Nellie Martel was not among the thousands who came to watch the Duke and Duchess of York open the first parliament. On 9 May 1901, the ebullient Nellie was in Paddington, preparing to give one of her ‘at homes’, the monthly reception she had been hosting since rising to prominence as recording secretary of the Womanhood Suffrage League in 1897. At first, she and Charles hosted these lively affairs from their rooms at the Hotel Arcadia, where the double inducement of a popular hostess and good impromptu music proved irresistible in making the visitors linger.1 When the couple bought a home in Paddington, purchased with the profits from Nellie’s elocution and singing lessons, the fashionable crowd followed, eager to have their names recorded as guests by the AUSTRALIAN TOWN AND COUNTRY JOURNAL or the EVENING NEWS.
If Nellie was a stylish entertainer, comfortable with the froth and bubble of Sydney’s middle-class elite, she was also proving herself a persuasive public speaker. As WSL recording secretary, she had become central to the earnest work being done by the advocates of the cause.2 She took notes of the meetings, and took the punches when accused of redundancy of expression. One disgruntled politician suggested that Nellie was doing Rose Scott’s dirty work—clearing the matriarch’s sooty chimney—by censoring meeting notes to keep the league’s reputation unsullied.3
By early 1898 she was ready to step out from the older woman’s shadow. Was it significant that Nellie’s mother had recently died? The notice she placed in the SYDNEY MORNING HERALD paid tribute to a noble life at rest.4 Perhaps Nellie thought of the life her mother hadn’t been able to lead while raising twelve children on a blacksmith’s wage. Whatever the impetus, the federal Constitution Bill provided Nellie’s chance to test her own mettle.
The eighth WSL annual meeting in June 1899 debated the league’s position on the bill—pro or anti—with anti-billite Scott declaring that if any of its members chose to fight one way or the other, they might do so; but the League had nothing to do with it.5 The latest women’s suffrage bill had again failed to pass the New South Wales upper house, and the meeting affirmed that suffrage itself was the main game, the desired end that must remain the league’s sole aim, just as Dora Montefiore had intended.
Though she was re-elected recording secretary, Nellie was not present at the meeting. She was speaking at an anti-billite rally—one of the largest, if not the largest held—in Katoomba, in the Blue Mountains outside Sydney. The Mayor of Katoomba, who chaired the meeting, was congratulated for securing Nellie’s services for Mrs Martel is considered the best speaker on the side.6 The Katoomba MOUNTAINEER praised Nellie, too, reporting the audience’s loud applause for her key objection to the bill: that New South Wales, as the most populous state-to-be, would meet the whole of the burden of financially supporting the smaller states. Nellie, warming to her subject with a long and eloquent sentimental peroration about hungry women and children, appealed to the electors…[to] vote for their own country and homes and not allow their colony to be made a fish pond for the other colonies. (Applause).
She urged women to convince their husbands to wait for a better bill, one worthy of the trust they had asked for before rushing to Federation. And she exhorted the New South Wales government to follow South Australia’s lead in adopting adult suffrage, for here your women are cyphers.
Nellie’s speech was widely reported in the papers. The SYDNEY MORNING HERALD noted that her address met with remarkable success. She had a large and enthusiastic audience and a unanimous vote was carried against the bill.7 Whether it was the ovation or the influence that Nellie enjoyed most, the success of her anti-billite campaigning inspired her to take an even more audacious step.
Vida Goldstein, a long-term ally of Rose Scott, had always been conscious that Scott’s class position gave her an unfair advantage. Your independent means, she wrote to Scott, enable you to be the leader in NSW but I have to work hard for the barest living.8 Nellie, who had scraped her way to prominence, appears to have shared that perspective despite the bourgeois trappings of her Sydney life: that never-to-be-forgotten procession of London’s East End workers continued to nag at her. Along with Annie and Belle Golding, she tried to steer the WSL towards a closer association with the labour movement, establishing branches in the industrial heartlands of Newtown, Glebe and Redfern. Scott resisted the push, holding firm to the citadel of her central Sydney branch.
