The women of England, observed Nellie Martel from her place in the front ranks of the WSPU leadership, have looked on the younger colonies of the Empire, and have seen that where women have the vote social laws and their industrial position have greatly improved. They could no longer close their eyes to their own continued subjugation: Seeing this, a holy discontent seized the women of Great Britain.
And now there was even more to be envious of. In 1907 it was ten years since the federal convention in Adelaide that had ensured a distinctive, world-leading constitutional equity. It was five years since the Franchise Act had made Australian citizenship sexually inclusive, if racially and ethnically exclusive. And in this year, there was another international milestone, one that demonstrated just how far the English liberals lagged behind their Australian counterparts on social and industrial policy.
In 1907 the principle of a fair and reasonable wage—a living wage—for a married working man with children was established in Australia when the Harvester Judgment was handed down by Justice Henry Bournes Higgins in the Commonwealth Court of Conciliation and Arbitration.1 The judgment abandoned the traditional wage system, which depended on the laws of supply and demand, as Prime Minister Alfred Deakin noted. Instead a minimum wage was fixed by law, using a calculation based on the normal needs of the average employee, regarded as a human being living in a civilised community.2
To come to his standard of wage arbitration, Higgins had amassed exhaustive evidence through minute enquiries into the cost of living among the working classes, those likely to benefit most from the decision. His research was largely based on reports provided to Higgins by Vida Goldstein, who was a close friend of his sister, Ina.3
The Harvester Judgment, lauded for both its audacity and its humanity, was dubbed the ‘New Protection’—because, according to Deakin, no industry which could not afford to pay fair wages could afford to receive his government’s protectionist duties. Groundbreakingly, workers and their families would be as sheltered by fiscal policy as their entrepreneurial, acquisitive bosses. Probably no strike, Deakin boasted, could have accomplished this result and certainly not as quietly and inexpensively.
Two expressions entered the vernacular when it came to describing the particular breed of democracy being reared in the world’s newest nation: Working man’s paradise and social laboratory. Under the heat lamp of the southern sun, Australia had become a valuable testing shop for all sorts of political and social experiments, as one British newspaper put it.4 The theory of politicians, lobbyists and social scientists was that as much may be learned from Australian failures as from Australian successes. But to date, there hadn’t been much failure.
The extension of the franchise was the experiment most closely observed, particularly since the outbreak of hostilities on ‘the woman question’ in Britain in 1905. Various commentators—from American feminist journalist Jessie Ackermann through British radical authors such as Brougham Villiers to Australian statesmen like Sir John Cockburn—wrote accounts of the Australian experience of adult suffrage, accounts which campaigners eagerly mined for evidence—proof of concept—to use in their propaganda. Apart from the goldrush, wrote Jessie Ackermann, the first genuine interest taken in the country was due to the glaring innovations along the lines of democratic, not to say socialistic, legislation.5 Commentators pointed to a range of progressive and protective measures as concrete markers of the impact of female citizenship: along with wage fixation there were pure food laws; tighter controls on drugs, alcohol and gambling; welfare reform; and a marked decrease in infant mortality rates.
Nellie Martel, in her WSPU pamphlet, bragged particularly loudly about Australia’s introduction of old age pensions. In the country where men and women are political equals, she wrote, they share equally in the distribution of the interest of the wealth which they create. With old-age pensions, argued Nellie, go citizenship, liberty, honour. She described England’s Poor Law system with its network of poorhouses, by contrast, as a disgrace and a blot.6
And she was quick to draw the connections: Such conditions as these people are living under here, she lamented, can never happen in the country where women have the vote. As evidence, she cited the unprecedented legislative advances made in South Australia since women became voters there in 1893: Married Women’s Protection, Gaming Suppression, Indecent Advertisement Suppression, Police Pensions, Opium Amendment, Affiliation (Illegitimacy), Legitimation of Children, Married Women’s Property, Workmen’s Wages and Compensation, State Children’s Protection, Factories Amendment and Early Closing, as well as the Age of Consent legislation that had been her own personal mission.
