‘Interesting work, good pay and increase of knowledge characterise medicine, and therefore it is unwomanly.’

– Martha Webster¹

By the early 1890s, Marvellous Melbourne had lost much of its gloss. The glittering tide of money that had borne the city aloft in the preceding decade had receded, and the colony was being badly hit by the worst economic depression in Australia’s history. This was partly the result of a vicious drought that had begun a decade before and was disastrous for rural Victoria, but also Melbourne’s building boom was now the creature of greedy speculation and overreach. It had been financed by reckless borrowing, both by government and, more significantly, private sources, as money locally and from overseas was still cheap and easy to get. Building societies and pastoral finance companies known as ‘land banks’ borrowed from the trading banks to provide credit to the building and pastoral industries.

In 1889 property prices collapsed, leading to a run of building society failures the following year. Falling asset prices as well as shrinking prices for commodities increased pressure on borrowers, many of whom defaulted, threatening the stability of financial institutions. Public confidence in banks and other financial institutions was seriously undermined. By 1893, probably the worst year of the depression, 56 per cent of bank deposits and 61 per cent of the banknotes issued throughout Australia had been issued by defaulting banks: unemployment reached 25 per cent in some places, and strikes were rife.

That was just in the cities. In the country, things were much worse. During the boom years, railways had been built to connect city and country, and consequently Melbourne’s suburbs had grown rapidly. Because access to rural areas had become so much easier, it had been assumed that country towns would flourish as new industries sprang up to service the rural population. The drought stopped that. Farmers were forced to sack workers, sheep numbers had to be reduced by 30 million in a decade, and wool and wheat prices collapsed. According to one account, in the two years from 1891 to 1893 more than 5700 farmers in Victoria walked off their land. And of course unemployed rural workers flocked to the city, making the situation there worse.²

For the Goldstein family in suburban Melbourne, too, life was growing tougher. Isabella’s inheritance from her family was steadily dwindling, and Jacob had been retrenched from his clerical job in the Titles Office without a pension: he had no source of income except for his pay as a colonel in the militia, and that ran out in 1898.

Jacob was never good with money. His granddaughter Leslie Henderson (daughter of the third Goldstein daughter, Lina) wrote that at one point during this period, Jacob guaranteed a man for £250 with the Bank of Australasia. The bank wrote to Jacob requesting the money, plus ten shillings for a duty stamp. Jacob wrote a formal letter regretting his inability to pay back the money, but in the margin he scribbled a note to the sub-manager of the Melbourne branch, who happened to be his son-in-law Charles Henderson (who had married Lina): ‘Dear Charlie, I’m not worried about the 250 pounds because I haven’t got it. But please do not press me for the ten shillings. It would absolutely break me.’³

Vida, now in her mid-twenties and spending most of her time working with her mother on their various campaigns, realised she had to do something to support the family, and hit upon the idea of teaching. She had done a little teaching at Toorak College, a boys’ school established by Mrs Donnolly, who had taught French at PLC when Vida was a student there, and found she enjoyed it. However, finding any kind of job as a teacher, whether in the city or the country, was extremely difficult.

And so Vida made a characteristically bold decision: she would open a school of her own. This was perhaps less radical than it sounds. Melbourne already had a few small schools run by private citizens, mainly for middle-class families who could no longer afford to send their children to more expensive educational establishments. But Vida decided that hers would be a primary school with mixed classes, which was a novelty in Victoria at the time. Her typically sensible rationale was that as boys and girls lived together in their own families, segregation at school did not make sense.

It says something for the closeness of the Goldstein sisters that Elsie and Aileen quickly agreed to be part of the plan. (Lina had married in 1892.) By the standards of the day, all three sisters were qualified to be teachers. All had matriculated and Elsie, who had been a student at Cornelia Ladies’ College, had gone on to study some university subjects, though she never graduated.

Vida, Elsie and Aileen found suitable premises in Inkerman Street, St Kilda, and after advertising in the local papers they opened their school. They apparently had about twenty students at a time, probably at today’s upper primary level in age. They employed other teachers, all women, most likely drawn from their PLC contacts.

The Misses Goldstein made a point of emphasising that their school was no frivolity for unemployed middle-class women, but a serious enterprise. They offered a rigorous curriculum that included English, history, geography, French, Latin, algebra, arithmetic, physical culture and drawing. Notable by their absence were intensive classes in sewing and cooking. This was either by design – Vida and her sisters believed that making domestic science compulsory, as it was in most schools for girls, was an excellent way of ensuring that the women’s sphere remained the home, which was not the aim of their school – or because none of the Goldstein sisters could be described as a domestic goddess.

