‘There is too much animal courage in society and not enough moral courage.’

– Mary Baker Eddy

The 1890s in Australia has quite rightly been seen as a seminal decade, with the country’s worst and longest economic depression and drought playing out against a backdrop of innovative and progressive ideas: with women demanding equal legislative rights, and workers joining together in unions, as the colonies of Australia were about to join together and become one nation.

Throughout the decade, Vida and her mother continued to do what they could to improve the conditions of working-class families in Melbourne, working closely with the Rev. Charles Strong and his Australian Church. However, by the turn of the century they were less than enthusiastic about some of the methods and causes Strong had adopted.

With the Rev. Horace Tucker of Christ Church South Yarra, Strong had become heavily involved in the village settlement movement, a utopian project intended to resettle unemployed men in Gippsland and central Victoria. It proved to be ill-conceived, soon ran into debt and had to be abandoned. With the example of Jacob Goldstein’s experience in a similar ill-starred venture, Isabella would certainly have had firm opinions about it. And the Church had other troubles; the building needed expensive repairs to the roof, and because of the financial downturn some members of the congregation were leaving.

There were other, deeper reasons for the Goldsteins’ growing ambivalence about the Australian Church. Because it had been Strong’s own organisation for so many years and he had run it as he wanted, his policy of loving-kindness was perhaps morphing into something of a benign dictatorship. The work that Vida and her mother and sisters had been doing in the area of women’s rights for so many years was also causing them to question some of Strong’s – and traditional Christianity’s – teachings. Strong’s insistence that the Australian Church sought Christ’s ideals, and his support for ‘the worship of God as the father of all men’ undoubtedly invited the question: what was the role of women in all this? Strong was still a man ruling over a church with a man – God the Father – at the head. Women, it seemed, had very little influence on the way it was being run. Were they destined to continue being handmaidens to men? Were they subordinates whose role was simply to make sure, for instance, that the hymnbooks were in the right place?

Vida and her mother were not the only citizens feeling disquiet about traditional Protestant Christianity. As sometimes happens in times of economic downturn, new religions were making their presence felt. Their numbers were small and they never really threatened the primacy of the established churches, but they attracted adherents who were looking for a different kind of spiritual certainty.

One of the earliest of these to appear in Melbourne, and the religion to which the Goldsteins were strongly attracted, was Christian Science. Vida might have heard about it during her discussions about different religions with Strong at the Australian Church.

The First Church of Christ, Scientist, to give it its proper name, first came to Melbourne in 1893 in the form of its seminal text, Science and Health With a Key to the Scriptures by the church’s founder, Mary Baker Eddy. A visitor presented a copy to the Melbourne Public Library. The first Christian Science service in Victoria was held in 1898 in a Swanston Street office. A meeting place and reading room were acquired in Oxford Chambers, Bourke Street, and the first Sunday school was opened in November that year. The church widened its influence thanks to its newspaper, the Christian Science Monitor, which from its inception in 1903 in Boston became a well-regarded and widely read journal.¹

Christian Science differed from other new faiths, including Seventh-day Adventism, because it did not celebrate visionary experiences or any kind of road-to-Damascus conversion or sudden ‘seeing of the light’. Described as a Bible-based system of spiritual healing, Eddy’s church asserted that God, the spirit of love, was both God the Father and God the Mother and, following from that, all souls and all minds were created equal. Men and women had the same rights – neither superseded the other in God’s universe – and therefore all the structures that created and entrenched inequality were made by fallible human beings and had to be corrected. It followed, then, that the class system and slavery needed to be abolished. Evil and sin were the outward expression of mistaken thinking and false thoughts. True knowledge could be gained only through prayer, and ‘mental work’ alone healed the sick. Everybody could control their own destinies – physical, mental and spiritual – by clear thought and acceptance of the nature of God.

It is not difficult to see why the Goldsteins were attracted to this new faith. A church founded by a woman and based on an assumption of equality, one where there was no system of hierarchy, where all members were valued equally: all these beliefs underpinned the Goldsteins’ feminist beliefs and reinforced their views of the essential nature of human beings, as well as giving a moral basis for living in an imperfect world. They might also have appreciated the lack of pomp and ceremony in Christian Science services. There were no ministers, no priests, no vestments or confession or communion; nor did the church have pictures of Christ, choirs, candles or marble angels. Bible passages and excerpts from Science and Health were read aloud by members of the congregation, who could also deliver speeches to the congregation if they wished.

