This ball is at your feet. So began Vida Goldstein’s pitch to the voters of Korumburra.
It had been an arduous journey to get here, 120 kilometres from Melbourne; an inconvenient swamp made it a circuitous route up through the Strzelecki Ranges. But Vida wouldn’t spurn an invitation to tell the women of this small South Gippsland dairying and coal-mining community that it was time to pick up the political football and run headlong at the forthcoming 1903 federal election. They had never possessed such a marked home-ground advantage. The hoary Tories are now kow-towing to the women’s associations, as Vida put it, abandoning the sporting metaphors but warming to her subject. The electoral roll contained seven thousand more women than men. They—the voters—could do the maths.
The numbers cut straight to the heart of something Dora Montefiore had said to Rose Scott over a decade before, when starting the Womanhood Suffrage League: Women will never get laws past [sic] to help the cause of purity until they have the suffrage. A vote means power and those who have power also have to be conciliated.1
It was so true. Women in England had been lobbying to get a vice suppression bill for almost a century. Such a measure would make it a crime to seduce a woman with the promise of marriage, such as had led Maggie Heffernan to her ruin. But why would men ever concede their licence, except through pressure at the ballot box?
Now, in Australia, that pressure could be applied. Even the Citizens Reform League was plumping for the women’s vote—and if ever there was rank Conservative Body, Vida told Korumburra’s burghers, it was the Citizens Reform League. (This statement created uproarious amusement among those who had put aside their milking and mining duties to come see the lady candidate. The chairman of the meeting, who had invited Vida to speak, also happened to be the chairman of the local branch of the Citizens Reform League.)
But gaffes aside, the fact that her speech at Korumburra on 14 October 1903 was reported as far afield as the Tasmanian NORTH WESTERN ADVOCATE AND THE EMU BAY TIMES was music to Vida’s ears. Her campaign for the Senate was a novelty, yes, but it had tongues wagging. And now, on 23 November, the good people of Korumburra had invited her back to address the much larger crowd of electors who had piled into the Mechanics Institute Hall.
It’s possible her father was there—Major Jacob Goldstein managed the state-funded Labour Colony at Leongatha, just down the road—but Vida had not seen much of him in the past few years. Her mother, Isabella, had effectively kicked him out, preferring to live with daughters Vida, Aileen and Elsie (and Elsie’s husband, socialist publisher Henry Hyde Champion) in their spacious Bourke Street apartment. Vida and Jacob had not seen eye to eye on much recently. In the lead-up to Federation, Jacob publicly opposed women’s enfranchisement, speaking at meetings on behalf of anti-suffrage women who were happy to gather petitions but felt it inappropriate to take to the platform.2 He even made a few jokes at his high-profile daughter’s expense. It was a slap in the face to all the Goldstein women, for whom getting the vote was just as much a spiritual calling as the Christian Science faith to which they now adhered.
The Korumburra crowd had gathered despite Vida’s insistence on charging a silver coin for entry. She was not a moneyed woman, she explained, and she had firmly determined that she would not, as some candidates had done, get into debt. But even the people who simply came out of curiosity to see the terrible person who was to be nominated for the Senate, seemed inclined to think they’d got their money’s worth.
While she had her audience captive, Vida dealt with various rumours that had been circulated. No, she was not a believer in free love. Neither was she an advocate of easy divorce, though she knew this view was unpopular among some women. But no, she had not become an out-and-out conservative. Nor was she a disciple of Mr Tom Mann, the British socialist and trade union organiser. That too was a cowardly insinuation designed to injure her chances of election. And yes, women’s sphere was the home. But so was man’s. (Cheers and laughter) It was a sphere, too, that he had often neglected. She would be the first to admit that she might not make the ideal member, but I am perfectly certain that I could not do worse than some of the men you have sitting in Parliament. (Loud cheers). Voters would also come to realise, as the Americans quickly discovered, that Vida was one of the most home-loving and womanly of women.3
Now that was out of the way, she had something to say:
Government of the people by the people for the people, without respect to property, person or sex. That, I say, is what the Federal Parliament has made possible. Thus far we have not had democracy—only male democracy.
