VIDA FOREVER
If Vida Goldstein were alive today, she would be considered a hero. As the first woman in the Western world to stand for parliament, a pioneering feminist and activist, she represented Australia on the world stage as part of the suffrage movement, yet her
Remembering pioneering feminist and activist Vida Goldstein.
SELLING NEWSPAPERS ON a Melbourne street corner does not sound like a revolutionary act. But on a rainy April day in 1912, passers-by were appalled to see a woman presenting papers for public sale. And feminist papers too; it was little short of scandalous.
Not that the occasional glares and mutterings worried the seller at all; 43-year-old Vida Goldstein had handled much more difficult situations than this. She had been the first woman anywhere in the Western world to stand for election to a national parliament – in Victoria, for the Senate, in 1903 in her mid-30s. This branded her as either a heroine or a shameless hussy and a member of the ‘shrieking sisterhood’. Any woman who pitted herself against men, for whatever reason, was widely regarded with suspicion. But though Goldstein’s political campaign had not succeeded, she had become a celebrity, and not simply in Australia. She counted as a friend every prominent feminist in Britain and America, and had also met the president of the United States.
Vida Goldstein (pronounced Vy-da) knew a thing or two about publicity. When nobody bought her papers that day she hit on a bold idea. The next day she was there again, but pinned to her skirt was a poster for the Votes for Women paper she was selling with a headline reading: ‘Torture! By order of the Home Secretary’. This stark interpretation of what was being done to the suffragettes in England caused a sensation, and copies of her papers sold out immediately. Goldstein’s photograph appeared in the press – it remains the most famous picture of her – and within a couple of weeks eight women were selling feminist papers on the streets of Melbourne.
It’s a story that demonstrates the shrewd, steely courage that Goldstein showed all her life. Born in Portland, west of Melbourne, in 1869, the eldest of five children, she came from a family that was anything but conventional. Her mother, Isabella, came from a prosperous pastoral family, but she married Jacob Goldstein, an Irish immigrant with a
Jewish background who ran a general store. It is easy to see why they were attracted to each other: Jacob was ambitious, craving social advancement, while Isabella was keen to break away from a difficult home life. They also believed it was their duty to help people who were less fortunate.
When the family moved to Melbourne after Goldstein’s eighth birthday, Jacob and Isabella became involved in charitable causes. After Goldstein left school, she joined her mother in her work. The pair helped establish the Victoria Hospital, set up by women for women, and worked in city slums. In her early 20s, Goldstein with her sisters Elsie and Aileen, ran a primary school in St Kilda for several years.
Though Goldstein enjoyed teaching, she wanted to join the group of extraordinary, intelligent and courageous women who were determined to break down the doors of male privilege, urging equal opportunities in medicine and education, enlightened access to contraception, equal pay for equal work, and much else. She very quickly showed herself to be a formidable organiser, an excellent writer and a persuasive advocate. And when in 1903, two years after Federation, Australia became the second nation in the world after New Zealand to grant its white women the right to vote, Goldstein was invited to visit the United States as the representative of our new, vibrant and progressive nation where women voted.
Goldstein had a wonderful time. She met all the leaders of the American suffrage movement, attended debates in Congress and even became the first Australian woman to have an audience with President Theodore Roosevelt.
Goldstein returned to Australia full of enthusiasm, and toured Victorian towns giving the 1903 equivalent of PowerPoint presentations about her American experiences, which she billed as ‘To America and back – cheapest fare in history!’ This was a shrewd move. Not only did she manage to defray some costs of her trip but she was also able to see what interest there might be in her next project: to stand for the Senate in the forthcoming general election.
She decided to become a candidate because, as she often said, women were needed in parliament to safeguard their own interests and those of their children. But her announcement created a sensation – and not an entirely favourable one. Women, many thought, should not push themselves forward in this way nor speak in public – something that, like selling newspapers, nice women never did. The idea of a woman expressing her opinions in front of strangers – and men at that Ð was outrageous! Again, none of these reactions fazed Goldstein in the least, and she calmly went ahead. The novelty of a woman candidate
was a huge drawcard; Goldstein’s rallies were always crowded. She proved to be a skilled and witty public speaker. To one heckler who called out: “Don’t you wish you were a man?” she replied, “Don’t you wish you were?”
Newspapers often reported her speeches verbatim, complete with audience reaction, but they rarely analysed her words. Instead, they devoted many column inches to her clothes. Goldstein was always neat and beautifully dressed but she grew weary of being evaluated for her smart coats and crisply elegant blouses. It is rather depressing to realise that this journalistic tendency hasn’t changed much. It’s a fairly short distance between Goldstein’s ‘coquettish bonnets’ and Julie Bishop’s high-heeled red shoes.
