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Margaret Sievwright

Channelling a desire to usher in a new era of gender relations following the right to vote, Gisborne suffragist Margaret Home Sievwright articulated a new vision of womanhood and society at large when she addressed the National Women’s Council in 1896:

“The New Woman is she who has discovered herself, not relatively as mother, wife, sister, but absolutely…she recognises her restrictions, and she further recognises that these restrictions must be struggled against, not in the direction of denying her nature, but rather of shaking off every artificial restraint and repression which will in any way hinder her own full and free development...

I would rather have this new woman — even in her occasional perversity, exaggeration, and revolt — than the female oyster who discovers no interest in life outside the limits of her own shell.”