And finally, Vida asked something of the gentlemen who had come to see her today. She wanted them to cast their minds back, not to last week or last year, but to thousands and thousands of years ago. Yes, back to the garden of Eden. (Laughter). Remember how peace and love reigned supreme? Remember how happiness abounded, until woman tempted man, and he did eat the apple of discord? Now, bring your minds back to the present, coaxed Vida. I am a modern Eve. I offer you an apple—but an apple of a different kind—the apple of harmony—the idea of a woman going into Parliament.
Take and eat of it, she dared, and you will find you will develop a relish for more apples of the same kind. Vida looked out at the crowd. Loud laughter, perhaps prompted by apprehension as much as jest.4
Having risen to public prominence—a young, beautiful, intelligent single woman with guts and determination—Vida Goldstein quickly became a national symbol of the new dawn of women’s potential. Every woman, proclaimed Vida, unless she be a household drudge, an industrial slave, has time and opportunity to inform herself concerning great public questions…A woman must be a citizen to know how to train citizens.
The test of that citizenship was now upon them. At the beginning of winter 1903, the first election of the Federal Parliament after the passage of the Franchise Act was called. 16 December 1903 would be a red-letter day, Vida wrote, for this was when, for the first time in the world’s history, the women of a nation would take part in the making of a National Parliament.5 That these auspicious electors would be white women went without saying.
Vida had long argued that that a woman must not only cast her ballot, but also represent other women in the supreme cauldron of democracy—the parliament. She believed that the interests of the home should be directly represented as are the manufacturing, farming, mining and labouring interests.6 All legislation in some way affected women and children, she contended, so there should be a woman in the legislature to consider their interests. Not because men were innately evil or incompetent but because owing to the different sex, men cannot understand such questions from the woman’s point of view, and injustices creep in in spite of their most earnest efforts to forestall them.
Moreover, the all-male parliament meant women wasted countless hours in the often Herculean task of educating MPs to recognise those blind injustices. Lord knows, Vida had devoted enough of her own time to sitting in the gallery studying the passage of legislation and barging in and out of MPs’ offices to lobby them on some matter of male bias or prejudice that would ultimately affect women and children. We had to tramp around getting petitions signed, she recalled, we had to write to the press. It was always hateful work.
The solution was simple: Let a woman of great mental power combined with executive ability enter Parliament and she will make surrounding nations stare, wrote Vida in a widely circulated essay.7 Not all women would be suited to the task, she conceded, but neither were all men. (Even some of the men who had been duly elected!) But once you get the right woman, or women, there, she reasoned, the people will ask themselves ‘why on earth didn’t we try this experiment before?’ And by the spring of 1903, Vida reckoned this woman—the right woman—was her.
Earlier that year, Vida had started the Women’s Federal Political Association to educate women in the exercise of their new citizenship rights. One of the standard arguments against women’s suffrage was that women would just vote the way the male members of their family instructed them. Vida didn’t believe this for a minute, but she also knew that not all women were versed in politics, or the political process. They would need to be taught, just as they were taught to darn or cook or ride a bicycle. With assistance to understand the issues and assess the candidates, the women of Australia are unlikely to cast an unthinking vote…they will do their thinking for themselves.8
If they cast a ballot at all. Voting was at this stage voluntary, so part of the task for Vida and the WFPA was to convince women of the importance of enrolling.9 It was a great responsibility to have the vote, argued Vida, noting that American women looked with envious eyes upon their Australian sisters as in this respect ‘the salt of the earth’.10 Would Australian women give a good account of themselves, when the eyes of the world would be upon them, as Vida urged them to do?11
Vida’s view of the upcoming election as a focus of world politics was not an exaggeration. As it will be the first time in history that a Parliament will be returned on a basis of adult suffrage, wrote academic C. J. Martin in a British journal, it is perhaps not too much to say that the eyes of the civilised world will be upon [Australia].12 Martin reported that the campaign cries were Educate! and Organise!…teaching and learning, learning and teaching, day by day.
