It had been a rough couple of years for Dora Meeson Coates.
In May 1909, both her beloved parents died. On the same day. Her father had been ailing for a few weeks, his degeneration diagnosed as the effects of bronchitis, when without warning her mother suffered a fatal heart attack. Her father died a few hours later. The dual loss was, in her words, a shattering blow. Without my father’s strong hand—at times repressive but always steadfast—to guide me Dora felt like a rudderless ship. The Meesons were our best friends and comrades, wrote Dora. George provided what Dora needed most: love and patient sympathy. It was what got her through.
The anguished couple moved back into Dora’s parents’ Ealing home, which eased the financial burden of surviving as artists but lost them the companionship of the close Chelsea community. In the spring of 1910, still stunned by the blow of the loss of both parents, the couple travelled to Italy, Paris and Luxembourg: a grand tour of art galleries, where Dora was uncomfortably reminded how dissimilar their tastes in painting were. (George preferred the heavy oils of the Italian masters; she revelled in the delicate frescoes.) She recalled too their unspoken pact: always he was the master and I the apprentice—not to mention being his amanuensis. Dora became a fairly efficient ghost, working on his paintings when he was too ill or tired or downhearted. George was a gentle force…painfully alive to the misery of the world. But he was also the truest, most constant and most solid thing in her life. She rarely left him on his own.
When they returned to England the couple found themselves in Chelsea again, leasing a studio in a nest of artists’ residences off King’s Road. They had some furniture now, souvenired from her parents’ home, and they bought a few pieces of antique furniture. George was particularly fond of a large Marie-Antoinette mirror which he placed under the window facing his sitters. He found it kept them interested either to look at themselves or to watch him at work reflected in the glass. By the spring of 1911, George was enjoying some welcome success as a portrait painter. Dora was happy and relieved for him, and always willing to step in when his vain and restless subjects could no longer be distracted like toddlers by their own reflected image. He generally finished the hands of his sitters from mine, she admitted, as, although not in any way beautiful, he found they gave him better than a model the form and pose he needed. Dora was cheap and could keep still.
The warmth and promise of spring was good for Dora. Two years had passed since her bereavement, and the artist community in Chelsea was her substitute family. There were plays put on in their studio, with up to fifty friends taking the roles of shepherds and nymphs in their garden pastorals. There were dancing parties and suffrage meetings and charades nights and boxing practice with George’s men-artist friends. George had a surprising reputation for his boxing prowess, so swift, sure and unexpected was his play. And he was giving Dora boxing lessons, which she found great fun and wonderful exercise.
There was an uncomfortable scene in this bohemian pastoral, though. A professor from the prestigious Slade School came scouting for an exhibition. After looking through the jumble of George and Dora’s works, he told her to send a little landscape of hers to a particular gallery. But we don’t want anything of your husband’s the professor told Dora plainly, having barely even glanced at George’s portraits. Neither of them ever submitted work to the gallery.
It was a tricky balance, this business of staying afloat, pitching towards independence, tipping back into a stable place of mutual regard and reciprocal reward. When the census man came knocking on 2 April, Dora leant towards compliance. She would never say it, but that summer of 1908 when, inspired by her new artist and suffrage friends and their huge canvasses, she had painted a tall, bold banner to aid the cause—it was a moment when Dora had truly steered her own course. She so admired people who did things.
By 4 May, Vida had been in England for almost six weeks. She had attended innumerable receptions in her honour, as well as addressing crowds in public halls and private parlours in the north and south of the country. She published letters and articles in journals and newspapers. She had met with constitutionalists and Conservatives, Labourites and Liberals. There had been little rest and plenty of talk. But she was a good listener, too, and when, on 4 May, Prime Minister Asquith finally divulged that he had received a resolution from the Australian Senate via cablegram six months earlier, Vida was all ears. She waited for the reaction. What she heard was the sound of deafening silence.
