On a frigid winter’s day in February 1902, Vida Goldstein stood outside the door to the Oval Office in Washington DC. Here, in the newly built West Wing of the White House, she took a moment to reflect on the journey that had brought her to this spot. Outside there was snow, the first she’d ever seen. Inside, the setting was just as novel. Vida was about to meet Theodore Roosevelt, President of the United States of America.
It had been a whirlwind couple of months for the acknowledged leader of the women’s suffrage movement in Australia. In December, four days shy of Christmas, Maggie Heffernan had finally been released from prison, a shell of the bush-born girl she’d been but a free woman nonetheless. Earlier that month, members of suffrage organisations from all states—as well as Trades Hall, representing Australia’s working women—had voted to appoint Vida as the sole representative of Australasia at the upcoming First Conference of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance in Washington. Objections had been raised in some quarters, but in the end Vida’s appointment was unanimously approved.1
Then there had been a big farewell dinner at the Austral Salon on 3 January, with all the usual trappings: speeches, music, recitations. Her colleagues agreed she’d made a feeling and suitable reply, which was just as well since it was their subscriptions that were paying for her passage to America. (Over £95 raised so far, with £30 coming directly from Miss Scott and the Womanhood Suffrage League; other contributions from Dr Maloney, Catherine Helen Spence and Lady Forrest, whose husband, the former premier of Western Australia, had so recently become a convert to the cause.)
Finally, there was the emotional leave-taking at the docks the following morning, with Vida’s sister Aileen agreeing to take over the editorship of the WOMAN’S SPHERE in her absence. A week in Sydney, staying with Miss Scott at her charming home in Woolloomooloo, then the long passage across the Pacific to San Francisco on the US steamship SIERRA. At least the press seemed encouraging of her international endeavours. The SYDNEY MAIL published a striking photograph and informed its readers that the young delegate…is a fluent speaker and her platform eloquence has brought her to the fore in the world of colonial women.2 TOCSIN called her Australia’s credentialed delegate.3
Vida was less qualified for the sea journey: as she closed in on her thirty-third birthday, this was the first time she had left Victoria. After three days of seasickness, however, she discovered that the rougher it was, the better I liked it.4 There were few passengers aboard, the SIERRA being a mail ship, so there was not much chance of getting up any wild excitement. An egg and spoon race with the crew provided the only entertainment. But the chance to be quite alone was not unwelcome after the torrent of activity in preparation for the Franchise Bill that went before the Federal Parliament in April. It was a pity not to be able to sit in the gallery to watch the debate—Vida never missed the opportunity to watch suffrage bills being debated in the Victorian Parliament, which they were, unsuccessfully, with alarming regularity—but she couldn’t pass up the opportunity to represent Australia and New Zealand internationally. The trip had already been so interesting. Though they couldn’t stop in at Honolulu, due to bubonic plague, she did go ashore at Pago Pago. I wouldn’t have missed it! Never had she seen anything like the native huts, curio shops and dances.
It was almost as intriguing to pass through Salt Lake City en route from San Francisco to the conference in Washington. Vida billeted with a local family and had to admit she was slightly disappointed that though I looked in every corner I did not see any more wives about. She’d expected dozens. It was in her nature to be curious: I am always on the qui vive for anything in the shape of an experience, and to be entertained by a polygamous family would have been an exciting experience. And though she considered herself easygoing, Vida was shocked to learn that the Americans are pre-eminently a nation of expectorators. Their habit of spitting on sidewalks and in public buildings was simply disgusting. Cuspidors were everywhere. I am a thorough going democrat, she joked, but I like a clean democracy. She also ascertained that Americans eat heartily, especially at breakfast: grapefruit, fish, cereal mush, waffles, hot cakes with maple syrup, iced water and coffee. She would ask politely for dry toast, but receive it hot buttered.
