Henrietta Augusta Dugdale

This meticulously researched book offers an illuminating insight into the formation of the Australian women’s movement.

Pioneer feminist Henrietta Augusta Dugdale holds an important place in Australian history. Her witty, forceful campaigning helped bring women’s rights to prominence in the second half of the nineteenth century. This biography of a thrice-married woman, who was born in St Pancras, London, during the reign of George IV and died 91 years later at Point Lonsdale, Victoria, seeks to understand why and how she came to Australia, became a vegetarian, a secularist, initiated the first female suffrage society in Australasia and, in her late middle age, published a futuristic allegory titled A Few Hours In a Far Off Age.

About The Author

Susan Priestley, Master of Arts (University of Melbourne), has been an independent historian since 1962. She has written eleven commissioned histories, an article for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, seven articles for the Australian Dictionary of Biography, as well as papers and reviews, mostly for the Victorian Historical Journal. She is a founding member of the Professional Historians Association (Victoria) and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society of Victoria, having served as RHSV councillor for 20 years and as president from 1999 to 2005.