The Senate resolution had been widely publicised in the suffrage press under the banner of Australia’s Advice, but sank without a trace in the mainstream media.1 For months now, the general press had been maintaining a boycott of any news or information related to suffrage activities. (Thus the Albert Hall meeting, attended by ten thousand people, did not rate a mention in the major London dailies—a situation described by many in the suffrage movement as a scandalous indictment of British liberty, supposedly based on freedom of the press.2)
On 4 May, a way was found to sidestep the press boycott and force Asquith’s hand in parliament. Labour MP Philip Snowden, whose wife Ethel was a prominent socialist feminist, asked the prime minister a question. Had Mr Asquith received from Australia a resolution of the Senate declaring that the extension of the suffrage to the women of Australia for States and Commonwealth Parliament had brought nothing but good, urging all nations enjoying representative Government to grant votes to women? And had His Majesty’s Government considered this resolution with a view of acting upon the advice given? Asquith replied that he had indeed received a copy of the resolution but he regretted to say the minds of the Government were still divided as to the expediency of woman suffrage.3 This being foreign affairs news, not suffrage news, the press duly reported the exchange. Asquith’s reply did not bode well for the fate of the Conciliation Bill.
Vida had of course heard all about Asquith’s famous smokescreens, stonewalls and parliamentary obfuscations. But just as it was unexpectedly humiliating to actually sit behind the grille—the experience of it much worse than the idea of it—so it was now maddeningly irritating to witness Asquith’s blithe deflection of the Senate resolution she’d worked so hard to engineer. The arrogance steeled her patriotic heart. If ever she might have felt a sense of belonging in this strange land, Vida was now achingly aware of her status as an outlander.
White women were safe in their political rights while in Australasia, but when they left the sanctuary of the antipodes, they were again vulnerable to a precipitous loss of status. Once in England, Australian women were no longer voters—as Nellie Martel, Muriel Matters and Dora Montefiore had been pointing out at every opportunity for the last five years. But there was a further dilemma.
In Australia, laws had been passed to safeguard the British subject status of Australia’s married women. Customarily, a woman assumed the nationality of her husband upon marriage, just as her name, children and property became his. In 1903, urged on by campaigns run by the Women’s Political Association and other female-led lobby groups, the Naturalisation Act 1903 created equal nationality laws for men and women, meaning that a woman, in Vida’s words, no longer acquired on marriage the legal status and individuality of her husband.4 To Vida, the Naturalisation Act was an example of the fact that all the social reform legislation for which Australia is noted has been vigorously supported by women voters.5 But should an Australian woman marry a non-British national (a Frenchman, say, or an American) and live with him in England, under the British Naturalisation Act she acquired his legal identity and automatically lost her right to British subject status. It was like being transported back to the days of the femme covert—the ‘hidden’ legal status that the Married Women’s Property Acts had begun to peel back in the 1870s.
Vida determined to throw her energies behind a solution to the problem with a very specific name. Just as she had set up the Women’s Political Association in Melbourne to bring together like-minded female advocates for social justice, so she knew that an activist lobby group would be the way to draw together compatible campaigners from among the thousands of Australasian women presently living in London.
On the night of 4 May, Vida happened to be entertained to dinner by the Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage at Pagani’s Restaurant in central London. It would be an ecumenical affair, with speeches by Mrs Fawcett, Mrs Despard and Christabel Pankhurst, representing each of the three major suffrage associations. William Pember Reeves, who had been New Zealand’s agent-general in London until 1905 and was now running the London School of Economics, was slated to chair. Although Reeves had gallingly pioneered the ‘one fine day’ school of argument about New Zealand women’s historic attainment of the vote he, along with Sir John Cockburn, had been a loud and regular mouthpiece for the virtues of women’s suffrage. His wife Maude Pember Reeves, a Fabian who ran in the same circles as George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells, was also a force in the Australasian expat suffrage scene.
The WSPU had hoped that a number of Colonials would attend the MLWS dinner for Vida, and Vida now hoped so too. She knew exactly the sort of lobby group she wanted to establish in London: the Australian and New Zealand Women Voters’ Committee. It would be the first time that Australia and New Zealand joined forces in an acronym representing Australasian kinship. Two sister dominions joined by the political pre-eminence of their female citizens. They would be the ANZWVC.
