‘I am a progressive politician . . . one would not think that was a crime.’
– Vida Goldstein
Vida had come back to Australia determined to do what she could to help the suffragette cause. In the WSPU newspaper Votes for Women she had praised their militancy as not just a temporary necessity but a demonstration of effective opposition whenever major issues of principle needed to be fought:
The principle for which this movement stands is right and justice at all times . . . After you get the vote it will be unnecessary to send stones as messages to the Government and to the electors, but when you are going to the root of the matter and trying to establish social, political and industrial conditions on a foundation of right and justice, you will always find the big battalions ranged on the side of compromise, and you will always have to fight against that.1
The suffragettes advocated ‘Deeds not words’, and in the face of British prime minister Asquith’s intransigence their actions became increasingly drastic as 1912 progressed. ‘We are fighting for a revolution,’ declared Emmeline Pankhurst. The suffragettes smashed bank and post office windows, vandalised postboxes and cut telegraph wires: newspapers reported these actions in language that would now be used to describe mass terrorism. Women, some of whom Vida knew, were arrested and sentenced to hard labour, denied the status of political prisoners. Some went on hunger strikes in prison and in June force-feeding, which had ceased because of public outcry, was resumed.
Vida gave a graphic description of it in the Woman Voter:
The victim is put in a chair, her body tied to it, her arms and legs held down by wardresses, the head is held back, the throat is held, the tube is forced down and the food poured into the oesophagus . . . Miss Betty Giveen was released from Birmingham [gaol] because her throat was so swollen that the doctors could not get the tube down. For two days she had severe attacks of functional paralysis in her face, throat, lungs, arms and hands immediately after the feeding. One morning the doctor attempted three times to put the tube down her throat, but it was not possible, as the throat was so sore and swollen.2
In orderly, secure Melbourne, Vida read about these outrages with anguish. How could she support her friends and comrades from the other end of the world? Making speeches and holding rallies was all very well, and enduring widespread criticism for her support of suffragette militancy could be shrugged off fairly easily, but none of this remotely resembled the awfulness of having a rubber tube forced down one’s throat. She decided there was one thing she could do: let as many people as possible know what was going on. She decided to sell copies of Votes for Women as well as her own Woman Voter, alone, in the streets of the city.
Encouraged by the relative success of this venture, in the Woman Voter Vida published an open letter asking members of federal parliament to protest against the treatment of the suffragettes on humanitarian grounds, and to give overt support to their campaign. Not too surprisingly, nothing came of this; Andrew Fisher’s view was: ‘I do not think it necessary to make representations to the imperial government on the matter.’3
From this point onwards, Vida stopped insisting that men and women should work together. She now believed it was vital for women to band together and fight solely on their own account. After her return to Australia the Woman Voter stepped up its criticism of male behaviour, as well as the leniency with which male violence and abuse of women were treated by the courts.
And once more she decided to stand for parliament. This time, however, she decided to try for the House of Representatives rather than the Senate: she thought the resources of the WPA would be more effectively used in one seat than spread throughout Victoria in a Senate campaign. She chose the prosperous Melbourne seat of Kooyong in eastern Melbourne, the seat where in 1910 she had received the largest number of votes, and where women outnumbered men (by about 8000, according to one estimate). Again, she would stand as a progressive independent against a conservative.
She had a formidable opponent with a long track record of public service. Sir Robert Wallace Best had twice been acting premier and responsible for important tariff reforms. After his resignation in 1901 and subsequent election to the Senate, he had negotiated on behalf of Alfred Deakin in forming the Fusion ministry, where he was minister for trade and customs. Defeated in the Labor landslide of 1910, he was now standing in Kooyong as a Liberal candidate. Sidney and Beatrice Webb, no lovers of conservative politics, had described him as ‘a young man of the clerk type, red haired and excitable, habitually overworking himself’, and Punch magazine regarded him as someone who spoke ‘with an overwhelming love of adjectives and heavy sentences’. He had been a workmanlike minister and was clearly not an exciting speaker, though the epitome of gravitas and authority. In short, he was both ponderous and conscientious, and he had many influential supporters, including the Australian Women’s National League.4
The election, for all seats of the House of Representatives and half the Senate, was to be held at the end of May 1913. There was also a referendum consisting of six questions aimed at giving the Commonwealth greater control over Australian trade and commerce.
The WPA, as before, moved swiftly into action. They opened new rooms in Arlington Chambers, 229 Collins Street, as the headquarters for Vida’s campaign team. The address included a shop that sold homemade jams, haberdashery and publications about the women’s movement and social and industrial issues; in pride of place was the pamphlet ‘The Life and Work of Miss Vida Goldstein’, written by Vida’s campaign committee and summarising her career and beliefs.
