The League of Women Voters (so named from 1939), earlier entitled the Women’s Non-Party Political Association, was established in South Australia in 1909 by Lucy Morice. Its main object was the removal of legal, economic and civil inequalities between men and women.
Could the problem of infant mortality be dealt with by giving expert advice to mothers? The Mothers’ and Babies’ Health Association certainly thought so.
The National Council of Women of South Australia argued for pensions for widows with children, raising the marriage age for girls from 12 and other reforms.
In July 1882 Rev. Joseph Coles Kirby of Port Adelaide Congregational Church delivered a series of lectures on what he termed the Social Evil – broadly interpreted as drinking, prostitution and other forms of sexual licentiousness. Those present, following a similar movement in England, agreed to form the Social Purity Society (SPS), to combat what they perceived to be an epidemic of vice.
Modelled on the gentlemen’s clubs that proliferated in London from the eighteenth century, the Adelaide Club resembles bodies established at about the same time in the capital cities of the other Australian colonies.
Carpenters, tailors, bakers, carriers, cordwainers and coachmakers had formed unions within ten years of European settlement of South Australia, and by the 1870s there were thousands of union members in the colony.
Institutions transplanted to Australia were not always successful but the WEA, brought from England, survived an early period of adaptation before becoming a significant South Australian educational institution.