New Zealand women achieved their national vote in 1893, Australian white women in 1902. Women in the USA were enfranchised in 1920, and all British women got their vote in 1927.

In Britain in the late 1800s, there were many more women than men. Consequently, some women did not marry and there was fierce competition for jobs. The lower classes worked in the mines and factories which had sprung up as a result of the Industrial Revolution. A woman was virtually owned by her father, then her husband: “By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage...” (quote from William Blackstone in 1765)

Because of the surplus of women, they were encouraged to migrate to Australia to find husbands. Those women who ended up in Victoria would have to wait till 1908 to get their state vote, and put up with attitudes such as these expressed by Victorian Members of Parliament: “I have never found any desire for the franchise on the part of women - I mean real women. I have met he-women - who ought to have been born men, but nature made a mistake - who were in favour...”
and “There is no safety in this State as long as these shrieking women are running about ... old frumps ... gawks ... tabby cats ... trash ...”

Louisa Lawson of New South Wales commented on the types of arguments put forth by men opposed to women's franchise thus: “Since the time when equal suffrage was first agitated, the subject has been grossly misrepresented and grossly caricatured ... (there is always) the covert sneer, the attempt at witticism, the unkind comparison ...”

Volleys of cartoons from newspapers of the time expressing views from both suffragists and their opponents can be found online at the State Library of Queensland's Picture Queensland.

Women campaigning for suffrage in Britain in 1906 were disrupting election meetings, chaining themselves to railings so police could not move them along while they were making speeches, and throwing bricks through shop windows. A grille was placed in front of the Ladies' Gallery in Parliament to contain these women. There, militant tactics engendered the term "suffragettes." Australian (white) women gained the vote without having to employ these tactics, and so are known as "suffragists."

Miles Franklin dedicated her novel Everyday Folk and Dawn to those English men supporting the women's suffrage movement. Australian women 'herein characterised were never forced to be “suffragettes," their countrymen having granted them their rights as suffragists.' (Virago, London, 1986, first published 1909)

There was also some cross-fertilisation between countries. For example, the Women's Christian Temperance Union was formed in America in the 1870s to address the effect alcohol abuse was having on men and, in turn, their families. Jessie Ackermann, a journalist, came as a WCTU missionary from America, and stayed in Australia for five years setting up branches of WCTU in many cities and towns.

Quotations above from Oldfield's Australian Women and the Vote

Nellie Martel
Martel was one of the first four women to stand for election to the Australian federal parliament in 1903. She was one of the first members of the Womanhood Suffrage League in Sydney in 1891. In London from 1905 she worked with the Women's Social and Political Union, becoming a paid organiser around May 1906, and one of the British votes for women campaign's most prominent speakers.

See Ann Nugent: "Nellie Martel and the WSPU 1904-9." Hecate 31.1.2005 (forthcoming)