narrowly defeated in the Legislative Council. In 1892 six petitions with nearly 20,000 signatures followed. John Ballance's Electoral Bill of that year would have given all women the vote but was abandoned in a dispute over postal voting.

established The "monster petition". In 1893 thirteen petitions reached the House with 31,872 women's signatures. Archives New Zealand records that Sheppard had the sheets of one petition sent back to Christchurch, pasted them end to end and rolled them round a broom handle. John Hall brought the roll into the House and unrolled it down the central aisle. NZHistory gives its length as 270 metres. Twelve of the thirteen petitions have not survived. The surviving roll holds 25,519 signatures, including a few men's. It is now displayed at He Tohu, in the National Library in Wellington, beside the Treaty of Waitangi and the 1835 Declaration of Independence.

established The Electoral Act. Richard Seddon, the new premier, opposed women's suffrage and was close to the liquor trade. His government's Electoral Bill nonetheless carried a women's franchise clause into the Legislative Council, where it passed on 8 September 1893 by a narrow margin. The governor, Lord Glasgow, a Scottish peer, signed the Act on 19 September 1893. The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography records that Seddon sent Sheppard a telegram conceding defeat and that Lord Glasgow gave her the pen used to sign the bill.

established The first election. Archives New Zealand reports that 109,461 women enrolled within two months. On 28 November 1893 women voted in a general election for the first time; the modern dictionary gives the share of adult women who voted as about 65 per cent. The Act covered Māori women as well as Pākehā women. The next day Elizabeth Yates was elected mayor of Onehunga, the first woman mayor anywhere in the British Empire.

shared A world first? Archives New Zealand calls New Zealand the first self-governing nation in which women won the right to vote. The qualifier matters. Some smaller territories and American states had already given women votes, and South Australia followed in 1894 with the right to stand for parliament as well. New Zealand women had to wait for the Women's Parliamentary Rights Act of 29 October 1919 to stand for Parliament, and the first woman MP, Elizabeth McCombs, was elected only in 1933. The safest wording is "the first self-governing country to give all adult women the vote in national elections".

After the vote

established The White Ribbon. In 1895 Sheppard edited the White Ribbon, the WCTU paper, and wrote much of it. NZHistory describes it as the first New Zealand newspaper owned, managed and published entirely by women. She also went to London as New Zealand's delegate to the World's WCTU convention.

established The National Council of Women. In April 1896 the National Council of Women of New Zealand was founded in Christchurch, and Sheppard was its president for three years. Its programme went well beyond the vote: proportional representation, the initiative and referendum, an elected executive, and legal and economic independence for married women.

established Later years. Ill-health made her give up the White Ribbon in April 1903, and she went to England with her husband that July. She returned in September 1904 and slowly withdrew from public speaking. In 1909 the International Council of Women elected her an honorary vice-president. In 1916 she helped revive the National Council of Women, which had lapsed.

Family and the Scottish thread

established An Edinburgh wedding. Her son Douglas married Wilhelmina Sievwright in Edinburgh on 29 June 1908, and died less than two years later, on 16 March 1910. Walter Sheppard had settled in England and died at Bath on 24 July 1915. Their granddaughter, Margaret Isobel Sheppard, died in 1930. Kate Sheppard outlived two husbands, her only son and her only grandchild.

established Second marriage and death. On 15 August 1925, aged 78, she married William Sidney Lovell-Smith, a printer and writer and a long-time ally. He died four years later. She died at her home in Riccarton, Christchurch, on 13 July 1934, a year after Elizabeth McCombs entered Parliament. She was buried in Addington cemetery.

shared Scots in the campaign. Sheppard was not the only woman of Scottish background in the movement. Scots were well represented in New Zealand, especially in Otago, and the first Women's Franchise League was set up in Dunedin. T. M. Devine, in To the Ends of the Earth (2011), cautions that Scots were over-represented among successful New Zealanders but not overwhelmingly. The suffrage campaign drew on English, Scottish, Irish and New Zealand-born women alike, and on men such as the English-born Hall.

Memory

established The $10 note. Her portrait was added to the New Zealand $10 note in 1991, with a white camellia, the flower suffragists gave to supporters in Parliament. The current note keeps both, with the whio, or blue duck, on the back.

established Memorials. The Kate Sheppard National Memorial on the banks of the Avon in Christchurch was unveiled on 19 September 1993, for the centenary of women's suffrage. Her house at 83 Clyde Road is now called Kate Sheppard House. She also appears on a commemorative stamp.

• Kate Sheppard's birth name was Catherine Wilson Malcolm.
• An older dictionary said she was born on Islay; she was born in Liverpool.
• An uncle who was a Free Church minister in Nairn shaped her religious outlook.
• She pasted the 1893 petition sheets end to end and rolled them round a broom handle.
• The surviving 1893 petition roll holds 25,519 signatures and is displayed beside the Treaty of Waitangi.
• The governor who signed the 1893 Act was the Earl of Glasgow, and he gave her the pen.
• Her son was married in Edinburgh in 1908.
• She married for the second time at 78.

• Myth: Kate Sheppard was born in Scotland. She was born in Liverpool to Scottish parents. The claim that she was born on Islay comes from a 1940 dictionary entry that the modern Dictionary of New Zealand Biography corrects.
• Disputed: her date of birth. The modern dictionary gives "probably 10 March 1847"; older sources give 1848.
• Disputed: New Zealand was the first country where women voted. It was the first self-governing country to give all adult women the national vote. Some smaller territories and American states gave women votes earlier, and South Australia, in 1894, was first to let women stand for parliament.
• Myth: women could stand for Parliament from 1893. The right came only with the Women's Parliamentary Rights Act of 1919, and the first woman MP was elected in 1933.
• Myth: one petition of 32,000 signatures. There were thirteen petitions in 1893 with 31,872 signatures between them. One great roll survives, with 25,519.
• Myth: Sheppard won the vote alone. She led the WCTU campaign, but thousands of women collected signatures, and men such as John Hall, Robert Stout and John Ballance carried the cause in Parliament.
• Disputed: the role of the temperance movement. The WCTU wanted women's votes partly to win prohibition, and its opponents in the liquor trade fought the bill. Sheppard herself came to treat the vote as a right in its own right.