Mary LEE

LEE, MARY (née WALSH) (b. co Monaghan, Ireland, 14 Feb 1821; d. Adelaide, SA, 18 Sept 1909). Social reformer and suffragist.

Mary Walsh, a landholder's daughter, m. George Lee, Armagh Church of England Cathedral organist, had seven children, was widowed and emigrated in 1879 to South Australia. In Adelaide she served the poor and weak by personal Christian ministration and by campaigning for structural social change. She embraced Primitive Methodist ideals of social justice; her writings and speeches resonated with Biblical allusions based on scholarly Scriptural knowledge.

She was secretary of the Adelaide Social Purity Ladies Committee which influenced statutory amendments raising the age of consent, worked on the Female Refuge Committee, comforted inmates of the Destitute Asylum and organised underpaid female trade unionists. Envisaging a just Christian society, Mary Lee urged SA to lead the nations of Christendom in granting women equal parliamentary suffrage: as secretary of the Women's Suffrage League she guided its 1894 achievement. Subsequently she laboured for twelve years as a compassionate official visitor to the Lunatic Asylums.

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HELEN JONES