‘An Australian woman should . . . help the women of England in their fight for freedom.’

– Woman Voter, 1911

During the 1910 campaign, Vida was criticised for her support of the English suffragettes. Tasmania’s Huon Times spelled this out: ‘Miss Vida Goldstein . . . has publicly championed the English suffragettes, with whom few Victorian women have any sympathy. Of course they have their admirers here, but those admirers are women of the type who would be invaluable to any candidate starting with a big majority and anxious to be badly beaten.’¹

Conservative women – who would probably not have voted for Vida anyway – deplored the suffragettes’ militancy and destruction of property. But Vida remained firm: she would always support her English sisters, she declared, because woman suffrage was an international issue. She had defiantly worn the colours of the suffragettes: white, symbolising purity in public and private life; purple for dignity and self-respect; and green representing hope and new life. Her Women’s Political Association also organised a petition of support, addressed to ‘Australian women’.

To Mrs Pankhurst, Christabel Pankhurst and Annie Kenney, who initiated the militant woman suffrage movement and the hundreds of other valiant women who, forced to become POLITICAL OFFENDERS because forty years of patient work by CONSTITUTIONAL MEANS had failed to obtain POLITICAL FREEDOM for the WOMEN OF ENGLAND, HAVE MADE SUCH NOBLE SACRIFICES TO FREE WOMEN from a LEGAL AND INDUSTRIAL SLAVERY that is economically dangerous to the nation and a personal degradation . . .

We ENFRANCHISED WOMEN OF AUSTRALIA offer our reverent appreciation of the SPIRITUAL INSIGHT AND FIDELITY TO PRINCIPLE that are enabling you to speedily overcome the opportunities and materialistic forces arrayed against you . . .

We are with you in spirit in the days of your strenuous endeavours to gain for the women of your country their natural rights, we are in entire sympathy with your objects and your methods, believing that you have embarked upon your present militant campaign as the result of earnest deliberation, and from a knowledge, bitterly enforced upon you, that the more pacific methods employed by you and your predecessors for so many years were bound to continue wholly ineffectual.²

If Vida actually wrote this – she certainly endorsed it – here was proof of the accusation, levelled at her during the election campaign that she condoned the suffragettes’ use of force. She was always aware that the fight for the suffrage in Australia, however frustrating, had been won with comparative ease, free of bloodshed or damage to property. This, she believed was because Australia, as a new nation, had not had time to develop Britain’s entrenched class system and resultant prejudice. However, she wanted to emphasise that her English sisters had not been so fortunate.³

Early in 1911, Emmeline Pankhurst’s Women’s Social and Political Union invited Vida to England to help them in their fight for the suffrage. The WSPU campaign would open on 23 March with a meeting in the Royal Albert Hall, at which Vida was invited to be a speaker, and culminate in a massive women’s procession through the streets of London in June.

Some of Vida’s newer supporters did not realise what a celebrity she had become, what a heroine for the English suffrage movement. The WSPU had described her as ‘a speaker of great power . . . under whose leadership Victoria finally won the vote’ and the Leeds Mercury added that she was a ‘champion lady candidate’. Vida must have been gratified that now, in her early forties, she was recognised and admired in the so-called Mother Country as a pioneer of women’s rights. In the United States she had had to pay her way: now her peers, her comrades in the struggle for women’s rights, had not only invited her to visit but were funding her to do so. She lost no time in packing her bags – and in making sure her supporters knew what an exciting opportunity this was for Australian women to make their mark in Britain.

Vida arrived at London’s Victoria station on Saturday 19 March after a long sea voyage. She was greeted by a huge crowd of WSPU supporters headed by Emmeline Pankhurst and Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, after which she was taken to the Inns of Court Hotel, where Pankhurst had rooms.

Vida had been looking forward to meeting the leader of the English suffrage movement. Emmeline Pankhurst, about ten years older than Vida and a woman whose elegant and aristocratic beauty was more than matched by her steely resolve, had come from a radical political background. She had married the lawyer Richard Pankhurst, who had drafted the English Married Women’s Property Acts that allowed women to keep their own money and property after marriage. They had two sons and three daughters, Sylvia, Christabel and Adela, all of whom became famous – even notorious, in some circles – during the fight for the suffrage. After her husband’s death in 1898 Emmeline founded the WSPU: she, Christabel and Sylvia organised and led the suffragettes’ demonstrations, which included the smashing of windows, arson and hunger strikes. She had gone to prison several times.

Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence had more in common with Vida. They were about the same age and looked strikingly alike, with the same thick eyebrows, large lustrous eyes and determined chin. Like Vida, Pethick-Lawrence had worked as a teacher and had founded and now ran a suffragette newspaper, Votes for Women. It was Pethick-Lawrence who had chosen the suffragette colours, in preparation for a 1908 street march. Not surprisingly, she and Vida got on very well and became firm friends. Pethick-Lawrence and her husband were famous for having a financially equal marriage: both worked most of their lives and kept separate bank accounts, which was very unusual for the time. However, unlike Vida and the Pankhursts, the Pethick-Lawrences disapproved of radical activism – a source of friction with the WSPU that eventually led to their expulsion.

Vida undertook to organise the Australian and New Zealand contingent of women’s rights supporters who wanted to take part in the June procession, and her reputation as a public speaker had preceded her. She spoke at a meeting with Christabel Pankhurst, and also visited Ramsay MacDonald and his family. MacDonald, the chairman of the Opposition Parliamentary Labour Party, was a supporter of woman suffrage, though he and his wife did not agree with the suffragettes’ methods.

Vida was given direct experience of the forces arrayed against the suffragettes when she started attending WSPU meetings. She was first disconcerted, then appalled, at the number of policemen who also turned out, witness to the state’s determination to stop English women from voting. In her speeches she paid tribute to the concentrated energy and determination of the suffragettes, observing that her own organisation, the WPA, had not needed to be quite so intense in its efforts.

Her disquiet about the anti-suffragette movement was reinforced when she joined WSPU members and supporters at Euston station to welcome the lord mayor of Dublin, who had arrived to add his support to the Conciliation Bill being put to parliament to grant UK women the vote. ‘We saw dozens of policemen hiding under a stairway,’ she wrote in the Woman Voter. ‘What they expected from the suffragettes, goodness only knows.’ She might have been unaware that the mayor was a member of the Nationalist Party, whose campaign for Home Rule for Ireland continued to arouse violent feelings in England; presumably the police were taking no chances. But she added, ‘What I saw of the behaviour of some of the police that night was sufficient to convince me of the brutality they can be capable of.’⁴

She was invited to the Speaker’s private gallery to witness the debate surrounding the Conciliation Bill, and was shocked to see the metal grille separating the Ladies’ Gallery from the floor of the House of Commons. This was, as Vida’s compatriot Muriel Matters had declared three years before, a symbol of the British man’s attitude towards women: ‘The House of Commons represents men’s opinions solely. The actual building plainly demonstrates this. All kinds of men are admitted freely to various parts of the House, but to women is allotted only a small, remote gallery in an obscure corner with a heavy iron grille in front, quite an ornamental custom.’⁵ It was impossible for Vida to visit this place without thinking of Matters, who in 1908 had chained herself and another suffrage supporter, Helen Fox, to the grille during a Commons debate, demanding the vote. They and the grille had been removed and taken away, though the grille had been reinstated.

Matters was probably the best-known Australian to be directly involved in the British women’s movement: her delicate blonde prettiness concealed a woman of fearlessness and passionate ferocity. In 1908 she had organised the first ‘Votes for Women’ caravan that toured south-east England, and she and her colleagues established many branches of the Women’s Freedom League, set up to educate women about the vote. The following year, during the official opening of parliament, she had hired an inflatable airship and painted ‘Votes for Women’ and ‘Women’s Freedom League’ on it, intending to scatter pamphlets over King Edward at Buckingham Palace, as well as over the Houses of Parliament. Adverse winds stopped that, but the airship rose high in the air over the outskirts of London, and Matters’ escapade made headlines around the world.⁶

When Vida was shown around the Houses of Parliament by founder of the Labour Party, Keir Hardie, the grille incident undoubtedly caused her to be less impressed than Hardie might have expected. She thought the Houses were ‘Great and yet small, for at the heart of them is embodied the smallness of the English mind. The grille behind which women visitors are concealed reveals the true English conception of women . . . I am amazed that English women have tolerated that symbol of their slavery and degradation for so long, and yet I should not be amazed, for slave conditions and slave minds must go together.’⁷

Vida made her first speech in favour of the suffrage cause at the Royal Albert Hall on 23 March, only a few days after her arrival in Britain. Suffragettes were forbidden to advertise their meetings, but word of her appearance had spread and 10,000 people, mostly women, came to hear her.