By the end of 1900, with Federation imminent, the WSL was still pushing hard to win the vote in New South Wales. The upper house was still doggedly holding back the tide. TRUTH reported in December on the fate of the latest Suffrage Bill:
Never before have so many women invaded the Legislative Council as on Wednesday night when [MPs] defeated the Suffrage Bill by the narrow squeak of three votes. Chirpy, chatty girls were there in evening dress; councillors’ wives; Miss Rose Scott, looking tired and anxious; brick-haired Mrs Martell, [sic] and the prominent suffragists…the hopelessness of petitions were never more apparent.9
Frustrations were already mounting when, in 1901, Nellie and the Golding girls organised a deputation to the premier without Scott’s knowledge. The shit hit the fan,10 and members began to take sides. Louisa Lawson stood firm behind Nellie. Mr Gundy, who represented the Australian Society of Social Ethics, told Scott that it was Nellie who was the problem, not the Goldings. If not for Nellie, he reassured her, the Goldings would be loyal to Scott but, swayed by the artful elocutionist, they had become the party of lying and spying.11
Brick-haired Nellie, her ample bosom and coiffed head held high, turned and walked.
Ten years after Dora Montefiore established the Womanhood Suffrage League in her home in Paddington, and with New South Wales women still not enfranchised, Nellie Martel founded her own organisation, the Women’s Progressive Association, with herself as president. The Golding sisters followed her, as did Louisa Lawson.
The WPA would stand for more than the winning of the vote. It would champion a range of issues, talking political economy until the cows came home. At the first meeting, held in the School of Arts in Pitt Street on 28 September 1901, the object of the association was read to a large audience: to educate women on how to vote, when they get it, and to expand the mind, enlarge the ideas, and familiarise the women with all progressive measures.12 From the stage, Nellie elaborated further:
The object of the association [is] to bring a better state of social affairs than now obtained—better socially and politically…[We] intend still to agitate, first for womanhood suffrage, secondly for the federal franchise…then we want to do away with sweating and other evils attendant on it. We want women inspectors and police matrons…anyone in sympathy can join and help…though we would prefer workers.13
Nellie promised that despite her large teaching connection, she had never missed and would never miss a session in the House when a suffrage bill was being debated. She also indicated that the WPA would advocate for the postal vote, so that when women did eventually go to the ballot box on election day, their husbands should not be put to the inconvenience of minding the children. Indeed, husbands need not worry at all. Not altogether is it a sex movement, assured Nellie, as it will be to the advantage of men also, on the theory that the elevation of woman means the elevation of man also.
By the end of 1901, the WPA had established multiple branches and many respectable gentlemen, including members of parliament, had enrolled. The Women’s Progressive Association, Sydney, has risen, phoenix-like from the ashes of the discarded Women’s Suffrage Bill, reported the WORKER, organ of the union movement, preferring Nellie Martel’s socialism of labour to Rose Scott’s socialism of love.14 The revolution would start now. But gently, so that no one might be inconvenienced.
While Mrs Nellie Martel was claiming leading lady status for herself, Miss Muriel Matters was pushing the boundaries that had previously constrained her ambitions. Since women had won their historic voting rights in her hometown in 1894, and Frederick Holder bent the other colonies over a barrel on the issue of women’s suffrage in 1897, Muriel had been busy trying to figure out how she would make her own mark. After winning a scholarship to the Elder Conservatorium, she studied music for two years.15 But university life didn’t thrill her half as much as the public performances—benefit concerts, small-town plays—she continued to give whenever she could get a part. Muriel was particularly drawn to stage roles as heroic women, triumphant underdogs and sacrificial lambs.16 Critics often noted the dissonance between her strong stage presence and her diminutive physicality. A frail, pretty and essentially feminine creature, noted one journalist, who leaves you marvelling at the mettle.17 In 1897, Muriel was still too young to vote but, at eighteen, she was old enough to leave her family home and go test that marvellous pluck and determination.
