The Greatest Procession Known in History
It was no surprise to anyone when the soft pink dawn of Saturday 17 June ripened into a spectacular golden day. The Women’s Coronation Procession threatened to become the Melting March, as one wag put it.1
There was certainly no chance of it being a repeat of the Mud March of 1907, when women had first taken to the streets en masse to protest their political exclusion and advocate their citizenship rights. In the intervening four years the world had watched the British suffrage movement transform from a staid, bluestocking affair to a youthful riot of colour and exuberance.2 During this period—The Four Years War, Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence called it—the world had also seen a handful of powerful men impose on the British polity, through their mulish arrogance, a regime of vengeful persecution and the tacit indulgence of police brutality. In the process, the British public morphed from apathetic bystanders to fervent spectators, hungry for the next episode in the serial melodrama of the suffragettes.
The transformation in the women’s movement from sleeping giant to seething termagant had been aided, and in many ways prompted, by what Emmeline Pankhurst had termed outside forces. Nellie Martel leading the first outdoor protest meeting at Westminster on 12 May 1905; Dora Montefiore’s headline-grabbing Siege of Hammersmith in June 1906 adding passive resistance to the arsenal of civil disobe-dience; Muriel Matters performing the most spectacular deeds of daring rectitude, in the House and in the heavens. All claiming the status of enfranchised Australian women as both motivation and authority for their brazen actions. All gaoled for their transgressions.
And Vida Goldstein, playing the game of political brinkmanship from abroad; negotiating—indeed drafting—a resolution from the Australian Parliament to the British government, a statesman in everything but title and salary. Now the canny diplomat was here, in the metropole, the centre of the action, still marshalling the forces of moral and patriotic coercion. Raising a corps of ground troops—the ANZWVCs—organised to keep up the pressure and influence decision-making in London in a more rigorous and sustainable way than show-stopping political fireworks.
As a newly minted foundational ANZWVC, Dora Meeson Coates had to make a choice: follow her high-profile countrywoman into the front line or continue to skirt the flanks of the movement. She too had brought skill and dedication—and the heady sense of entitlement mixed with grievance that characterised other Australian activists in Britain—to the suffrage campaign. Through her artistic contributions to NUWSS and WFL propaganda and her flirtation with mild militancy—postering and parading, but not census-resisting or window-breaking—Dora had defied her conformist upbringing and her cautious husband. She had identified with the cause; contributed to it. But she had not led by example. Today, Dora had the opportunity to march in the front line of history. Literally.
For Australia and New Zealand—in honour of those countries’ pre-eminent, path-breaking achievements in the global campaign for women’s enfranchisement—had been given pole position in the Women’s Coronation Procession, forming up behind the leadership of the WSPU. The significance of the procession will be world-wide, reported the London correspondent for the Adelaide REGISTER, for the procession will not only be national in its character, but also Imperial and international.3 Noting that Australian women had been enfranchised in the coronation year of Edward VII, the journalist predicted that the crowning glory of the Coronation year of King George V will be the emancipation of the women at the heart and centre of the Empire. The gift of historical coincidence made the imminent success of the British suffrage movement appear inevitable.
If Vida was concerned that people would not turn up to witness the great event, she needn’t have worried. You couldn’t hold them back. It was Suffrage Day! exclaimed Christabel Pankhurst. The climax of all peaceful effort! In this direction there was nothing left to do.4 For the spectators, nothing to do but watch the passing parade. For the peaceful protesters, nothing to do but walk together, heads held high. Selectively, the women marshalled in their suffrage societies and professional or geographical groupings. Collectively, they embodied the full spectrum of British womanhood.
An elated Christabel Pankhurst described the mass of women who came together that day:
Toilers from factory workshop, field and garret; wave after wave, rank after rank…Endless it seemed—Science, Art, Medicine, Culture, Ethics, Music, Drama, Poverty, Slumdom, Youth, Age, Sorrow, Labour, Motherhood—all there represented.5
Mother, Christabel wrote later, walked at the head.6
All of the publicising, pushing and puffing had paid off. Suffragists and suffragettes alike had been asked to form up at the Embankment at 5.30 p.m., organised into contingents. And there they were: forty thousand women. Several thousand man sympathisers. One thousand banners. One hundred female marching bands. Twenty-eight societies. Horses. Floats. Costumes. And the colours. Everywhere, the colours.
