Muriel Matters waited on the Victoria Station platform at 7.40 p.m. on Sunday 19 March feeling a little nervous. Surrounded by thousands of adoring suffragettes, she might not even be able to find Vida—far less help cut a swathe through British society for her.
VOTES FOR WOMEN had been tempting its readers since January with hints about the Distinguished Visitor to Speak at the Albert Hall on 23 March. Finally, the WSPU leadership announced that We are very grateful to Miss Goldstein for promising to come all this way to address us.1 By the time Vida’s train pulled in at Victoria, a colossal crowd, including both Emmelines—Pankhurst and Pethick-Lawrence—was waiting to greet the woman the WSPU had been billing as a speaker of great power…under whose leadership Victoria finally won their vote.
‘Is it Royalty passing?’ ‘Is the King coming?’ ‘What are all these people waiting for?’ were among the many questions asked at the railway station, reported one paper, of those waiting to welcome Miss Vida Goldstein on her arrival in London.2 London had never seen anything like the welcome she got, wrote one observer. It was a welcome that a general like Kitchener might well have been proud of.3 A hero’s welcome.
It was not just the suffrage press—the mainstream dailies, too, covered Vida’s visit. The reportage in the LEEDS MERCURY was typical, revealing under the headline Champion Lady Candidate, that 1) Vida had come to London to help her unenfranchised sisters in this benighted land; 2) she had stood twice for the Senate in the Commonwealth Parliament (unsuccessfully); and 3) she was a contemporary of Madame Melba at the Presbyterian Ladies College. Only the last of these fun facts was incorrect. Nellie Mitchell (not yet Melba) had been eight years ahead of Vida, but by 1911 the diva’s global fame was such that even a spurious association was a feather in Vida’s cap. It was not inconceivable that Emmeline Pankhurst herself fed the line to the press. Good impresarios always puff their talent.
Muriel was no longer so close to the action that she could set the record straight. Though she had lost none of her activist spirit, Muriel’s priorities had shifted. On her return to England after the sell-out Australian tour, and fast approaching her thirty-fifth birthday, Muriel had resigned from the Women’s Freedom League. When she departed the organisation that had made her a household name as the Lady of the Grille, Muriel barely took a bow. She quietly replaced heat-seeking publicity stunts with the cold, hard slog of slum work.
Unlike Teresa Billington-Greig, who had always been Muriel’s favourite of the leadership team, Muriel wrote neither inflammatory articles nor a tell-all memoir detailing her reasons for leaving the organised suffrage movement. Instead, she gave a long, measured interview to the BRITISH-AUSTRALASIAN, a publication serving the antipodean expats of London. The story was entitled ‘Australian Women in Politics’. Asked why she had joined the suffragettes in England, Muriel replied: I have always been a democrat, and democracy means the equality of woman as well as man.4 It seemed a straightforward proposition.
But to Muriel’s mind, the women’s suffrage movement in England had become the preserve of the educated and middle-class woman. Returning to the substance of what had first compelled her to hold a torch up to injustice—the plight of vulnerable and exploited actresses—Muriel had decided that the great problems in this country, in the future, are the position of women and poverty.
There were any number of recent examples of working-class women around the world acting in solidarity to improve their lot. Even as Muriel stood here at Victoria Station, eleven thousand workers at the Singer sewing machine factory in Glasgow—the largest manufacturing concern in Scotland, with a twenty-five per cent female workforce—were on strike. They had gone out after a dozen girl pieceworkers were laid off.5 Industrial strife was rampant across Great Britain, with maritime workers, dockers and transport workers all engaged in strikes in late 1910 and early 1911.
