The campaign for Women’s Jury Rights and the Geography of Citizenship in Australia, c.1900-1997

For decades after women won the right to vote in Australia, few were entitled to sit on juries and fewer still actually did so. Although Australian women were among the first in the world to receive the right to vote and sit in Parliament, it took until the 1997 before women had full legislated equality of jury suffrage in all states in Australia. Objections to female jury service ranged from the notion that women’s domestic duties should trump their civic duties, through to arguments that women - seen as as overly-sentimental, delicate and irrational - were unsuited to the task of legal adjudication, particularly over the unseemly matters of criminal law. This paper extends upon scholarly investigations into the protracted campaign for jury service in Australia by moving the focus away from abstract citizenship rights to explore the subterranean spatial questions upon which women’s inclusion depended. From concerns about female and male jurors being locked up in a room over-night, to ‘ladies’ being forced into a jury box with ‘undesirables’, to the refusal of successive governments to build women’s toilets and dormitories in courthouses, the campaign for jury rights raised questions around the geography of citizenship. How were women to find a place in courtrooms built for men at a time when women were never considered capable of exercising adjudicatory power?

Drawing upon archival evidence of feminist deputations to government officials over the course of almost a century, this paper brings law, geography, and feminist history into dialogue to contest binarized notions of citizenship as determined by totalising notions of inclusion or exclusion. Through redirecting our gaze from the heroic theatres of court and parliament to more mundane forms of exclusion that coexisted with inclusion – an absence of toilets and child-care or the fear of mixed jury rooms – this paper reveals the gradations and hierarchies of citizenship that were inscribed upon, and produced by, spatial arrangements.

Alecia Simmonds is an Associate Professor in law at the University of Technology Sydney. She is a Chief Investigator on the Australian Research Council Grant, Juries Justice and Citizenship: Women’s Century of Struggle and has published on the historical relationship between law, gender, empire and emotions, in a range of scholarly journals. Her book Courting: An Intimate History of Love and the Law (2023)won the biennial W.K. Hancock Prize for history and the Australian Legal Research Awards for best book. It has also been shortlisted for the Australian Prime Minister’s Awards and the Ernest Scott History Prize. Her first book Wild Man: A True Story of a Police Killing Mental Illness and the Law (2015) won the 2016 Davitt prize for best crime non-fiction. Alecia’s current research is on women’s struggle for jury rights in the twentieth century; contesting racism through defamation actions 1850-1950; the popular life of law in the Victorian era; and the history of friendship in the modern era.