Makers: Kate Snow and Dianne Robertson

Panel number: 5

Petition sheet number: Signed 1892 suffrage petition

Person honouring: Margaret N Sievwright

Relationship to makers: Live in Whataupoko near Margaret’s home (Sievwright Lane)

Margaret [Home] Sievwright played a very significant role in the New Zealand suffrage movement. The daughter of Jane Law Home and John Richardson, she was born at Pencaitland, East Lothian, Scotland, on 19 March 1844. She taught deprived children in the ragged schools of Edinburgh before training as a nurse. She joined a campaign for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, 1866, and 1869.

In the 1870s Margaret emigrated to New Zealand and on 29 November 1878 in Wellington, she married William Sievwright. William was a solicitor originally from Scotland who already had two daughters by his first marriage. The couple were to have one more daughter. In 1883 the family moved to Gisborne and Margaret was appointed to the Waiapu Licensing Board. She organised the Gisborne branch of the New Zealand Women’s Christian Temperance Union.  

In 1893, suffragists, headed by Kate Sheppard and Margaret Sievwright, took a petition of nearly 32,000 signatures to their leading pro-suffrage supporter, Sir John Hall. He presented the petition to the House of Representatives and the Electoral Bill finally became law.

Margaret died at Whataupoko, Poverty Bay, on 9 March 1905. In 1906, a monument to her memory was erected in Peel Street, Gisborne and later relocated to Fitzherbert Street.

Margaret’s feminist vision was perhaps best expressed in a speech of 1900: “The question is often asked, ‘What do women want?’ We want men ‘to stand out of our sunshine’, that is all.”

Panel materials: The main panel fabric is old sheeting. It is decorated with printed images and embroidered stitches and is embellished with old heavy crochet lace found in a hospice shop (which looks like a camellia and ferns), old ribbons from our personal collections plus a small number of scrapbooking items.