Susan B. Anthony’s words were not aimed only at the patriarchal systems of power and privilege that made men the masters and women their slaves; they were also intended as a rebuke to women themselves. The full quote is this:
The fact is, women are in chains, and their servitude is all the more debasing because they do not realize it.1
Women, according to feminists like Anthony and her fellow Americans Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Carrie Chapman Catt, needed to wake up to their own subjugation and to rise from the stupor of centuries of political and sexual oppression.
Vida Goldstein was one woman who was utterly alive to the great challenge of the times.
Vida—the name is the Latin feminine for David—was born on 13 April 1869, in Portland, in the far west of Victoria.2 Her father, Jacob Robert Yannasch Goldstein, was the son of a Polish Jewish father and Dutch Irish mother.3 After migrating to Australia in 1859, Jacob became fully integrated into Anglo society and never practised as a Jew himself. When he met Vida’s mother, Isabella, he was working as a businessman in Portland. Isabella, née Hawkins, was Australian-born, the daughter of wealthy Scots Presbyterian squatters in the rich farming land of the Western District. The odd couple was married in 1868. Vida was their first child; Elsie, Lina, Selwyn and Aileen followed.
In 1877, when Vida was eight, the Goldsteins relocated permanently to Melbourne. She was educated at home by governesses and then at the Presbyterian Ladies College, which had built a reputation for educating the daughters of the colonial elite to the same standard as their sons. PLC’s founding principal, Charles Henry Pearson, thought it absurd that women should not be trained in medicine and law but permitted that they should amass large fortunes by singing and acting on the public stage.4 Tall, graceful and attractive, Vida had the external attributes for a career as an entertainer, but her intelligence coupled with a first-rate education set her on another path. Vida’s teachers found her extraordinarily hardworking—to the extent that she suffered a nervous breakdown in her final year—but also vivacious, spirited and possessing a firm conscience.
The Goldstein family attended the Scots Church in Collins Street where former PLC girl Nellie Mitchell, later Dame Nellie Melba, sang in the choir. The charismatic minister was Charles Strong, a progressive liberal and social reformer whose controversial views on science and religion eventually saw him split from the orthodox Presbyterian Church and establish his own independent ministry at the Australian Church. The Goldstein family followed him there, as did many of Melbourne’s intellectual elite, including Alfred Deakin.
This was where Vida developed her passionate commitment to the underprivileged and her zeal for social reform. When Reverend Strong took his anti-slum campaign into the dismal back streets of Collingwood, Isabella Goldstein and her daughter were with him. Vida witnessed first-hand the misery and turmoil in the slum houses where women tended to large families, suffering violence and abuse at the hands of drunken husbands, while babies starved and children resorted to petty crime. She would later explain her support for socialism by speaking of her personal observation of how the poor and working classes live. She had seen too much to be satisfied with a system which makes their lives one unceasing round of toil, deprivation and anxiety.5
Vida’s mother also led her eldest daughter into the work that would ultimately consume her life: the struggle for women’s rights.
The earliest call for women’s rights by a woman in Australia is generally credited to Henrietta Dugdale. In 1869 the Melbourne ARGUS published her letter decrying the inadequacy of a married women’s property bill then before parliament. It was personal: Dugdale had herself lost her property to a profligate husband whom she could neither live with nor divorce.6 Her letter criticised the bill as but a poor and partial remedy for a great and crying evil, particularly for deserted wives. This is a piece of the grossest injustice, she went on,
and being unjust the consequences can only be evil. In the case of a young woman so deserted it is three to one but she either falls a victim to some vile seducer, and ultimately ends her shortened career in Bourke-street or the River Yarra.7
But the question of the female franchise went back further. In 1857, Victorian MP George Higinbotham (the sympathetic but insufficiently gutsy politician at whom Dugdale’s wrath was now directed) had raised it when debating a bill to extend manhood suffrage in Victoria. Giving the right of voting to females, he argued twelve years prior to the publication of John Stuart Mill’s famous essay ‘The Subjection of Women’, will be one step towards that general and complete political equality which it appears to be the chief purpose of this age to effect. Earlier still, women in Ballarat—women who had fought for the same voting rights that unpropertied men had won after the mass democratic protest movements at Eureka—pressed for their own inclusion in the newly democratised political machinery of the colony.8
Opponents viewed the call for the female franchise as one of all the crazy ideas going around,9 not just wrong but risible. Although I entertain great respect and regard for the female sex, chortled conservative premier James Francis, I consider the qualifications of the ladies are already sufficiently charming without adding to their influence in society by conferring on them the right to vote for members of the Legislature. Former premier James McPherson expressed a similar view, adding that nature has drawn distinctions between the sexes which can not be ignored. MacPherson was a member of the Legislative Assembly, the so-called ‘people’s house’. The responses from the elite Legislative Council were worse.