If Vida had to learn fast about her American hosts, so she discovered they had a thing or two to understand about her. Everyone thought I was travelling through America with my wedding cake, she laughed. The acquisitive Americans couldn’t understand that she was touring the country with only a small tin trunk the size of a hat box. She was also surprised to find that Americans knew so little about Australia or Australians.
We have such a keen sense of our own importance that it came as something of a shock to hear the curious opinions they expressed about us and our country. Many were astonished to find I was white, others that I spoke English so well. ‘Why, you speak it quite as well as an American’ which seemed quite the highest praise they could bestow.5
But everyone she’d met so far had been genial, lavishly hospitable and broad-minded, if ill-informed. The cross-country trip had been nothing but a delight.
And now here in Washington, summoned to the White House as something of a curiosity, Vida waited until she was bidden to enter. When the door opened, she saw the president sitting with his feet up on the desk. He rushed to greet her, grabbing her hand and pumping it up and down in a hearty grip. I am delighted to meet you, he shouted. You’re from Australia; I’m delighted to hear that.6
Teddy Roosevelt told Vida Goldstein what fine people he thought the Australians were and talked warmly of the Australian soldiers he’d served with in the Spanish-American War. But the president was just as excited about the fighting spirit of Australian women. Roosevelt supported the principle of votes for women (though amending the American constitution to enfranchise them was going to be a hell of a struggle) and this was why he’d been keen to meet Vida. With Australia poised to legislate for the federal franchise, she had more political rights than any woman he’d ever met. It was a great object lesson, this antipodean experiment in equality. I’ve got my eye on you down there in Australia, the president of the free world told the watchful woman from Victoria.
And with that enthusiastic embrace, Vida Goldstein became the first Australian to meet an American president at the White House. She would be back in the West Wing before long.
The First Conference of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance opened on 12 February 1902 at the Georgetown Presbyterian Church—a much grander building than anything served up by Vida’s own Presbyterian upbringing. In fact, the whole experience was overwhelming. The president of the American Suffrage Association, Carrie Chapman Catt, in her opening address before a packed audience of local suffragists as well as the delegates from Norway, Chile, Turkey, Russia, Canada, England and Sweden, warmly acknowledged the significance of Vida’s presence at the conference:
The little band of Americans who initiated the modern [suffrage] movement would never have predicted that… the island continent of Australia, then unexplored wilderness, would become a great democracy where self-government would be carried on with such enthusiasm, fervour and wisdom that they would give lessons in methods and principles to all the rest of the world… Australia, associated in our memory of childhood’s geography as the abode of strange beasts and barbarians, sends us a full, up-to-date representative woman, widely alive to all the refinements of life, and fully cognisant of all the rights of her sex.7
The world’s newest nation had delivered the most stunning example of the New Woman: single, independent and, like her country, self-governing, ‘civilised’ and white.
The conference was declared open. Its purpose was to work towards establishing a permanent international suffrage association, and to that end a committee was formed for the collection, exchange and dissemination of information concerning methods of suffrage work, and the general status of women in every country in the civilized world.8 The elder stateswoman Susan B. Anthony, eighty-two years old, was duly elected chairman and Vida, the youngest delegate, was elected secretary. Mrs Catt, the English delegate Mrs Fenwick Miller and Vida were chosen to draw up a constitution.
Vida’s elevation to these prominent positions did not simply reflect the distinction of her country of origin. It was also determined that Vida possesses all the qualities in a statesman.9 This dark, alert, slender girl from Australia, as she was described in a Boston journal, captivated all she met. Even the NEW YORK HERALD, then considered the greatest of American dailies, published an interview with Vida, with accompanying portrait. She was not only the (hot buttered) toast of Washington, but of the entire country. Her diary was soon filled with bookings for a national speaking tour and she extended her stay in America for an extra three months.
Vida had so impressed her American counterparts that they invited her to make a submission to the select committee of the US Senate dealing with woman suffrage. Five senators would be present as well as a who’s who of the US suffrage movement, including Susan B. Anthony, the Reverend Anna Shaw and Harriet Taylor Upton. At the hearing on 18 February, Anthony noted that this was the seventeenth Congress in thirty-three years to be addressed by American women in the hope of amending the constitution.