The streets were thronged with cheering crowds, noted Christabel.7 From the Thames to Trafalgar Square, past Pall Mall and Piccadilly, a surge of onlookers craned to get a glimpse of the extravagant display wending its way past London’s most iconic landmarks. People stood six or eight deep on either side of the streets. Taxis and buses lined the streets, with people poking their heads out from inside or standing on top. People scrambled to fill the seats in the stands that had been erected for the royal pageantry of the following week. They leaned out of the upper windows of clubs and private residences, watching the advance of that great army marching five abreast.8 To the Antis, remarked the REVIEW OF REVIEWS, who looked down from the club windows in Pall Mall, the procession must have seemed like a deadly boa constrictor stretching its coil around its fascinated victim.9
The best vantage point for the snaking line of dissenters was from outside Green Park near Piccadilly, where one obtained a splendid view of the cortege as it came down the slope of the hill with the gorgeous, changing, scintillating, iridescent colours of the banners flashing in the sun.10 Photographer Christina Broom set up her camera and tripod in the middle of the Embankment, where she could capture the fine-grain detail of the women as, in the words of one participant, they walked in the dust of the summer’s day: broad hats to keep off the late afternoon sun, flat shoes peeping out below full summer frocks and skirts that fell to the ground, gloved hands gripping banner poles, flags and hand-crafted emblems (shamrocks for the Irish, elephants for the Indians, lattice gates for the prisoners). Some objects in motion became a blur on Broom’s glass plates; other images show the sharp-edged defiance of young women staring straight into the camera.11
This was no jumble of humanity: the order of the march was strictly sorted and tightly choreographed. A printed program of the event, sold for a penny by the WSPU, made it clear that nothing had been left to chance. Should the police choose to strike that day, holding back the tide with batons and fists as they had on Black Friday, the assailants would encounter not a rabble but a fully realised formation. Taking the lead was General Drummond—on horseback, naturally, and clad in a green habit. At a mare’s breadth walked Miss Charlotte Marsh, the colour bearer, a young woman with a crown of gold hair, who had been force-fed in Holloway. Behind her rode Joan of Arc on a white steed of her own, played by silver-helmeted, flag-bearing Miss Marjorie Annan Bryce, the daughter of a Scottish businessman and Liberal politician. Then came the WSPU committee officials—the Emmelines, with Christabel and Mabel Tuke—walking tall, all resplendent in white. Christabel wearing her academic regalia; her mother, steely blue gaze fixed ahead, mouth set, a step ahead of the pack.
Next came the prisoners’ pageant, the cohort that Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence considered to be the most significant and beautiful, with the seven hundred women marching to represent the seven hundred who had to date been incarcerated in the struggle for the vote. They too wore white frocks and wide-brimmed hats, some trimmed with daisies, and each carried a simple white flag. Rising from their midst was a large banner depicting, in Emmeline’s words, a symbolic woman with a broken chain in her hands and the inscription: From Prison to Citizenship.12
Following the prisoners’ pageant was the historical pageant, illustrating, according to the official program, the great political power held by women in the past history of these Isles, the last vestige of which was lost with the vote in 1832 when the Reform Bill was passed. In order to look forward to a new dawn, the suffragettes consistently looked back to prior female heroines whose deeds provided historical inspiration for the modern movement.
Thus here, costumed in gorgeous fabrics with exquisite stitching (that £100,000 war chest the WSPU had amassed was being put to extravagant use) were the Abbess Hilda with her attendant nuns. Peeresses summoned to parliament in the reign of Edward III. Women governors, custodians of castles, high sheriffs of counties and justices of the peace. Burgesses on the parliamentary register in the reign of Elizabeth. Freewomen of various companies and corporations: mercers, stationers, drapers, grocers and fishmongers. Women who were voteless after the Reform Bill, in their early Victorian costume: Charlotte Bronte, Grace Darling, Harriet Martineau, Florence Nightingale. And behind them, the women trailing at the end of a glorious but fractured history, came the women who had started a new era in female sovereignty.