As Vida had done in previous campaigns, she spelled out her platform very clearly in her speeches and in newspaper articles. She supported the legal and financial protection of young people until the age of twenty-one; the right of women to occupy all government and municipal positions and to act as jurors; marriage and divorce laws that treated men and women equally, including equal parental rights over children; equal pay for equal work; protection of deserted wives and children; and international peace and arbitration.
Her appearances continued to be popular events. As the Box Hill Reporter noted, ‘The pretty little hall [at Camberwell in the Kooyong electorate] was thronged to the doorways long before 8 p.m. and a number of people were turned away, while [latecomers] had to be smuggled through a side entrance by a constable. Proceedings were preluded by the singing of suffragette songs by a band of white-robed young women, most of whom wore green, white or purple favours.’5
Vida’s speeches were clear, matter-of-fact, surprisingly frank about her position as the underdog, and free of easy appeal to the emotions – not necessarily tactics that would be successful today. She was still an attractive woman wearing fashionable clothes, but she was now in her forties. With increasing age and maturity had come a strength of argument that, always there from the beginning of her campaigns, had hardened into conviction and a sense of rightness. No longer did she want to be entertaining, to work the audience: she sought to convince them by sheer force of argument.
At the Camberwell meeting, as elsewhere, she emphasised a point she had made in previous campaigns:
As a non-party candidate I had difficulties to face that confronted no other candidate. The non-party candidate does not get the support of the party press. And the other special prejudice I have to fight is that of sex. So the strikes against me are that I am not only a woman but non-party, progressive and a defender of the suffragettes.
I have watched all proceedings on behalf of women and children ever since federal parliament was established. Sometimes it has been a torture to sit in the House and see questions mutilated, simply because men did not understand them. They would not like to see their interests left entirely to a parliament of women; they found such a thought highly amusing, and yet women were supposed to put up with it.
I ask you to vote for me because I am not a member of a political party. Study has convinced me that party government is a system that is entirely out of date, one that does not suit modern conditions. It is a cumbersome, unbusinesslike method of running the country. It simply means a shameful waste of public time and public money, and it does not always mean that we get the best man for the position. I think the time has come to devise some better method for carrying out public business. In the very interests of the country, we must break away from party.6
An elderly male voter interjected: ‘You must surely be conscious of the fact that if you remain away from either party you will be a nonentity in the House.’ Vida kept her temper and said only, ‘I just ask you to try me.’
She continued: ‘You are being asked to vote against me because I am a progressive politician. One would not think that is a crime. My policy is always to look on every single measure on its merits, and to see whether it is for the good of the country. If it is, I do not care which part of the country it comes from, I will support it.’
Vida also tackled the electoral problem of her connection with the suffragettes. ‘People have stated that they agree with me about everything but that point. But,’ she asked her audience, ‘where do you get your information about the suffragettes and what they are fighting for?’
‘From the newspapers?’ someone suggested.
‘Exactly! But if you want true knowledge about the suffragettes, why would you go to the enemy for it? The suffragettes wanted the vote, and they fought for the vote, but only as a symbol of freedom, as a weapon for securing justice, and not only justice, but morality and moral conditions for their own sex.
‘I have heard it said that the women of England did not need to [adopt militant tactics] because the women of Australia had not had to. This was because we had a sensible body of legislators, and the only explanation I can offer about England is that ours is such a broad country that it begat big, broad views. The suffragettes are not only fighting for the vote, but for the honour of womanhood and the sanctity of childhood. They are fighting against the white slave traffic. A few years ago only a few people knew anything about that; women knew nothing, or if they did, they were supposed not to talk about it. Now women feel very differently. As long as they have to suffer these horrors, men and women should hear about them.
‘Do you really think women would go through the awful torture they had to suffer just for the vote? No, no, indeed no! The vote is something in itself, of course, but it is also the means to a thousand ends.’
