Beyond Kate is a podcast exploring women's suffrage in New Zealand 125 years after women gained the right to vote in New Zealand. The series launches 19 September commemorating women's suffrage.

Beyond Kate is a podcast that traverses stories from past to present, exploring themes across 8 episodes that address women's suffrage in New Zealand and the complex, hidden and nuanced challenges that women face in a society where the rules continue to shift.

Producer Sonia Sly meets contemporary women who share their thoughts on education, work, diversity, gender and more. And she meets historians, archivists and descendants of women who signed the 1893 petition to unlock the history of the suffrage petition that won women the right to vote in the 1893 election.

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Gaining the vote was a battle hard won for New Zealand women. Episode one of Beyond Kate visits the petition, hears about the woman whose name sits atop it & looks at the lives of rural women then and now.

It's a frosty, wintry Christchurch day when Peter Aitken and his wife Margaret take me on a drive to a cemetery in Yaldhurst where his great grandmother, Mary Jane Carpenter, and her husband, George Frederick Carpenter are buried.

While those names may not mean much to you, Mary Jane's should. She has a special place in the story of this nation and we're at the cemetery - where Peter used to have acorn battles as a child - to record part of this week's episode of RNZ's suffrage podcast, Beyond Kate.

The Kate in the title is of course, Kate Sheppard. But this series will look at the lives of other women back in the 1890s and the lives of women today to ask how far we have - and haven't - come in the 125 years since New Zealand became the first country where women were able to vote.

Mary Jane Carpenter is one of the more than 30,000 women who signed the 1893 petition that successfully went through parliament. That was a quarter of all adult Pākehā women in New Zealand at the time.

The petition comprises of around 500 sheets of paper that together measured 270m. They were glued together, rolled up on a segment of a broom handle and presented to parliament.

What makes Mary Jane's name special is that hers is the signature right at the top of page one. The very first.

Mary Jane lived first in Yaldhurst, and later Riccarton, where all the action was taking place around the petition.

Kate Sheppard led the campaign along with a group of women who were members of the Women's Christian Temperance Union. The sheets were mailed out around the country to other members of the WCTU who circulated them door-to-door to households across the country.

"Formidable, that's how I would describe ," says Aitken.

"To be proactive on women's rights or seeking women's vote...you had to have a fair bit of guts to stand up and propose those sorts of propositions".

Mary Jane arrived in New Zealand in 1870, with her parents and two siblings. She was in her early twenties and a domestic servant. But before long she married George, having seven children and helping run their 260 acre farm.

As well as climbing the class ladder, Mary Jane was a staunch Methodist. And for many women who supported suffrage, religion and temperance were the driving force behind the movement…

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Episode Two of Beyond Kate explores politics, the reality of women at the polling booths, and Victorian attitudes that kept women in the home.

It's 2018 and we have our third female Prime Minister. Back in 1893 when women's right to vote was being debated in parliament, opponents mocked the mere idea of women MPs and laughed at the scenario of a nursing mother handing over her baby to address the House.

So much has changed in the 125 years since women won the vote, and having a Prime Minister who has given birth while in office is empowering to women like me. It challenges even my own stereotypes of women who make it to the top and the choices they make to get there.

It reflects new ideas of womanhood and, lest we forget, having our third female Prime Minister is a big deal. Most countries still have never had a single woman leader, let alone three.

Professor Charlotte McDonald from Victoria University says the vote - and the leadership roles that have come since - were not easily won.

"It wasn't something whereby you woke up the next day and low and behold, women have got the vote. It was a big, energetic campaign," she says from her sunny Wellington office.

"They had to rely on pretty labour-intensive forms of political agitation most of didn't have vast amounts of money or time."

If we look back to the 1890s, while the class structure was flatter than back in 'the home country', it wasn't exactly an egalitarian landscape for a woman. Public life was for men; women stayed at home and church. Polling booths and parliament were definitely no-go zones for "the fairer sex".

They were seen as raucous environments where foul language was freely used, and which, women would be best protected from.

That was one of the key points used by those opposed to women's suffrage. On the surface it was an argument purporting to support women, but from the 21st century it looks more like a male attempt to maintain the status quo and keep women out of the business of politics.

So why was New Zealand the first self-governing nation where women could vote?

Kate Hunter, professor of history at Victoria University, says it was partly out of practicality.

"In Victorian Britain, women's roles were narrowly confined the stereotype was that were the 'angel' in the home," she says.

That angel might have been doing needlework by the fireplace, learning French and playing piano. But here in New Zealand the demands for women were very different.

Hunter says the places where women gained the vote were those where women as workers were crucial to daily existence. …

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