One after another, women brought forward the usual arguments: taxation without representation is tyranny; municipal housekeeping is simply housekeeping on a larger scale; even criminals, if they be men, may assume the prerogative of the franchise. Lashings of heavy-handed metaphors of motherhood and birth swamped the testimonies. A great reform never had spontaneous birth, but exists in embryo, often for years, waiting for the fullness of time when it shall be born, ventured Lucy Hobart Day. Share and share alike—the lesson our mothers taught us in infancy, tried Mrs Lucretia Blankenburg.
Finally, Susan B. Anthony got up to announce her star witness: Miss Vida Goldstein, of Australia, where women vote. Vida took the stand.
I am very proud to think that I have come here from a country where the women’s suffrage movement has made such rapid strides as it has in Australia…women to-day are struggling here for what we have had in Australia for years and years.
Warming to her subject, she pressed further. If women in South Australia, Western Australia and New Zealand were the world’s guinea pigs, they had not only survived the experiment, but:
proved all the statements and arguments against women’s suffrage to be utterly without foundation… The women have not raided the platforms; they have not neglected their homes; they have not gone away and left their babies.
Vida had collected testimonials by leading men in New Zealand—lawyers, clergy, educators and MPs—to attest to the positive effects of women’s suffrage in that country, where women had now had the vote for nigh on a decade. Their conclusion? It had raised the tone of political life. The only change, Vida insisted, was that they manage to get alterations in the laws that previously they had been asking for years.
And there was more. We now have a federated Australia, Vida lectured the (potentially geopolitically unwitting) senators, pointing out that it was none other than the female electors of South Australia and Western Australia who helped to frame our great Australian Commonwealth. Why, within a matter of months, the Federal Parliament would have to pass voting legislation on the widest franchise existing. And in case the good senators didn’t appreciate the full extent of that victory, Vida would spell it out for them: because of South Australia’s franchise, all Australian women will not only vote but have the right to sit in Parliament. Vida wished the senators to know, too, that this was the result of years of hard fighting—in case they also subscribed to the ‘one fine day it just happened’ school of political progress.
Like the seasoned platform orator that she was, Vida had built her case with rational precision. Now she mounted her final, heartfelt finale:
I want to say to you that if Australia, that land tucked away in that far corner of the world, can trust its women with a vote, why can not you American men do the same. You trust the Indian, you trust thousands and tens of thousands of ignorant, illiterate foreigners who arrive on your shores every year. I am proud to have the privilege of coming to-day to plead with you to trust your women. You will find your trust is not misplaced.
The American women in the audience were thrilled. In the past, Anna Shaw noted, all they’d had to back up their claim to the suffrage was theories. But with Vida’s testimony, we now have proof. 10 Reverend Shaw ordered that a transcript of the proceedings be made immediately and that copies be distributed as a matter of urgency. Ten thousand copies would do for starters.
After the conference in Washington wound up, Vida started off on the lecture circuit, addressing huge audiences on the topic of The Australian Woman in Politics and attracting press coverage wherever she went.11 The most celebrated Australian woman in America since Nellie Melba, Vida herself used Melba’s fame to dispute one of the favourite arguments of the Antis: that women would be degraded by voting. There was nothing degrading about the polling booth, countered Vida, nothing like so objectionable as elbowing all sorts and conditions of men in a scramble for tickets for the theatre, or a Melba concert, or the races.12
One of Vida’s themes was that campaigning for women’s suffrage was what she termed a Policy of Concentration. She saw the parliamentary vote as the right that covered all other rights, and decried the futility of working piecemeal for the emancipation of women, without the vote.13 Only the vote, Vida argued, would ensure the protection and prevention of degraded womanhood. Only the vote would unravel the vast web of legal, economic and social disadvantage that ensnared women and girls the world over. Furthermore, she told her rapt listeners, women should enter Parliament, something South Australian women alone in the world were entitled to do—but for which, by the time she returned to her native shores, she too would be eligible in the national legislature.14
I have always maintained that wherever there are women’s and children’s interests to be considered, she argued, women should be there to consider them.15 Such a simple premise; such a revolutionary idea.