But despite the ridicule and vilification to which members of the shrieking sisterhood were routinely subjected, the movement for women’s rights intensified in the post-goldrush years. By 1884, Australia had its first organised women’s suffrage association, established in a private parlour in Melbourne by Henrietta Dugdale and Annie Lowe. As Vida would later note, women’s suffrage had now reached the region of practical politics.10 George Higinbotham was not present but sent a sizable donation. In 1889 Dr William Maloney, a dapper thirty-four-year-old medical practitioner and ardent socialist, introduced into the Legislative Assembly the first bill to remove all sex disabilities in regard to voting. Maloney’s bill failed but his commitment to women’s suffrage would make him one of the prime movers for change in the next two decades.
By the end of the 1880s, two-thirds of women in Victoria earned their own living and paid taxes. But not one of them got representation for their taxation. And to add insult to injury, women’s rights advocates—including male supporters like Higinbotham and Maloney—had to put up with the longstanding accusation that most women couldn’t really care less about getting the vote; that suffrage was just a new-fangled fad espoused by a few noisy, carping, dried-up old bluestockings.
In 1891, Premier James Munro promised to introduce a female suffrage bill into parliament if Victoria’s women could demonstrate that their sex really did want the vote. Rising to the challenge, Henrietta Dugdale mobilised a legion of female foot soldiers to spend six exhausting weeks collecting signatures for a massive petition. The core supporters would be easy: respectable middle-class reformers from the burgeoning suffrage and temperance societies. But for the first time women now came together across class lines. Volunteers trudged through the working-class slums of Fitzroy and Carlton as well as the genteel neighbourhoods of Hawthorn and South Yarra. Regional districts organised their own petitions, with volunteers knocking on doors and talking over fences. Isabella Goldstein was one of those women. And where mother went, so did daughter. When other girls of her class were busy attending balls and starting families, Vida trudged the streets helping her mother collect signatures.
The volunteer army collected an astonishing thirty thousand signatures in six weeks. All of the individual paper petitions were stuck onto bolts of cotton, and proud delegates lugged the 260-metre roll into the parliament building, where it took four attendants to place the petition before the House. This was the largest petition ever presented to a colonial parliament. Win or lose, women’s suffrage could no longer be dismissed as the shrill bleating of a few radicals.
The 1891 franchise bill did fail, but the petition converted Premier Munro, who now became a staunch advocate of women’s suffrage, berating the recalcitrant members of parliament for over an hour:
The whole thing is a scandalous disgrace. If you believe that women are differently constituted to men, remove taxation from them; but if you are a democrat, and believe in government of the people by the people and for the people, then give the people fair play, and when you tax women, give them the vote as well.
That was how Vida got her first taste for the blood sport of politics. Campaigning in the slums, collecting signatures—witnessing the power of collective action—set the course for her lifelong undertaking to improve the lives of women and children.
That year, Vida was twenty-one. Smart, witty and beautiful, she collected marriage proposals like others collected the daily mail. (A dashing young member of her father’s militia unit, John Monash, was one of her unsuccessful suitors. She found him frivolous; he dismissed her as haughty—after she’d rejected his affections.) But Vida vowed she would never marry. She wanted to devote her life to bettering the conditions of all women and children, and she believed, justifiably, that her own marriage and childbearing would make this impossible.