Women had campaigned for all of these reforms, Nellie explained, for years without success prior to gaining the vote. Afterwards, miraculously, the bills were suddenly taken seriously and passed by MPs eager to please a volatile extended electorate.
The stats didn’t lie. Since the passage of legislation to protect illegitimate children in New South Wales, the deaths of ex-nuptial infants had decreased from 240 per thousand to less than 100 per thousand, as Nellie documented. The new bill also allowed an unwed mother to name the father of her child, forcing him by law to raise the funds to carry her through her trouble and provide for the child until she reached a certain age. Not only had infant deaths gone down, but fewer children were born out of wedlock. It was these changes that addressed precisely the kind of trouble poor Maggie Heffernan had found herself in less than a decade ago.
As Nellie Martel spruiked the Australian example from platforms across England, other suffragists began to incorporate her evidence into their own speeches and publications. British feminist journalist Alice Zimmern cited a raft of state and federal reforms (wages boards, children’s courts and welfare measures, new marriage and divorce laws—even, soon, equal pay within the Commonwealth public service) concluding that within a few years of their enfranchisement, Australian wives and mothers have received a measure of justice for which women in England are still asking in vain.7
Australia’s international reputation as a world leader in political, social and industrial reform was beyond doubt. (Zimmern worried, however, that credit might not be given where it was due. Perhaps it is not always realized, she wrote with a prophetic eye for historiography, how much of this social legislation was helped on by women.)
Just as significant as the example of what had happened in Australia was what had not. As William Pember Reeves put it, the antipodean experiment not only proves a good deal, but disproves a good deal more.8 The anti-suffragist argument leaned heavily on prophecies of doom. If women could vote there would be marital discord; an end to the family; a degraded race of manly women and womanly men. Indeed, there was an interesting tension brewing for the WSPU, which wanted to attract young and energetic women to its ranks with the excitement and adrenaline of staging a revolution. Yet most suffrage propagandists were at pains to demonstrate that in Australia there had, in fact, been no such cataclysmic upheaval. A leaflet published by the People’s Suffrage Federation assured readers that, if the antipodean experience was anything to go by, the Prophets of Revolution would be disappointed.
We can show the highest marriage rate of any European or English-speaking country except Hungary; higher birth rate except Italy, the Netherlands and two Australian states and the lowest infant mortality in the world.
The women’s vote does not cause any revolution, the pamphlet’s anonymous author (presumably a New Zealander) argued, though it steadily improves the condition of life for the women and children and thus ensures a strong, intelligent progressive people.9 Other commentators, like Jessie Ackermann, believed that the only thing the Australian example proved was that women could not possibly remedy the results of centuries of bad legislation. There would be no wondrous transformation of the social order. No breathtaking makeover of the political system with the hoary toad of male tyranny miraculously turning into the prince of British liberty.
Woman, regretted the pragmatic American, possesses no magic wand.10
Vida Goldstein might have regretted her lack of fairy godmother powers, but she made up for it with prodigious energy. Not content to rest on the laurels of her respectable Senate campaign, she now found every inch of her elegant body was itching to be up and doing, as Mary Lee had exhorted the women of South Australia all those years ago.
Vida had decided not to run for parliament at the 1906 federal election that saw the Australian Liberals retain government and Alfred Deakin become prime minister. She knew from experience what singular focus and commitment a campaign required. The travel, the long hours, the expense—she was still paying off her 1903 campaign by giving illustrated lectures about her American tour—and the constant, microscopic attention of a largely hostile press. Nor did she attend the International Woman Suffrage Alliance conference in Copenhagen, though the IWSA’s president, Carrie Chapman Catt, urged her to do so. My heart, lamented Catt, yearns for a genuine voting Australian woman!11
Not that Vida was daunted by the hard work, the vilification or the time-consuming travel to Europe; but she had a battle to fight closer to home. Victoria, the place where universal suffrage was first mooted and home to the first women’s suffrage societies in Australia, was the only state of the Commonwealth yet to enfranchise its women. A singularly reactionary upper house and a notoriously truculent premier, the corpulent and (true to his name) corrupt property developer Sir Thomas Bent, saw to that.