Muriel left Adelaide in November 1897, bound for Sydney. There she languished in exasperating obscurity, trying to catch a break. It’s unclear how, as an unchaperoned teenager, Muriel kept body and soul—not to mention reputation—together in the city, but she was never estranged from her large and close family, who appear to have supported her aspirations. Like Nellie, she may have given elocution lessons, teaching the daughters of Point Piper to enunciate.
After twelve months without so much as a hospital benefit to her name, Muriel stopped waiting to be rescued by some canny impresario and organised her own inauguration onto the Sydney scene. She arranged the publicity, apprising the press of her debut at the YMCA Hall on 20 October 1898. She chose a stage name, shoehorning her mother’s maiden name into her own for a touch of class: Miss Muriel Warburton Matters. Several newspapers announced the upcoming entertainment by the popular young elocutionist from Adelaide who promised to recite both humorous and pathetic pieces in verse and in prose.18
The media blitz worked. There was a large and appreciative crowd. Miss Muriel Warburton Matters was rewarded for her enterprise in arranging such an excellent entertainment, reported the SYDNEY MORNING HERALD, by a numerous attendance. A bright example of an Australian girl, they called her, showing a special talent for depiction of boyish characters and touches of sly humour.
The ‘Australian girl’ was not merely a description; she was a type. Vigorous and independent, brave and brash, the Australian girl appeared in literature and in melodrama as a deliberate counterpart to the withering English rose. Australian girls didn’t get seduced by foppish gits or tied to railway tracks: they outsmarted the rascals and derailed the trains.19 Muriel’s impish charm perfectly suited the temper of the times.
Favourable notices kept coming, and soon Muriel no longer had to notify the press of her movements. The papers followed her, and not only in the theatrical columns. She also appeared in the social pages where her outfits were described as fulsomely as her acting. Miss Muriel (Warburton) Matters had arrived.
In September 1899, a year after she had plucked herself from anonymity, Muriel’s impresario arrived. Robert Brough was an English actor-manager who had made his own illustrious debut on the Australian stage in 1885. Since then, he and his wife Florence had established one of the most successful touring companies in the country, producing all of the latest plays from London. Brough knew talent when he saw it, and he hired Muriel the following day. Ironically, her first performance as part of the Broughs’ company was back in Adelaide. But no matter. Her name (minus the Warburton) was appearing on the playbills of this famous outfit. She was now Miss Muriel Matters of the Brough Comedy Company and she was off on an extended tour through the eastern colonies, including Tasmania and New Zealand, as the Adelaide QUIZ was proud to report.20
Adelaide newspapers were now reporting the success of their homegrown darling of the stage, but as the century neared its close, Muriel found herself restless again. After her eastern tour, she parted company with the Broughs and began playing second lady with George Rignold’s company. Rignold, another English-born actor-manager, had a reputation as a serious man of theatre. Perhaps Muriel hungered for the gravitas of playing Princess Katherine to Rignold’s Henry V; perhaps she was just tired of the lousy pay and conditions on offer in the Brough troupe. But by the time Muriel joined his company, Rignold was over sixty and past his prime—the BULLETIN complained of his arrogance, slow-wittedness, unpleasantness back-stage with minor actors, impatience with stage-managers and interminable ‘farewell’ performances21—and Muriel’s association with him was brief. In January 1901, Rignold wound up his final farewell tour in Tasmania.
By May 1901, when Lady Tennyson of Adelaide was standing on a dais in Melbourne admiring the Duchess of York’s diamond-studded muff chain, Muriel was back in Adelaide, teaching elocution. Miss M. Matters wore a neat cream serge Eton navy skirt and black crinoline hat, reported QUIZ.22
If Muriel Matters was the epitome of the millennial New Woman—independent, mobile, self-governing, putting personal dreams before social obligations—another young artist was finding it more difficult to buck convention.