The mood of mutiny seemed to be infecting women along with men, and authorities were eager to avert the kinds of female-led industrial protests now infamous across the Atlantic. The International Ladies Garment Workers Union had staged two mass strikes in New York. The first, in 1909, was sparked by a walkout of workers at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. Soon, twenty thousand shirtmakers—almost two-thirds of the largely female workforce—had downed needles in a quest for better pay and conditions. The strike lasted fourteen weeks, and was followed by another general strike, known as the ‘Great Revolt’, of sixty thousand cloakmakers. Many of the organisers were Jewish immigrants; supporters of the strike took a traditional Yiddish oath of solidarity: If I turn traitor to the cause I now pledge, may this hand wither from the arm I now raise.
Such was the global zeitgeist, the first International Women’s Day was being celebrated on this very day, 19 March, with a million people demonstrating for equal rights across Europe, prompted by socialist Clara Zetkin’s call for wage, employment and political justice.
Muriel was no traitor to the cause that had animated her waking life for the past six years, but she had always seen the vote as a means to an end—specifically, the end of social injustice. Now she had come to believe that the vote alone could not, would not, relieve the distress of the forty per cent of London’s population who lived in dire poverty. Certainly not when the loudest of the English suffrage activists refused to campaign for universal adult suffrage. Like Dora Montefiore, Muriel determined to use her skills to fight directly for social reform.
Of course I am still working for the feminist movement before all else, she told the BRITISH-AUSTRALASIAN, for without the aid and advice of women, no country can advance and improve as it should. But she felt her duty as a fully awakened (and enfranchised) woman was in the trenches. There were many fronts on which to serve. She could have holed up dockside in Bermondsey, for example, where eighty per cent of the residents lived in grim poverty. Instead she posted herself in the slums of Lambeth, an area in central London crammed with tenements housing the working poor of the local manufacturing industries, including Royal Doulton, which made dinner sets for West End dowagers. Here Muriel would establish a women’s settlement—a sanctuary of skill-based education in hygiene and mothercraft. She would teach poor women face to face, not preach to their more privileged sisters from the platform.6
In Australia, Muriel had admired the great progress that women’s work has made. Labor women in particular, she noted, were taking up their political responsibilities in a creditable manner, the result of the training of a practical Colonial life. Just as personally witnessing the misery of women and children in the slums of Melbourne had forged a young Vida into a political being at her mother’s side, Muriel felt her destiny was now conjoined with these unfortunate women, whose condition is generally the result of the horrible conditions under which they live. Violet Tillard—Tilly—who had accompanied Muriel to Australia and back, would be ever at her side. The photo accompanying the interview in the BRITISH-AUSTRALASIAN showed a more pensive Muriel, eyes downcast, less jaunty and carefree than her earlier staged portraits. Perhaps, having seen the world from an airship, she was done with the big picture: the minutiae of daily life beckoned.
There was only one complication. Muriel’s erstwhile beau, Bryceson Treharne, now director of the Adelaide Conservatorium, had recently proposed to her. Muriel was well advanced into marrying age. Just as she was setting about relocating to Lambeth, she was faced with the thorny perennial clawing at the convictions of all young feminists. Work for the benefit of every mother. Or become a mother herself.
There was so much to discuss with Vida, a woman who had turned down marriage proposals like a housekeeper turns down sheets. If only she could see her friend’s shining dark eyes in the sea of faces presently drowning Victoria Station.