For here came the Representatives of Countries where women have the vote: New Zealand, Australia, Norway and Finland, plus American women representing the enfranchised states of Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho and Washington.
Following this scene-setting, breathtaking beginning, the procession stretched for a further four miles.
The empire pageant, a stunning horse-drawn float of white canvas, linen and lace, rising like a triumphal wedding cake, decorated with upright nymphs holding the emblems of the colonies and dependencies: the maple leaf, the Indian elephant, the springbok and the New Zealand tree-fern; gilded harps and shamrocks, the red dragon of Wales, Scotland’s rampant lion, and the kangaroo. The West Indian, Mediterranean, African and Pacific colonies were technically represented by white-robed brides of empire who sat at the feet of the King, but they were denied a motif, the charm bracelet of empire missing a few symbolic links.13
Now came the International Contingent, as many women from as many lands as could be scooped up from London’s immigrant population and bulging tourist quarters: Sweden, Switzerland, Portugal, Italy, Russia, Romania, Germany, Spain. Nation-states with armies and churches and factories and universities—but no enfranchised women.
And now the hoi-polloi of suffrage societies: from the Actresses’ Franchise League through the Gymnastic Teachers’ Suffrage Society and the Jewish Women’s Suffrage Society to the Women’s Freedom League, along with the endless regional and municipal branches of the WSPU and NUWSS. At the head of the NUWSS section was Mrs Fawcett, leading ten thousand members of the oldest established constitutional organisation. Being drawn along in a bath chair: Mrs Saul Solomon of South Africa, who had been rendered an invalid in the Black Friday attack. She represented all the women whose bodies, but not spirits, had been crushed that day. Mrs Solomon carried a banner with the subtly insubordinate message: Join the next Deputation.14
Finally, bringing up the rear, waiting patiently at the Embankment for three hours as the other cabs left the ranks, were the men’s groups: the Men’s Political Union for Women’s Enfranchisement, the Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage, the Men’s Committee for Justice to Women, and assorted Friends and Sympathisers. By the time these contingents reached the Albert Hall, the sell-out meeting hosted by Emmeline Pankhurst that marked the end of the procession had well and truly finished. The tail of that great army, enthused one participant, had not even started when the leaders reached their destination.15 The men—the procession’s appendage—arrived in darkness.
The women have had triumphal processions before, said THE TIMES, but this was beyond them all in numbers and effect!16
Of the most imposing and inspiring character, admitted the DAILY NEWS.
Never before has such pageantry passed through the streets of London, judged the DAILY CHRONICLE.
A red letter day in the history of the movement for the emancipation of women, reported the REVIEW OF REVIEWS for distant Australasian readers who were also in Empire mood.17
An astonishing demonstration, said the MANCHESTER GUARDIAN, the only daily newspaper to have consistently eschewed the press boycott,
but more astonishing the acceptance, the enthusiasm in the streets. The police have so much confidence in the women that they left them to their huge task unaided. For a men’s procession half the size there would have been barricades.
And that was the truth. The Women’s Coronation Procession had passed off non-violently: a diplomatic demonstration of the aspirations and achievements of forty thousand women. Forty thousand women with faces to the dawn, as THE VOTE summed up the mood of optimism and unity.18 If the coronation was intended to be an object-lesson in the power and dignity of Imperial manhood, as suffragette Elizabeth Robins wrote, then the Women’s Coronation Procession had demonstrated just what a splendidly barbaric Pageant of militarism his crowning would be. By contrast, the event projected, guided, marshalled by British women was an homage to a peaceful Ruler.19 Despite the military metaphors they themselves used, the women’s methods had remained pacific and conciliatory.