After her encounter with the New Zealand suffragists in 1892, Dora Meeson continued to travel, but still in the close embrace of her family. In May of 1895 the Meesons moved back to Melbourne, the place of Dora’s birth, where she was accepted into the National Gallery of Victoria Art School, then a private fine arts college located behind the State Library in La Trobe Street. Eugene Von Guerard had been the inaugural master of painting. When Dora enrolled, Frederick McCubbin was drawing master. Tom Roberts had been a student at the school in the 1870s, and Arthur Streeton was another alumnus.
While Streeton and Roberts and their rugged Australian masculinity cast a long shadow over the reputation of the gallery school, a photograph taken of the class of 1895 reveals that not all, or even most, of the students were men. Of the cheerful faces surrounding a large replica statue of the Venus de Milo, over fifty belong to women. There are fewer than twenty men, all standing at the back hugging Venus. It is the women who overwhelm the foreground—buttoned and corseted (but largely hatless) though they be. Prior to the late nineteenth century, the idea of the professional female artist was anathema. Art could be a genteel drawing-room accomplishment, but not a calling. All this changed when public and private art schools around the world began enrolling women, who flooded through the open doors. Art became the avenue by which to pursue not only personal expression but also paid employment.
The gallery school class of ’95 was a close one, known as The Family. Paterfamilias McCubbin, who sits at the front of the photograph surrounded by a sea of white linen and lace, was remembered by one of the students as that dearly loved man…who [along with Mrs Mac] kept open house on Sundays to painters, musicians and senior students in their home in Brighton. The ‘children’, with their family in-joke nicknames—‘Mamma’ was Agnes Kirkwood, somewhat older than the other girls and with a motherly attitude to them—comprised a collection of big, attractive personalities, including Percy, Lionel and Ruby Lindsay. But of all her charismatic classmates, Dora Meeson fell for George Coates, the family’s ‘Daddy’: a solemn boy and intensely interested in his work.23
George was born in North Melbourne in the same year as Dora, 1869. Following the early death of his mother, he was largely raised by his two Irish grandmothers and according to Dora, had much of the romantic and imaginative Celt in his nature.24 At twelve, George was sent to the North Melbourne Art School, and by fifteen was apprenticed to a stained glass firm. He was fit and athletic, with the body of a labourer and the tortured soul of an artist. If his fellow students found him solemn, Dora perceived something else in his bearing: He had a woman’s sensitive refinement along with his masculine strength. George hated the coarse humour of other men and was wretched until we got out of the hurly-burly of crowds. In the equally serious, sober Dora Meeson, George had found a safe harbour. She sat for him, and, according to Dora, a close friendship formed. The two referred to themselves as Coates and Trousers.25
Like the rest of their art-school family, they prided themselves on their freedom from conventionality in dress as a symbol of protest against the bourgeoisie who set store by these things—and perhaps against her real family. Dora’s father was an uncompromising disciplinarian; she had to fight for the right to a career. John Meeson, the proprietor and master of Hawthorn Grammar who had home-schooled his own children, liked to keep all his daughters’ activities close to the family home. The Meesons had little social life.26
By September of 1895, still in her first year at the gallery school, Dora’s future was looking bright. She won first prize in the Chipman Art Competition, an honour reported in papers nationally and judged by the National Gallery of New South Wales, for the best picture of Minerva, the Goddess of Wisdom. The award was open to all artists in Australasia, and twenty-one designs were submitted. George entered too, with a painting expressing, in Dora’s words, his big Latin ideas. Dora was more grounded; she painted her Minerva from a tall, handsome barmaid in a hired gown.27 Dora’s prize money of seventy-five guineas was not insubstantial, but the recognition of her talent was just as important.28 The Minerva Company, a Sydney firm of manufacturing chemists—makers of the Minerva Pill, the Minerva Tonic (the modern elixir of life…safe, speedy and effective) and Minerva Wine—reproduced Dora’s winning picture in black and white for its advertising materials.29