Beyond that, her private life is a mystery. Although she was friendly, warm and vivacious, with devoted male and female friends, almost everything we know about her comes from her reported speeches, her journalism and other published sources. Even her travel diaries read like reportage. Vida was a public woman. She lived and breathed politics.
In 1893 Vida and her sisters opened a school—co-educational, since they believed it was ‘unnatural’ to separate the sexes in education—run out of the family home in St Kilda. (The financial crash of that year hit independently wealthy families like the Goldsteins hard, and meant the girls needed a source of income.) Vida continued her slum work. She helped organise a committee to raise funds to found the Queen Victoria Hospital, staffed entirely by women.
In 1899, when her friend Annette Bear Crawford died, Vida assumed from her the leadership of the movement for women’s emancipation in Victoria. She closed the school to devote herself full time to the women’s cause. It was her belief that conditions for women would never change until they had the vote: women’s lives would not be improved; women themselves would not be taken seriously as credible, worthwhile human beings without political power.11
Vida made her first public speech at a woman suffrage meeting at the Prahran Town Hall in July 1899. A month later she addressed a packed audience at the Melbourne Town Hall, where she shared the stage with Alfred Deakin, Reverend Strong and the Mayor of Melbourne. She spoke in what would become her characteristic style: calm, rational, measured; able to reach every corner of the hall (in those days before amplification) without raising her voice in a ‘manly’ fashion. TABLE TALK noted after the speech that she is a living demonstration of the time-honoured fallacy that an ‘advanced’ woman cannot be womanly.12 The AGE was similarly impressed. Miss Vida Goldstein showed by the grace and aptness of her remarks, it reported, that there is no reason why a woman’s presence should not be as acceptable on a public platform as in the drawing room.13 The papers didn’t report what Vida actually said at these meetings. Her presence on the stage was newsworthy enough.
In September 1900 Vida began publishing a monthly journal, the WOMAN’S SPHERE, as registered proprietor, with full editorial control.14 As she revealed in its first issue, Vida had received an offer from an unnamed benefactor to start a journal to represent all interested in the local movement for advancing the highest interests of women, the only stipulation being that she assume complete charge of the operation. Though it entailed embarrassing responsibility, she jumped at the opportunity. It is no use to make any other promise than that I will do my best, Vida announced in her first editorial. I shall try not to blame anyone but myself, if you, ladies and gentlemen, do not find my paper worthy of your penny, and a little esteem and possibly affection.
The journal’s title was, of course, tongue-in-cheek, a play on the notion that a woman’s place was in the home. There were no social notes—no descriptions of who’d worn what gown to what soirée. Nor were there recipes or etiquette tips like those found in the women’s pages of other journals. (‘What a Girl Should Learn’: to sew; to cook; to mend; to be gentle; to value time; to dress neatly; to keep a secret…to make good break; to be sweet-tempered…to be a womanly woman under all circumstances.15)
Rather, Vida’s WOMAN’S SPHERE contained what she called serious reading: colonial politics, parliamentary reports, a regular column called ‘The World Turns’ containing updates from the women’s movement in other countries, notices of meetings and demonstrations, and arguments one could use against anti-suffragists. For example, to the charge: It will be the cause of dissension in families, the ready answer could be: It will not cause dissension except where dissension already exists.
The journal named its supporters in parliament—and also called out its adversaries. Advertising was accepted from typewriter and bicycle companies, coffee shops and organisations such as the School of Physical Culture and Medical Gymnastics and the Working Men’s College, which promised classes open to women. There were no ads for corsets.
Above all, Vida’s ambition was that her paper would obtain the friendship of even a small percentage of my country-women who love their land and know it can never prosper until half of humanity has its rights—and performs its duties. At thirty and proudly native-born, never having travelled abroad, Vida was an avowed democrat and Australian patriot. And she was now at the helm of an organ of communication that would find a wide audience for her activism.
