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Her Magazine June July 2013

Her Magazine is New Zealand’s only women’s business lifestyle magazine! Her Magazine highlights the achievements of successful and rising New Zealand businesswomen. Her Magazine encourages a healthy work/life balance.

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2013 marks 120 years since the law was changed but its significance is not forgotten. In Christchurch each year on September 19 at 12.30 p.m. women wearing a white camellia gather at the Kate Sheppard Memorial on the Avon River bank near the Information Centre to honour the occasion. This success came at the end of an enormous struggle by suffragists in New Zealand, led by Kate Sheppard. 31,872 signatures were collected during a seven year campaign, which culminated in the 1893 petition for the enfranchisement of women being presented to Parliament in a wheelbarrow. It was the largest petition ever gathered in Australasia. Women's suffrage becomes law. On September 19 1893, the Electoral Act 1893 gave women the vote, despite claims that families would be abandoned and the economy destroyed. Kate Sheppard, the leading light of the suffrage movement, was vindicated when 65% of New Zealand women took the chance to vote in their first general election. Source: www.nzhistory.net.nz Source: www.christchurch.org.nz, www.nzine.co.nz "A great woman has gone whose name will remain an inspiration to the daughters of New Zealand, while our history endures." In later years, Kate was often asked by suffrage campaigners abroad for the secret of her success. Her response was apparently pragmatic. She believed that her campaigners had triumphed as a result of years of unceasing toil - and because NZ's colonial beginnings meant it was less tightly bound to the societal norms that ruled Britain. "It was a kind of political experiment," she said. She said it… "All that separates, whether of race, class, creed, or sex, is inhuman, and must be overcome" "We are tired of having a 'sphere' doled out to us, and of being told that anything outside that sphere is 'unwomanly'. We want to be natural just for a change … we must be ourselves at all risks." Source: www.professionelle.co.nz w In 1895, Kate Sheppard became the editor of the first newspaper in New Zealand to be owned, managed and published only by women. It was called the White Ribbon. She also established the National Council of Women in April 1896 and continued to argue for women's rights, especially the right for married women to have control of their own money. w Source: www.newzealandatoz.com W H O 'S W H O 2 0 1 3 | 11

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