A month later, when the French rage for artistic posters had found its way to Melbourne, art students leapt at the chance to try their hand. The aboriginal with his boomerang, the laughing jackass, the emu and the gum tree, were all popular local motifs to adapt for advertising purposes but, noted TABLE TALK, the designs suggest eccentricity instead of originality. Miss Dora Meeson’s work, however, was noted as full of merit.30
At the end of year annual exhibition of students’ work, Dora’s nude was singled out by the ARGUS as conspicuously meritorious, while George Coates’ painting contained plenty of promise.31 A pattern began to emerge in the critics’ notices: Dora’s work almost inevitably received higher praise than George’s. Did it rile the serious young man when Dora received a long profile piece in the AUSTRALIAN TOWN AND COUNTRY JOURNAL two days after the exhibition opened, complete with biographical sketch of this clever young lady, a flattering portrait (Dora, usually noted for her particular melancholy expression, is almost smiling in the photo) and the headline A Successful Australian Painter?32
If George was put out, it didn’t affect their friendship. And a year later, when the Christmas show of 1896 included a travelling scholarship, Dora was very pleased when George won. Only five paintings had been accepted in the competition, Dora’s among them. TABLE TALK thought them all ghastly, with George’s faces homely to the verge of repulsiveness…realism without the spark of human feeling to make it appealing.33 (TABLE TALK judged Dora’s painting not without vitality but…clumsily done.) Dora considered that the correct decision had been made in awarding the scholarship. It was right he should have it, she reasoned, as the only other two likely winners were going home to England in any case.34 As it happened, one of those students was her.
John Meeson had decided to uproot his family and return to London. Dora, twenty-seven years old and at the start of a promising career, consented dutifully to follow. She and George agreed to meet on the other side of the world.
By May 1901, Dora Montefiore had been on the other side of the world for almost a decade. When she left Australia on her study tour, her two children were barely school age. Now Florence and Gilbert were teenagers, and knew London better than Sydney, the city of their birth. But Dora had not lost connection with the political awakening she had undergone when discovering she had no legal right to their guardianship. In fact, starting the Womanhood Suffrage League was but the beginning of her activism. And Dora had no ambivalence about where her allegiances lay. All women, as far as Dora was concerned, were outlanders—stateless—for without political rights they belonged to each other more than any putative homeland.
From Sydney, Dora had in 1892 sailed to Paris, where she would develop her lifelong passion for writing. In November her article ‘L’Inspiritrice’ was published in LE JOURNAL DES FEMMES, the organ of the French feminist movement. Fluent in several languages, Dora had no trouble expressing her support for an article that had been previously published in the journal, sur les questions brulantes de la cause feminine: on the burning issues of the women’s cause—one of which was the need to band together, particularly for the benefit of the most vulnerable in the community.
C’est pourquoi je voudrais fonder des confraternités laiques de femmes qui serviraient de refuges aux faibles parmi nous, a celles qui ne sont pas faites pour lutter dans le monde et qui se vendent souvent en mariage pour avour un chez eux.
That is why I would like to found women’s [lay] communities, which would serve as shelters for the weak among us, for those women unable to do battle in the world, and who often sell themselves into marriage in order to have someone at home.
The idea that marriage was a socially acceptable form of prostitution was common among the Victorian-era feminists. Dora’s experience of setting up the Womanhood Suffrage League had convinced her there was another way to keep body and soul together: associations of women, bound together not by charity, but by clarity of purpose and shared activism. She wanted to teach the women in these confraternités, particularly the young women, that it was good for a woman to work for the community and that her main purpose in such work should be to develop what is best in her rather than working to please, as women had been taught until now.35 No longer a young woman herself, Dora had begun to find her voice.
