By late 1905, the beleaguered Nellie Martel had been joined in England by another Australian renegade. This one, however, was not fleeing ignominy. Quite the opposite: Muriel Matters was at the top of her game.
Where the Adelaide press poured scorn on Nellie, despite her brother’s status as a South Australian golden boy who had risen through the local political ranks to become a federal senator, Muriel was universally adored. On the eve of her departure for Europe on 22 July 1905, the NORTHAM ADVERTISER sang the praises of the gifted dramatic artiste.1 (The best the ADELAIDE CRITIC could do for Nellie was refer to her as someone who, though she speaks well, provokes opposition which often takes a personal turn.2) Two states wanted to claim Muriel: South Australia, where she was born and raised, and Western Australia, where Muriel’s mother had moved, taking eight of her children, in 1903 after separating from John Matters.
The estrangement was a gift of sorts for twenty-six-year-old Muriel, whose relationship with her overbearing, rage-filled father was strained. She had pursued her acting career against his wishes.3 The marital break gave her the opportunity to stay in Adelaide, alone, and nurture not only her flourishing business as an elocution teacher but also a budding romance with Bryceson Treharne, a fellow music student from her days at the Elder Conservatorium. Treharne was a difficult man and a divisive figure, whom the musical fraternity in Adelaide initially embraced but soon shunned when he proved himself to be a snob and a prat. Though she had always been a democrat, Muriel might have forgiven Treharne’s elitist views about music. But she simply couldn’t abide his reactionary stance on one of her core beliefs: women’s equality. Treharne considered women inferior in most regards, including their musical abilities, and alarm bells went off for the little woman with big dreams. She was mindful of her favourite literary anti-hero, Ibsen’s Nora, married to a bully and trapped in a domestic cage which she herself had locked. Muriel had first read A DOLL’S HOUSE at fourteen and it made a lasting impression on her. I shall never forget my joy in finding that the sentiments I had always vaguely but keenly felt had been put into words, forcible, majestic, dignified.4
Muriel decided to trail her family west.
But despite rave reviews and an ever-expanding repertoire, she was restless. Her favourite brother, Leonard, had gone to serve with the South Australian Imperial Bushmen Contingent in South Africa, sparking his lifelong taste for travel and adventure. Muriel too had a wanderlust. After just over a year treading the boards in Perth, she decided to throw caution to the wind and sail to London. There she could spread her wings and try her luck on her own terms. In Australia, her fortunes had been tied to the dictates or fancies of a series of men: her father, Robert Brough, George Rignold, Treharne. Why not ride the wave of expectation that the New Woman, and the ‘Australian girl’ in particular, could move mountains?
By 1905, when Muriel was ready to take flight, the Australian girl represented modernity and independence, qualities aligned with the new nation.5 Australian girls enjoyed a cultural free pass not yet accorded European women, signifying and embodying a young democracy, unburdened and unbound by old world traditions. If Stella Miles Franklin could write about Sybylla’s brilliant career, Muriel could live it:6 life mimicking art mimicking life. Making the nation had been a deliberate act of political production that intimately involved women. Making an Australian national identity was just as active a process, and women were similarly conscious of their role as producers of a character type. Muriel was tired of playing the deuteragonist, albeit a feisty one. It was time to be the heroine of her own story.
Muriel arrived in London in October 1905, just five months after Nellie had led the longstanding, but somnolent, English suffrage movement into its first public demonstration. She was met at the docks by an old pal from Australia, baritone Frank Robertson. Like Robertson, she soon discovered that what passed for a big fish in Adelaide or Perth was but tasty krill in London. There was a whole school of failed Australian actors living together in cold and cramped boarding houses in London’s outer suburbs.
Fortunately for Muriel, she didn’t have to join them. She had arrived with letters of introduction from British actors whom she’d met touring in Australia, including a push on to George Bernard Shaw. She even had lodgings with one such couple in their charming flat in Russell Square, at the heart of the metropolitan action.7
What was the key to Muriel’s good fortune? Her winning personality? Her niche talent as an elocutionist? Or sheer good luck?8 Muriel had been advised that even with her many gifts, it might pay to disguise her identity as an Australian if she wished to be successful. The Australian must not expect any of the sentiment which he himself feels for England to be felt by the Englishman for Australia, warned a journalist friend from Perth. It was not that the English disliked their colonial cousins, but that the Australian performer could not expect to go such a long distance and secure a preference [when]…we have hundreds of our own people.9
Muriel needn’t have worried. Within a month of her arrival—and without having to modify the lazy vowels that speak of kyke for cake—she had a stage engagement in the West End and press plaudits began to roll in.10 She’d signed up with a theatrical agent and was receiving a variety of tempting offers, including a tour of the Netherlands. For ready cash, she appeared at recitals and ‘at homes’, gave lectures on literary topics and tutored Shakespearean actors on the finer points of enunciation and projection. She was even indulging in journalist work, interviewing Prince Kropotkin, the exiled Russian socialist, and other interesting personalities.11 Muriel was on her way. Not yet Melba, but not squashed into a miserable sardine can with a sorry lot of other Australian hopefuls either.