Standing alone at the front of the stage, with the WSPU banners as a backdrop in a hall where the people in the balcony were so far away they looked like flies, Vida might well have quailed. But she spoke firmly and concisely, as she had always done, canvassing the need for women to be in parliament, the difficulties of obtaining the franchise, the reasons why ‘young’ countries such as Australia and New Zealand had been relatively ready to give their women the vote, and her hopes that England would soon do likewise. To the surprise of some, her voice, at a time before the general use of microphones, carried easily. Vida described her reception as ‘magnificent’.

That Albert Hall meeting featured the new anthem of the suffragette movement, ‘The March of the Women’, written in 1910 with music by Ethel Smyth and words by actor, playwright and novelist Cicely Hamilton. Smyth was a musician of note, always referred to as a ‘woman composer’ and therefore presumably not to be taken seriously: her work, including her opera The Wreckers, was sometimes criticised for being ‘too masculine’. Because of her suffrage activities Smyth was arrested with 100 other women, including Emmeline Pankhurst, and sent to Holloway prison in the same year as Vida’s visit to England. When her friend the conductor Thomas Beecham visited her there, he described suffragettes marching in the quadrangle to Smyth’s ‘March’ while she leaned out of a window, conducting with a toothbrush.

Vida’s triumphant speech was widely reported in Australia, to general approval at first. However, the AWNL took exception to some comments she made at the Albert Hall and in interviews, saying these implied that Australian women approved of the suffragettes’ extreme methods. Several Australian papers reported that Vida had arrogated to herself the right to speak for Australian women in sympathy with the militant suffragettes.

In that year of George V’s coronation, Vida was given a taste of sovereign power from the centre of the British Empire. She attended the opening of the Festival of Empire at Crystal Palace, where she was seated near members of the royal family, and attended the Lord Mayor’s dinner. She also went to a dinner given by the British Labour Party for the relatively new Australian prime minister, Andrew Fisher, and managed to persuade Margaret Fisher, who was pregnant, to take part in the June procession. In a photograph of Vida with Margaret and other women, Margaret towers over them all. She was 190 centimetres tall, as was her husband. The Fishers must have been as imposing a couple as Gough and Margaret Whitlam sixty years later.

Vida was also a guest at the Imperial Conference. Convened in London late in May and running for a month, it was chaired by British PM Herbert Asquith and dealt with constitutional and international matters. Delegates came from the dominions of the British Empire: Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa and Newfoundland. But Vida had some time to herself, too. Gardening has not been listed anywhere in her various biographies as one of her primary interests, possibly because she lived for most of her adult life in apartment buildings, but she was enchanted with her visit to Kew Gardens in the glorious English spring weather. She also heard a cuckoo and several nightingales, and saw an aeroplane for the first time.

After her time in London, Vida embarked on a lecture tour, taking in many of the large manufacturing towns in England and Scotland. She was shocked by the poverty she saw, especially in Liverpool, writing in the Woman Voter: ‘As it is a seaport city, one would likely see the worst types congregating about the docks and ferries. The women especially distressed me; they looked regular viragoes, half sodden with drink. Little wonder, indeed, when one knows how they live.’⁸ She visited a model cotton mill in Bolton, north-west England, where she admired the skills of the workers. However, she noted that they were paid only about £1 a week.

All this, as well as the preparations for the procession, made Vida tired, exhilarated and thrilled. In a letter home she declared she was being rushed off her feet but loved ‘every minute of my work and the splendid women I am working with’. Seeing and speaking with the suffragettes energised her, and she was always proud that Australia had led the way in giving women the vote.

Being away from home also gave Vida the opportunity to consider and evaluate the work she had been doing for so long. It was here that she prepared her pamphlet ‘Woman Suffrage in Australia’, setting out the Australian experience of the vote, presumably for the benefit of English women. It is a succinct summary of her beliefs and work, refreshingly free of any grandiosity. The great difficulty in getting the vote for women (and she used the struggle in Victoria as an example) was, she said, the influence of the ‘propertied classes’. She added that the campaign for woman suffrage in Australia, as in England, had been largely a middle-class one. The Australian suffragists had wanted the vote before other social reforms, but women needed to be educated in order to use their power wisely. Non-party-political women who had sought equal marriage and divorce, the protection of children and equal pay for equal work would bring an entirely new element into political life, for the reforms they wanted were not party questions and therefore did not need party-political solutions.

