“The news is being flashed far and wide,
and before our earth has revolved on her axis every civilized community
within the reach of the electric wires will have received the tidings that civic freedom has been granted …”
— Kate Sheppard

Even he had to give in: he had lost.  But wait… he was a politician… Here was a opportunity…

He had fought, blocked, and delayed the women’s right to vote in New Zealand. Only to reverse himself and claim he was trying to help, when the bill was passed finally.

Kate knew he was a hypocrite. She understood the political process. She knew that New Zealand was the first nation to “give the women” the right to vote in 1893. So, by letter, announcing to the world she encouraged her predecessor fellow civic activists in America including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan Anthony to continue the fight. She had seen the future in 1869 because in the relatively new territory of Wyoming, farmers had given their women the right to vote partly as a reaction to outrageous behavior of brazen and politically connected cattlemen lynching an independent innocent single woman farmer.

Social progress thru politics is on the edge of chaos/order. Two steps forward in the future, one step back to the future. One Vote against, two Votes for.

Richard Seddon, though a member of the Liberal Party, opposed women’s suffrage, and expected it to be again blocked in the upper house. Despite Seddon’s opposition, Members of Parliament assembled sufficient strength in the House of Representatives to pass the bill. When it arrived in the Legislative Council, two previously hostile members, moved to anger at Seddon’s “underhand” behaviour in getting one member to change his vote, voted in favour of the bill. Hence the bill was passed by 20 to 18, and with the Royal Assent [Queen Victoria] it was signed into law on 19 September 1893.

It would take the United States another 27 years to get enough states to ratify into law the right for women to vote.  England would take 35 years to get the full vote.

Kate Sheppard knew although she had gotten her small nation to innovate, the bigger, the more populous and diverse in the new and the old societal networks (via states and territories) of the United States would take longer to adopt the nineteenth century social innovation of Sheppard because some States were still in primarily a social eighteenth century.  England had even a more backward and forward set of networks, some in the eighteenth and some in the twentieth centuries. New Zealand was new political nation where New Zealand’s culture is mainly derived from Māori and British settlers: whalers, missionaries, tradesmen, farmers. To adopt the Sheppard political innovation born in New Zealand, enough of the representative political males in the old societies across the United States and England had to be born of a newer societal network.

Katherine Wilson “Kate” Sheppard, Champion Idealist, (10 March 1847–13 July 1934) was the most prominent member of New Zealand’s Women’s Suffrage and was the country’s most famous suffragette. She also appears on the New Zealand ten-dollar note. Since New Zealand was the first country to introduce universal suffrage in 1893, Sheppard’s work has had a considerable impact on women’s suffrage movements in several other countries.

Champions have a wide range and variety of emotions, and a great passion for novelty. They see life as an exciting drama, pregnant with possibilities for both good and evil, and they want to experience all the meaningful events and fascinating people in the world. The most outgoing of the Idealists, Champions often can’t wait to tell others of their extraordinary experiences. Champions can be tireless in talking with others, like fountains that bubble and splash, spilling over their own words to get it all out. And usually this is not simple storytelling; Champions often speak (or write) in the hope of revealing some truth about human experience, or of motivating others with their powerful convictions. Their strong drive to speak out on issues and events, along with their boundless enthusiasm and natural talent with language, makes them the most vivacious and inspiring of all the types. [Please Understand Me II]

Nowdays, there are societal networks in India and Saudi Arabia, for example, that are of the 18th, 17th, 7th, 21st centuries.  Societal progress thru the political majority rule is a slow idea.  Political positive market forces are slower in innovation than economic and technological innovation, because most of political forces and money are devoted to maintaining the system as the way it operates and maintaining the benefits for those currently in power.  Only global political competition and cooperation between continents, countries, states, territories, and cities with the flow of: replication and dissipation of the capital of ideas, people, products, and money — can, and will, — things change for better and worse (creative destruction).

These new and old societies that are coping, clashing, and clinging to the past future of political, economic, and technological modernity will slowly realize their evolutionary potential.

Other Champion Idealists include: Richard Attenborough, Debbie Cima, Ariel Durant, Nicholas Kristof, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Nelson Mandela, Wilber Wilberforce, Karen Underhill, Ray Bradbury, Rod Serling, Joan Baez, and Ann Dunham