It is quite a mistake to think, as many people in this country seem to do, realised an older and wiser Vida Goldstein, that women will immediately rush into Parliament as soon as they get the chance.1
In the Australian summer of 1910 the now-seasoned political campaigner had a huge and potentially life-changing decision to make. The Commonwealth government had called a general election for 13 April: Vida had another chance to make her own dash at the national legislature. With the battle for suffrage finally won in Victoria, would she, could she, steel herself for another tilt at the Senate? No woman had stood in the 1906 federal election, and in South Australia, the only state where women were eligible to run for parliament, not a single woman had put herself forward. Did Vida have a responsibility to run? She believed with all her heart that even if she were to lose again, every woman who stands as a candidate makes the task of the next woman candidate easier. And she was perfectly content to blaze the track for others.2
But there was rocky ground to break on both sides of the globe, and Vida had just started to consider how she might best help her British sisters fight for the fundamental political rights they were still so far from winning. On 29 November 1909, Vida convened a public meeting at Melbourne’s Athenaeum Hall. There was an attendance of 250, of whom 230 were ladies, according to the ARGUS.3 The purpose of the meeting was to tell the truth about the Suffragettes. Vida was joined by another WPA member, Irish-born journalist Miss Agnes Murphy—Nellie Melba’s private secretary—who gave an eye-witness account of the way that a new chivalry had been instituted in England: it was now women for women.4 Murphy had been involved in WSPU activism and testified at the trial of Mrs Pankhurst, when she, Christabel and Flora Drummond were gaoled. It was the biased reports of an antagonistic press that had poisoned the mind of the world against the suffragettes, argued Murphy, something it was difficult to understand in Australia where journalistic practice was characterised by honesty, reasonableness and humanity. (Nellie Martel might have begged to differ.) At the conclusion of the meeting, Vida called for a resolution of sympathy with the suffragettes and congratulated them on their sublime courage in putting principle before party. But where would Vida now put her principles? She was all for women, but which women? Her enfranchised but still unrepresented sisters at home, or her unenfranchised sisters abroad?
Under the glare of the January sun, there were already audible whispers in the air about the likelihood that she would contest the upcoming federal election. Rumours too that there would be another female candidate, Mrs D’Ebro, the vice-president of the conservative Australian Women’s National League. If true, this would add an element with which Vida had not previously had to contend: not just male combatants on both sides of politics, but another woman too. While she agreed with many of the progressive policies of Deakin’s incumbent government and of the opposition Labor Party, she could not stomach the anti-socialist, pro-military rhetoric of the AWNL.
Mrs D’Ebro, daughter of a Melbourne establishment family and wife of a prominent architect, was known for her remarkable assertiveness and other abilities which distinguish her as a likely bidder for a position which no woman has yet achieved. Fortunately—if bizarrely, after the bitter years of campaigning for the vote in Victoria—Vida had maintained her reputation as the most non-political woman existing in our midst, at least as regards her personality. This was code, of course, for the fact that she had kept her ladylike dignity in the face of torment, vilification, disappointment and setback upon setback. Unlike those crazy English suffragettes, Vida displayed a wide and vast supply [of] all the most pleasing attributes belonging to women, a soft voice, soothing manner, pleasing ways and often merry touches of happy humour.5
Yes, it was always worth having a laugh—with your enemies as well as your friends—but did she really have the energy and commitment to rush into Parliament? At forty-one, Vida could focus on her new journal, the WOMAN VOTER, and enjoy the company of her family, with whom she lived, and the fellowship of their Christian Science community. She could join her friend Cecilia Johns and raise poultry on one of the new women’s farms springing up, or go to England and join Muriel Matters and Mrs Montefiore—surely the movement there needed a new Australian friend now that Nellie Martel had left the fold—or…
But who was she kidding? Wild horses couldn’t keep her away from this campaign. As if she would let Mrs D’Ebro be the first to accomplish what no woman had yet achieved!
On 14 February 1910, Valentine’s Day, Vida Goldstein opened her campaign. Not in her home town of Portland as she had in 1903 (she knew that it is said ‘Portland votes for Miss Goldstein’) but under the wide blue skies of nearby Casterton, home of the kelpie.6 It would be a long road—eight weeks of speeches and meetings the length and breadth of the state—to pick up one of the three Victorian Senate seats on offer. Both the Liberal and Labor parties were putting up three candidates each for the three seats; so far, there was no sign of Mrs D’Ebro.