But on the night of the dinner, Vida kept her plans off the official agenda and restricted herself to her well-worn narrative: how Australian women had won their vote, what they were doing with it now they had it, and some of her own adventures on the campaign trail. She included the key takeaway that victory had been achieved because our men electors have a keener sense of justice than the men in England have—despite the mendacity of the press.
She concluded on a note of romantic optimism: I am quite sure that this year of 1911 you will see the men of England lay at the feet of the women of England the beautiful red and white roses of chivalry and justice.
One of the distinguished guests, Laurence Houseman, wrapped up the formal part of the evening with a bizarre parable based on Edward Lear’s poem, ‘The Duck and the Kangaroo’. In the present case, Houseman began, the kangaroo represented this great wide woman’s movement, so startling in its progressive leaps and bounds. The duck was practical politics, the Conciliation Bill, the rather small temporary expression of it. It is the kangaroo, he chortled to the crowd, that takes the duck into the great world.6
Dora Meeson Coates was among the founding members of the ANZWC when it met for the first time on 11 May, a week after the jaunty dinner at Pagani’s. Maybe she sensed an affinity with Vida. They were both native-born Victorians, both practising Christian Scientists, both forty-two years old and childless. Maybe she was a little star-struck—Vida Goldstein was after all the biggest thing that had happened in the women’s movement for some time in England, as Stella Miles Franklin noticed when she arrived in London in 1911.7
Sir John Cockburn’s wife, Lady Sarah Cockburn, was the founding president. She and her husband had been active suffrage campaigners since moving to London from Adelaide in 1898, when John became agent-general of South Australia. Lady Anna Stout came forward as the heavyweight from New Zealand, the colonial counter-punch of Vida Goldstein. At this first meeting, the founding objective of the committee was formulated and affirmed.
To watch over the interests of Australian and New Zealand women under Imperial legislation, and to promote their welfare generally from this side of the world. To help forward the Women’s Movement in every part of the British Empire.
The first part of the objective was defensive: to protect their own. The second part was offensive: to leverage their unique status to assert the rights of others. The dual purposes were indissoluble. This stigma cast by English law on Australasian women, Vida wrote in an article for VOTES FOR WOMEN, must be removed, and the best way to remove it is to enfranchise English women.8
The committee adopted three founding principles.
1. To represent to the Imperial Conference the disabilities of Australian and New Zealand women under the Naturalisation Act;
2. To represent to Asquith the loss of political status incurred by Australian and New Zealand women who lived in Great Britain;
3. To make arrangements for an Australian and New Zealand contingent in the Women’s Procession on June 17th.
Like Vida’s WPA in Victoria, the ANZWVC would be educational and political. Implicitly, the work of the committee would also be constitutional. Neither Australia nor New Zealand had won its pre-eminent status as pacemakers of the world through militant means. There was no reason to start now. For Vida, whose reputation at home took a savage blow when she was seen to endorse the tactics of the WSPU on behalf of all Australian women, it was particularly important to toe the legal line. It was also important to demonstrate her national allegiance over suffrage party politics, something she’d been careful about previously. When a reporter asked her before she left Australia how long she was likely to remain in England, she said that while there would be plenty to do in the old land…I’m afraid I’m a woman and will long for home—Australia.9
The ANZWVC’s avowed function was to lobby the heads of government at the forthcoming Imperial Conference—their own governments as well as Britain’s. But the committee’s first order of business was more immediate. In late February the colonial secretary, Mr Lewis Harcourt, had made an appearance at an anti-suffrage demonstration at the Albert Hall. Now the ANZWVC executive sent a letter to Harcourt expressing its deep regret at his actions holding as they do that his public opposition to the enfranchisement of women is a slight upon those two Dominions in which equal suffrage is an integral part of the Constitution.10 When Harcourt didn’t reply, the ANZWVC passed on a copy of his reactionary speech to the prime ministers of Australia and New Zealand, Andrew Fisher and Sir Joseph Ward. The committee asked to be informed whether the public condemnation of any Constitutional principle accepted in any of the self-governing Dominions is compatible with the tenure of office of Colonial Secretary. In other words, could Harcourt get away with trashing the founding political and philosophical tenets of two cherished members of the imperial family?