By 1893, she was back in England and ready to join my fellow-workers in the pioneer causes in whichwe [shall fight] shoulder to shoulder.36 Dora had no financial worries, with an income stream flowing from properties she still owned in Sydney, and soon established a base at Eldon Lodge in the Sussex village of Lindfield, about forty miles south of London. She sought out Millicent Garrett Fawcett, the leader of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS). A small woman with a huge capacity for work, Fawcett was four years Dora’s senior and, like Dora, the daughter of a prosperous middle-class family that educated its girls as effectively as it boys. (Millicent’s sister, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, would become the first female doctor in the United Kingdom.)
Unlike Dora, Mrs Fawcett (as she was always called) had been radicalised while still a teenager. She’d seen John Stuart Mill speaking—a fine intellectual speech in which he advocated for women’s suffrage—the year before the British Parliament passed the Second Reform Act of 1867. The first popular expansion of the franchise in England since 1832, the Reform Act liberalised, but did not abolish, the property qualification and resulted in the enfranchisement of male heads of households. But women were still excluded, a fact proved beyond doubt when almost four thousand Manchester women attempted to vote as householders, claiming that, by legislative precedent, the word ‘man’ in any Act included ‘woman’. This claim was defended in court by socialist barrister Richard Pankhurst. He lost the case, but interest in the cause of womanhood suffrage was greatly stimulated.
Then in 1869 Mill published his influential essay THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN, which he had developed with his wife, Harriet Taylor Mill, before her untimely death. The essay’s call for perfect equality, admitting no power of privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other, was a profound challenge to the sexual politics of the day. A year later, Richard Pankhurst drafted the first women’s suffrage bill. Borrowing Mill’s language and sentiment, he called it the Women’s Disabilities Removal Bill.
Unquestionably, Pankhurst’s wife Emmeline would later write, those pioneer men suffered in popularity for their feminist views.37 Yet they won the hearts of refractory young women. Emmeline Goulden was twenty-four years younger than Richard Pankhurst when they married in 1878. Millicent Garrett married J. S. Mill’s fellow radical MP, Henry Fawcett, fourteen years her senior, in 1867. When Henry died in 1884, the widow Fawcett, only thirty-eight years old, started the NUWSS. Its aim: to win the hearts and minds of our countrymen to the justice of our cause.38 Its platform: to win the suffrage on the same terms as men: that is, a limited franchise based on a property qualification. Accepting these terms, the NUWSS were half-loafers. In England, it was only a few fanatical whole-loafers who advocated adult suffrage, that which women in New Zealand and South Australia at the time enjoyed.
Dora Montefiore was a staunch whole-loafer, but the various local branches of the NUWSS represented just the sort of confraternités she’d had in mind in ‘L’Inspiritrice’. She went to work for Mrs Fawcett, though she had to admit she found it depressing work. Twelve months of toil for the annual Bill for the Enfranchisement of Some Women culminating in its introduction to parliament by a sympathetic Liberal MP—when, invariably, it would be talked out or laughed on by the majority in the House. For the rest of the year, the loyal suffrage worker bees would go begging for subscriptions, organise public meetings (which went regularly unreported by the Press) and campaign for the election of Liberal candidates or re-election of Liberal MPs, who then dropped the cause when elected.
