Say her name: Madge Donohoe and the promise and problems of using Trove to write Australian suffrage histories

Abstract

Like most middle-ranking suffragists, the Sydney schoolteacher Madge Donohoe is largely invisible in Australian historiography. Until widespread newspaper digitisation, the task of uncovering her name, let alone tracing her rise from Kogarah Girls’ School to the British National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies’ executive committee, would have been unimaginable. In this paper, I outline how Trove has enriched Australian feminist histories from the suffrage era (1890–1910). Yet, as indispensable as it has become, new histories relying on newspapers to vividly retell the suffragists’ stories also reveal the database’s distorting effects, not least the absence of the vibrant women’s advocacy press from its collections. Trove, I argue, affords vital new points of entry into lives like Donohoe’s but, without careful interrogation, risks privileging the pressman’s gaze above understanding the quotidian realities of feminist activism.