In the late nineteenth century, adult and public learning pedagogy were the key instruments utilised in the campaign to achieve Victorian Women's Suffrage. The democratic process of changing state government legislation on franchise demanded multiple pedagogical methods. Through the actions of Bessie Harrison Lee (1860-1950), this paper identifies the reaching out to urban and rural women by the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), where they engaged in a transformative exercise in consciousness-raising. This helped women visualise the possibilities of improving their lives through the democratic process. The WCTU taught Lee the value of female-centred political action. The WCTU and Lee's involvement successfully influenced the suffrage debate and contributed to the emerging international women's culture (McLean & Baroud, 2020, p. 506). Part of this culture featured Australian women adopting the petition as a political instrument. The petition had already had a long history in Britain, used by groups with little political influence. Ian Fletcher's conception of the British Empire as "a set of relations, rather than the sum of their parts, as frameworks structuring political, economic and cultural exchanges between metropole and colonies" is useful in understanding how political ideas travelled to and were adapted in the Australian context (Fletcher, Levine & Mayall, 2012, p. xiv). This paper argues that new ways of knowing were made possible by Lee, who, empowered by the evangelical faith (her cultural capital) spoke out confidently in public spaces such as town halls, outside public bars, and on the front doorsteps of women's homes in both cities and rural towns. These spaces were the places of learning, or as Bourdieu described, the field. Also, the meeting places of the WCTU, whether private lounge rooms or church halls, enabled women to support each other in the political process of debate, addressing community issues, and devising strategic plans to improve the lives of women. Through critical discourse analysis of newspaper reports, WCTU's publication The White Ribbon, the Victorian Alliance publication Alliance Record, and Lee's autobiography, this paper identifies these learning spaces. It also explores the community of practice in WCTU meetings, doorknocking, pamphleteering and the physical act of collecting signatures for the 1891 'Victorian Monster Petition'. The language and actions used to enact democratic activity that involves women in ways of saying, doing, and being full citizens are unlocked; however, the WCTU was exclusionary of Indigenous and non-Anglo-Celtic ancestry. Therefore, their learning spaces were complicit in the Great Silence (Stanner, 1968).