Had the Royal Albert Hall ever looked as glorious as it did on the evening of 23 March 1911? Vida had nothing to compare it to, but Queen Victoria had famously been too overwhelmed to speak when she opened it in 1867. It had been designed to evoke an ancient amphitheatre, and the view from the stage, where Vida now sat, was certainly epic. Draped from the magnificent wood-panelled walls were suffragette banners. Spread out before her was a sea of suffragettes, dripping and soggy from the drenching day—a perfect torrent.7 They were crammed into the stalls and virtually hanging from the balconies and boxes. The Albert Hall was built to accommodate five thousand concert goers, but there were reportedly ten thousand here to see her speak. Incredible, given that the cold and damp that evening was enough to ruin the success of any Melbourne meeting.8 And even more impressive given that in the case of a full let—the use of private boxes—commercial advertising was prohibited. All these people had turned out merely through individual effort. The WSPU’s surreptitious spruiking had done the trick. People all over England and Scotland, not just London, knew that Vida was here to tell the old-world folk…of the new world and its new women.9
Vida needed to put the whirlwind of the last four days behind her as she composed herself to speak. She had arrived in London after almost a month’s journey, via Perth, Colombo and Bombay—and there had been all those women at Victoria Station, lined up, three or four deep, on either side of the station entrance, and cheer after cheer erupting.10 The reunion on the platform with her ever-ebullient friend Muriel, whose glowing face was almost the first that flashed upon me in the crowd.11 Their meeting was happy but brief—just enough time to pledge a holiday together towards the end of Vida’s trip—then Emmeline Pankhurst whisked away her prize visitor to her rooms at the Inns of Court Hotel, where Vida would be staying.12 A surge of reporters, all wanting an interview. A WSPU meeting. A dinner with the Pethick-Lawrences. A tour of Westminster led by none other than Keir Hardie, grand old man of the British Labour Party.
Now Vida knew why Muriel had put herself at great personal risk to stage her most famous militant protest. To Vida, standing behind that iron trellis in the Ladies Gallery, the grille represented the smallness of the English mind, a symbol of British contempt for Woman, the mother of the race.13 She could barely contain her own fury at the humiliation, but chose instead to hold her fire.14 She was in London at the behest of the militants, but not yet prepared to be thrown in gaol. She’d been bred a democrat, and a feminist one at that. The grille was quite simply galling.
But there was nothing standing between Vida and an audience now. No metal bars. And no trace of the hierarchy and reserve for which the English were noted. She sat beside Mrs Pankhurst, Mrs Pethick-Lawrence, Christabel Pankhurst, Annie Kenney and Dr Annie Besant—titans of the militant suffrage pantheon. Thus far they had treated her splendidly. How often it is said English people are cold, Vida reflected, basking in the glow of adulation. I certainly have experienced nothing of it. I have been simply overwhelmed with kindness.
Before Vida had the chance to be overwhelmed with applause a choir burst into passionate song. Another very great attraction billed for the Albert Hall meeting was a rendition of the new anthem of the cause, a rousing hymn composed by Dr Ethel Smyth, with lyrics by the actress Cicely Hamilton—Dora Meeson Coates’ friend. ‘The March of the Women’ would be performed en masse for the first time tonight and men and women suffragists who have strong voices had been instructed to join the choir (with the added incentive of obtaining lower orchestra seats for a reduced price).15 Protest songs had been a feature of the British movement, with at least four compositions in high rotation, generally set to well-known tunes such as ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’. But ‘The March of the Women’ was special. Ethel Smyth had a doctorate in music and counted Tchaikovsky, Brahms and Schumann as her peers. She had not enjoyed critical success, however: her compositions were considered too ‘masculine’. In 1910, at the age of fifty-two, Smyth took a hiatus from her career and joined the WSPU. High art’s loss was the suffrage movement’s gain, as Vida could now hear.
Shout, shout, up with your song!
Cry with the wind for the dawn is breaking.
March, march, swing you along,
Wide blows our banner and hope is waking.
Sylvia Pankhurst described the swelling music of ‘The March of the Women’ as strong and martial, bold with the joy of battle and endeavour.16 The entire audience joined in, the Albert Hall merely a repository for what Annie Kenney called the Soul of the Movement… the burning enthusiasm…charged with suffragette electricity.17
As the anthem was sung, Vida had a chance to stare at the famous personages around her. Mrs Pankhurst, rather short and slight, with a particularly sweet face, framed by soft, wavy, grey hair. Mrs Pethick-Lawrence: a tall, commanding woman, with a most attractive face. The enigmatic Christabel, a slip of a girl, charming and quite an unusual type. A small woman, but I can quite imagine her conquering a hostile crowd with her quickness and wit. The General, Flora Drummond, was present too: short and stout but there all the time. And Lady Constance, the woman who had been to prison under two guises—noble and char—was tall and fragile, loving and lovable, willing to die for the cause. A sacrifice never required in Australia.