The school stayed in Inkerman Street from 1890 to 1892 and then moved to the family home, ‘Ingleton’, at 133 Alma Road, East St Kilda, where the Goldsteins had been living for a year, rents being cheaper in that part of Melbourne. Ingleton was clearly a sizeable house, since it had to accommodate six people plus Lizzie. According to The Argus, the school was still a flourishing, serious concern in 1896, when the paper gave a short and approving account of its end-of-year displays: ‘An interesting programme, consisting of marching, dumbbell exercises, action songs and recitations was excellently rendered by the pupils. Mrs Holroyd kindly distributed the prizes, and expressed her pleasure at the progress made by the pupils during the year.’⁴

 

Despite the dismal economic circumstances, women in Australia in the 1890s seemed to be making great strides towards equality with men. An important milestone had been women’s entry to the University of Melbourne in 1881, when Vida was twelve. Not everybody had approved: the publicity given to the first woman to graduate from an Australian university – Julia Margaret (Bella) Guerin, who was awarded a Bachelor of Arts from Melbourne in 1883 – gave the distinct impression that, regrettably, there was no turning back. The arch-conservative morning newspaper The Argus struck a note it amplified for years afterwards, declaring that too much education would make women uppity, discontented and disinclined to know their proper place.

Allowing women to study medicine was the next hurdle. The very idea was regarded with consternation by members of the medical establishment: their view was that medicine, dealing as it did with the grosser aspects of the human body – and frequently the male body at that – was far too unpleasant and difficult for women to study or practise. It did not stop them allowing women to be nurses; the real problem was that women doctors would be able to assume authority equal to their male counterparts. There were heated discussions for a few years, but in 1887 women were grudgingly granted permission to study medicine at the University of Melbourne.

Among Australia’s first women medical graduates were the Stone sisters, Clara and Constance. About ten years older than Vida, both had been homeschooled by their mother, a former governess and evidently a brilliant educator. Constance had gone abroad to study medicine, completing a three-year degree at the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania and graduating MD in 1888 (women had been medical graduates in the USA since 1849) at the age of thirty-two. She had then gained a second medical degree in Toronto – Emily Stowe, the first woman doctor in Canada, had graduated in 1867 – before going to London. There she worked at the New Hospital for Women, established in 1890 by Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and probably the world’s first facility for the treatment of women patients by women doctors. Constance Stone returned to Australia determined to set up a similar hospital in Melbourne. In the meantime she needed to earn a living, and the only work she could get was one day a week at the dispensary of the Collingwood Free Medical Mission, set up and run by doctor and philanthropist John Singleton to give rudimentary care to the poor. Constance’s sister Clara, also a medical graduate from the University of Melbourne, joined her there.

Clara and Constance Stone knew very well what Australian women doctors of their generation were up against. The first five placegetters in the medical graduation honours list had always gone on to be employed as residents at the Royal Melbourne Hospital. But in 1891, when the Stone sisters’ colleague Margaret Whyte headed the list, the Royal Melbourne refused to take her. The hospital committee never gave a reason, simply exercising their right to refuse graduates on other than academic grounds.

In 1895 Constance and Clara Stone and their cousin Emily, all medical graduates, set up a forum for women doctors to share information. They called themselves the Victorian Medical Women’s Society, and intended the forum to be the first step in introducing medical services especially for women. Eight members of this group set up an outpatients’ clinic for women in La Trobe Street, central Melbourne, offering pregnancy advice and preventive medical services for a nominal fee. Very soon they had on their books more than 2000 women patients, from middle-class matrons to women from the poorest areas of the city. Most had come, they said, because they were embarrassed and uncomfortable about being seen by male doctors.

At this point appeared a slight, quietly spoken and thoughtful woman who balanced charm with an astute and formidable intellect. Not only did Annette Bear-Crawford have a seismic effect on the fortunes of the women’s hospital project, but – as importantly – she became a close friend and mentor to Vida and an important influence on her career.