By the new year, Muriel was appearing on the society pages in two hemispheres. She’d lined up an engagement at the Royal Court Theatre through a management company, which produces chiefly plays by Ibsen and Bernard Shaw. With such a future, predicted the ADELAIDE CRITIC on 24 January 1906, it is not surprising that Miss Matters has no present intention of returning to Australia.12
Middling success—neither supernova nor space debris—glittered brightly enough on the outside. But it was not long before Muriel realised that the core of the metropole was red hot, molten bullshit. She described the problem in more discreet terms: an antagonistic social environment. Everything in England conspired to drag one down: the cold, damp mist and fog of November; the extremes of wealth and bitter black poverty; the rows of squalid awful lodging houses; and the endless beggars that tugged at one’s heart strings on every street corner. All who have eyes that see and hearts that feel cannot but be affected, wrote Muriel. At the heart of the rot was hoary old English conservatism, especially easy to perceive for one coming from a younger country, where the tides of life run high and pulses beat more strenuously. Where Australians were risk-takers, prepared to gamble on a brighter future, the English lacked the capacity for optimism.
Into the very bones and marrow of this sea-girt people has entered that insularity which although the cause of so much that is admirable, breeds likewise the sincere belief that what is, must continue ever to be.13
As an onlooker to the pain and suffering of others, Muriel felt her democratic temper arc. But it did not flare and force her to become a combatant until she witnessed first-hand the exploitation and degradation of other actresses working in London’s theatres, where theatre agents were unregistered and therefore had licence to operate on the dark side of decency street. Many such agents, she quickly realised, were decoying young English girls to Europe.14 Once marooned in these foreign ports and cities, the aspiring actresses soon became ‘actresses’, their bodies, souls and reputations in tatters.
Around the time Muriel realised the fate that could befall girls with less luck, charm or skill than her, a fateful and suitably dramatic encounter changed her life. Performing for Prince Kropotkin one night, Muriel looked into the revolutionary’s deep, searching eyes and saw her future. To what end? To what end? she saw Kropotkin silently implore her. A personal career. A name in the world of art! Suddenly, in this moment of dramatic transference, it was not enough to entertain an audience. She must use her talents to move them, to mobilise them.
As Vida Goldstein had consciously eschewed marriage and a family to work for the betterment of all women and children, so Muriel realised that individual success was nothing compared to serving an ideal.15 The veil had been torn from her star-struck eyes by the penetrating gaze of a mysterious Russian prince. I had to cross the line to discover myself as an active agitator in this movement, she would later reflect.
Before too long, she had organised a little circle of women she called the League of Light, a support network for young women in the theatre world who were being abused. Ever since I have started to think, confided Muriel, I have felt that it is terrible, so many women must sell themselves to live; that something must be done to enable a woman to possess her own body…so that she may not have to barter one in the marriage market and lose the other in the streets of cities. The league’s symbol was a lighted beacon, its MO simple.
The object of the league was to go quietly among the girls—chiefly girls of the stage and studios—and let them know where friends were to be had if they wanted them. We wanted to try and prevent immorality being forced on women and girls through the exigencies of their having to earn a living.16
Whether Muriel’s own safety or dignity was ever compromised by an unscrupulous agent is impossible to know. How often had she been seduced, groped, mistreated? How many times had she looked the other way, in order to guarantee her own place in the company, while a fellow actress was abused? How many times had silence been her surety? The record gives no answers to these intimate questions. What is evident is Muriel’s immediate sense of commitment and responsibility once she determined that the purpose of her art would no longer be personal achievement but social reform.
