Helen Hart: Founder of Women's Suffrage in Australasia by Helen D Harris

Book Description

Secondhand. Good condition. Minimal edgewear. Ex library book with all external stickers removed. Protective plastic covering. Date due slip on inside, now covered with blank ex libris bookplate sticker. Stamps on inside pages. Purple pen mark on half-title page, otherwise interior is very good.

Helen Hart was born in 1842 in Birmingham, England. In her childhood, Hart became involved with anti-slavery and temperance movements and began open-air preaching from the age of 19. In 1876 she was on the executive committee of the National Society for Women's Suffrage.

In 1879, carrying references from leading English clergymen, Hart sailed to New Zealand as matron in a migrant ship. Failing to find employment, she returned to the lecture stage and travelled the South Island, speaking on a number of topics, including women's rights. A year later, she arrived in Melbourne and continued to preach on a wide range of subjects, including public health, temperance, politics and women's rights, in many city and suburban venues.

For the rest of her life, Hart continued to lecture, preach, and sell her portraits and poems in almost every city and country town in Victoria and numerous others in New South Wales and South Australia.

She claimed to be the founder of the women's suffrage movement in Australasia.