Dora had never before felt driven to sex antagonism—she had been personally well treated by her father, her husband and men like her mentor Sir George Grey—but she began to tire of the fellows who relied on women to be their political helpmeets but did nothing of value to secure womanhood suffrage. Many of us felt rebellious, she wrote of the moment the desire to please began to fade, and realised that as long as we continued to help men into Parliament who did nothing to help us, we were simply wasting our time and our energies.39
In 1896, worn down by the seeming futility of the NUWSS work, Dora returned to writing. The English feminist periodical SHAFTS published her blistering article, ‘Why Women Need Woman Suffrage; and Why We Need It Now’ in one of its earliest editions. (The cover of SHAFTS, whose themes included vivisection, dress reform, women’s control of their sexuality, child care, and vegetarianism40 featured a young barefoot woman in a Grecian gown, bow and arrow braced, the words Wisdom, Justice, Truth spurting from the tip of the arrow.) Dora’s words belied her comfortable nursery upbringing and laid bare her current frustrations. England in the Belle Époque was being crushed under the weight of the numbing soul destroying bonds of …materialistic luxury, she wrote. Commercial materialism… commercial Imperialism [has] won the day. England needed an Ideal.
It is the woman’s role in life to keep alive and nourish the Ideal; for inspiration and spiritual life come to her in occult, subtle fashion through the pulsation of the young life within her own, which first teaches her the full lesson of her womanhood.
Just as the placenta feeds embryonic humanity, women’s superior moral qualities would feed a higher spiritual life. So motherhood would provide the basis for the revolutionary internationalism that Dora had espoused since leaving Australia: as long as her own motherhood makes her feel at one with motherhood all over the world, the soul of woman cannot be enslaved as her body is daily enslaved, cannot be prostituted as her body is daily prostituted.
It was her experience in Australia that had alerted Dora to what fresh young life had to instigate in the ravaged body of the old. She wrote of the colonies of England, who in the first flush of young inspired enthusiasm, are leading their Motherland on the upward path and employed the military metaphors that would become standard usage for the suffrage movement to describe England’s need to follow her daughters into the social and political field of battle.41
She wrote poetry, too: a volume entitled SINGINGS THROUGH THE DARKNESS contained two poems that harked backed to her years in Australia. ‘One People, One Destiny’, a sonnet about Federation demonstrating that she still had one eye on political affairs in Australia, and ‘Christmas Morning on the Blue Mountains’, written in Katoomba. The SYDNEY MORNING HERALD published a tepid review of the collection, noting the poems of local origin but complaining that while the tone is sympathetic and the subjects are those that now engross the attention of thoughtful men and women, it can hardly be said that the verses make a decided impression upon a reader. And the worst insult: it is philosophy and philanthropy in metre. The scribblings of a bored doctor’s wife. Or a rich businessman’s widow, as the case might be.
But Dora was hardly gripped by ennui. She was in fact developing some pragmatic solutions to the propaganda problems that plagued the NUWSS. She realised that Our work as suffragists was to get our claims placed before the tribunal of public opinion, because it was impossible to obtain fair publicity in the Press.42 Women everywhere knew the truth of that. In 1887, American pioneers Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony noted in their history of the suffrage movement that leaders of the movement were uniformly ridiculed, misrepresented and denounced in public and private by all classes of society.43
But a new strategy for attracting attention was starting to brew in Dora’s mind, a tactic that cut straight to the heart of democracy itself. In an inflammatory letter to the editor of THE WOMAN’S SIGNAL, Dora laid out her case for what she intended to do next:
I cannot but think that now, when every argument against granting the suffrage to women has been met and answered, and when only privileged injustice prevents thousands of Her Majesty’s taxpaying and qualified subjects from making their influence felt in the land, other measures…are required.
If the next suffrage bill was again talked out or shelved, we women who believe in the justice of our demands should form a league, binding ourselves to resist passively the payment of taxes until such taxation be followed by representation.
The last time the non-payment of taxes had been used as a political weapon in England was when the Quakers protested the payment of church tithes in the early 1800s. Dora knew what would happen: the bailiffs would be sent in. Non-taxpayers would have their goods and chattels distrained, confiscated—by force if necessary—and sold to cover the tax bill. She envisioned the spectacle of five or ten thousand women refusing to pay their taxes while all of England watched as the goods of quiet law-abiding citizens [were] allowed to be sold at public auction. This, she believed, may convince the most sceptical that the time had come to grant women the rights they so clearly wanted and justly deserved.44 In Sydney, Dora had espoused education. Now, comfortable in her middle age, she advocated direct action.
