Green cloth binding with gilt title and black and cream household image on the front board. Gilt and black flowers and title on the spine.

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First Edition

A well written children’s book

Lilian Staple Mead (30 June 1865 – unknown) was an Australian suffragette and children’s book author. She was the only female student ever educated at Adelaide’s Prince Alfred College.

Mead was a signatory on the Women’s Suffrage Petition in 1894, which is acknowledged by the UNESCO Memory of the World Programme as an Archival treasure. In 1895, Mead gave an address title “The Awakened Woman” at the South Australian Woman’s Christian Temperance Union state convention calling for equal education opportunities. She said,

‘Why’, the awakened woman asked, ‘if the intellectually accomplished man is not unmanly, is an intellectually accomplished woman unwomanly? Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Mary Somerville answered the question. Both highly intellectual women, both ideal wives and mothers, both occupying prominent and public positions, they were intensely and undeniably womanly. The awakened woman … rightly reasoned that if even a moth does not exist only to subserve another’s gain, much less does a woman.

Mead was a leader alongside her father in Christian Endeavour and in 1897 gave an address at the society’s international convention in California called “The World’s Prayer Chain” in which she called for prayers for, among other things, the downfall of caste in India and the abolishment of foot-binding in China.

Mead authored two children’s fiction books, A Brother’s Need and Patsie’s Bricks, which was called by one reviewer “far superior to the general run of books for children.” Her third book, Daring and Doing, was a collection of short stories of heroism, based upon true stories and “intended to inspire young readers to similar acts of unselfish devotion.”  She also had short stories published in The Quiver, a Christian magazine.