The Australian Women’s National League and Democracy, 1904–1921

The Australian Women’s National League was founded in response to the gaining of the federal franchise by Australian women. It founders were conservative elite women whose politics were anti‐democratic, laissez faire and opposed to the public exercise of women’s citizenship. The League’s interaction with democracy proved to be mutually constitutive. The League’s crude anti‐socialist ideology and its capacity for electoral organisation gave the AWNL an impact on the content and conduct of Australian democracy which far exceeded that made by other groupings of political women. And the League’s platforms and programmes slowly broadened to include state action in progressive and even feminist causes. But its continuing refusal to endorse a public role for political women limited the League’s ability to appeal to a new generation of progressive women.