Education was the key, and though she hoped women would support her candidacy, Vida was sincere when she said I would sooner see women educated in views diametrically opposed to mine than not educated at all. She vowed to lend a hand in the process of schooling the electorate. The WFPA would canvass federal candidates on their views regarding issues of importance to female voters—including equal pay, age of consent legislation, pensions, maternal and child welfare, improved industrial conditions for the thirty per cent of women who earned their own living, child labour, sweated labour, restrictions on gambling, drinking and vice—and publish findings in Vida’s journal, WOMAN’S SPHERE.
It would gather evidence from New Zealand and South Australia that would demonstrate the influence of female voters on public policy and social relations in the five-odd years that women in those colonies had been going to the polls. There was plenty of supporting data. In New Zealand, pubs were now closed on election day. Women were treated with more respect and not as a mere afternoon tea machine.13 New Zealand’s labour laws were now, according to its premier, Richard Seddon, the most advanced in the world. In South Australia, testified Sir John Cockburn, all questions of social, sanitary, industrial and domestic legislation now receive much more careful and earnest attention.14 The WFPA would also use the occasion of the federal election to draw attention to the fact that Victorian women like Vida, while now national voters, were still disenfranchised at the state level.
The WFPA was politically astute but party neutral. In fact, it was non-party, believing that party politics and the machine ticket leads to disastrous consequences.15 Vida owned that labour should represent labour, as women should represent women, but she was hostile to the log-rollers, feeble candidates who had been trundled into parliament purely because they were on a party’s ticket. Such men could often be found intoxicated in parliament, men of doubtful character, men whose social life is a scandal.
One of the chief aims of the female franchise was to purify politics. Vida adopted a light-hearted way to describe the need for women’s direct parliamentary representation: man seems to be constitutionally unable to keep things tidy. Playing to the four-fifths of the crowd at her election rally meetings who were female, Vida joked that it had always been woman’s lot to tidy up after men—He leaves the bathroom in a state of flood, his dressing-room a howling wilderness of masculine paraphernalia, his office a chaos of ink and papers—and this disorderly boor was equally untidy in the nation. No wonder the national household was in such a terrible state of muddle!16
Such gendered metaphors and gendered stereotypes were not challenged by women’s rights advocates. It was a later generation of feminists whose demand was to be liberated from the role of ‘angel of the hearth’ or spiritual redeemer—God’s police. The feminists of the early twentieth century proudly accepted their natural function as civilisers of the civilisers. They simply wanted the political power to make the white man’s burden woman’s burden too.
Women cherished their feminine virtues and saw themselves as morally and spiritually superior to men. As Jessie Ackermann put it, men in power had selfish aims and a greed for gain. The advent of women into national life, she argued, would mean clean politics. As mothers taught their children to share and play nicely, so women would take a principled approach to national housekeeping.17 Their votes and their parliamentary presence would clean up individual men’s acts, and clean up the nation too.
Vida may have considered that female voters would be astute judges of character, sniffing out the stench of avarice, sloth and vainglory, but she was neither a political prude nor a gender separatist. We are not advocating a political nunnery for women, Vida clarified. The WFPA welcomed, as member or supporter, any man who wanted to assist in women’s campaigns for justice, equality and social reform.18 Indeed prominent male public figures, including Alfred Deakin and Charles Kingston, appeared on the stage beside her at meetings.19 Vida was ever at pains to give honour where honour is due: To the men of Australian, who have grown so far in democratic sentiment that they can tolerate the idea of living with political equals.20
Despite her conflicted relationship with her own father and her vow to remain unmarried, sex antagonism was never a motivation for Vida’s activism.
When, in August 1903, the WFPA nominated Vida as ‘the woman’s candidate’, not all greeted the novel occasion with pleasure or sympathy—not even all women.21 The Victorian Executive of the WCTU publicly declared its opposition to female candidates (contradicting their organisation’s own motto: ‘No sex in citizenship’). They felt it was too early in the franchise experiment to countenance such an extreme move, one that would ultimately prejudice the interest of the women’s cause.
