Bessie Harrison Lee's fight for Victorian Women's Suffrage in the late nineteenth century: Educating urban and rural women on the democratic process.

We ask for suffrage that we may stand side by side with our fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons, working with them ... for a noble political life for the country's wealth. Not for a man's place do we ask, but for the fullness of women's. (The Argus, 1891, p. 9) In the late nineteenth century, adult and public learning pedagogy were the key instruments utilised in the campaign to achieve Victorian Women's Suffrage. The democratic process of changing state government legislation on franchise demanded multiple pedagogical methods. Through the actions of Bessie Harrison Lee (1860-1950), this international women's culture (McLean & Baroud, 2020, p. 506). Part of this culture featured Australian women adopting the petition as a political instrument. The petition had already had a long history in Britain, used by groups with little political influence. Ian Fletcher's conception of the British Empire as "a set of relations, rather than the sum of their parts, as frameworks structuring political, economic and cultural exchanges between metropole and colonies" is useful in understanding how political ideas travelled to and were adapted in the Australian context (Fletcher, Levine & Mayall, 2012, p. xiv). This paper argues that new ways of knowing were made possible by Lee, who, empowered by the evangelical faith (her cultural capital) spoke out confidently in public spaces such as town halls, outside public bars, and on the front doorsteps of women's homes in both cities and rural towns. These spaces were the places of learning, or as Bourdieu described, the field. Also, the meeting places of the WCTU, whether private lounge rooms or church halls, enabled women to support each other in the political process of debate, addressing community issues, and devising strategic plans to improve the lives of women. Through critical discourse analysis of newspaper reports, WCTU's publication The White Ribbon, the Victorian Alliance publication Alliance Record, and Lee's autobiography, this paper identifies these learning spaces. It also explores the community of practice in WCTU meetings, doorknocking, pamphleteering and the physical act of collecting signatures for the 1891 'Victorian Monster Petition'. The language and actions used to enact democratic activity that involves women in ways of saying, doing, and being full citizens are unlocked; however, the WCTU was exclusionary of Indigenous and non-Anglo-Celtic ancestry. Therefore, their learning spaces were complicit in the Great Silence (Stanner, 1968). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]