Henrietta Augusta Dugdale (1827–1918)

A radical and pugnacious free thinker, Henrietta Dugdale was a pioneer of the women's movement in Australia. She has been described as a 'trenchant and forceful' campaigner, 'relying upon the justice of all she advocated'.¹

Born at St Pancras, London, Dugdale migrated to Melbourne in 1852 with her husband Junius Davies. Following Davies's death, in 1853 she married William Dugdale, and they had three sons before separating in the late 1860s. In 1903, she married Frederick Johnson.

A staunch non-conformist, Dugdale was a member of the Australasian Secular Association and the Eclectic Society, 'a group devoted to the discussion of controversial subjects'.² A supporter of the 'Rational Dress' movement,³ she cut her hair short and preferred to wear a home-made divided skirt and tunic with no corset.

Dugdale campaigned tirelessly for the female franchise, for women's rights to education and property, equitable distribution of wealth and property, and for changes to marriage laws. In her 1883 utopian work A Few Hours in a Far-off Age, she declared 'the great obstacle to human advancement' to be 'male ignorance'.⁴ In 1884, Dugdale and her friend Annie Lowe⁵ co-founded the Victorian Women's Suffrage Society, with Dugdale serving as its president.

Dugdale remained an influential advocate for gender equality throughout her life, despite clashing with more conservative campaigners. In 1903, she joined the Women's Federal Political Association to support Vida Goldstein's unsuccessful campaign for the Senate. Reflecting on her life, she wrote to Goldstein, 'I always consider my greatest work was paving the way, cutting a track through a dense scrub of ignorance and prejudice'.⁶ She died at Point Lonsdale, Victoria.

References
1.'Death of Early Resident', Queenscliff Sentinel, Drysdale, Portarlington, Sorrento Advertiser, 29 June 1918, p. 2. Information in this biography is taken from: Janice N Brownfoot, 'Dugdale, Henrietta Augusta (1827–1918)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, published first in hardcopy 1972; Morgan Burgess, 'Henrietta Dugdale's A Few Hours in a Far-off Age', Australian Women Writers Challenge, 13 May 2017; Audrey Oldfield, Women Suffrage in Australia, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1992; Patricia Grimshaw, 'Henrietta Dugdale (1827–1918)', The Encyclopedia of Women & Leadership in Twentieth-Century Australia. Websites accessed 27 June 2024.
2. 'Henrietta Dugdale', Victorian Government Honour Roll, accessed 27 June 2024.
3. Margaret Makepeace, 'The Rational Dress Society', British Library, Untold Lives blog, 12 October 2021, accessed 27 June 2024.
4. Mrs HA Dugdale, A Few Hours in a Far-off Age, M'Carron, Bird and Co, Melbourne, 1883, accessed 27 June 2024.
5. 'Death Of Mrs. Annie Lowe', Geelong Advertiser, 15 April 1910, p. 3, accessed 27 June 2024.
6. Cited in Ingeborg van Teeseling, 'History Shorts – Henrietta Dugdale, "Lay the axe to the root of the tree"', Australia Explained, 20 January 2024, accessed 27 June 2024.