Vida was pleased to see that the crowds were coming out to greet her again. She had not expected, she told a packed hall in Hamilton, to have such a bumper house as she had on the former occasion when a number of people attended out of curiosity to see the wild woman of the woods who sought to enter Parliament. She stood, Vida told the largely female audience, because she wanted to represent the interests of women, children and the home. If they had attended meetings in the legislature, as she had done for two decades now, they would see that every subject of legislation in which women were interested was mutilated because they could not see the question from the women’s point of view.
Could they imagine watching a bill for infant life protection be introduced, only to witness nearly every member of the assembly walk out when it came to be debated? It was with the utmost difficulty that she had persuaded enough members to vote for a bill that would prevent a child being sent to prison at the age of seven. The bill passed by only three votes.
How often had she written to Prime Minister Deakin asking him to introduce a marriage and divorce bill into parliament? The Commonwealth constitution assumed these powers from the states, but still there was no federal legislation. She wanted mothers and fathers to have joint rights over their offspring—for at present women had no legal control over their children, the very reason Dora Montefiore had gone into politics almost twenty years ago—and equal grounds for divorce. Why should a man be able to obtain a divorce by proving one act of infidelity when a woman must also prove habitual drunkenness, cruelty or desertion?
She stood for equal pay for equal work.
As a genuinely patriotic Australia, she stood against the ticket system of voting, a system which was rotten to the core. She had seen the workings of machine politics on her tour of America—the way the men put on the tickets were controlled by business monopolies and trusts—and hoped it would never be foisted upon Australia.7 When voting for a party’s ticket, people did not vote according to their principles, but according to the decision of the majority. Vote for the women’s candidate on 13 April, and you could still vote for two other members of your preferred party. Vote for the ticket, and vote for the devil of party government with all its corruption and jobbery.8
Thus would Vida address audiences in every part of the state. She gave one speech and one speech only, so as not to be more misrepresented than she could help. If she gave twenty speeches, the press would find a way to misrepresent every one of them. She would keep her message clear and simple, answering questions from the floor so long as they were civil.
It was in this context that she would canvass her views on other critical election issues such as states’ rights, the financial agreement with the Commonwealth (she opposed it) and the transcontinental railway (in 1903, she had been opposed to it; now that she’d travelled to Western Australia to visit her brother Selwyn, she could see the need for it).
As in 1903, she charged an admission price to her meetings: a silver coin donation—unlike other candidates, she had neither independent means nor party backing. And she introduced a novel element into her campaign: having studied the way that all the English suffrage societies now adopted their own colours, she wore the colours of the Women’s Political Association. Lavender—signifying the fragrance of everything good in the past. Green—for growth and development. And purple—indicating loyalty to justice and equal sovereignty of men and women.
But foliage and lace could only get a lady so far. The 1910 election was always going to be one of the hardest fought in the history of Australian politics.9 It was the first time that the contest would not be run as a three-cornered race. Deakin’s Liberal Protectionist Party had merged with the conservative Anti-Socialists Party in 1909 to become the Commonwealth Liberal Party—‘the Fusion’, it was called—and it had been a bruising process. Some sitting members had not joined and were now recontesting as independents. Other liberal protectionists had joined the Labor Party in the wake of Deakin’s perceived treachery.
In the Victorian Senate contest, two Liberals were defending their seats and Labor was defending its one. By the end of February, it was clear that Mrs D’Ebro would not stand. Vida would only have one other independent competitor, James Ronald, a Scots Presbyterian clergyman and disgruntled federal Labor Party MP who had failed to be re-endorsed when his seat was abolished. The party system that Vida so despised had won, and this election would test just how feasible it was to be not only a female candidate, but a non-party candidate. Which of those heresies would voters find worse?