Vida’s speeches sometimes read as if she was more vehemently passionate about the suffragette cause than about the issues on which she was campaigning, and her support for the women’s vote in Britain continued to alienate many people. The WPA suggested that she should debate the subject with an anti-suffrage campaigner, but representatives of the AWNL refused to be involved. Ernest Scott, professor of history at the University of Melbourne, was approached, and the hostility of his letter of refusal, printed in the Woman Voter, might well have taken Vida aback.7
At first he apologised for neglecting to answer the letter from the WPA, which he said had been hidden under a pile of papers and he had found it while looking for something else. That was slighting enough, but he added, ‘in any case I couldn’t debate with Miss Goldstein. She would be sure to get the best of it, and her case being so infernally bad, I shouldn’t like that to occur. Secondly, it seems to me to be useless to debate the pranks of the Pancakes [Pankhursts] and their maggot-brained following. They have taken the subject out of the realm of argument. The example [they choose] is to throw things. If I debated with Miss Goldstein I should come equipped with a basket of rotten apples, and as I can throw straighter than she can, I should be bound to triumph by the use of suffragette methods, and I shouldn’t like that either. Please accept my apologies.’
A constant irritation, and an issue that seemed no closer to resolution, was the matter of equal pay. In Vida’s view, more firm legislation was needed so that the issue was not subject to the whims of judges. Even Mr Justice Higgins had been unable to see the question of equal wages from a woman’s point of view. Vida pointed out that when Higgins had been dealing with the Mildura fruit industry award he had fixed the rates for women at a particular branch lower than for men, because he believed women did not need the same amount of money to live on.
Another live issue was the maternity bonus. This, introduced by PM Andrew Fisher, gave a one-off payment of £5 for all women who had had children, regardless of their marital status – except for Indigenous women and those of Asian and Pacific Islander heritage. This money, equivalent to about two weeks’ wages for unskilled workers, was intended to pay for medical care for mothers and babies. Fisher had proposed it because as a miner in Queensland he had seen families in grinding poverty and believed that working mothers should be able to spend time with their new babies without straining the family income. There was also the question of infantile mortality: in 1912 about eighty male babies and about sixty females per 1000 died before their first birthday, mostly of preventable causes. Five pounds would cover hospital costs or pay for a doctor or midwife to be present at a birth, increasing the child’s chances of survival. When the Labor Party introduced the reform, they insisted that the allowance had never been intended as a gift or a form of charity: it was simply a way for the Commonwealth to have a stake in the growth of the population.
The allowance attracted the kind of criticism that has echoed through this country every time welfare has been extended to women – namely, that unmarried women would take advantage of it in order to have illegitimate children. It was argued that a more effective use of public funds would be to allocate money to hospitals and provide better community housing.
When Vida was asked her opinion of the maternity bonus she said, ‘In the first place I refuse to call this scheme a maternity bonus. It is put forward in many quarters that this is the bonus for the encouragement of maternity . . . It is a good thing because it is the first time that any government in any part of the world has recognised the service that women render the state. It is not a very handsome recognition, but at any rate it is the beginning to the economic independence of women.’ The ‘baby bonus’ is still a feature of Australian welfare payments.
Vida was also a staunch supporter of trade unions. ‘I think preference to unionists makes for efficiency in work, loyalty of the people to each other and good to the community all round,’ she declared. ‘Nobody is as rigid on the principle of preference to unionists as lawyers and medical men. Unions are the only way for men to raise the standard of labour, and the only way in which they are able to maintain the privileges they have bought so dearly.’
As she had done before, Vida worked hard during the campaign. A firm believer that voters had to be contacted personally, and preferably in their own homes, she spent days in Kooyong talking directly to people and holding public meetings. Voters were cautious: her platform was too close to Labor’s for the taste of many in the electorate. But by her own account, she managed to win over some of them. As she later wrote in the Woman Voter, ‘At our meetings the audience, in the ultra-Conservative parts of a Conservative electorate, were cold and critical to begin with, but always I could feel the mental atmosphere warming up as I proceeded with my address, and my critics one by one began to see that women were not animated by sex antagonism in their desire to get into parliament; that they had work to do there that no man nor any number of men could do for them.’8
Doris Hordern, one of the women who had sold the Woman Voter on the streets of Melbourne, was Vida’s secretary for this campaign. By 1913, aged twenty-three, she was already known as a committed member of the WPA, and her job included managing more than 150 campaign workers, arranging publicity and Vida’s public appearances, and even scrutineering on election day. She was falling in love with Maurice Blackburn, a personable young lawyer who also worked for Vida in Kooyong and whose commitment to the cause, clarity of legal advice and ability to speak on Vida’s behalf were much admired by members of the WPA.