Believing from the start that the present social and industrial structure was inimical to the well-being and development of the masses of this people, it was but natural that within a short time of my arrival I should be taking part in the women’s agitation for political freedom.17
Through the league, Muriel attempted to lobby the home secretary to register theatrical agents for the protection of women in the theatre industry. But when Mr Gladstone said that nothing could be done in the matter, Muriel realised she was going about the business of reform all wrong: putting the cart before the horse. Without the vote—something she took for granted, having already voted in a state and a federal election—Muriel realised that there was nothing she could do for the women of the West End. Only the vote could remove stumbling blocks which lie across the path of women. Only the vote could grant women the opportunities denied them to-day by their economic dependence on men.18
Within weeks of Muriel Matters’ arrival in London, her world had turned inside out. She was no less ambitious, but her aspirations had changed. Muriel had needed to travel to the other side of the world to realise just how lucky she had been at home. She would not rest until she had helped British women win what Mary Lee and Catherine Helen Spence—her feminist foremothers—had helped win for her. The ticket to her freedom. The vote.
The fire now burning in Muriel Matters’ belly was not the only political hot spot in London in the autumn of 1905. Until that fateful year, the women’s suffrage campaign was like a beetle on its back, according to prominent suffragist Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence. Every avenue for reaching public opinion had appeared to be closed: the press was hostile and impenetrable, the parliament obdurate and obstructionist. But the unprecedented events of 12 May suggested a new way forward: a younger generation of women now looked to political and social ideas that were alive. It was the beginning of a great movement, wrote Pethick-Lawrence, the uprising of British women.19
From her new home in Hammersmith, Dora Montefiore watched the spot fires igniting around her. Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy stayed with her whenever she was in London, and together the polyglot widow and the little white-haired warrior kept each other informed of events. Dora learned from Mrs Elmy that the WSPU had flared up like a torch in Manchester, under the charismatic leadership of Emmeline Pankhurst and the clear and logical mind of her daughter Christabel, who had a gift for practical politics.
On 13 October, Christabel and another young activist, Annie Kenney, went to a Liberal Party meeting held by Winston Churchill and Sir Edward Grey in the Free Trade Hall in Manchester. It was customary for members of the public who had obtained a ticket to the meeting to send questions up to the stage for the candidates to address. Emboldened by the new spirit of defiance slowly catching light, Annie Kenney put forward a novel query: If you are elected, will you do your best to make Woman Suffrage a Government Measure?
It was a valid line of questioning. The Liberal Party was hoping for an historic victory at the January 1906 election and had pledged to uphold people’s rights against the powers of a privileged aristocracy.20 Indeed, its election motto was trust the people. Many Liberal members were privately committed to women’s enfranchisement. Would they make it a party platform? An election issue?
Neither Churchill nor Grey answered. Instead, Christabel and Annie Kenney were forcibly ejected from the meeting—but they were not prepared to go quietly. They physically resisted their removal and were charged by police with disorderly behaviour and causing an obstruction. In court the next day, faced with a fine, Christabel saw the opportunity to score a publicity coup, just as Nellie Martel had attracted press attention when defiantly marching the contingent of women at the House of Commons to the Broad Sanctuary instead of dispersing when moved on by police. Christabel and Kenney refused to pay the fine, thus incurring short prison sentences: a week and three days respectively.
The stunt had the desired effect. The press was instinctively drawn to the extraordinary incident where two primly dressed young women caused an uproarious scene by their attempted advocacy of the cause of women’s suffrage. Insisting their question be addressed, the women both mounted a seat in the body of the hall and yelled and shrieked to the utmost of their powers, reported the MANCHESTER GUARDIAN. When removed from the hall, Miss Pankhurst spat in the faces of Superintendent Watson and Inspector Mather, and also struck the latter on the mouth. Asked to explain her unladylike behaviour in front of the police magistrate, Christabel said I am only sorry that one of them was not Sir Edward Grey. Christabel assured the magistrate she had nothing against the police. Her action was meant as a protest against the present position of women, she said, who, as they had no votes, could not help creating disturbance. While the magistrates were absent considering their decision the defendants, who were seated in the body of the court, fixed a small banner bearing the words ‘Votes for women’ on the rails of the dock.21
From the press point of view, it was gold. Ladies of education acting like women from the slums, as the magistrate said himself. The coverage went viral, reported throughout England.
The WSPU took the bit between their teeth. Another feisty young suffragist, Teresa Billington, wrote a letter to the MANCHESTER GUARDIAN revealing that Pankhurst and Kenney had waited quietly for over an hour to get their answer. When, towards the close of the meeting, they rose to ask the question again, they were howled down by the liberty-loving Liberals, the champions of free speech. They were then brutally removed by four or five burly men…Passive resisters, temperance advocates, and Liberal officials shared in the glorious work of dragging two slight women from their seats and flinging them from the hall.
