Dugdale, Henrietta (1827-1918), was a leader of the suffrage movement to grant Australian women voting rights. In 1884, with Annie Lowe, she founded Australia’s first women’s suffrage association.
Dugdale was born Henrietta Augusta Worrell on May 14, 1827, in London. In 1852, she emigrated to Melbourne with her husband, a man named Junius Augustus Davies. Her husband died soon after. In 1853, she married William Dugdale. The couple had three children.
In 1869, Dugdale made the first public demand for women’s equality in Australia. Under the pen name ADA, she wrote a letter to the Melbourne newspaper The Argus in response to debate over the Married Women’s Property Bill. In the letter, Dugdale made a plea for a complete revision of the laws on marriage and married women’s property. In her futuristic novel A Few Hours in a Far-Off Age (1883), Dugdale presented a vision of an enlightened Australian society free of inequality, poverty, and crime. Such a society, Dugdale believed, would come about after women had been granted suffrage.
In 1884, with Lowe, Dugdale established the Victorian Women’s Suffrage Society in Melbourne and served as its first president. The group was Australia’s first women’s suffrage association. The society’s campaign for women’s right to vote inspired suffragists in other Australian colonies to initiate similar campaigns. In 1895, South Australia became the first colony in Australia to grant women the vote. The Commonwealth Franchise Act of 1902 granted all Australian women the right to vote on a national level. A week after the death of William Dugdale in June 1903, Henrietta Dugdale married Frederick Johnson, with whom she had been living since separating from her second husband in the late 1860’s. She died in Point Lonsdale, Victoria, on June 17, 1918.
See also Australia, History of (The struggle for women’s rights); Lowe, Annie; Woman suffrage.