The great suffragette procession took place in London on 17 June 1911. It has been described as the greatest formal gathering of women the world had ever seen, and the sheer numbers do give some substance to the hyperbole. In all there were 40,000 women and several thousand men, carrying 1000 banners, with 100 women’s marching bands. Christabel Pankhurst described the range of women who took part: ‘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.’⁹

Vida and Margaret Fisher led the Australian and New Zealand contingent, which numbered about 170 women. They were joined by Emily McGowen; Lady Cockburn, the wife of the South Australian premier; and Lady Stout, the wife of the former prime minister of New Zealand. They carried a banner with the Australian coat of arms and another, painted in 1908 by Dora Meeson Coates, an Australian living in Britain, depicting Australia as a young girl in Greek-type robes, asking Mother England to ‘Trust the women mother as I have done’. In common with many of her compatriots, Vida wore the WSPU colours in a ribbon over her heart. ‘I wouldn’t have missed that march for anything on earth,’ she declared to a journalist later.

The procession began at 5.30 p.m. and went from the Thames Embankment to Westminster, past Pall Mall and Piccadilly, all the way to the Royal Albert Hall in South Kensington. Thousands of spectators lined the streets to cheer it on. General Laurence Drummond, English hero of the Boer War and a committed suffrage supporter, led the procession. He was followed by Charlotte Marsh, representing the WSPU members who had been force-fed in Holloway, and then a woman dressed as Joan of Arc, on a white horse. There were women representing New Zealand, Australia, Norway and Finland, all countries where women had the vote. American women represented the states of Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho and Washington. Women carried the emblems of British colonies and their dependencies – the maple leaf, the Indian elephant, the South African springbok, the red Welsh dragon, Scotland’s lion and, of course, the kangaroo – as well as the New Zealand tree fern, and gilded harps and shamrocks.

The purpose of the pageant was not simply celebratory. Seven hundred women marched to represent all those who had been imprisoned in the British struggle for the vote. No English woman who marched would have forgotten Black Friday on 18 November of the previous year, when 300 suffragettes had violently clashed with police in what was nothing short of a riot. Many women had been slapped and beaten and the Daily Mirror had published a photograph of a protester lying on the ground, her face covered in fear as a constable stood over her. The police had made no arrests. When Vida declared that the suffrage procession must melt even the anti-suffrage heart of Asquith, she was clearly being over-optimistic.

The following week she joined the spectators for the coronation procession of George V. While Vida was no colonial republican, the pageantry for the King Emperor – the mounted soldiers, guards resplendent in their various uniforms, the coaches, representatives of Empire in their national costume – must have impressed her. Not least because the only woman in the procession was probably Queen Mary.

Vida did have time to do some visiting and, as she had done in the United States, she kept an autograph book. One signature she later displayed with pride was that of George Bernard Shaw, then at the height of his success as the author of Major Barbara and Man and Superman, among many other plays. Vida visited him and his wife in their house north of London. Shaw already had some connection with the Goldstein family, though indirectly: he had been in contact with Henry Hyde Champion, who wanted to take over the Australian licences for Shaw’s plays, then in the hands of theatrical producer J.C. Williamson.

Vida and Shaw found immediate common ground, and established a warm friendship based on their shared political beliefs. At one point she apologised for not keeping an appointment with him because she was being rushed off her feet, and he chided her gently for not looking after herself properly. ‘No matter how much you may be occupied with the Procession, you must eat,’ he wrote, ‘unless you wish it to be your funeral procession. Why not eat here? Will you lunch with me tomorrow (Friday) at 1.30?’¹⁰

Indeed she did, and it is pleasant to wonder what they talked about. Shaw was a supporter of the suffragettes – in Vida’s autograph book beneath his wife’s signature are the words ‘George Bernard Shaw, husband of the above’ – but he was also keen to learn from her about the state of theatre in Australia. Shaw was a canny businessman who never assigned rights to his plays but simply licensed performances for a single tour, run or season, and he was well aware, to the penny, how much he stood to gain by any such arrangement.