When Emmeline rose to speak, it was with her characteristic brio. None of her pictures do her the slightest likeness, remarked Bessie Rischbieth, a young Australian suffragist in London, on first seeing Emmeline in person. Her face is so soft and full of soul. Really as I listened I felt my back-bone growing longer, as though you gained courage and freedom from her.18 Enthusiasm is infectious and Mrs Pankhurst was as viral as they came. As chair of the meeting, Mrs Pankhurst proposed a resolution calling for the enactment in 1911 of the Conciliation Committee’s promised Women’s Suffrage Bill. She further called upon women to unite in determined militant protest against any attempt on the part of the Prime Minister to prevent it.19 The time for stalling, prevaricating and obfuscating was over. The resolution was passed.
Following a speech from Mrs Pethick-Lawrence, it was finally Vida’s turn to take the rostrum. In the clear, confident, undeniably ‘womanly’ tone for which she was renowned, Vida told the spellbound audience that she brought a message of sympathy from Australia. She went on, part fawning guest, part arrogant envoy, one hundred per cent politician:
I shall always be glad to think that the truly enfranchised women of Australia, women enfranchised in spirit as in fact, recognised the inner meaning of this movement from the very beginning. In 1905, when those two girls, Christabel Pankhurst and Annie Kenney, fired the shot, heard around the world by all lovers of freedom, we knew in Australia they had heralded a new age of chivalry, the chivalry of woman towards woman.20
Vida assured the crowd that we in Australia are proud to think that we are of your blood and race. The ties that bind were strengthened, not frayed, by the differences in the roads Australian and English women needed to travel to gain the charter of our womanhood. In our young country the path had been comparatively easy—the road of persistence rather than martyrdom. In England, all such peaceful methods had been ineffectual. Therefore, in the name of the mothers—the spiritual leaders—these Australian women:
we are on the side of you militant women, and we offer you our deepest gratitude for having demonstrated to an unbelieving world the real existence of the sisterhood of women.
Vida went on to speak of the humiliation she felt when sitting behind the grille and the pride she felt to think that it was one of my own countrywomen, Muriel Matters, who had a hand in damaging it! She then turned to her main take-home message: how women’s role as active citizens, as voters, in Australia had had an immediate and positive effect on legislative reform. It was capitalism, invented and organised by men, not gender per se, that had worked to oppress women so effectively. Men have relentlessly sucked women into the industrial whirlpool, they have made a devastating war on women, Vida told a breathless crowd. Now women with the vote in Australia are seeking to protect themselves, and men also, by establishing the principle of equal pay for equal work. Don’t be fooled, warned Vida, it is all moonshine for people to tell you that the vote has no effect on the economic status of women! In every session of parliament since women won their franchise, equal pay for equal work was discussed. And everywhere you go you hear women pleading earnestly that war is a barbaric method of settling international disputes.
Vida reminded the crowd that in just two months there was to be an Imperial Conference here in London. At that grand meeting, there would be at least a few men representing women voters. Our Australian representatives, advised Vida (perhaps speaking as much to the those men themselves, through the global press, as to the suffragettes in the audience), go into that conference instructed by us as women to do certain things. Was it not an unthinkable proposition that England’s grand-daughters should have an equal voice with the men at the conference, when England’s own daughters should have no voice at all?
Having orchestrated a crescendo of provocation, Vida steadied. I believe this is a most critical year for your movement, she predicted. I do hope—I believe—that it will be a year of peace. Come May 5, when the Conciliation Bill was slated to go before parliament, the women of England would see that God was on their side.
Christabel, who directly followed Vida in the order of speakers, thought some backup might be wise. Inspired by the words and the mood of the evening, we decided to prepare the most imposing peaceful demonstration that we could imagine, a great women’s procession and Pageant of Empire to proceed through London at mid-summer.21 Christabel announced the date—Saturday 17 June—and called on the constitutional suffragists of the NUWSS to join with the militants in a demonstration of unparalleled solidarity.