So when Vida Goldstein walked into Maggie Heffernan’s prison cell, it was always going to be a turning point. Remembering the popularity of the monster petition nine years earlier, Vida decided to use the tactic again. She would make Maggie’s case a cause célèbre.
The following is the text of the petition on behalf of Maggie Heffernan, announced the Melbourne AGE on Saturday 3 March 1900.
The paper proceeded to print the contents of the petition of the Women’s Political and Social Crusade in toto. The petition called for the death sentence to be commuted on the grounds that Maggie’s conviction rested on incorrect medical testimony. The judge had directed that she was not criminally insane because she remembered her actions and knew she had done wrong. But puerperal insanity, argued the petition, was not the same form of disorder as insanity; the legal definitions of disease were biased against postnatal women, thus producing a legal fiction.
The injustice done by the court, however, was not merely a technicality. There was a moral dimension:
Your petitioners believe that the unfortunate girl is deserving not so much of legal punishment as the deepest sympathy…Seduced, betrayed, deserted, homeless, friendless, left to starve in the streets, in a physically exhausted condition, with nothing but water to give to a newly born babe. The hanging of such an unfortunate creature…would be an outrage on our common humanity.16
Public opinion had always tended towards mercy for Maggie, but now Vida’s campaign provided a tangible goal. Vida orchestrated a letter-writing campaign, wrote articles for the WOMAN’S SPHERE and led deputations. The Trades Hall Council, a powerful labour lobby group, unanimously endorsed the views of one such WPSC deputation. Public meetings were held, and support rolled in from across colonial borders.
A letter to the editor of the Sydney TRUTH, signed by Justice, denounced the behaviour of charities who had closed their doors to Maggie: Christian (so-called) institutions and Christian (?) women who turned aside and withheld the hand of sympathy from the poor fallen one. Shame! Shame on all such!17 Justice’s censure went beyond religious humbug to call out social hypocrisy:
May the day be not far distant when the betrayer must take his place by the side of his victim and bear with her the penalty. Will the day never come when it will be no longer the woman only who pays?
Vida noted in the WOMAN’S SPHERE that Judge Hodges had adjudicated in a case a few weeks before Maggie’s in which a man had returned home drunk and cut his wife’s throat with a razor almost severing her head from her body.18 The man was found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to two years imprisonment, Judge Hodges remarking that drink had led him to commit the crime.
Maggie’s petition received seventeen thousand signatures. Faced with just such a largely-signed petition, the lieutenant-governor commuted the death sentence to four years’ imprisonment.
Vida had proved that she was not only a dedicated follower, but also an influential leader. And she did more than just chalk up Maggie’s reprieve as a feather in her political cap. There is evidence that she maintained an acquaintanceship, possibly even a friendship, with Maggie.
Maggie didn’t see out her four-year term. She was released from Pentridge on 21 December 1901, eleven days shy of the first anniversary of Federation.
Not, sadly, as a reward for good conduct: the Melbourne TOCSIN reported a few months earlier that a lady who has all along taken a great interest in the case heard that Maggie Heffernan had developed consumption.19 Nine months after her incarceration, Maggie showed pronounced symptoms of phthisis—fevers, night sweats, fatigue and weight loss—and yet,
when not ill enough to rest in hospital, she was kept hard at work in the laundry, where the steam is so dense that at times it is impossible to breathe, and at night she was compelled to sleep on the floor, with a piece of coir matting as mattress.
TOCSIN surmised that if the mysterious friend outside, who was watching her interests, had not intervened to set the wheels in motion to secure her release, Maggie would still be coughing her lungs up in her bluestone bunker. A Royal Commission into the penal system was needed, the paper argued, and no one would have agreed more fervently than Vida. She published an article on penal reform in the WOMAN’S SPHERE arguing that the current system was no more than a State manufactory of criminals.20
How could Australia claim the righteousness that supposedly exalted the new nation, freed from its penal past, when injustice still yoked the vulnerable and the poor? For a democrat and a patriot like Vida, such hypocrisy simply wouldn’t do.