All told, fifteen of the women on Davis Street signed the petition. The number is small compared to 30,000 total signatories, but the one small block of Davis shows the intense interest of women in the franchise. We must remember that signature collectors had only six weeks, and that women's suffrage was in its youth in Victoria and around the world. Given the number of areas they had to cover and the patterns of the signatures (almost all of the Davis Street names are close together on the petition), we have to assume that the collectors only went down Davis Street the one time. Unlike many other streets where mothers and daughters signed together, all the Davis names are those of individual women at individual residences. On that day in 1891, nearly one-third of Davis Street women signed the petition for the franchise. Did Agnes Lewis sign happily? Did Sarah Coulthard need to be persuaded? We will never know the answers, but these are not idle questions. In 1891, these women were willing to challenge the status quo even though they were working-class, immigrants (in the cases of Jessie and Ada) and mothers.

The Women of Davis Street¹²
Agnes Lewis was above all else a mother. She had eleven children over the course of seventeen years. Putting that in perspective, she would have been pregnant for the first time at twenty-one and delivered her last child just before she turned forty. Agnes was the youngest of the women we will get to know, but not by much; she married at nineteen or twenty, and in this was almost perfectly typical of her neighbours. The women of Davis Street were on average a little younger than their peers on the surrounding streets, and this may help us understand why they were also less likely to own their homes.

Agnes and her husband, John James, were new North Carlton residents. They married in the city in 1887, and moved to 43 Davis Street sometime in 1891 with their two children, Ada May, 3, and Mary Adeline, 1. The family lived in a four-roomed brick house that was both smaller and more expensive than those of most of their neighbours. They had moved off the block by 1893, but five years after the signing of the petition they had returned to Davis Street. Like so many other families during and after the Depression, they needed financial help. By 1897, Agnes and John had moved one house east to number 45, a five-bedroomed house with a bathroom. The building, however, was owned by the Northern Assistance Society, perhaps one of the aid agencies that sprang up to help families in need. Unfortunately, Agnes's historical record is tied almost exclusively to her children; after Doris's 1907 birth record, which shows they were still in North Carlton, the Lewis family virtually disappears until Agnes's death in 1945 in St Kilda.

The story of Agnes, incomplete as it is, is a powerful reminder of how long it took Victorian women to gain suffrage. Between the time she signed the petition and achieved the right to vote, Agnes would have nine more children, losing two of them. Her last child, Doris, would have been a toddler by the time suffrage for women was enacted in 1908. It is a striking fact that the fight for the vote encompassed the entire childbearing years of many women.¹³

Eliza Emma Manders gave birth to her eleven children over a period of twenty-one years, making her the only woman to stretch her pregnancies out for longer than Agnes. Eliza met her husband, John Edward, when he lived in her family's boarding house in Port Melbourne. John rented a room in the boarding house for ten years, and the two married in 1885, when Eliza was just eighteen. They quickly moved north, and Eliza gave birth to their first two children, William Edward and Florence Beatrice, in Carlton. They moved on to Davis Street in 1890, and had their third child, Robert Cecil, the year Eliza signed the petition. Nine of Eliza's eleven children were boys, which must have been a challenge in the small houses in which the family lived. Their five-roomed house would have filled up quickly with the four children they had by 1892. Eliza, it seems, had endless patience for children. Family memory indicates that she also served as a wet nurse for a number of children, and may even have fostered them in her home. By 1893 the Manders family had left Davis Street, but they remained in North Carlton until John Edward's death in 1921. When she died in 1947, Eliza was living in East Brunswick with nearly her entire family in close proximity.¹⁴

Eliza Manders and family, c. 1912. Courtesy of Bernie Manders

Despite its large size, or perhaps because of it, the Manders family seems to have been particularly close. In her will, Florence Beatrice, the eldest daughter, stipulated that although the East Brunswick house was to go to her brother Walter, he must allow three other siblings, George, Eileen and Francis to live in it rent-free. When Walter died nine years later, he also passed the house on, this time to his niece, Florence Eileen. Again, his will required that Francis be allowed to remain. This emphasis on taking care of family, as well as the family names given to Florence Eileen, demonstrates the strong bonds they must have had. When Eliza signed the petition, she may have been pregnant with her second (and last) daughter. Perhaps she signed it for Florence Beatrice and the daughters she hoped to have; little did she know that Eileen would be followed by seven (and seventeen years of) boys. The women in Eliza's house may have been outnumbered by more than three to one, but in 1891 she took a strong step towards levelling the playing field for all Australian women.¹⁵

Living just to the east of Eliza was Helen Morrison. Helen is unique among our women on two counts: she was older than her Davis Street peers, and she appears to have been part of the gold rush. All the other Davis Street women either came from Melbourne and surrounding suburbs, or moved straight to the city upon their arrival in Australia. We do not know where Helen and her husband, John, married in 1865. It seems likely that it was somewhere in eastern Victoria or in Scotland, as both Morrison and McRae, Helen's maiden name, are traditional Scottish names. They had their first child, John Alexander, in Stanley, Victoria in 1866, followed by four more children in El Dorado (both near Beechworth). The family settled for several years in El Dorado, a town nearly 300 kilometres northeast of Melbourne. Presumably they, like so many others, were prospecting or making their living providing services for other gold prospectors. Life appears not to have been easy: Helen and John lost two of their five children shortly after birth. Whatever happened in El Dorado, the family had moved to Fitzroy by at least 1881, where they had Christina, their first child in six years. They appear to have moved frequently, as Christina's birth in Fitzroy and death the following year in Carlton suggests.