Women, exhorted Christabel, our call to you is this: Be united. Make yourselves a great conquering army. Let us be so many, so strong, so brave, so proud that nothing outside matters.22 In preparation for the June march of the great conquering army of women, the WSPU would fill the halls all Spring with speakers, including Vida, who was always referred to as the leading suffragist in Australia.23
As Vida had not booked her return passage, she would be able to attend this blockbuster rally, the likes of which she had never before seen. She would not only be able to troop shoulder to shoulder with these heroic women, but also mobilise her own legion of foot soldiers from the multitude of Australians living in England.
At ten o’clock the monster meeting, to attend which I had travelled so many thousand miles, was over. Vida was exhausted and exhilarated. Without artificial amplification, Vida’s message had reached into every corner. Everyone says that I could be heard in the remotest part of the hall, Vidas reported to the WPA members at home. I could see the people applauding away in the balcony, where they looked like flies. Her conviction that she’d aced the space was confirmed by a fellow Australian who was present that night. Florence Rankin told Vida that, despite her misgivings about the notoriously testing acoustics of the Albert Hall, you were more easily heard than anyone I have ever heard there either man or woman.24
By the end of the evening, the WSPU had collected another £6000 towards the £100,000 fund-raising target set by Mrs Pethick-Lawrence, long the financial brains of the operation. Now it was no more than £10,000 short. And Vida had collected an army of new fans. Crowds thronged round me afterwards, she later wrote home to the WPA members, amongst them many whose names are familiar to you. Name-checking was superfluous in the face of such a personal and public relations triumph.
Vida’s Albert Hall debut had been, by her own reckoning, a magnificent success in every way.
If ‘The March of the Women’ brought the house down at the Albert Hall, a less turgid tune was taking all of London by storm. ‘The Land Where the Women Wear the Trousers’, written and performed by expat Australian vaudeville star Billy Williams,25 was an instant hit with its catchy melody and graphic lyrics:
I’ve been reading in the papers of a very funny land
It’s the land where the women wear the trousers
Where woman is the boss and poor old man is second hand
In the land where the women wear the trousers…
The fellows all go out on Sundays dressed in petticoats
They’re not allowed in parliament
The girls have all the votes…
In the land where the women wear the trousers.
Williams’ tongue-in-cheek tribute to the global reputation of his native land was classic topsy-turvy, cross-dressing, role-reversing fare. It provided a high street soundtrack to the political anxieties animating the high politics in Westminster: a bit of comic relief.
But not everybody was laughing. Two days after Vida’s magnificent success, Florence Rankin wrote to her countrywoman. Florence declared she was a Mrs Fawcett follower, but was writing to Vida because she had been struck by the high plane on to which you lifted the whole controversy. Rankin offered her congratulations and admitted it was a great pleasure to hear ‘my’ Australia acquit itself so well.26
The Australian press was less enamoured of the nation’s de facto ambassador of democratic freedom. Great commotion in Women’s League circles, reported the Brisbane TRUTH, because Vida Goldstein has asserted in London that Australian women approved of the militant methods of the suffragettes.27 The conservative Australian Women’s National League28 had drawn to the media’s attention a statement Vida made to the British press in her first doorstop interview at Mrs Pankhurst’s rooms, and later repeated in her Albert Hall speech. The article went on to claim that sundry petticoats…have risen to say that Vida is a perverter of the truth, and that we do not believe in the policeman smacking etc. Even dear old Rose Scott did not condone Vida’s approving of militancy, seemingly on behalf of all Australian women (though TRUTH found a way of making fun of every woman in the story: conservative, pacifist and militant).
