Mary Walsh Lee - Infinite Women

Born: 14 February 1821, Ireland
Died: 18 September 1909
Country most active: Australia
Also known as: Mary Walsh

The following is republished with permission from the Victorian Honour Roll of Women.

Mary Lee was the founder of the Working Women’s Trade Union.

Mary Lee was born on 14 February 1821 in Ireland. She married George Lee and together they had seven children. By 1879, she was a widow and sailed with her daughter, Evelyn, to Adelaide to nurse her sick son John Benjamin. He died the following year but they stayed in Adelaide. She spent the rest of her life working tirelessly for political and social reform.

Mary became secretary of Reverend Kirby’s Social Purity Society, which worked for legal changes in women’s social and sexual status. One of their achievements was raising the age of consent to sixteen in 1885. She realised that women’s suffrage was necessary for women to improve their lot, so she helped establish the Australian Women’s Suffrage League in July 1888. She steered their campaign and understood the value of publicity to arouse public interest in this issue.

Mary travelled energetically around the city and country speaking publicly about franchise. She collected shilling subscriptions and organised petitions and deputations. Mary was concerned with working women’s conditions so she proposed the formation of women’s trade unions at a public meeting on sweating in December 1889. The Working Women’s Trades Union was founded the following year and Mary was secretary for the first two years.

She visited factories and workshops, trying to persuade employers to adopt the Union’s recommended wages. In 1893, as vice-president, she was delegate to the Trades and Labor Council where she examined sweating in the clothing trades. She also worked on the Distressed Women’s and Children’s Committee which distributed clothes and food to poor women. Mary was also a member of the ladies’ committee of the Female Refuge.

From 1889, she worked tirelessly on parliamentary petitions calling for female suffrage. In 1891, the United Labor Party decided to back the cause. Mary organised a colony-wide petition, which contained 11600 signatures and was 400 feet long. It was presented to the House of Assembly in August 1894. Women ‘deluged’ members with telegrams and thronged the galleries. The Constitution Amendment Act was passed on 18 December 1894, making South Australian women the first in Australia to gain the parliamentary vote. It also gave them the right to stand for parliament. Mary was exhausted but jubilant.

In 1895, two trade unions wanted her to stand for parliament however she did not want to be hampered by obligation to a particular party. In 1896, she celebrated her 75th birthday at Adelaide Town Hall. Premier Kingston handed her a purse of 50 sovereigns, which was publicly donated through the Mary Lee Testimonial Fund. Her role in the achievement of women’s suffrage was officially acknowledged.

In 1896, she was appointed first female official visitor to the lunatic asylums and performed this task with immense courage for twelve years. Her financial resources dwindled and in 1902 an appeal was launched with little result. Her last years were blighted by poverty. She died in her North Adelaide home on 18 September 1909. Her work remained unrecorded until 1980.

This biography is republished from The Encyclopedia of Women and Leadership in Twentieth-Century Australia. Written by Patricia Grimshaw, The University of Melbourne. See below for full attribution.

Mary Lee was a notable leader in the South Australian suffrage movement and a worker for working women. Mary Lee was born Mary Walsh in Ireland in 1821. She married George Lee in 1844, bore seven children, and in 1879 travelled to Adelaide when her migrant son became ill; it became her permanent home.

Lee’s first activism centred on the ladies’ committee of the Social Purity Society that fought for improvements in laws relating to child labour, young women’s employment and the age of consent. She served as secretary of the Working Women’s Trade Union League from its foundation in 1890, and attended meetings of the Trades and Labour Council. Lee also Committee and the Adelaide Sick Poor Fund. She helped form the Women’s Suffrage League of South Australia in 1888, serving as secretary and collaborating with the president, Augusta Zadow, a German-born suffragist who was a trained tailoress and similarly linked her pressure for the vote to better conditions for working women. Invigorated by the New Zealand suffrage victory in 1893, Mary Lee, like a number of Woman’s Christian Temperance Union activists, travelled all over the colony to obtain signatures for a suffrage petition. With 11,600 signatures, the petition was presented to parliament before the successful Act granting women the vote and right to stand for parliament passed in 1894. A widow, with no surviving children, Lee died in 1909.

This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Patrick M. Geoghegan. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.

Lee, Mary Agnes (1821–1909), suffragist in Australia, was born Mary Agnes Walsh on 14 February 1821 in Co. Monaghan, the daughter of John Walsh; her mother’s name is unknown. Raised in Ulster, in 1844 she married George Lee, the organist and choirmaster of Armagh Cathedral; they had four sons and three daughters. After the death of her husband, in 1879 she emigrated to Australia for the sake of her son John Benjamin Lee, who was terminally ill. He died the following year, but Mary decided to stay in Adelaide, both because she could not afford to return and because she had become attached to the country.

Despite her advancing age, she threw herself into political causes, especially campaigns to improve women’s status in society. She became ladies’ secretary of the Social Purity Society, a movement which made great progress nationally, and many of the improvements in the Criminal Law Consolidation Act (1885) were credited to Lee. Continuing the fight, she was instrumental in the founding, in July 1888, of the South Australian Women’s Suffrage League. As joint secretary and later sole secretary she played a pivotal role in the movement, which she described as her ‘crowning task’. Her main objective was to secure the vote for women on the same terms as men; she was less concerned about women sitting in parliament. Employing biblical, historical, and literary allusions to prove her case, she was frequently attacked by opponents in quite extreme terms. Her emphasis on social justice alienated many conservatives: one wrote that, if women got the vote, ‘I may live to see her [Lee] knitting, counting the while the bleeding heads of the thrifty and learned as they fall between the strokes of the guillotine’ (Oldfield, 177). At a meeting in 1889 Lee proposed the formation of trade unions for women, and two years later the Women’s Trades Union was founded; she was secretary until 1893. The United Labor Party supported female suffrage from 1891, but the lack of progress frustrated Lee, who caused uproar when she denounced the party as ‘a lot of nincompoops’. Finally, in 1894, women in South Australia won the right to the parliamentary vote.

The following year Lee declined two invitations to stand for parliament. For her seventy-fifth birthday in 1896 she was awarded fifty sovereigns by the Adelaide town hall, and she was praised for her leading role in securing women’s suffrage. Later that year she was appointed by the government the first woman official visitor to asylums for the mentally ill, and over the next twelve years she ministered to the patients with great compassion. Beset by financial problems in her final years, she was forced to sell her library. Despite pleas for public aid, it seems her sharp tongue and uncompromising attitude had made her many enemies and few genuine friends. As she fell into poverty she became bitter that her years of public service had been carried out at her own expense. She died 18 September 1909 at her North Adelaide home, and was buried in the Wesleyan cemetery, Walkersville, her tombstone bearing the words ‘Secretary of the Women’s Suffrage League’. A fiery orator, she had a volatile temper but a kind nature. She is now recognised as one of the leading figures of the Australian suffrage movement.

Work cited
Patricia Grimshaw, ‘Lee, Mary’, in The Encyclopedia of Women and Leadership in Twentieth-Century Australia, Australian Women’s Archives Project, 2014, https://www.womenaustralia.info/leaders/biogs/WLE0608b.htm, accessed 16 January 2022.