And the British public returned the favour. Those forty thousand brave faces were neither spat in nor smacked down nor scorned. From press and punters alike, words of encouragement and salutation were generously thrown out, in a diversity of tongues, from such a cosmopolitan crowd as London has seldom seen before. No one hurled the old time-worn requests to ‘go home and do the washing’ or ‘mend father’s socks’. Kate Parry Frye, who had come up on the train from Buckinghamshire for the day to volunteer as a group captain, was surprised to find that the crowd was so quiet—hardly a rude remark and constant applause all the way for us.20 No one threw rocks at their heads or dragged them from their homemade horse-drawn conveyances.
Is it any wonder that militants, constitutionalists and commentators agreed that, after such a show of loyal comradeship, of sisterly solidarity and popular adulation, the days of contempt, of ridicule and of real antagonism to the cause of woman suffrage had gone for ever?21 The Women’s Coronation Procession was a stunning public relations coup.
The question remaining was how Asquith would respond to the shift in public opinion.
The George Rose Stereograph Company of Melbourne captured three images of the Great Suffragette Demonstration of London, as the stereoscope photographs are labelled. The first, taken from a slightly elevated position at the back of a crowd (Rose appears not to have enjoyed the same access to the front line as Christina Broom) is of the empire car. Emerging from a sea of straw boaters and trimmed bonnets is the horse-drawn wedding cake passing through Trafalgar Square. The stereoscope, with its 3D effect, shows the lily white float hovering, as it seems, before the sepia brown buildings of central London. An apparition of imperial loveliness.
The second image shows The Australian Section forming up on the Thames Embankment, according to the printed caption.22 In this picture, a dozen or so women wearing simple white dresses and unpretentious hats mill about beneath a modest banner, waiting for their turn to set off from Blackfriars Bridge towards the Albert Hall. They have gilt kangaroos on sticks—the sort that an enterprising souvenir vendor might sell at a fair—and the banner depicts the Australian coat of arms: the official one, with the cock-legged emu, the cartoon kangaroo and the Advance Australia logo that Andrew Fisher so deplored and had tried to have expunged. It’s impossible to tell whether the design is stitched or printed onto the white fabric backing, but it is unmistakably hokey, a cheap graphic ill-befitting the nation that had pioneered [women] into citizenship.23
There is another noteworthy detail, so peripheral as to be easily missed. On the far right, almost out of shot, is the unmistakable face of Nellie Martel. She is, uncharacteristically, half-hidden and peeking out from behind two other figures. Though she is not mentioned in any of the accounts of the day, neither personal testimonies nor newspaper reports, Nellie had quite evidently been unable to stay away from the action. Like a moth to the flame, she had gravitated back to the Australian contingent, to the nation with which she always associated most strongly, at least in terms of her political identity. Our Australian friend, as Christabel Pankhurst had called her in more congenial times, had come out to support her adopted countrywomen. True to form, she was wearing a most flamboyant hat, cut from a dark cloth, and trimmed with a ring of large white flowers—chrysanthemums or carnations. Her smiling face is almost dwarfed by its enormous brim. On the fringe, then, but hardly inconspicuous. And there’s the familiar twinkle in her eye, the same one that peered over Emmeline Pankhurst and Charlotte Despard around a conference table in the early days at Caxton Hall. A twinkle that reassures the observer that you cannot keep a stellar woman down.
