Henrietta Dugdale's campaign for ‘equal justice for…

Henrietta Dugdale's campaign for ‘equal justice for women’, which had begun with a letter to Melbourne’s Argus newspaper in April 1869, peaks during the 1880s in radical public debate as a member of Melbourne’s Eclectic Society and the Australasian Secular Association, through her utopian allegory A Few Hours in a Far-Off Age and in the formation in May 1884 of the Victorian Women’s Suffrage Society, the first of its kind in Australasia.

Born at St. Pancras London on 14 May 1827, the second surviving daughter of John Worrell and Henrietta Ann (née Austin), her claim of a first marriage at fourteen does not fit with her official marriage in 1848 to a merchant navy officer J. A. Davies, with whom she had come to Australia in 1852.

After Davies’ death, she married ship’s captain William Dugdale in Melbourne in March 1853 and settled at Queenscliff where her sons Einnim, Carl and Austin were born.

She had moved to the Melbourne suburb of Camberwell after separating from William Dugdale in the late 1860s.