Once Victoria’s gold-rush population settled down, most men were eligible to vote. Elsewhere in the world, the long fight for manhood suffrage continued. Here in Victoria, it had been achieved without a struggle. But another name for responsible government is representative government. How could the government be representative of its citizens when women could neither vote nor stand for parliament?
 
A loophole in the Electoral Act unintentionally allowed some Victorian women to vote in the parliamentary elections of 1864; but that loophole was quickly closed. Forty years later, every Australian state but Victoria had granted its female citizens the right to vote. As Premier George Turner told parliament in 1898:

'We, in Victoria, used to claim that we led the way in all these reforms. Now we are gradually falling into the wake of other countries.'

Why was Victoria so slow on this reform? It differed from the other states in one important respect: by 1900 more than half its adult population was female. There was a fear that if women were allowed to vote, they might take over!
 
Eighteen women’s suffrage bills were rejected by parliament between 1889 and 1908. When finally the 19th was passed, in November 1908, the number of Victorians eligible to vote more than doubled. No female revolution followed.

'We believe in what we call representative government. This has been defined as the governing of the people by the people for the people. But have we not rather the government of the people by half the people, etc.?'
– ‘A Daughter’, in The Court, December 1895
 
'No man could stand being dictated to by the women of the country.'
– The Hon. SW Cooke, MLC, 1898

Illustrations
Top: RE Poole, ‘Thou shalt not vote: womanhood, madness, criminality’, in Australian Woman’s Sphere, 8 April 1892
Bottom: ‘Petticoats, Patchouli and Politics. Whimsical Parliament of Women’, in Truth, 2 July 1904
Leading suffragist Vida Goldstein played the role of Speaker at a Women’s Parliament held in Melbourne in 1904.