The third image in the Rose stereograph set captures five upright women (ten, if you’re looking at the photograph as intended, through the stereographic viewer), standing in a row, stiff as boards, in front of the Advance Australia banner. They stare into the camera. Each wears a spray of tri-coloured ribbons pinned to the left lapel. Both the Australian and New Zealand contingents chose red, white and blue for their ‘colours’ on the day, as being the only women, explained one of the marchers, who are entitled to wear the ‘Empire’ colours as a right, and not as a privilege.24 Unlike the spontaneous image that captured Nellie in the background, this is a posed shot. A staged moment in history. The caption names three of the women: Mrs Fisher, Mrs McGowen and Miss Vida Goldstein.25
Of course Vida hadn’t gone to the Stockholm Congress. I would not have missed that march for anything on earth, she later told a reporter.26 Mrs Catt was disappointed in her decision but no other was possible. Vida had previously admitted in a letter home to the WPA that she was being run off her feet in England, with so many speaking engagements that sleep was barely an option. But she loved every minute of my work and the splendid women I am working with.27 She could no sooner abandon these women than forsake her God. Since…women in the United Kingdom gaining the vote means so much to women in all parts of the world, she reasoned, we who have it must do all we can to help those who are deprived of it, and Australians must make a brave show in the procession as peacemakers. It was in that last week before the procession, the very time she’d need to be en route to Stockholm, when I shall be most needed, and could not think of leaving those who brought me here just at such a critical moment.
Perhaps it is the exhaustion, or the brave show, or the mild regret that tells on Vida’s face in the stereograph.28 She looks pinched and careworn, the strain of duty overwhelming the triumph of raising a contingent of over 170 Australian and New Zealand women. Or perhaps it is simply quiet Edwardian pride: what one Australian woman in London who marched that day noted as an air of serious dignity among her compatriots.29
Margaret Fisher, in the middle of the group, towers above them all, her height, bulk and naturally thick waist disguising the early stages of her pregnancy. She wears a plain, unassuming skirt and jacket, in keeping with her aversion to dressing up, and signalling that her presence rather than her attire is what is noteworthy about her astonishing addition to the Australian contingent. Atop her natural six feet and three inches, however, Margaret has added a voluminous purple hat, trimmed with the ostrich feathers that Andrew had acquired in Cairo.30
Vida (whose own hat adds at least six inches to her tall, slender elegance) later revealed that she was able to extract Margaret’s promise to walk in our procession at the dinner given by the British Labour Party. The presence of the prime minister’s wife was a tremendous help in encouraging other Australian women to take part in the procession31 and it was not by any stretch an undertaking that could be taken for granted. Vida acknowledged that Mrs Fisher had been a warm sympathiser in the great economic and ethical movement in which women in every part of the world are engaged.32 But sympathy was one thing; partaking was a horse of a different colour. Her participation was a political act, a statement of defiance. It meant either that her husband, the Prime Minister of Australia, also supported the public demonstrations of the militant suffrage campaigners, or that she was acting in violation of her husband’s wishes. Either scenario was a reflection on the man at least as much as his wife. Given that Vida had copped so much flak for claiming that Australian women sanctioned the tactics of the suffragettes, the fact that Andrew Fisher’s wife was marching at the head of a contingent of Australian women—behind the official Coat of Arms of Australia, in a WSPU-sponsored rally—was an incontrovertible no-confidence motion in the British government.
The significance of Mrs Fisher’s presence was not lost on the press. It was noted in the extensive Australian and British media coverage of the event. The MANCHESTER GUARDIAN was typical in remarking that Australia had the wife of the Prime Minister of Australia, among its contingent.33 Melbourne PUNCH, in its routinely disparaging way, managed to remind readers that a peaceful procession was the happy outcome of the day, but far from guaranteed.
Let us hope Mrs Prime Minister and Mrs Premier made express stipulation that, in the event of a row, they were not expected to kick, bite, slap or otherwise maim or maltreat a policeman. In Australia the sex secured the suffrage without finding it necessary to tear policemen’s hair or kick in the shins of Ministers of the Crown, and both the Australian ladies mentioned, being unused to the game, would probably make a mess of it if they attempted to operate among the militant propagandists of the London movement.34
The real issue was not whether Margaret Fisher or Mrs McGowen might be disposed to bite and kick like tantruming toddlers, but whether, in the event of a Black Friday-style attack, they would have been subject to the same police and mob brutality—including assault, battery and sexual violation—as the suffragettes had been in the past. In 1911 not even a prime minister’s wife travelled with a bodyguard.