Not one of the fine Edwardian gentlemen rose to stop the brutality. Rather the crowd of Liberal men cheered the sight of this indignity. The greatest consolation in the whole sorry affair, wrote Billington, was that the Liberal position regarding the rightful demands of women had been publicly exposed and, in the process, the cause of the emancipation of women has received an impetus which is immeasurable from the action of the two brave women whom we are proud to call our sisters.22
Like moths to a flame, the public meeting to welcome Kenney and Pankhurst’s release from prison attracted not only the press, eager to follow this beguiling he said/she said story, but also a host of new suffrage recruits. From that day forth, announced Emmeline Pankhurst from her base in Manchester, there should be no more peace until the women’s question was answered.23
This was the news that Mrs Elmy passed to Dora Montefiore. For her part, Dora kept her northern friend au courant with what was going on in London. She reported that the WSPU was marshalling its forces for a metropolitan branch under the leadership of a group of women, myself included, who undertook to attend political meetings and question speakers about their intentions towards the enfranchisement of women. The tactics of their northern sisters were duly noted: if necessary, holding up proceedings until an answer was obtained.24 In Australia, Dora had faced mockery but little active resistance when she and other members of the WFL requested a deputation upon MPs, and even the premier himself. But in England, they could not even get a foot in the hallowed doors of Westminster, such was the stubborn refusal to abide women’s suffrage advocates.
This original band of women now mustering in London included Nellie Martel—the woman voter from Australia25—who, having inaugurated the militant movement, as one press report noted, had a leadership role to play. They made it their mission to attend Liberal rallies and put the question, over and again, though they never received an answer. Ex officio, Liberal members would pledge their personal support, but in public they refused to speak on behalf of the party. The duplicity was galling.
As a single-issue organisation, the WSPU made its position transparent: the vote, and only the vote, would end its campaign. The cross on the ballot paper is a symbolic act of citizenship, explained new recruit, Cambridge-educated barrister Frederick Pethick-Lawrence, as the band on a finger is the symbol chosen by law for marriage.26 Just as a lover could only legitimately exercise his conjugal rights if he put a ring on it, so the voter is exercising his sovereign rights as one of the rulers of the country.
For a rising generation of New Women, it was becoming clear which symbol of domination she most aspired to own. Though the leaders of the movement were older—married women and widows like Emmeline Pankhurst, Dora, Nellie and Mrs Fawcett, born in the 1850s—the new recruits were Christabel’s contemporaries, girls born in the 1870s and ’80s. The experience and vision of the mothers was complemented by the energy and ambition of their daughters.
After Annie Kenney’s release from prison in Manchester, she joined the London squad, only to be just as violently treated when she again put the question to aspiring Liberal leader Herbert Asquith at a meeting at Queen’s Hall. Dora had obtained tickets for Annie in the orchestra, and for herself in the stalls. The crowd had been in excellent humour with itself, reported Dora, for it smelt victory and knew that the spoils of office were within the grasp of Liberalism. But the merriment turned sour when there was a prolonged scuffle in the orchestra punctuated with cried of ‘Votes for Women,’ and finally Annie Kenney was carried out.
With Annie removed, it was now left to Dora to implement the program of deliberate disruption.
It was then my turn and at the next opportunity that Mr. Asquith gave when rehearsing the Liberal programme, I rose to my feet and asked if the Liberals were returned to power, what they were going to do for the emancipation of women. A gasp of outraged surprise filled the stalls and people round me asked me to sit down, but I insisted: ‘Will the speaker tell the audience what the intention of the Government is about the enfranchisement of women?’
Dora never received an answer to her question, but neither was she manhandled away from the meeting. Perhaps it was her age—Dora was fifty-four compared to Annie Kenney’s twenty-six. Perhaps she chose to beat a more dignified retreat, realising that if the movement was going to have forward momentum it would require a constant, reliable presence in the engine room.