It was galling to Vida that she still had to argue the case for women’s suffrage when the rest of the country was enjoying its benefits. Victoria at one time led the way in every form of progressive legislation, she repeated endlessly, but was now content to go lazily on in the wake of the other states.12 Two votes would have swung it: only two more votes and the Legislative Council would pass the women’s suffrage bill that was presented almost annually. But, Vida lamented, Victoria did not possess a Premier with sufficient strength of character to compel its Upper House to bend to the popular will.13
The jovial premier smirked in rejoinder that Miss Goldstein was a very nice young lady possessed of great ability.14 Mired in the quagmire of Victorian politics, it would take all of the nearly forty-year-old Vida’s considerable gumption to maintain her dignity and fight Tommy Bent.
But Vida had always been international in her outlook, an Australian patriot with a strong sense of her nation’s evangelical mission. After Nellie’s appeal to her free sisters of Australia to come to the aid of the embattled women of the mother country, she hit on an idea that would help out the British movement while she was welded on to the Victorian political terrain. One of the questions that curious onlookers from England posed to the Australian crash test dummies was How do the men like the change?15 Vida decided that the best way to answer that query was to ask the men.
On 12 April 1907, Vida Goldstein wrote a letter to members of the Commonwealth and state parliaments of Australia in her capacity as president of the Women’s Political Association. Dear Sir, her letter began,
We Australian women who have had our right to political liberty granted by the National Parliaments and by every State Parliament save one, have been appealed to by the International Woman Suffrage Alliance to help our less fortunate fellow women in other lands, where it is urged by those in authority that the enfranchisement of women means social and political disaster.16
And she pressed the statesmen, many of whom she knew personally, to write testimonials about the successful workings of full adult suffrage in Australian political and social life. She was obliged with an avalanche of letters, including responses from Prime Minister Deakin, as well as ringing endorsements from the federal attorney-general and postmaster-general and from state premiers. Even former opponents of women’s suffrage, like Thomas Waddell, the colonial secretary of New South Wales, testified that women exercise the franchise wisely and I feel sure that their influence in public life will be all for good. Vida was able to forward a thick wad of sanguine, self-important letters of validation from respectable and influential men to the campaign leaders at the IWSA. The replies bear gratifying testimony to the good results of woman suffrage, Vida summarised for her less fortunate fellow women abroad.17
They were put to good use. Alice Zimmern cited the testimonial of the Bishop of Tasmania to close her 170-page book, WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE IN MANY LANDS: Australia is thus reaping the reward of having responded to the unanswered appeal of justice, quoted Zimmern, adding: surely these words sum up the whole case for women’s suffrage!18
Vida herself had always emphasised that Australian men were core to the solution, not part of the problem, of women’s political emancipation. Indeed, it was a feature of the Australian suffrage campaign that made it radically different from any other country, this readiness of our men to admit that our cause was a just one and entitled to immediate recognition. To Vida’s mind, it was not male privilege that held Victoria back from being the last link in the electoral chain that encircles Australia, but class privilege. In the lower houses, where one man, one vote was the standard, it was relatively easy to get suffrage bills through. It was the propertied class of the upper houses that choked the life out of democracy, she argued: the gatekeepers of privilege who, in Australia, are always against reform.19 This was why she believed the Victorian example offered the most curious and interesting parallels to the movement in England.