But if there was safety in numbers, then Margaret would be sheltered in the company of at least 170 other Australian and New Zealand women. In the front row of the contingent, marching behind Margaret, were Mrs McGowen, Mrs Batchelor, Mrs Bowman (wife of the leader of the opposition in Queensland), Lady Cockburn—and Vida Goldstein, the only woman whose ambassadorial status was won by merit, not marriage. Some of the women who brought up the rear were well known to English and Australian audiences: actors Inez Bensusan and Madge Titherage, singer Carrie Haase, writers Constance Clyde and Alice Grant Rosman. According to Vida, Margaret Fisher had the support of the onlookers, too, her tall figure instantly recognised and cheered by the crowd.35 Bystanders applauded all the groups that passed, but gave a particularly hearty welcome to the Australians. (Given that it took three hours for the procession to pass by any given point, the Australians may have benefitted from their early spot in the draw.)
Vida’s interpretation of the demonstrative clamour was that the sightseers recognised the gilt kangaroos carried by the marchers as representing Australia ‘where women vote’ and congratulated the contingent accordingly. But best of all the praise were the ‘coo-ees’—real unmistakable Australian coo-ees—that rang out from the crowd surprisingly often. Like Muriel, who’d enjoyed the fellow-feeling of countrymen on her vanning tours around England, expressed by the inimitable bush call, Vida was buoyed by the affinity of the gesture. Everytime we heard them we straightened ourselves up and stepped out more briskly, she admitted, to do extra credit to Australia. Those coo-ees put new life into us, and made us feel as if we could walk miles further. The sense of being a nation on show was palpable.
And if the comradeship and applause were not support enough, Margaret Fisher was flanked by not one but three sizable material expressions of national association and self-belief. For the crude cloth bearing the humorously exaggerated figures of a kangaroo and emu was not the only banner that the Australian brigade raised that day.36 There was also a large scarlet silk flag with the stars of the Southern Cross flung across it, carried by Vida’s sister-in-law, Mrs Selwyn Goldstein, a native of Perth.37 Vida described its shimmering effect:
[it] floated gaily in the breeze, as if boasting of the proud position held by Australia in being the first country in the world to grant to women the national franchise and the right to hold Parliamentary office.
But the third banner, carried at the rear of the Australian contingent, was the largest and by far the most beautiful and skilfully wrought. It bore neither distinctive flora and fauna nor orienting constellation. Its message was figurative but not obtuse. Literary, and literal.
Trust the Women Mother As I Have Done.
Three summers earlier, Dora Meeson Coates had, as she phrased it, designed and painted a very large banner for the Commonwealth—the same banner she now carried, along with Miss Alice Trechmann and Miss Madden, in front of an international audience of well-wishers. Dora was pleased to be one of the four bearers who staggered under its weight when we passed a windy corner. George walked devotedly alongside all the way, begging in vain to be allowed to help us.38 A friendly policeman even nudged him and said Give the poor girl a hand!
Fashionably classical in imagery but electrifyingly eccentric in intent the banner remained. Mother Britannia, draped in white, holding her sceptre and staring into the middle distance; Daughter Minerva, bearing the heraldry of the Australian Commonwealth, reaching out, entreating, offering advice. All who lined Whitehall Place and stood on Waterloo Bridge to watch the procession slither past would have understood the meaning of Dora’s banner, just as the onlookers on Suffrage Saturday in 1908 had appreciated the artistry and innovation of the work. But the meaning had changed.
In 1908, the statement was bold, but its political context had as much to do with domestic affairs as international relations. In 1908, the suffrage movement was castigating a hypocritical Liberal government that had won office on the promise that it would ‘trust the people’. Dora’s banner had a double-meaning. Trust the people, half of whom are women, as Dora’s native country had done without ill-consequence.
But three years is an eternity in politics. In the context of all that had occurred in the past few months, let alone years, the meaning had now changed. Asquith’s government was no longer merely insincere; it was downright treacherous. And Australia was no longer a distant homeland of an expat artist, a far-flung lighthouse casting its beam on the shoals and reefs of illiberal policies. It was now a nation that had reverse-colonised the landscape of ideas: the ideas of freedom, representation and democracy that were the cornerstones of the new twentieth-century democratic state. It had sent its ambassadors and missives across the seas, from periphery to metropole, conquering the high ground of ideological innovation.