Goldstein polled 51,497 votes, about half those of the winning candidates and enough under today’s rules to get her a place in the Senate. She failed to be elected, and declared she had been “beaten but not disgraced”. It is unlikely that the result surprised her. The whole point of standing had been to challenge the status quo, and she had certainly done that. She was also right when she stated: “I had against me the combined power of the morning and Labour papers, deliberate misrepresentation by two of them, lack of finance and the prejudice of sex.” The fact that she, like subsequent women candidates, stood as an independent also told against her. But the political parties of the day refused to endorse women.
Goldstein felt great affinity with the English suffragettes, especially Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters, supporting their determination to be given the vote as strongly as she could. She was always aware that the fight for the suffrage in Australia had been won with comparative ease, free of bloodshed or damage to property, and that her English sisters were not similarly fortunate. She was appalled by the strength of the forces arranged against the suffragettes. Women were being force-fed, beaten by police, imprisoned. A pacifist by nature, she stood with her English sisters, not condemning their destruction of property. She believed their cause was just, and that woman suffrage was an international issue.
In 1911, Pankhurst’s Women’s Social and Political Union invited Goldstein to England to help in their campaign for the vote. She spoke at a huge rally in the Royal Albert Hall and helped organise and take part in a massive women’s procession through the streets of London. Now, in her early 40s, Vida was admired internationally as a pioneer of women’s rights.
At the time the great suffragette procession was described as the greatest formal gathering of women the world had ever seen. About 40,000 women and several thousand men took part, all carrying banners. Goldstein and Margaret Fisher, wife of Australian PM Andrew Fisher, led the contingent from Australia and New Zealand, numbering about 170 women. Like many others, Goldstein wore the Women’s Social and Political Union colours of purple, green and white in a ribbon over her heart. “I wouldn’t have missed that march for anything on Earth,” she commented.
Goldstein kept fighting, not just to enter parliament, but for the causes she believed in. During World War I, she and her Women’s Peace Army defied the Australian Government’s determination to conscript young men, sending them overseas to take part in the carnage of the Western Front. She, Adela Pankhurst and Cecilia John, among others, wrote petitions, made speeches and held rallies opposing PM Billy Hughes’s proposed conscription bills. At a time when war fever was at its height, their actions showed extraordinary courage. But nothing – not angry soldiers, government censorship, press ridicule, public hostility, the threat of physical violence – deterred Goldstein and her colleagues from their work. And they were vindicated when, twice, the Australian public rejected conscription.
Goldstein belongs to that great group of Australians who have been honoured everywhere except in their own country. This is partly because all her attempts to enter parliament – she made five, between 1903 and 1917 – were unsuccessful, so have scarcely been remembered. Her work for the suffrage, the immense amount of time she spent campaigning for the rights of women and children, her staunch pacifism, her journalism, her lobbying: all were forgotten, even before her death in 1949. However effective her subterranean influence might have been, she never led an army into battle, never presented arguments in a court of law, never set up a university department. In Australia’s hypermasculine culture, these are the things that are celebrated, and they have historically been the province of men.
It is reasonable to ask whether the women and children for whom Goldstein fought so hard during her career included Australia’s Indigenous people. The answer is almost certainly no: like most of her generation, Goldstein would have met very few. Victoria’s Indigenous people, like those elsewhere in Australia, lived on the edges of country towns or in the bush, hardly seen by white people.
And what of the great feminist reform of Goldstein’s lifetime, the granting of the vote to women in 1903? It took another 40 years for a woman to enter the Australian Parliament. (Dorothy Tangney and Enid Lyons entered the House of Representatives and the Senate respectively in 1943.) The USA and Britain gave women the vote almost two decades after Australia did, but women joined Congress or the British Parliament within five years. And if Goldstein has not been remembered as a pioneer, Tangney and Lyons are scarcely household names either.
It would be pleasant to report that Australian women who enter political life these days have an easier time. In some ways they do – and she would have been proud to see our first woman prime minister 10 years ago. But as is well known, Julia Gillard had to cope with epic levels of misogyny during her time in office, culminating in her so-called ‘misogyny speech’ when she called out the sexism of opposition leader Tony Abbott.
Statistics worldwide show that politics is still largely a man’s game. Goldstein would have been dismayed by these and other signs that in many respects women still form the unequal half of Australian society. But her lifetime of political and social advocacy taught her that she and her successors were embarking on a long, long journey and that, as she wrote in 1903, “the world moves slowly, my masters”. Let us hope she continues to be right in adding, “but it does move”. Jacqueline Kent is a biographer and author of Vida: A Woman For Our Time (Penguin Viking), published September 15. Kent has written biographies of Julia Gillard, musician and social activist Hephzibah Menuhin, and pioneer book editor Beatrice Davis.
Goldstein failed to be elected, and declared she had been “beaten but not disgraced”