But, as the nineteenth century drew to a close, the time was not ripe for Dora to raise her army of intractable tax-resisters. There was a real war waging, a war that tore at Dora’s already burning distrust of materialism and its discontents. Empire, I hate the word, she wrote, I know the misery that imperialism has always caused.45 Whether she was reflecting on the effects of imperial expansion on the original inhabitants of Australia is unclear. But it’s certain that Dora kept a close eye on what was going on in South Africa. We strain our ears in vain through the murky darkness, she had written in SHAFTS in 1896 of the trouble in Transvaal. Now, with the outbreak of the Boer War on 11 November 1899, she had cause to pay close attention to the workings of empire.
The Boer War was nominally started over the grievances of British citizens who lived in the two Boer states, the Republic of Transvaal and the Orange Free State. These ‘foreigners’, or Uitlanders, had to pay tax but did not have a vote. The British government used the rationale of defending its subjects’ democratic rights to fight a war against the independent states, ultimately annexing the republics as part of its existing South African colonial holdings, the Cape Colony and the Colony of Natal.46
For Dora Montefiore, Britain’s justification for military intervention in South Africa raised questions. In October 1899, on the eve of the declaration of war, she penned a pamphlet published by the Union of Practical Suffragists within the Women’s Liberal Federation. The pamphlet was simply called WOMEN UITLANDERS, and her proposition was straightforward. England was still doing to half her population what she was accusing the Boers of doing in Transvaal. We women, she insisted, are, in fact, Uitlanders as far as our political rights are concerned.
Women were suffering because they had no share in the government of the day. Others were legislating on their behalf. Because they had no vote, women could not redress their grievances. It was exactly the same argument as was being made by the British government on behalf of their disenfranchised subjects in South Africa!
So, Dora asked, how shall pressure be brought to bear on the men of England?—men who were prepared to mount a military campaign in a foreign land to defend so-called British liberties. If nothing but war will meet the situation, then war must be declared by women at all Parliamentary elections. Women’s single weapon in this now-declared war on the British Parliament would be the seemingly benign, but in fact incendiary, Test Question, which women would put to all parliamentary candidates before lending their help on the hustings in election campaigns.
The question was: will you support votes for women in the parliament? This question shall in the end, Dora was convinced, prove as powerful as an appeal to arms. The answer would determine whether women would be friend or foe.
Not all suffragists agreed. On the outbreak of the Boer War, Mrs Fawcett suspended the activities of the NUWSS. Two fires cannot burn together, she reasoned, privileging imperial obligation over domestic disturbance. She also had faith that the Boer War would in fact provide a fillip for the women’s cause. It has been observed again and again, she wrote, that a war or any other event which stimulates national vitality, and the consciousness of the value of citizenship, is almost certain to be followed by increased vigour in the suffrage movement.47
From Dora’s perspective, however, the Boer War was nothing but a hypocritical imperial folly. It would ultimately cost thirty-two thousand lives, including those of twenty-six thousand South African civilians, many of them children, who died of disease and starvation in British concentration camps. She would probably have agreed with the editor of the Australian REVIEW OF REVIEWS who concluded that the revelation of waste, of unreadiness, of Titanic stupidity and mismanagement…will do much to destroy what may be called the Imperial prestige, if not to lessen the sense of pride and confidence in the Empire itself. 48
Dora Montefiore refused to pay her taxes for the duration of the war. Not only was she disgusted by the abuses of empire, but she would not fund a war in the making of which I had had no voice. It was a show of defiance against the leadership of Millicent Fawcett—and a mode of activism she would employ to astonishing effect in the new century.
By the time the Duchess of York pushed the button that signalled to the world that Australia’s national parliament had opened, Dora was getting ready to drop a few bombshells of her own.