Prime Minister Deakin—referred to as Judas by Labor MP Billy Hughes—would fight the election largely on the strength of his past record and his vision for defence (an Australian navy), the peopling of North Australia (based on mining) and a harmonious federation, with Australians united by their commitment to the national good, the Commonwealth.10 Deakin had every expectation of a sweeping victory and looked forward to representing Australia at the upcoming Imperial Conference in London in 1911.11 But he had a formidable opponent in his Labor rival for the top job: Andrew Fisher.
Fisher was a Scot—a former coalminer and a unionist—who had come up through the Queensland Labor Party, getting his political blooding during an era of drought, depression and industrial strife. He became known for his quiet, conciliatory approach to improving workers’ living standards: arbitration and legislative mechanisms over lockouts and class warfare. He was a keen federalist, and secured the Labor Party’s endorsement to represent Wide Bay in the Commonwealth Parliament, a contest he won with a convincing majority. In May 1901, along with other Labor parliamentarians, he formed the Commonwealth Labor Party.
It was a big year for the Ayrshire pit boy. On New Year’s Eve 1901, forty-year-old Fisher married twenty-seven-year-old Margaret Irvine, the eldest daughter of his landlady in Gympie. He had been in close contact with her for a decade, watching her grow from a schoolgirl with more formal education than he’d ever received to a tall, strong woman. It was a measure of the man that he was not concerned by the discrepancy in their height: at six foot three, Margaret towered over her husband’s five feet and nine inches. Even before their marriage, Fisher had been eager for Margaret to be at his side on public occasions. It had been Fisher’s pleasure to take Margaret and her mother to Melbourne for the opening of the Federal Parliament in May 1901. He affectionately addressed his letters to her as Dear Maggie, but signed them formally as Andrew Fisher. Their first child, Robert, was born in September 1902, a honeymoon baby. By the time of the 1910 election, there were three more Fisher children, born at neat two-year intervals (Peggy, Henry, Andrew) and one more on the way (John, born in June). Margaret was child built, as her daughter Peggy tenderly noted.12
At the time of the 1910 election Fisher, at forty-eight, was the sort of man who people turned to look at again, in the words of one contemporary.13 He had warm, dark eyes, a slightly cleft chin and a thick head of greying hair. He was clean-shaven except for a signature handlebar moustache. His personality was as becoming as his appearance. He was slow to anger and very tolerant if he were angry, according to Peggy, and took such interest and care of little things like the taking of a bee very gently out of the window or the explaining of things to a little child.14 The Fishers kept a happy, Presbyterian, teetotal household in Melbourne, which included Margaret’s mother and sisters. Fisher never swore and disliked with great intensity the expression ‘shut up’.15
Fisher was a staunch supporter of women’s suffrage, a position he had long held. At the 1908 Labor Party conference, he welcomed female delegates, acknowledging that their presence was an indication that women in Australia were taking an active part in the economic and political questions of the day. As a Labor Party, he noted, we can be congratulated on giving [them] every facility and encouragement to do so.16
And it was true. Labor had early recognised the organisational and electoral importance of mobilising women’s support. Women had been attending the inter-colonial Labor congresses as early as 1884, when two of the fifty delegates were female.17 Adult suffrage had been part of the South Australian Labor platform since 1892—a situation Mary Lee had worked hard to orchestrate, and which led directly to the historic South Australian suffrage win in 1893—and Tasmanian Labor’s platform since 1896. Federal Labor put one adult one vote as the first item on its first platform in 1900, followed by the total exclusion of colored and other undesirable races.18 Equal pay for equal work became part of the Victorian Labor Party Platform in 1908.
Labor Party stalwarts like William Spence, a New South Wales federal MP, tied sex equality back to a unionist appreciation of the fortitude and devotion of women. In his 1909 history of the labour movement in Australia, AUSTRALIA’S AWAKENING, Spence praised the unemblazoned courage of the wives of trade unionists locked out or on strike…the grit of men, women and children to go hungry to bed every night.19 To Spence, the history of the labour movement was one of self-sacrifice, heroism and suffering far greater than has ever been shown on any battlefield.20 This was a tradition of heroism quite distinct from the militarist norms of the day: in it, Australian women could take their place in the pantheon of martyrs.