All the world will be wondering, Vida knew, how the experiment answered—what exactly was the result of this bold recognition of the principle of democracy—government by the people—in the political affairs of a continent.16 She was fully aware of the leadership role she had been asked to play in presenting this prized object to the world. Woman suffrage is with us to stay, she told a crammed house during her address to the 34th American National Suffrage Convention in Washington in March, and that our success may hasten the day when you American women will stand before the world as political equals of your menfolk is the earnest desire of the countries which have sent me here to represent them at this great conference.17
Her authority was given a boost, when, on the eve of her New York speaking engagements, the Federal Parliament passed the Franchise Bill. The most significant political event of the century is the enfranchisement of 800,000 women of Federated Australia, reported the CINCINNATI COMMERCIAL TRIBUNE in an article that was syndicated throughout the United States.
This is the first time in the history of the world that a whole nation has enfranchised its women, and the object lesson will help the cause of human liberty throughout the earth. [This]…is the greatest victory ever won for woman and ensures the establishment of woman’s complete equality in the near future throughout the Southern Hemisphere.18
As a proud currency lass, Vida was chuffed to know these sentiments were being shared around the country, consumed at the breakfast tables of Americans along with their waffles and coffee: Australia being lauded as the world’s exemplar in human progress. These people are attacking and solving the complex governmental and social problems that have baffled the great nations of the earth, the COMMERCIAL TRIBUNE article went on. The triumph of human liberty echoes from Australian shores…Australia, the infant in the family of nations, leads the van, and is an object lesson to the world.
Throughout her topsy-turvy journey from the enfranchised South to the retrograde North, Vida kept a travel diary that doubled as a sort of autograph book. It was a peculiar nineteenth-century fashion, the autograph book, where people met along the journey would scrawl aphorisms, offer romantic platitudes and cite poems and Biblical verse. In her book, Vida collected the wellwishes of admirers like journalist Elizabeth Hauser, who scribbled:
To Australasia all the world gives ear
Youthful, audacious, unrestrained and free
No immemorial bonds of time’s decree
Shackle her progress nor excite her fear.19
Social reformer William Lloyd Garrison Jr wrote in a similar vein, harking back to earlier Australian novelties of democratic reform: Australia gave us safer ballots, wiser laws. Armed with the record of your land’s great deeds. Welcome light-bringer from the Southern Cross.20
Mary Garrett Hay joined in the chorus:
We are glad ‘Little Australia’ crossed the waters to see us, and now we will look for great things from across the sea. We love Australia more because we have known you. God speed the day when women are free in every way.21
Vida was not a silent witness to all this hero worship. She was growing into her role as an ambassador and representative, her confidence increasing daily. Photographic portraits reveal the nervous eyes of an accomplished but unworldly activist replaced with a steely glint. Vida was an inveterate note-taker as well as a speechmaker, scrawling aide-mémoires in her looping copperplate. After visiting Washington DC, her note to self reminded her to advise Alfred Deakin to think of the great American city when he was planning the new federal capital site on the bush acreage that would become Canberra.22
Vida also had her own homilies to add, spoken in the captivating, essentially womanly voice for which she was always noted.23 Never one to be patronised, she cheekily parroted Teddy Roosevelt’s own words to her:
The [Australian] Federal Franchise Bill is the greatest step in the direction of political equality that we have yet seen, and must be a splendid object lesson [her emphasis] to every civilised country in the world.24
This speech was reported by the WASHINGTON POST, with none of the caustic disdain that was generally reserved for women who knew not their rightful place.