Annette Bear was born in Melbourne in 1853, so she was sixteen years older than Vida (she added the name of her husband, William Crawford, a solicitor nine years younger than she, when she married him in 1894). She was the daughter of a member of the Victorian Legislative Council who had founded the Chateau Tahbilk vineyard on the Goulburn River. Bear-Crawford was educated in England by governesses and at a ladies’ college, and spent her early youth doing charitable work in the slums of London. Left-wing in her political views, she became a friend of the influential socialist economists and writers Sidney and Beatrice Webb (Beatrice described her backhandedly as ‘a gentle-tempered, intelligent woman who keeps me company in the dowdiness of her dress’.)⁵ Bear-Crawford also formed a warm friendship with Millicent Garrett Fawcett, one of the movers and shakers in the British woman suffrage campaign.

When Bear-Crawford returned to Melbourne in 1890, she speedily became involved in many different campaigns aimed at giving women a political voice. Because of her connection with London’s New Hospital she linked up with Constance Stone and other members of the Victorian Medical Women’s Society. According to Vida, it was Bear-Crawford who came up with the idea of setting up a women’s hospital in Melbourne, not Constance Stone, who is generally given credit for it.⁶

Early in 1896 a historic meeting took place at Ingleton. Vida and Isabella had convened it, and present were Dr Constance Stone and her colleagues, and Bear-Crawford. The purpose of the meeting was to work out how to obtain funding for a Melbourne hospital exclusively for women. It would be called the Queen Victoria Hospital for Women, and its opening in 1897 was intended to form part of the celebrations for Queen Victoria’s Jubilee.

Finding the money for such a project was the first and greatest problem. Bear-Crawford came up with the idea of a ‘women’s shilling fund’, where women would be asked to give one shilling each, a sum that most families could afford; it was an early example of crowdfunding. Bear-Crawford travelled to Victorian rural towns, explaining the aims of the appeal and asking for donations. Vida was in awe of her energy and persistence, and later wrote, ‘The idea of the Queen Victoria Hospital . . . was carried to fruition through [Bear-Crawford’s] organising, speaking and writing ability. She did not leave one likely avenue of support unexplored, and linked up into a marvellous organisation every sympathetic group of women and prominent women in Victoria.’⁷ At the same time, Isabella and Vida organised teams of women to go into Melbourne’s city centre and suburbs, knocking on doors and asking for donations.

The shilling fund also set up operations at the Collins Street shopfront of Cole’s Book Arcade (E.W. Cole, publisher of the enduringly popular Cole’s Funny Picture Book, was an extremely prosperous property developer and bookseller who supported the cause). Day after day, women committee members sat at the entrance soliciting shillings from their fashionably dressed sisters in Melbourne’s most prestigious shopping street.

When the hospital appeal closed on 22 June 1897, it had raised £3162 11s 9d. This, plus a government grant of £250, was enough to give the new hospital a home; and a site in Lonsdale Street – the former premises of the Governesses’ Institute – was purchased. The new hospital opened only two years later than planned, in July 1899.⁸

The fundraising for the Queen Victoria Hospital was very different from another massive hospital campaign run at about the same time. This was for an infectious diseases hospital and it was spearheaded by Janet, Lady Clarke. The widow of a wealthy man, Lady Clarke was famous for the generosity of her contributions to charity. During the depression of the 1890s she had fed thousands of poor people in Richmond and Collingwood from the kitchens of Cliveden, her mansion in East Melbourne.

Her campaign to set up a hospital for the treatment of infectious diseases was strongly supported by conservative politicians and other members of Melbourne society, including the medical establishment, as many male doctors did not want a hospital set up for women only.

Lady Clarke’s hospital was intended to be a much more elaborate facility than the Queen Victoria; £16,000 were raised to build it, and construction was completed in 1901, but more money was needed to be raised to furnish the buildings and to employ staff. The hospital opened its doors in the inner suburb of Fairfield in 1904.

The Age made much of the competition for funds between these two hospitals, especially as both appeals were run by women. Given the paper’s general conservatism, it is perhaps surprising that The Age tended to favour the Shilling Appeal, but they did so because they believed that appeal had a much wider base for funding.

The doorknocking and persuasion that Vida learned as a result of the Queen Victoria campaign was her first experience in bringing women together for a common cause. Even women who lived in country areas and would be unable to use the hospital were happy to contribute to it. But perhaps the most immediately and personally rewarding aspect of the hospital campaign for Vida was the strong and deep friendship she formed with Annette Bear-Crawford. Then and always, Vida gave Bear-Crawford enormous credit for her example as a quietly effective social reformer and an efficient organiser.