Her one personal word of advice to her British colleagues was this: to concentrate on working for the right that covered all other rights—the right to the parliamentary vote. This was the secret of our comparatively rapid progress. It was a waste of time to expect reform on any other matter without first attaining the vote. As long as Suffragists do not put the foundation stone of social reform—political principle, the vote—above every other question, Vida preached from the altar of experience, they have none but themselves to blame for the delay of which they complain.20
If, by late 1907, the state of Victoria and the British government were both stuck in their reactionary slough, there’d been a seismic shift within the suffrage movement itself over the northern summer. Dissension within the ranks of the WSPU had been rising since Emmeline Pankhurst relocated her organisation’s headquarters from Manchester to London the previous year. Her despotic management style was one thing. Coupled with her tendency to play favourites—both towards her daughters and between them, with Christabel being the pet, young Adela positioned as the black sheep and Sylvia the sensible centre—it sorely tested the sisterly alliance. Teresa Billington-Greig21 summed up the problem: to Mother Pankhurst, all outer criticism is abuse; all inner criticism is treachery. The charismatic leader required fanatical loyalty at all costs and ruled through a conspiracy of silence. For many women, who had joined the movement as a gateway to liberty and a means to find their own voice, the price of solidarity was too high.
Two factions began to emerge. One group was led by the unlikely pairing of thirty-year-old Billington-Greig and sixty-three-year-old Charlotte Despard, a high-born Anglo-Irish suffragist, author, vegetarian and childless widow who had devoted her life to the welfare of the poor. The other group stayed loyal to the Pankhurstocracy. There were ideological and strategic, as well as personality differences. The mutineers wanted to run the WSPU under a democratic constitution. The Pankhursts, supported by the Pethick-Lawrences, worried that monocratic control was essential to the success of the militant campaign: that too many (popularly elected) cooks would spoil the broth.
In September, Emmeline Pankhurst halted the infighting by declaring that the WSPU would henceforth be governed by a committee appointed by herself. Three days later, Charlotte Despard steered the disgruntled democratic faction towards a new association, which, by November—after precisely the sort of representative wrangling that drove Emmeline Pankhurst spare—members voted to call the Women’s Freedom League. The WFL declared itself an unashamedly militant organisation committed to using any means that did not injure person or property to achieve the vote for women on the same terms as men. While many of the WFL’s leaders were themselves aligned to the Labour Party, the organisation was committed, like the WSPU, to oppose any candidate for election who did not canvass on a platform of Votes for Women. The WFL’s beef was not with the WSPU’s combative tactics, but its domineering organisation. I am a feminist, a rebel and a suffragist, announced Teresa Billington-Greig, who was voted the WFL’s first honorary organising secretary, a believer, therefore, in sex equality and militant action.22 Billington-Greig’s platform was suitably lofty and inspirational:
I seek [woman’s] complete emancipation from all shackles of law and custom, from all chains of sentiment and superstition, from all outer imposed disabilities and cherished inner bondages which unite to shut off liberty from the human soul borne in her body.
To Billington-Greig, the movement was not just about political freedom but personal emancipation. Rejecting Vida Goldstein’s advice, Billington-Greig made it clear it was the revolution for which we gathered. The vote was but a preliminary concentration. It was not just the franchise that drew young women out of their homes and studios and onto the streets; women who had proved their powers in science, art, letters couldn’t tamely submit to exclusion from social status, public life and personal liberty. The energy of militancy, argued Billington-Greig, came not from political impotence alone, but from an ineluctable desire to cast off her immemorial chains of correct behaviour.23
Australian women had called for political citizenship in a new and flexible nation. They wanted to help make the rules. British women cried freedom and found the abandonment of the worship of propriety the great cause for rejoicing. They wanted to break the rules.
Despite the mobilisation of great numbers of women—including Dora Meeson Coates, who joined the WFL, won over by its promise of both democracy and insurgency—and the new-found visibility and venom of their actions, the movement found its situation at the close of 1907 invidious.
Journalist Brougham Villiers summed up the problem: It is still perfectly possible that the largest Liberal majority for generations may do nothing for women; it is almost certain that it will do nothing unless compelled by outside pressure. Even with a fact bank of information about the successes of suffrage from the Australian and New Zealand experiments, and ambassadors from those parts to guide and inspire, the British government would not listen to reason. Fortunately, recognised Villiers, after forty years of pleading in vain, this outside pressure is now being applied and that in a number of ways hitherto unattempted. The ground had been prepared over the long course but the electric spark was needed which should turn woman the suppliant into woman the rebel.24 That spark was militancy.