LAST night a party at Victoria's Parliament House in Spring St, Melbourne, marked the end of a year of Centenary of Women's Suffrage celebrations.

It is 100 years since women got the right to vote in Victoria.

It was a nice party but by and large, the year has gone by with little fanfare about this, what with economies collapsing, water supplies running low and the globe warming.

In the meantime, women have notched up a million achievements, like getting out the door to work and getting the kids off to school and keeping their farmer hubbies in reasonable form, despite the weather's dispiriting assault on their income and lives.

Just off the top of my head, some of the more accoladed achievements include Birchip Cropping Group CEO Alex Gartmann being nominated for a Telstra Business Women's Award and Loddon Murray Community Leadership Program co-ordinator Kerry Anderson being named Victorian Office Professional of the Year.

Then there was the Australian Women in Agriculture organisation signing up to help the newly established Foundation of Women in Agricultural Development in Papua New Guinea, Swan Hill councillor Yvonne Jennings getting a new women's leadership program up and going, the Gippsland women completing their Can-Do leadership program, and so on.

But history and this year's focus on the Centenary of Women's Suffrage has revealed our rural forbears left us a solid legacy of responding in profound and lasting ways to the challenges of their time.

At Haddon, women celebrated the centenary by identifying women from their Woady Yaloak district, west of Ballarat, whose "lives and extraordinary contributions to society left an indelible mark", project co-ordinator Jean Evans says.

They formed a choir to sing about them.

They discovered Lizzie Ahern, one of 12 children who became a socialist and advocated for unemployment relief, went to jail for free speech and opposed conscription in the early 1900s.

She believed that only under socialism would women not be oppressed.

They discovered, too, Elizabeth Gordon, one of 14 children and a Sunday school teacher who ran a private school in the late 1800s and whose pallbearers were all women.

They learned of Vera Scantlebury-Brown, a doctor and anaesthetist who pioneered infant welfare centres in the early 1900s.

Choir leader and singing teacher Belinda McArdle, who is in her 20s, wrote lyrics about these women that the choir sang at last night's party.

"When I first turned up to practice, they were all talking about suffragettes," Belinda says.

"I didn't even know what a suffragette was.

"I had to duck out and call my husband and ask him to look it up on the net."

So we have learnt something by celebrating this centenary. Not least that today's young women can be reconnected to a powerful legacy.

It's a legacy that could well be an inspiration in the tough times facing us now.