Just last November, the Australian Parliament had cabled a resolution to the British Parliament, piercing its flag of ownership in the heart of British liberty. Worrywarts in the Senate had been concerned that the resolution would be viewed as impertinent. They were more distressed to learn it had been ignored. Then Australia’s most senior ex-officio minister for enfranchisement, Vida Goldstein, had come in person to drive the message home, which she had done tirelessly for three months now, in public and private forums, through speeches, articles, letters and personal lobbying.
Following on Vida’s heels came the Prime Minister of Australia himself, Andrew Fisher, our Andy, as some of the papers called him, not always with affection. Fisher didn’t go as far as the ANZWVCs were pushing him. Concerned at the potential blowback for some of Australia’s own democratically dubious laws and attitudes, he’d declined to make women’s suffrage an agenda item at the Imperial Conference. But he had been an outspoken advocate for his nation’s innovative approach to gender relations. He consistently affirmed that universal suffrage had been beneficial for both women and men, raising the tone of politics and national life generally, while not for a second threatening the sanctity of the home or the hallmarks of femininity. Furthermore, he had high-handedly pushed the barrow of colonial self-assertion—if not independence—claiming a greater stake in matters of imperial defence. The Prime Minister of Australia was asking his British counterparts not only to trust the women, but to trust the dominions. No more striking method could have been devised for bringing Australasia into prominence, the BRITISH-AUSTRALASIAN wrote of Dora’s big banner.39
In 1908, Dora’s banner represented the ambitions of female Australians in London—a message from the enfranchised women within. Now, it represented Australia itself—a message from the demonstrably confident and democratically superior nation without. The new wave of Australasian progressivism had come crashing on to the old world’s crumbling shores.
The beauty and effect of Dora’s banner was almost invariably commented upon by observers and correspondents: the message thoroughly absorbed, even if the words were sometimes jumbled: Trust Your Women, Mother. We Have Done So.40 Mother, trust your daughters as I have done.41 As in 1908, Dora’s masterwork was singled out among the thousand-odd banners carried on the day as one of the crowd favourites.
One English writer commented on the effect of the Australian intervention into British politics:
Australian women who value their privilege will be glad to know that the testimony of Australians with regard to the working of womanhood suffrage in Australia has had something to do with the set of the tide here in favour of womanhood suffrage.42
Whether or not Australians, individually or collectively, had built up enough moral and political momentum to turn the tide of British affairs, the effort had at the very least confirmed the young nation’s belief in its own power and efficacy. One Australian woman studying at the London School of Domestic Economy regarded the fact of our having proved to the world our political fitness a fine object lesson.43
Remarkably, Melbourne PUNCH—never one to blow the trumpet of suffragists—agreed. There has never been a time when Australia wanted to bulk larger in the eyes of the world, it wrote in advance of Fisher’s departure for London. All the partners of the Empire are to be in London, and Australia should take her place as the most advanced, the most important, the ablest of them all.44
Dora’s artistically accomplished and politically persuasive banner played an intrinsic part in helping Australia to bulk large.
But not all of the Australian women who had played a part in the struggle were there to march in lock step.
