The struggle for the vote was only one aspect of the political activism around the first wave of feminism. The advancement of women was being organised for on many different fronts. Some feminists fought for legislative reform such as the raising of the age of consent (it was twelve in 1891), and for the abolition of the Contagious Diseases Acts (that quarantined women infected with venereal diseases in locked hospitals). There were campaigns for property rights for women, for legal protection against domestic violence, for shared ownership of children, for the education of girls and the entrance of women to the universities and into professions; there were advances in women's writing and publishing (Léontine Cooper edited a suffrage paper called The Star). They called for women police wardens and for women to be allowed entry into the public service and a full range of professions.

Marilyn Lake suggests that their “aims were limited but they were no less threatening for that. They sought to curtail masculine privilege and those practices most injurious to women and children - notably drinking, smoking, gambling and male sexual indulgence. They did not seek a total independence for women but to make their dependence a happier and more secure state.” In Sydney, Louisa Lawson, editor of The Dawn, along with Rose Scott, focussed upon “the burden of wives and the degradation of mothers” and believed that “in the ballot lay the power to change relations between men and women and ultimately to create a better world.”

Léontine Cooper's stories are pervaded by women's attempts to resist violence and the appropriation of their money by their husbands.

In the labour movement, the struggle for better working conditions for women was consistently prosecuted, especially through the establishment of a Women's Union by May Jordan O'Connell (and later, unions for different trades), and there were demands for equal pay. Some activists connected up these issues. Cooper, teacher of French at Brisbane Girls' Grammar School, wrote for example in her “Queensland Notes” column in Lawson's Dawn: “The Trades Union is a grand step taken toward the Suffrage.”

The vote was part of a many-faceted struggle for equality for the Woman Movement from around 1880 to World War One. Susan Magarey's recent Passions of the First Wave Feminists asserts:
First wave feminists felt they had been defeated even though they had won the vote....What went wrong?

She suggests: “White Australia, masculinisation of the labour market and party politics” were central. Certainly, race suicide ideologies associated with the White Australia Policy impacted upon reproduction, especially in relation to women's access to contraception. Certainly, as Magarey says, “the first decades of the twentieth century set up new barriers between women's and men's work and between men and women in the labour movement.” Advances towards women's economic independence were consistently held back as in, for example, the 1907 Harvester judgement that Henry Bournes Higgins (Nettie Palmer's uncle) wanted to make on the family wage - that men were the family breadwinners. Certainly no Party had any kind of adequate engagement with changing the situation of women - although the Communist Party in its early years before Stalinisation had tried to. But perhaps the key issue in the persisting inequality of women was unwillingness or inability to transform the family. As Marilyn Lake summarises it, William and Annie Lane for example did not substantially propose to try: NACSA promised to “secure the most complete homelife to its members”, but very much in “straight, temperate and monogamistic” terms.

A hundred years ago, a “Birth Strike” was believed to be occurring. In February 1901, the Australian Women's Sphere observed that “emancipated women are in revolt against maternity, as it has been known in the past, against enforced maternity”. A 1903 Royal Commission on the Decline of the Birthrate in NSW reported in 1904 (notably on a fall from 7 to 4 children on average between 1870 and 1900). Socialists concerned about the Nation wanted to keep women in the home and family. For Mary Gilmore in The Worker in 1908, a University education was inadequate unless supplemented by “a thorough course in roastology, boilology, stitchology, darnology, patchology and domesticology”. By contrast, Kate Stone, writing as 'Sydney Partridge' had commented in The Worker in 1910 that 'no woman of powerful intellect should ever marry unless she would be content to sink herself in her children, in doing which she gains nothing unless her desire for domesticity is stronger than her genius', while Marie Pitt applauded in the Socialist in 1912 “the greatest strike in world history - the revolt of the slave bearers.”
'Slave mart bosses may bluster as they please, medical missionaries in the pay of fat fleshmongers may talk learnedly and threaten dire evils to prudent mothers of three or less, and suave magnates of Christianity may prate of the sin of ease or pleasure until they go black in the face...it will only stop when human life has become of more importance than successful commercial exploitation of human life, which is what the present Capitalistic system stands for.'

see also details about the work of the Qld women's suffrage groups
see also Who's who page for bios of some women important to the suffrage movement