Though Vida never said so, she more than likely managed to persuade him to ditch his arrangements with Williamson in Australia and place his business in the hands of Champion. Shaw’s letter firing Williamson is a fair example of his curmudgeonliness:

You are not a bit of use to me: you don’t do [my plays] yourself, and far from preventing other people from pirating them, you sit smiling on your throne while performances are going on in all directions . . . I therefore cry off our arrangement, and am putting my Australian theatrical business into the hands of my old friend Mr H.H. Champion . . . I may say that I have refused half a dozen Australian offers on the grounds that my plays were in your hands, and that my devotion does not seem to have touched you in the least.¹¹

After her speaking commitments, Vida escaped for a holiday in Buckinghamshire, where she visited Selwyn, his wife Minnie and their four daughters. This must have been the first time she had seen her brother since she was a guest at his wedding in Kalgoorlie five years before. It is impossible to say whether she had been close to her younger brother while they were growing up – the age gap between them might have prevented that, as well as gender – and Selwyn had left for Western Australia as soon as he qualified as a mining engineer. But she must have enjoyed hearing about his adventures in Mexico and elsewhere.

Afterwards, Vida went on holiday with Muriel Matters and Violet Tillard. She knew them both personally, not simply by reputation: Matters had visited Australia for several months the previous year to give lectures about her experiences as a suffragette who had been in prison. A former actor with an excellent sense of publicity, she had provided newspaper illustrations of her experiences, and gave her lectures in a dress similar to the prison clothes she had worn after being sentenced to a month in Holloway for the grille incident. She had attracted large and appreciative audiences. While in Melbourne, she and Tillard had been guests of the WPA and had stayed with Vida and her family.

One of the things Matters had wanted to do during her Australian visit was to craft a message about woman suffrage, prior to delivering it to British prime minister Asquith like, she said, ‘a child scolding the parent’. She and Vida had prepared a resolution for the Australian Senate outlining the benefits of giving votes to women and urging prime minister Fisher to support their call to the British parliament to do the same. The resolution read: ‘That the Senate is of the opinion that the extension of the suffrage to women of Australia for state and Commonwealth parliaments, on the same terms as men, has had the most beneficial results . . . It has given greater prominence to legislation particularly affecting women and children . . . Because the reform has brought nothing but good, though disaster was freely prophesied, we respectfully urge that all nations enjoying a representative government would be well advised in granting votes to women.’¹² The resolution was passed and sent to Asquith.

The close friendship between Vida and Matters caused some press comment in Australia. ‘An interesting pair,’ wrote the correspondent for the Perth Sunday Times. ‘Both have charm and brains and it is really hard to understand why either of them insists on fighting the entire male sex when they look so eminently fitted to make at least one [man] happy.’¹³

Vida’s work in Britain was being closely followed by her family, especially Isabella. Always concerned about her daughter’s health, she had asked Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence to keep an eye on Vida. Pethick-Lawrence reassured her that Vida had been very well and ‘I think we have followed your wishes that she should not work too hard’. She added that Vida had ‘endeared herself greatly to us and her help has been most valuable at a critical time in our agitation’.

Miles Franklin had managed a quick meeting with Vida in London; she had been on her way to Chicago to work with Alice Henry. Franklin told Isabella:

I saw [Vida] one morning as she drove from her hotel to the station in a taxi and another morning for ten minutes at Clement’s Inn. I exhibited her with great pride to Miss Phelps who says no wonder we are proud of her in Australia as she never saw such a beautiful, efficient, attractive little creature. She was the biggest thing that has happened in the woman movement for some time in England. I heard of her everywhere I went and people asked me what her mother was like and her sisters and so on and I had great joy in telling them as you may believe. Agnes Murphy said she never saw anything like the welcome she got – that a general like Kitchener might well have been proud of it.¹⁴

Vida left England in January 1912. She gave her farewell speech at the Royal Albert Hall in December. ‘We suffragists are one all the world over,’ she said. ‘The principles for which we stand, and of which the vote is only a small symbol, have to be woven into the national life everywhere.’ She was grateful for the hospitality, warmth and friendship she had been given, and promised to return as soon as she possibly could. She kept her promise a few years later, but in very different circumstances.