Vida joined the First Church of Christ, Scientist in 1902, the first member of her family to do so, closely followed by Isabella and Aileen. Other members of the Australian Church joined too. By the end of May 1902 the church had fifty-four members, who came to informal discussion and religious groups. Church membership, however, needed to be put on a formal footing, and in February 1903 thirteen people, including Vida, met to set this up. She was on the board of directors, and became president in June 1903. In that year the Melbourne group became recognised as a branch of Boston’s mother church, and the Athenaeum Hall, Collins Street, was rented to accommodate the increasing numbers of those who wanted to join; the average number who attended services was usually about forty. The headquarters moved to St Kilda Road in 1922.

The most difficult issue for Vida and her family – supporters of the Queen Victoria Hospital for Women – must have been Christian Science’s assertion that illness could be alleviated by mind control, that the mind could always heal the body. Presumably if spiritual work was not successful in achieving this, other more practical methods would be tried. (However, it is clear from at least one of Isabella’s letters that she felt she – not Science – had failed when spiritual healing was unsuccessful during an illness.)

The conviction that spiritual laws run beneath the surface of human life was something Vida embraced wholeheartedly. It informed almost everything she did in public and private life from then on. And some of her enviable calm in times of stress was undoubtedly due to her ability to detach temporarily from the troubles of the world, as taught by Christian Science.

 

Victoria, the first colony to embark upon a campaign for woman suffrage, still had not granted this right after sixteen years. Maybe, Vida thought, the women of Victoria needed more fully to hear and understand how important it was. She decided that the Victorian suffrage movement, beginning with her own United Council for Woman Suffrage, needed a mouthpiece. The most effective one would be its own newspaper.

Vida did not know how to set up, publish and run a newspaper, but one member of her family certainly did. Her brother-in-law Henry Hyde Champion undoubtedly gave her a great deal of help in establishing the monthly periodical she decided to call The Australian Woman’s Sphere, with herself as editor. In her first editorial she thanked her benefactor, though not by name, for his ‘very generous offer to found a monthly periodical of which I should be proprietor, with full editorial control . . . here I am in the editorial chair, with in my hands the Archimedean lever which moves the world, if only it is wisely worked’. She gave Champion and the Rev. Charles Strong credit as ‘consultants’.

The first issue, which appeared in September 1900, had a full-length picture of Annette Bear-Crawford on the cover, Vida’s way of acknowledging her mentor. Vida assured the readers of her new journal that ‘I do not want this to be a dull paper, though it must contain a good deal of serious reading, for it will have to deal with very serious things, and it is a small paper to begin with . . . It is no use to make any promise other than that I will do my best. I am sure there are plenty of people who are interested in this venture, I only want them to support it so long as they find it interesting.’ The list of those who were supporters, and who became subscribers, was most encouraging. Every progressive women’s organisation in Victoria was represented, including the Victorian Women’s Franchise League, Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, Trades Hall Council, and women’s groups in Melbourne and Victorian country towns.²

By today’s standards, Vida’s introduction to the Sphere seems earnest and downbeat. But as she signalled, hers was different from the general run of women’s journals. The Sphere was not interested in giving fashion advice, hints on beauty or current hairstyles, needlework, knitting patterns or easy-to-prepare recipes for the busy housewife. There is nothing to suggest, of course, that Vida herself scorned popular magazines, especially as her own clothes were always elegant and fashionable. But she wanted the Sphere primarily to be a vehicle to educate and inform Victorian women, to convince as many as possible about the necessity for the state vote, and to keep them up to date with the state of women’s suffrage around the world. As part of the Sphere’s educational function, Vida set up parliamentary, organising and literature committees. Champion was the honorary secretary of the parliamentary committee.

Vida wrote much of the material for the first issue of the Sphere. She pointed out, perhaps with understandable weariness, the stalemate the suffrage question had reached in Victoria. And she could not resist reminding her readers of some of the anti-suffragists’ more absurd claims, of which there were many:

Frank Madden in the Legislative Assembly 1895: Woman Suffrage would abolish soldiers and war, also racing, hunting, football, cricket, and all such manly games . . . Woman suffragists are the worst class of socialists. Their idea of freedom is polyandry, free love, lease marriages and so on. Are these qualifications for the franchise? Are we going to allow women who would sap the very foundations of a nation to vote?

Mr Staughton: The class of women who are now howling about women’s suffrage would be at every dirty little street corner arguing and quarrelling and fighting. It is in their nature, and they cannot help it.³

Following her usual practice, including in her public speeches, Vida never poured active ridicule upon those who expressed such sentiments. She let them speak for themselves.