Though ideologically and sentimentally tied to an international socialist movement for the elevation of the world’s workers, the Australian Labor Party’s philosophy was explicitly nationalist. Its federal platform of 1908 stated the ALP’s primary objective as: The cultivation of an Australian sentiment based upon the maintenance of racial purity, and the development in Australia of an enlightened and self-reliant community.21
As enlightened racists, Australians would not only be capable of achieving colonial independence, but also of providing a beacon of hope to the imperial and international community. Give Labor a chance—give it reasonable time, promised William Spence in 1909, and it will start such an era of growing prosperity in Australia as will make it the envy of the world. Spence took pride in what the Labor Party had already achieved in Australia—claiming the social legislation for which it had become famous as a Labor victory—and offered it as a motivation for writing his history. If the Socialist Movement of the world is helped, encouraged and stimulated by this record of our success in Australia, he wrote, I shall have ample reward.
Just as the world was paying attention to what women’s suffrage had achieved in the antipodes, so it was mindful of the strong performance of the Australian Labor Party as a parliamentary and legislative force. In the 1906 federal election the Labor Party, under the leadership of Chris Watson, had won a five per cent swing, picking up three seats to bring its total to twenty-six. This was the same number as George Reid’s Conservative Party (running as the Anti-Socialists), forcing them into coalition with Alfred Deakin’s Protectionist Party (which suffered a thirteen per cent swing against it and managed only twenty-one seats). Labor held thirty-six per cent of seats in the House of Representatives.
By comparison: in the UK general election of 1906 that saw the Liberals sweep to power, Keir Hardie’s Labour Representative Committee (forerunner to the British Labour Party) took less than five per cent of seats. At the New Zealand general election of 1908, David McLaren’s Independent Labour League won three per cent of seats. Canada didn’t even have a federal labour party until 1917.
When it came to Labour’s electoral strength, Australia was in a league of its own.
Vida Goldstein doubted that Labor’s position on women’s rights owed much to anything other than party political machinations. William Spence had said that the labour movement stood for true self-government, meaning the government of Self—the preservation of Self from trespassing on the rights of others.22 To Spence, this was purely a class issue. Landlords and employers could not, in a nation enjoying true self-government, rule over tenants and workers. He expressed no vision of what his labour politics might mean for female citizens—whose rights were trespassed upon by men—let alone for Indigenous Australians, who were so far from self-governing that they weren’t even counted as citizens.
It was this sort of ideological blind spot that made Vida wary of aligning her own political fortunes with the Labor Party. When Spence wrote: Labor takes the home as the unit for the nation, he meant the patriarchal home. In the same way, H. B. Higgins’ Harvester Judgment—groundbreaking as it was—based its ‘living wage’ on what a husband must earn to support a wife and children. When he said: Labor undertakes to change the whole tenor of the world’s ideas, Spence was talking about matters like the state control of industries such as sugar, tobacco and coal mines.23 He didn’t envision that women would take control of their own needs and represent their own interests. What of the women who were family breadwinners? What of the women who were not wives? Where Vida was a feminist with socialist leanings, Spence was a socialist, end of story. He claimed that it was the advent of Labor in politics which brought womanhood suffrage. But who doesn’t like to walk into a clean house and take the credit for owning the mop?
The rhetoric of the home as bastion of morality and source of power—whether national or feminine—was proving sticky for Vida, too. On the 1910 election campaign trail she was criticised for having a bob each way. The Sydney STAR pointed out the hypocrisy of the advanced woman…a glib-tongued political lady of the twentieth century claiming that her own pre-eminent right to represent a portion of her country was based on the empire of the Home.
That a woman who is so smart at repartee and so intelligent as Miss Goldstein should have to drag the feeble old stalking horse ‘Vote for the Home’ out of his political stable, is one of the strongest arguments against the presence of women on the political platform.24
Other newspapers eschewed Vida’s claptrap on the age-old grounds that she was not sufficiently womanly. The Melbourne ADVOCATE, quoting her assertions that I have often written the speeches for members and that she was thus practically in the House now; the only difference is that I am outside the barriers, decried Vida’s lack of shrinking modesty, the virtue that defined women. (The ADVOCATE did admit that this very feature might indeed qualify her as a typical politician.25) Another news outlet argued that Nature decided the question herself when she endowed the weaker vessel with a smaller brain pan.26
Vida knew that, even on her second election campaign, she would not be judged on the strength of her policies but on the very fact of her presence. When she criticised Deakin on policy grounds27 she was accused of splitting the conservative Fusion ticket. The danger, said the AUSTRALASIAN, came from female citizens who are new to the exercise of political rights, and are not so versed as men are in the duty of regarding a vote as a public trust, to be used as reason dictates rather than as emotions or mere sentiment may prompt.28 It was a measure of just how worried the anti-Labor forces had become that Melbourne PUNCH, claiming that Vida was a Labour Socialist in all her politics, she might as well be a Labour woman, resorted to anti-Semitism to scare conservative voters further.