Nonsense, retorted the Australasian WCTU in its journal OUR FEDERATION. Women have never won any improvement in the condition of their sex by sitting down to wait.22
The GIPPSLAND TIMES greeted Vida’s candidacy as a welcome sign of the times. It praised the WFPA’s prudence: a better choice could hardly be made. Miss Vida Goldstein has a remarkably clear insight into politics, and will soon outshine our second and third rate male politicians.23
But if Vida herself was seen by some as an optimal pick, others disparaged the whole notion of ‘Petticoats in Parliament’. Hon. Members will have to debate, so to speak, in kid gloves when a lady is an actor in the fray, tutted journalist and clergyman Dr William Fitchett, while a lady will probably have a quickness of wit and an incisiveness of speech which male politicians will find disconcerting.24 Which was it then? That grown men would be forced to behave as if there were children in the House? Or that grown women would beat them at their own game? The reasoning was unclear. The anxiety was palpable.
Vida opened her hair-raising campaign in the Western District town of Portland, the place of her birth. If she expected a hometown welcome, she was disappointed, at least as far as the conservative ARGUS newspaper would have had readers believe. The meeting was crowded, noted the ARGUS, but the audience scarcely seemed to take her seriously.25 Still, she laid out her platform briskly, as she would in dozens of town halls and mechanics institutes around the state over the following three months. She stood for the principles of democracy; so far in Australia it had been government for the people by the men. On the tariff issue, although rather inclined to call herself a fiscal atheist, she was a protectionist. In this regard, she aligned with leading Liberals like Alfred Deakin. But the ‘Fiscal Question’ was not a very vital one from her standpoint, as the social evils which she primarily stood to eradicate could be found in free trade England as well as in protectionist Germany. She was in favour of compulsory arbitration and conciliation, a position more consistent with Labor policy. She was opposed to the federal capital being built any time soon. We [are] only four millions of people, she reasoned, and why spend millions on a capital in the bush. She approved of the Commonwealth taking over the state railways, but wanted to hold off the building of the transcontinental railway—a wild-cat scheme—for the time being. (Like the capital, it would cost too much money to service too few people.) She wanted to see the nation develop a proper system of water conservation, as well as a ‘squatter tax’ on unimproved land value and better mining laws, which are no credit to masculine government. She was not averse to the federal government taking over state debts. She favoured an Australian navy.26
On the key social and political issue of White Australia, Vida heartily approved of the Immigration Restriction Act. She made it clear that she believed in the principle at the root of this legislation—in her interpretation, that Australia should be protected against the cheap labour of other countries—but feared that the operation of the law had resulted in palpable absurdities and injustices to others of different blood from ourselves.27 Ultimately, she believed, it would be the principle of equal pay for equal work that would provide the best protection for the Australian economy and labour force, not the principle of racial exclusion. Her beef was chiefly with capital, not colour.28 She was against alien pauper labour, but would consider some skilled migration. She also deemed it a hardship to insist on the deportation of some of the imported kanakas [who] were very much civilised.
But, like most suffragists (and progressives), she still held that unrestricted immigration was unwelcome, due to its dangers to health and morality. This view, she confided, had been formulated during her trip to America, when she saw the thousands of foreigners that were landed there and whose children were foisted on to the state.29 Central to immigration restriction was an assertion of Australia as a self-governing dominion, able to make its own choices and set its own standards. (A concept that dovetailed with Vida’s orthodox feminist argument for sexual sovereignty: that woman wanted herself to herself.30)
As a patriotic Australian native, Vida was in synch with the almost universal acceptance of the theory and policy of a white Australia. Just as white women had been complicit in the process of colonialism, so white women abetted the process of creating and perpetuating a racialised nation.31
At the end of her Portland address—as at Prahran, Fitzroy, Horsham, Benalla, Hamilton, Stawell, Bendigo, Ballarat, Korumburra and wherever she went—Vida addressed the various criticisms put forth by the newspapers of women’s suffrage in general and her candidature for parliament in particular. She answered questions from the audience with patience, grace and humour, her sparkling dark eyes…very much on the alert.32 She assured them that, should they favour her with one of their four votes for the Senate, the world would not come to an end.33
And through it all, as the BENALLA STANDARD noted, she managed the crucial balancing act of getting off a slap at the other side without in the least descending from the pedestal she as a lady stands on.34 Ever the womanly woman, even in open battle.