The Sphere could be direct and hard-hitting too. The cover of the second issue shows drawings of eight men: a toff in a suit and straw hat, a drunkard, a sailor, an Indigenous man holding a bottle, a Chinese man, a parliamentarian, and a man stepping on a woman who is lying on the ground. These, the caption reminded readers, were all people who had the vote (except the Indigenous man, that is). In the centre is a woman wearing a mortarboard and academic gown with the line: ‘But I may not be trusted with a vote’. In case the reader had somehow failed to get the message, the pictures were captioned ‘Voters and Voteless’.

From the time of first publication, the Sphere drew attention to workers’ conditions in Melbourne; it is a valuable source of social history. In 1902 Vida mentioned, with justifiable pride considering how much campaigning she and Isabella had done, that the women’s prison in Pentridge was now staffed entirely by women, and its governor was the only woman in charge of a gaol in the British Empire. However – two steps forward, one step back – the paper also pointed out that the Factories Act of 1901 had not put an end to sweated labour and that the workers in garment factories, almost exclusively young women, had to supply their own sewing silk, cotton and machine oil. (Women who work in clothing factories, it seems, have always been given a raw deal. One of the early campaigns Julia Gillard undertook as an industrial lawyer for Slater and Gordon in the 1980s was to gain better conditions for migrant workers in the clothing trade.)⁴

Vida worked from the family apartment in Oxford Chambers, 473–481 Bourke Street in the centre of Melbourne. Now demolished, this imposing many-storeyed stone building with intricate wrought-iron gates had large and spacious living quarters. It was something of a Goldstein compound, with members of the family occupying the entire fourth floor. Vida had a bed-sitting room there, Isabella and Jacob a bedroom; Elsie Belle and Henry Hyde Champion had their own quarters, comprising office space as well as living areas. Champion worked from these rooms, and Elsie did much of the administrative work for the Book Lovers’ Library there. Possibly not coincidentally, Oxford Chambers was also the headquarters of Melbourne’s Christian Science movement. From about 1899 there were temporary reading rooms on the first floor, and Mattie Lincicombe, Victoria’s first listed Christian Science practitioner, occupied three rooms on the third floor.⁵

 

Federation became a legislative fact on 1 January 1901, and Australia’s first Commonwealth Parliament was opened by the Duke of York in Melbourne on 9 May. The following day Lord Hopetoun, the newly minted governor-general, announced to parliament that preparations had begun ‘for the grant of a uniform suffrage in all federal elections’. At last, thought progressive white women all over the new nation, they would be able to vote in national polls.

Not exactly. The draft bill recommending universal woman suffrage was not presented to parliament for another twelve months, allegedly because there was other and presumably more important legislation to get through the House of Representatives and the Senate. When the Commonwealth Franchise Bill did come to parliament in April 1902, its passage was accompanied by a notable lack of excitement in the chamber. Prime Minister Edmund Barton, no champion of the vote for women, was out of the country attending the coronation of Edward VII; Sir William Lyne, premier of New South Wales and acting PM, had the job of shepherding the bill through. In his second reading speech, he gave a short history of the American states’ franchise, and the Australian states’ attempts – with patchy success, of course – to enfranchise women. Lyne admitted that he had not always been in favour of female suffrage but that ‘some ten or twelve years ago I formed the conclusion that not only was it just to accord women the vote, but that it was in the best interests of the entire community’.⁶

The Commonwealth Franchise Act 1902, passed in the House of Representatives on 9 April, gave the vote to all adult British subjects in Australia over the age of twenty-one. The relevant clause was ‘Until the Parliament otherwise provides, the qualifications of a member of the House of Representatives shall be as follows: He must be of the full age of twenty-one years, and must be an elector entitled to vote in the election of members of the House of Representatives.’ With reluctance on the part of some, one imagines, under the Federal Acts Interpretation Act ‘he’ was understood to include ‘she’. It is rather galling to think that Australian women became voters thanks to a convention of English grammar.⁷

The original bill gave the vote to Indigenous women – no doubt by omission. However, MPs from WA and Queensland were dead against this. They argued that tribal people living in and around cattle stations were mostly illiterate and therefore subject to manipulation by station owners, possibly also by parliamentary candidates themselves. Of course, racism was at the core of this argument: why should Indigenous women think they were worthy of the same privilege as ‘our wives and daughters’? And so, when the bill went to the Senate, that clause was reversed. Indigenous Australians were permitted to vote only if they had already been enrolled in one of the states. The only white people excluded from the federal franchise were those who had been sentenced for an offence punishable by imprisonment, people of ‘unsound mind’ and those ‘attainted of treason’.

The way was now open for a woman to stand for the federal parliament. It may be, though we do not know, that Vida had been thinking along these lines for some time. However, she was about to embark on something just as exciting: a visit to the United States of America as a representative of newly enfranchised womanhood.