For all around the country now—in Wigan, Liverpool, Brighton—the word was catching on. Women turning up to Liberal meetings and popping the question. Women standing on chairs or sitting in balconies, draping bright banners embroidered with those three little words: Votes for Women. One fledgling suffragist wrote to Dora explaining the significance of her guidance:
please take good care of yourself, for the world cannot do without women like yourself, they are very scarce. I have been very much encouraged since knowing you and reading your pages in the NEW AGE. It has helped me you will never know how much, and I am not the only one.27
In one of those articles in the NEW AGE, entitled ‘Women Voters in Australia’, Dora had encouraged readers to join the WSPU and strengthen the hands of those who are uniting to demand the sweeping away of sex injustice.28 When Annie Kenney arrived in London in late 1905, it was Dora she first went to see. Kenney had lost her own mother earlier that year, an event that scattered the family. Personally untethered, she looked to Dora for guidance.
In another NEW AGE article commenting on the effect of the woman’s vote in the 1903 Australian federal election, Dora argued that women’s independence was shown and their right to do exactly as they pleased was freely claimed and acted upon.29 How alluring these words must have sounded to a generation of women who had been educated, then intellectually confined to the drawing room. Or to a legion of working women constrained by a different set of stifling conventions and stunted opportunities. Whether chained to the wheel of industry or to the pedestal of gentility, women longed to break free.
As Jessie Ackermann observed of the Australian experiment, within democratic citizenship is enfolded the hidden possibilities of a new social order.30 The immediate goal was the vote. But the ideal was to change the world.
Forty years of ladylike methods, according to Frederick Pethick-Lawrence, ended in 1905. The new wave of suffrage campaigners concluded that decades of patient argument and entreaty had failed: failed to sway public opinion, failed to attract the attention of the press and failed to achieve even a modicum of political reform. The adoption of militancy was the outward sign that [women] have at last abandoned this false and pernicious doctrine of submission. If they could not persuade, then they would coerce. They would disrupt, heckle, annoy, irritate, aggravate, demonstrate, provoke and incense.
If no other way is open to win their liberty, warned Fred Pethick-Lawrence, whose wife Emmeline was moving into the inner circle of the WSPU, even revolution will not be eschewed. He could see that for centuries men had treated women as an inferior and subject race. But the awakening of women was daily occurring. No one should be anything but convinced that this new breed of warrior woman would take by force what was rightfully hers as a proud, freeborn Briton and sentient human being.
A war was coming and, surprisingly, the arch nemesis was not the antediluvian Tories, whose number was surely up. The enemy was the Liberals, who preached enlightened autonomy for all but delivered trumped-up tyranny to women.31 Prejudice was one thing; hypocrisy was worse.
Our army is growing, growing daily, announced Nellie Martel of the swelling ranks of the WSPU. We are fighting for Liberty and Freedom.32
And there, in those last eye-opening months of 1905, watching for her cue, was Muriel Matters. Star struck by a new cast of characters—a real life company of players on what now seemed like the biggest stage she could imagine—Muriel began attending WSPU meetings. This troupe even had its own stage name now, courtesy of Charles Hands, a journalist for the popular DAILY MAIL newspaper: he had dubbed the WSPU women suffragettes. He meant the term to be offensive, a way to distinguish that modern absurdity, the suffragette from the conventional, non-politicised term for women and men the world over who campaigned for the vote, the suffragists.33 Soon all the papers were running with the word and rather than suck up another form of derision, the WSPU leadership chose to embrace the free publicity, proudly adopting the nomenclature. As Fred Pethick-Lawrence said, In a war of armies the immediate tactics of one side are determined by the tactics of the enemy. Call us names, and we’ll adopt them as our sticks and stones.
Muriel had witnessed women in Australia achieve their citizenship rights without such tit for tat. The leaders of the suffrage movement had worked hard for their political inheritance—Vida Goldstein was still moving heaven and earth to tip the Legislative Council over the line in Victoria, the only state yet to adopt adult suffrage—but they had not gone to prison, let alone gone to war.
Yet simply asking the British government to regulate the theatre industry had come to naught so, Muriel now realised, womanhood suffrage is not just an asking for the vote.
The movement is the awakening of women—their demand for light. In order that they may have light there must be social, economic, and political equality of the sexes; in order that there may be social, economic and political equality women must have the vote.
It had taken the ocular kiss of a prince to wake Muriel from her slumber. She knew it would take more than that to shift the torpid giant of British prejudice. The movement for womanhood suffrage is not ephemeral and local, she decided, but universal and gathering strength.
In this roiling forward motion, being Australian would not be a hindrance, as her actor friend had warned. Being Australian would be an asset. Being Australian would cast the spotlight on Muriel, as it had already shone on Nellie Martel. She just needed to find the right time to make her entrance.