The same current affairs column in the ALBURY BANNER AND WODONGA EXPRESS that reported the Women’s Coronation Procession—five miles of misguided women, according to the disgruntled columnist—also noted the marriage of a celebrated suffragette…a young lady who achieved considerable fame by her strenuous exertions in the cause of woman suffrage.45 The woman who had recently been joined in matrimonial felicity with a musician was Muriel Matters. It was a tongue in cheek report, full of the cheap sexist shots that women’s enfranchisement tended to flush out. It was also wrong. Muriel Matters did not marry Bryceson Treharne.46 But nor did she join Vida and her fellow Australians in the Women’s Coronation Procession. Instead, she and Tilly had returned to vanning, undertaking a caravan tour of Buckinghamshire for the Tax Resistance League, where she continued to deliver her characteristic verbal thunderbolts.47
Not all Australians were consumed with pride at their bulking, crowing nation, fortified by numbers and legitimated by the de facto approval of the federal government. The criticism of Australia’s role in the procession came not from the conservative press—who, like PUNCH, were content to parody rather than censure—but from Socialist commentators. Mrs Fisher and Mrs McGowen, wives of Australian Labor Ministers, wrote a disgusted Dora Montefiore in the WORKER, walked in the procession, and thereby gave their countenance and support to an undemocratic measure, intended to act as a bulwark against the increasing demand for adult suffrage.48
This supposed rise of the whole-loafers wasn’t really reflected in feeling on the ground in England. The Adult Suffrage League was a minority voice in the chorus of the women’s movement. But it was certainly a cause that Dora Montefiore remained committed to and she tried valiantly to raise it, from the distance of her Sydney base, amidst the imperial sound and light show that the suffragettes had bought into so wholeheartedly.
As her long and fiery WORKER article pointed out, the history of franchise reform in England was a staggering example of the triumphant rule of the classes over the masses. She wanted to set the record straight (again): the militant suffragists, when we first organised in London, had with us the working women of the East End…working women came twice a week to demonstrate in front of my house, when I was besieged for six weeks by bailiffs. But when Dora’s ever-reviled Pankhursts came to town, they soon discovered that the singing of revolutionary songs didn’t sit well with the rich society ladies whose silken pockets they wanted to plunder. Drawing room meetings replaced factory floor meetings. The political rights of property and privilege replaced the democratic rights of all women. It was iniquitous—and left-wing ladies like Vida and Mrs Fisher should have known better. If they had really desired to help forward the political emancipation of the men and women of their class, they should have publicly endorsed the adult suffrage demand and damped the ardour of the propertied ladies.
Vida took Dora’s rebuke personally, as she was intended to. She acknowledged the plight of the working class: in England she’d seen more evidence of animality and poverty than I’ve seen anywhere else.49 The women especially distressed her: they looked regular viragoes, half-sodden with drink. But the fact of the matter was that the demand for universal adult suffrage in Britain was weak. We are all adult suffragists in our country, Vida wrote home to the WPA, but in England there is absolutely no demand for [it]. Even the labour organisations weren’t putting up a fight. So given that in England the issue was a dead letter, she saw little reason to agitate for the whole loaf while she was visiting. Better to help her sisters get the sustenance they were asking for than lecture them on the benefits of a better diet.
And Vida had not lost her political toughness swanning around at those English tea parties. We are sorry, she wrote, that Mrs Montefiore, who must know so well what it costs a woman to come out boldly and agitate for reform, should impute these motives to women whose moral courage is universally acknowledged. She had certainly not met anyone capable of the treachery with which Dora charged the leaders of the British suffrage movement. In deflecting the criticism of her WSPU allies, Vida was also defending herself against Dora’s public reproach.
*
But if there was some bad blood within the Australian sisterhood, it wasn’t enough to mar the glory and the optimism of forty thousand women marching to the cheers, not the jeers, of a sympathetic crowd. The British prime minster had promised facilities for the Conciliation Bill at the next session. A new king was about to be crowned. The sun was shining on London, the metropolis of a nation and empire drunk on its own giddy good fortune.
Today, announced Vida Goldstein on 17 June 1911 from the eye of the storm, the general feeling is that victory is at hand.
When she boarded the ship to return to Australia six months later, Vida carried with her an exquisite gift from Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence: a rose topaz set with pearls to wear for friendship’s sake. Even more precious were the words that accompanied it:
My very dear Comrade,
We shall never lose the sense of touch with you and the strength of that unity with our sisters overseas which you have made so real.
You daughters of freedom, you go back to the Newer World, the world of the future, bearing with you the love of your sisters in the old country.
Rich is the fellowship, that our human movement stands for—our world movement. Ever my dear Colleague, Yours affectionately. Emmeline50