I often think that if Miss Goldstein were not of Jewish extraction she would be wheeling about the perambulator she talks of so much, and leaving women to settle their own wrongs in their own ways. But she has all the pushfulness of that race in her, and feels that she has a mission to free women.29
The question of Vida’s racially ingrained aggression, so repellent it had prevented her from winning a husband, was raised in the dying days of the campaign. How to respond? Perhaps she lay back and thought of England—where women had now given up on following the rules of etiquette. Forswearing diplomatic reassurance that the women’s vote would not split the ticket, she now beseeched women to do just that: I ask electors to split the ticket, she implored provocatively at the Town Hall in genteel Hawthorn, as an emphatic protest against the tyranny of the ticket system.30 It was the closest to disobedience that the headstrong but ultimately well-mannered private schoolgirl had ever come.
Labor too may have feared that Vida would coax votes away from its candidates with her support for workers over employers and her positive stance on the New Protection.31 But many Labor members, like Dr William Maloney in Victoria and Josiah Thomas in New South Wales, were her friends and long-time political companions. When they couldn’t convince her to stand as a Labor candidate, they left her alone. Ultimately, Vida asked to be judged by what she had said, by her manifesto, reported the MOUNT ALEXANDER MAIL as election day neared, and what she had done in the interests of women and children in the past.32 Deakin expected to be assessed on his record, and so did Vida.
And just as Deakin was campaigning on a ‘put Australia first’ platform, so Vida had a nationalist agenda. She told the voters of Kerang that a vote for her was a vote for a proud, self-assertive, risk-taking Commonwealth—a vote they should cast If they desired to see Australia lead the way as the first nation to do justice to women by placing a woman in its National Parliament.33
Vida, of course, knew full well that Finland had already elected nineteen women to its national parliament. By this moment of wilful blindness she made a final play for the patriotic sentiments of voters. In one of her last appearances of the campaign, three thousand women filled the Melbourne Town Hall to capacity, with three hundred more clamouring for admission outside the locked door. This is probably the largest political meeting of women ever held in Australia, the EVENING TELEGRAPH in the remote Queensland town of Charters Towers reported, demonstrating just how far the sparks from Vida’s experiment had flown.34
On the morning of election day, 13 April 1910, Vida awoke to a telegram from Emmeline Pankhurst: Women’s Social and Political Union wishes you success.35 And in fact, the result was spectacular.
Labor won 49.97 per cent of the primary vote, a stunning increase on the eighteen per cent it mustered in 1901 and thirty-six per cent in 1906. It swept all Senate seats and the majority of the seventy-five House of Representatives seats.
The victory was historic in the true sense: the first time that an openly socialist government had been elected to govern in its own right anywhere in the world. It had campaigned on three discreet virtues: moderation, respectability and competence. In other words, classic liberal territory—a fact not lost on the many liberal voters who, no longer able to support Deakin since he sided with the conservatives in 1909, now had nowhere to turn but Labor.36
The victory made headlines around the world, and, given that Australia was the primary proving ground for the experiment in universal adult suffrage, curiosity turned to the influence of women voters. In July, the WSPU’s organ, VOTES FOR WOMEN, published a report from Cyrus Mason, the electoral returning officer in Melbourne, attesting to the order, good humour and perfect sobriety of all voters on polling day. He dismissed the usual Antis’ argument that women would rush to the polls in an excited state by testifying that he personally saw mothers with babies in go-carts, smiling girls with their young men and old ladies helped and guided courteously.