The colonial secretary was on notice that Australian and New Zealand women would not stand idly by and watch their national ideals be so diminished. Vida had long maintained that women’s enfranchisement was necessary not only for the protection of women and children and for industrial well-being, but also for national righteousness.11 Embracing (white) women as equal citizens was critical to a country’s fundamental rectitude, its honesty and decency. The ANZWVC action was also, therefore, a reminder to the respective prime ministers that women’s suffrage was not window-dressing for self-government, something to be dusted down and shown off when useful for display. It was a structural beam in the edifice of Australasian democracy. In Australia’s case, women voters had contributed to the federation that was the bedrock of the Commonwealth. To undermine the centrality of their civic role, as the colonial secretary was now doing, was an insult to the nation. Would Fisher accede to the slur or stand up for the integrity of his citizens? Was he sovereign man or sycophantic mouse?
The ANZWVC had fired its first rhetorical salvo. The next challenge was to persuade Fisher to add the iniquitous British Naturalisation Act to the agenda for the Imperial Conference. Oh, and also to rally the thousands of Australian women who lived in London, drawn to the centre of the imperial action, to join the Women’s Procession on 17 June, only six weeks away.
Nellie Melba’s accompanist, Agnes Murphy, had signed up. So had the pioneer educators Harriet Newcomb and Margaret Hodge, English women who had opened a school in Sydney that fielded one of the first female cricket teams.12 They had returned ‘home’ in 1908 due to Hodge’s ill health; now Newcomb urged London’s antipodean women to join the ANZWVCs. These fortunate souls, beseeched Miss Newcomb, must not forget their duty towards their sisters of the Motherland who are struggling to obtain the powers and privileges which the women of the South already possess and which they regard as a sacred trust.13
Could Nellie Martel also be drawn out of the woodwork? Would Muriel Matters be brought back into the fold? For now, Dora Meeson Coates had been coaxed out of her grief and into a new family outside the Chelsea bubble, one that anchored her to where she came from, and gave her a fresh sense of purpose. She was an ANZWVC. And Vida Goldstein had an empire-wide league of her own.
Margaret and Andrew Fisher arrived in London on 14 May to the biggest brouhaha the city had seen in years. It was nothing like the deadly Siege of Sidney Street, thankfully, although authorities were working hard to suppress industrial unrest in the East End, and the government, still unable to deliver on its promised social reforms, feared a summer epidemic of ‘strike fever’.14
No, the commotion into which the Fishers arrived was not a calamity but a carnival. The Festival of Empire opened at the Crystal Palace on 12 May, touted as the civic centrepiece of coronation celebrations. Each of the five countries of the British Empire—Canada, South Africa, New Zealand, Australia and Newfoundland15—put on a display of their chief products and hence chief purpose to the empire. The items were displayed in models of each country’s parliamentary buildings, built to a three-quarter scale. The All Red Route, a miniature train with rail cars carrying eighty passengers each, took more than sixty thousand people a day (10 a.m. to 11 p.m.) around a twenty-minute circuit where they would feast the eye on a living picture of the more salient characteristics of the British Empire.16
Newfoundland where split codfish are drying on the flakes; Jamaican darkies at work amid the sugar cane; the mystery of an Indian jungle complete with Mr Stripes, the tiger. Next stop Australia: Sydney, the most beautiful harbour in the world and a lofty Blue Mountains waterfall down which real water is falling at a rate of sixty million gallons (230 million litres) per day; a sheep run and sheep-shearing in actual operation. (Not live sheep, but dummies.) Then on to New Zealand: frozen mutton loaded for the home market and Rotorua geysers in action; South African natives at work and play, goldfields, diamond mines. It’s a small empire after all.
The King himself opened the festival of his empire before a huge crowd. We hope every success will crown the labours of those who, promoting this Festival of Empire, have striven to serve the cause of Imperial unity, and to awaken interest on the historic part of our great mother city.17
If Dora Montefiore had been present, she would have dismissed the King’s speech as so much sentimental claptrap. This three months’ orgie of pageantry, she lamented from the land of real sheep-shearing, this one-sided and vulgarly blatant interpretation of the evolution, culmination and responsibility of Empire. The fifteen thousand people who would be performing daily at the festival, all those codfish splitters and cane cutters, were labouring at their own expense. This—this exploitation and corruption—was the only truly accurate representation of empire, a record of deeds of filibustering and of crime. Dora exhorted the socialists of London to hold a pageant of their own, a nightly vigil on the Thames Embankment,
In which the actors should be the unemployed men and women of this city, the underfed children, the homeless wanderers, whom the stress of competition and the daily increasing pressure of industrialisation have thrust outside the pale of society.
