31 Facts About Muriel Matters

Muriel Lilah Matters known as Muriel Matters-Porter, was an Australian-born suffragist, lecturer, journalist, educator, actress and elocutionist.

Muriel Matters was born in the inner city suburb of Bowden in Adelaide, South Australia, to a large Methodist family.

Muriel Matters's father was John Leonard Matters, a cabinetmaker and, later, a stockbroker.

Muriel Matters spent the majority of her youth in South Australia.

Muriel Matters studied music at the University of Adelaide and, by the late 1890s, had begun to act and conduct recitals, initially in Adelaide, but later in Sydney and Melbourne with the Robert Brough Company.

At the time of the federation of Australia in 1901, Muriel Matters had returned to Adelaide and taught elocution, while concurrently performing for audiences at numerous halls and salons across the state.

When Muriel Matters arrived in London she began giving recitals intermittently and eventually performed at the Bechstein Hall.

However, recital work in London was difficult to acquire due to a surplus of performers, and Muriel Matters undertook occasional work as a journalist for income.

Muriel Matters is known to have interviewed George Bernard Shaw and the exiled anarchist Prince Peter Kropotkin.

Muriel Matters accompanied Maud Arncliffe Sennet to an event at which Milicent Fawcett was debating the support for women's militancy.

Sennett wrote in the press that Muriel Matters had not been forced into silence.

In early May through to mid-October 1908, Muriel Matters was "Organiser in Charge" of the first "Votes for Women" caravan that toured the south-east counties of England.

In Tunbridge Wells, Muriel Matters met a young Quaker named Violet Tillard who remained a close acquaintance until Tillard's death in 1922, due to typhus contracted while helping people in famine-ravaged Russia.

Muriel Matters was at the heart of the protest over that symbol of women's oppression.

Muriel Matters was found guilty of wilfully obstructing London Police and was sentenced to one month imprisonment to be served at Holloway Gaol.

Muriel Matters scattered 56 pounds of handbills promoting the WFL's cause and leading members of the league, Edith How-Martyn and Elsie Craig, pursued her by car.

From May to July 1910, Muriel Matters gave lectures focused on her experiences in Britain agitating for change.

Dr Elsie Inglis presided over a meeting in Edinburgh in November 1913, at which Muriel Matters was the speaker.

Muriel Matters made a number of other appearances in Scotland in the first six months of 1914, for instance, in Musselburgh in June when she dealt "most effectively" with the subject of women's suffrage.

In September 1913, Muriel Matters became engaged to William Arnold Porter, a divorced Bostonian dentist, at the fourth time of asking.

In June 1915, a year after the outbreak of World War I, Muriel Matters declared her opposition to the war in an address entitled "The False Mysticism of War".

Muriel Matters expressed her displeasure at Christianity being used as a justification of war, because the origins of the faith made no appeal to armed force.

In 1916, Muriel Matters spent a year in Barcelona attending the Italian educator Maria Montessori's international course, which focused on new education strategies for children, looking at the whole child's development: physical, social, emotional and cognitive.

Spain's neutrality during the Great War allowed Muriel Matters to go there to study the child-centred approach to learning taught by Montessori, which fitted her view that education should be a universal right.

In 1922, Muriel Matters undertook a second lecture tour of Australia but this time her primary concern was to advocate Montessori's ideas to the educators of her native country.

Muriel Matters's opponent was the incumbent Conservative candidate, Lord Eustace Percy.

In 1928, a fifty-one-year-old Muriel Matters finally saw the achievement of what she and other women of Great Britain were seeking, equal suffrage for women and men.

Widowed in 1949, Muriel Matters died 21 years later, on 17 November 1969, aged 92, at the St Leonards on Sea nursing home.

Muriel Matters was not given the same recognition in Australia as in the UK, where she was interviewed by the BBC in 1939.

But, in 2009, the Muriel Matters Society was set up.

The Society's play Why Muriel Matters was performed in the Adelaide Town Hall in June 2010,100 years after Matters appeared at the same venue.