I can say with confidence that as soon as the Mother of Parliaments adopts the whole of the Australian manner of conducting parliamentary elections the better for Great Britain.37
Another correspondent, an Englishman who had recently returned from Australia and watched the elections, similarly reported that voting in the southern colonies was a pleasant family affair, like a tri-annual picnic. Women’s part in politics is taken as quite natural, the man wrote. And, crucially: They do not neglect their husbands’ meals nor are they in any way unwomanly in appearance.38
In June, the journal of the American Woman Suffrage Association, PROGRESS, reported that two local women had recently returned from Australia where they had been very taken by Vida Goldstein’s campaign. She was a young and beautiful woman, reported Miss Mavin Fenwich and Miss Brackinridge. But that was not the most surprising thing about the elections. The women in Australia have had the franchise for so many years, noted the pair of travellers, it is no longer an experiment and the results of their political efforts are attracting the attention of the civilised world.39 A reporter published in the BOSTON WOMAN’S JOURNAL commented on the decorum displayed at the Milson’s Point polling station in Sydney, compared to the hustling, the barracking and the brawling that characterised American election days.40
But for Vida, no Senate berth. She received 54,000 votes, an impressive twenty-five per cent share, but it was not enough. Nonetheless she maintained the optimistic aspect she had presented in 1903. I was not at all disappointed by the result, she told journalists, as some people expected me to be.41 She had done the job of making it easier for the next female candidate, and the next.42 Vida regarded her 54,000 votes as a magnificent tribute from the people of Victoria for supporting the cause she represented: they put justice to women before the triumph of party. But Vida had achieved more than sweeping a scythe through the political wilderness. She’d taken a wrecking ball to the Liberal ascendancy in Victoria. Woman’s influence in politics has been remarkably illustrated in Victoria, assessed Queensland’s GYMPIE TIMES, where Miss Vida Goldstein’s candidature has probably resulted in the defeat of three Liberal Senatorial candidates.43 Much to Labor’s delight, Vida had indeed split the Liberal ticket—a nil sum political game that she herself hated. Vida claimed that perhaps her greatest victory was coming out of the campaign with her principles unscathed: in a straight-out party fight conducted on the most rigid machine ‘ticket’ system that has been known here, it was marvellous that the one non-party candidate, and that a woman, was not mutilated beyond recognition.44 Ever the optimist.
It was not only the fact that she had been taken as a serious candidate that pleased Vida. It was also that in Victoria, female voters had outnumbered male voters by eleven thousand. The fact that she had not won on the strength of this remarkable voter turnout showed that women themselves had put party over sex. To Vida, this meant that women required more education and support to know how to be just to women: it was still too easy for them to be swayed by arguments that votes given to her are virtually thrown away or that they could never trust a spinster or a Bachelor Woman.
But to other political commentators, the remarkable female participation rate pointed to a different reality. Writing anonymously for the London MORNING POST, Alfred Deakin himself conceded that the Labor leagues had worked hard at enrolling all who were eligible to vote, leading to a fifty per cent increase in turnout. And it was mostly women who worked as the recruiters. Their women pass from house to house, reported Deakin, enlisting those of their own sex.45 The real test of Labor, Deakin wrote under the cover of journalistic inscrutability, was whether the incoming government could satisfy the mass of our everyday citizens, male and female…stimulated by visionary aims of a new social Paradise to be conjured out of the ballot boxes. Of one thing Deakin was sure:
No transformation in our politics so complete or so unexpected by the general public has ever been witnessed on this side of the world…[it is] a new era in politics without precedent for its methods.46
Its methods involved the active participation of female citizens in delineating the national political narrative. The Labor leagues had enlisted an army of unpaid volunteers, discipline, unity…and the complete efficiency of its machine. Women were oiling that machine.
In her 1906 pamphlet for the WSPU, THE WOMEN’S VOTE IN AUSTRALIA, Nellie Martel had argued that female citizens were the best asset any country could wish for because they had raised the moral, social and spiritual tone.47 The 1910 election demonstrated that it was their long-range vision and organisational capacity, not their innate sex superiority, that might make women superior citizens. Not enough women had chosen Vida Goldstein to be their political representative in the Federal Parliament. But substantial numbers had worked tirelessly to ensure that their vote helped put the first Labour government in the world into office.