This—this is the heart of the great and boastful Empire! she thundered. The sound of empire was not trumpets and waterfalls but the weak cry of the hungry babe drawing the empty breast. This was what Americans and Japanese and Continental Europeans should come and study and take to heart.18 Couldn’t they see that the world was burning to the ground? The future was not the rise of nation-states and the coming together of imperial networks of trade and political economy. It was a new world order, based on peace and justice, of international bonds of collective strength. Not global hierarchies of domination and subservience.
They didn’t see, though. Dora’s was a voice in the wilderness, much like the Australian republican ranting from his soapbox in the Domain: some wild-tongued Anarchist haranguing a crowd—to its amusement—decrying the Monarchy.19 Nothing, claimed the REVIEW OF REVIEWS in full festival mode, is more characteristic of the people of Australia than their passionate loyalty to the British Empire.
We may consider our life freer than that of the people of Great Britain. We may wonder why they put up with certain anachronisms in political and social life. That, however, is their business, and the son loves the father none the less for these hoary antiquities in his makeup.
It remained to be seen whether the daughters of empire were as forgiving of the mother.
Andrew and Margaret Fisher were in Egypt, enjoying a stopover at the Pyramids, when news came that the referendum had been lost. It was a bitter blow. Fisher had staked much of his prime ministerial authority on his plan to reduce the power of monopolies and give the federal government more control over industrial relations. It had always been a risk to leave the ambitious little Welshman, Billy Hughes, in charge of the government (and hence the government’s Yes campaign) while Fisher attended the Imperial Conference. Some in the press had referred to the London trip as a little junketing.20 PUNCH had decided it is the wives of politicians who are driving them off to London, the none-too-subtle implication being that women like Mrs Fisher and Mrs McGowen, the wife of the New South Wales premier, were packing all their clothes and belongings to parade their colonial finery in front of royalty.21 It now looked like the coronation might have cost Fisher not just his manly reign over a frivolous wife, but also control of the government’s agenda.
Those analysing the results of the election didn’t consider Fisher’s absence from the last three weeks of the Yes campaign a major factor. Rather, pundits acknowledged that just as Fisher’s government had swept into power at the last federal election due to the superior organising skills of Labor women, so the No vote was largely mobilised by female voters. It was the women’s vote that turned the scale, argued Miss Rose-Soley in an article republished in REVIEW OF REVIEWS. The fact is universally acknowledged. For once, while men hesitated, women rushed off to the polling booth with their minds made up. Women constituted the majority of voters on the rolls, in some districts surpassing male electors by more than four thousand. The female vote is quite sufficient to turn the scale when it pleases, surmised Miss Rose-Soley. And it wasn’t the Labor women turning on Fisher.
It was the Liberal, otherwise the anti-Labor, vote that won because the Liberal woman had suddenly become ashamed of herself. She had it dinned into her ears to satiety that her supineness lost the last elections.
Liberal women had been called lazy, indifferent voters (Vida Goldstein had certainly said this) while Labor women were nothing of the sort. It wouldn’t have mattered whether Fisher was standing on a soapbox in the Domain or climbing the Pyramids of Giza. The Liberal woman pulled herself together and exercised her privilege.22
Whether Fisher had come undone courtesy of a newly energised groundswell of conservative women, or a conniving deputy or an electorate for which too much progressive change had come too quickly, one thing was certain. His prestige was shaken by the referendum results. It was not the white horse of success upon which he would have liked to charge into London, rising to his advance reputation as the first elected Labour head of government in the world.
Dora Montefiore had little sympathy. She had nothing to say to those who join in Coronation festivities. And in particular, she had nothing good to say to Vida Goldstein.