The fact that an Australian women’s organisation had taken aim at the most prominent Australian woman on the international political stage was newsworthy. The QUEENSLANDER reported that the AWNL was furious about Vida Goldstein arrogating to herself the right to speak for Australian women in sympathy with the militant suffragette.29 One aggrieved woman wrote to say: She certainly does not represent the views of the Women’s Liberal League of NSW. Mrs Eva Hughes, blue-blood president of the AWNL, issued a statement repudiating Vida’s claim that Australian women approved of the methods adopted by the militant suffragettes.30 Much to the media’s delight, a cat-fighting class war had been triggered. The secretary of the Women Workers’ Union, Caroline Nicholson, was quoted in the RIVERINE HERALD in support of Vida.
Women are perfectly justified in taking up arms and becoming militant when they don’t get what they desire by peaceful methods. They have never yet got anything by being peaceful and never will; they must make themselves a nuisance till they get their rights.
Nicholson vouched that she agreed with Miss Goldstein and I speak for the great majority of Labor women.31
The issue became a national barbeque stopper, refreshing the commentariat’s memory of events so recent, and yet now so taken for granted, that they generally went unremarked. In Australia, wrote the WEST AUSTRALIAN, where women enjoy the same franchise privileges as men, the opposition to the women’s suffrage movement in Great Britain is somewhat difficult to understand.32 Still, who could agree with Miss Goldstein’s apparent sympathy with the militant policy of the suffragettes? Storming the House of Commons by means of a balloon, padlocking themselves to the grille and wrecking the windows of the Prime Minister’s official residence, argued the WEST AUSTRALIAN with seeming disregard for the fact that the first two atrocities were committed by an Australian woman, all contribute to the gaiety of the nation…but such conduct cannot be adjudged as anything but deplorable tactics. Given that Miss Goldstein was usually such a wise head, the paper concluded that she must have allowed her enthusiasm to cloud her judgement. The WEEKLY TIMES reckoned Australians should have seen it coming, given that when Muriel Matters, that militant little lady, was in town, she was Miss Goldstein’s pet protégé.33 Some outlets gave Vida the benefit of the doubt, reckoning that her line was a white lie to appease her hosts who, after all, had paid for her passage to England.
The Women’s Political Association, scrambling to protect their absent leader from the fallout, blamed the unreliability of the intercontinental telegraph. Acting president Miss Fullerton was certain that Miss Goldstein must have been misunderstood. What they all knew she must have said, asserted Fullerton, was not that the women of Australia were in favour of militant methods, but that the progressive women of Australia were.34 PUNCH was having none of the hair-splitting. Reliably, it had a field day.
Evidently Our Vida has developed into a fierce Suffragette since she inhaled the London fog. It seems to have affected her memory also, for she told the audience at the Albert Hall last week that ‘Australia sympathised with the militant policy adopted by the women seeking the suffrage in England.’ Now, that is just what Australia does not do. We sympathise with the women who want the suffrage and can’t get it, but think their ‘militant policy’ absurd and ridiculous and unnecessary, and calculated to defeat the very aim it is intended to realise.35
It mattered little what Vida had actually said.
What she did actually say, in an interview conducted on the day of her arrival and published in the BRITISH-AUSTRALASIAN on the day of her Albert Hall engagement, was that militant tactics were never employed in Australia, but not because the women of Australia were not ready to employ them. She had personal knowledge of a group of women waiting for the word, ready to break the windows of the Victorian Parliament should a suffrage bill not be introduced. A member of the Legislative Assembly had promised to lead them to the attack; there had even been a scheme to kidnap the premier. But the bill was introduced and the crisis averted. The extreme measures proved unnecessary but there was never any doubt that the Australian women were perfectly ready to become militant to obtain the vote.36
Was Vida defending the commitment of Australian women against the assumption that they had got their vote effortlessly—that they were soft? Did she think this tactic would improve her chances of getting a fair hearing in England, where Dora Montefiore, Nellie Martel, Dora Meeson Coates and Muriel Matters had for years now earnt their militant stripes through their deeds, not words?
Whatever the motivation—hubris or self-doubt—the golden girl of Australian politics looked finally to have lost her sheen.