The Australian press also tracked Vida’s progress. Victorians are very proud of Miss Goldstein, reported the QUEENSLANDER, she has captured the hearts of the Americans, not omitting that of President Roosevelt.25 The Sydney DAILY TELEGRAPH headed its report of her tour The Superb New Woman. In sharing details of her tour, it noted one of Vida’s most rousing speeches:
Citizens of no mean country, let us enter the new international alliance, and never rest until we have obtained for the women of other lands the same privileges which we enjoy in Australia.26
TABLE TALK enjoyed reporting the boast of one Victorian senator that their delegate must have been the most intellectual and best looking at the convention.27 To be fair, it also conveyed one of Vida’s descriptions of a prominent American she’d met, a self-made man, in love with his maker.28 Apart from noting that Vida was really a smart, pretty girl, the very opposite to what one unconsciously expects in a woman’s suffrage advocate and her attire (a skirt which clears the ground, and rather a tailor-built style, but for dress occasions always very prettily and stylishly gowned), the papers also regularly commented on her voice: fluent, mellifluous, womanly.29
But Vida was not so seduced by her diva’s reception that her own critical faculties were blunted. Her notes contained some disparaging remarks about her host country, which she would later share with Melbourne audiences in a series of lantern-slide lectures designed to recoup her expenses. (The subscriptions collected before her departure had not covered the unexpectedly extended stay.) Most of us regard America as the most democratic and advanced country politically in the world, she logged. Instead it’s as conservative as a country can well be. A democratic form of government does not necessarily mean that the people rule.30 Vida offered an analysis of the root cause of the hypocrisy: Their written and hidebound constitution [has] played directly into the hands of moneyed and unscrupulous politicians.31
The AGE published her American Notes, including the observation that among the many social problems that the United States is confronted with, the negro problem is by no means the least. She confided that the feeling of race hatred is so bitter that the Southerners will hesitate at nothing to accomplish their desire to disenfranchise the negro.32 If Vida perceived any parallels between the citizenship status of African Americans and Indigenous Australians, she kept those thoughts to herself.
On the eve of her return voyage, Vida penned and published an Open Letter to the Women of the United States thanking her Dear Friends for their lavish hospitality and unnumbered kindnesses, acknowledging that we women in the land of the Southern Cross are reaping what England and America has sown. For this reason, she vowed to help our English sisters and American cousins in their struggle for freedom.
Vida promised: Our chief care will be to so use our right of suffrage that the men of other nations will soon want to follow the example of the Australian champions of woman’s enfranchisement. And, with respect for the decades of effort of dear Miss Anthony and her noble warriors, Vida offered some advice. You want, and must have, she declared, the support of the rank and file of working people…Of this I am convinced. That is how we got it in Australia. The labour movement and the woman movement were both working for a better social order. She predicted that there would be a big smash-up between Capital and Labour in the United States. It would be the trusts and your political machines that would be the major roadblocks to suffrage. But take courage, Vida reassured her American readers, our own recent victory in Australia will help you, and the united forces of Labour and Women will enable you to surmount every obstacle.33
If Susan B. Anthony was offended by Vida’s audacity, she didn’t show it. Before Vida’s departure on 24 July, the venerable old woman made a gift of her momentous HISTORY OF WOMAN SUFFRAGE. On the dust jacket, Anthony inscribed these words of respect and affection for the trail-blazing Australia:
From her disenfranchised friend in the city of Rochester, county of Monroe, state of New York, Country of the United States of America—the Land of the Free—who has worked, to the best of her ability, for fifty years and more to get the right for women to vote—and will continue to battle for it to the end of her life.
With congratulations that the new world of Australia has given to her women all the rights of citizenship equally with men, and with the love and esteem of her friend.
Rejoicing that you have gained the national franchise…while we of the United States of America struggle on—no one can tell how long—to get the right to vote.34
Vida sailed home from San Francisco in the heat of July, with the hefty volumes in her little tin trunk and the weight of expectation on her slim shoulders.