Hordern also worked part-time at the Book Lovers’ Library – she was one of Elsie Champion’s ‘girls’ whom Elsie had said worked more efficiently in the bookshop than men. However, as soon as Hordern announced her engagement to Blackburn, Elsie dismissed her. There was no suggestion that she had not been doing a good job: Elsie told her that she wanted someone more ‘reliable’ – evidently code for unwillingness to employ a married woman, and an attitude scarcely congruent with Elsie’s professed feminist beliefs. The fact that the young couple did not intend to marry for at least eighteen months apparently left Elsie unmoved. Naturally this experience infuriated Hordern, and she became further alienated from the WPA and Vida’s campaign.9
A continuing problem with the latter – and Hordern was not the only one to think this – was Vida’s relationship with Cecilia John. John, eight years younger than Vida, was the kind of woman whom Miles Franklin might have described as a ‘person of tonnage’. Assertive, with square shoulders and a direct, perhaps intimidating gaze, John was described as ‘having a constitutional inability to compromise’. Born in Hobart in 1877, she had left home to study music and singing in Melbourne in her early teens, setting up and running a poultry farm at Deepdene, about 10 kilometres east of the city, to pay for her musical training. By 1911 she was both a recognised expert on poultry and a successful teacher of singing and voice production.10
John was also intensely interested in social questions. Vida, attracted by John’s convictions and ability as an organiser and her enthusiasm, made John her campaign secretary, as well as the business manager for the Woman Voter. Vida’s relationship with Cecilia John obviously caused gossip at the time, and since then there has been conjecture that their relationship might have been sexual. The two women were comfortable colleagues and later companions; they were evidently close friends. However, intimate friendships, after all, do not necessarily have to be sexual. Friendship between single women, especially before sexual issues were openly discussed, could be very intense. Vida never identified as lesbian, though Cecilia John did. At no time did Vida refer to John except as a friend and travelling companion; whether their relationship was more than that we do not know.
John’s rise to prominence naturally did not please the WPA members and others who had worked with Vida from the time she had ventured into politics. According to Hordern, several people believed it was ‘not wise to give so large a responsibility into the hands of one so new to the game as Miss John’.11 Vida’s colleagues could clearly see that John was becoming increasingly important in Vida’s life, and that she would continue to influence Vida in years to come – as indeed she did.
Possibly as a result of John’s influence, Maurice Blackburn noticed in the WPA a certain amount of what, had he lived two generations later, he might have described as political correctness. When he mildly criticised a letter of protest Vida had written about the reported views of an Australian anti-suffragist resident in England, retribution was swift. ‘Miss John wants to hold a class at Deepdene for the education of me,’ he wrote to Hordern. ‘I expect to have Miss Goldstein brought on me like a shower.’12 Blackburn fell out further with the Goldstein camp from about the middle of 1913. War in Europe was an increasing possibility, and he was in favour of compulsory military training, something Vida and the WPA vehemently opposed.
Public reaction to Vida’s campaign was muted this time: it was, after all, her third attempt to enter parliament. There was much less of fancy-a-woman-standing-for-parliament rhetoric from the media, and even fewer jokes. Journalists also ignored the fact that ten years after the passing of the Franchise Act, only six women had stood for election to an Australian parliament. In this 1913 election, Vida was one of only two.
The other woman candidate was Ellen Mulcahy, standing as an independent Labor member in Melbourne. An Irish-born labour activist and former primary-school teacher, she had also been a probation officer at the Children’s Court and was instrumental in forming a number of women’s unions. She had fallen out with the Labor Party when the equal-pay status granted to women clerical workers had been overturned by the Court of Appeal. Mulcahy and Vida undoubtedly knew each other – in a town the size of Melbourne, women of like mind congregated – though they were probably not close.
Vida and her campaign were largely ignored by The Argus and The Age, the latter going so far as to call her a ‘political nobody’.13 This called forth a protest from the WPA in the form of a deputation to the editor to remind him that Vida was an international figure who had secured more than 50,000 votes in the past. Not surprisingly, the deputation turned out to be a waste of time. Neither of the major Victorian dailies, with their strong ties to the political parties, was going to support an independent candidate – and especially not a woman who was a well-known and admired public speaker, had a high profile and might even have a chance of winning a seat.
Vida understood this very well, and in the Woman Voter she published an open letter to voters:
No stone is being left unturned to induce you to vote against me – because I am a woman, because I am a non-party politician, because I am a progressive politician, because I defend the Suffragettes. It is for these very reasons I urge you to vote for me . . . do not condemn me unheard. Read what I have to say to you, come to my meetings, write to me . . . cast a thinking vote, a conscientious vote!14
Election day, 31 May, was cold and wet, as the weather had been the first time Vida had tried to enter parliament ten years before. Her team feared that the weather would prevent many of Kooyong’s voters from bothering to turn up. Her women scrutineers and supporters at the booth were subjected to ‘extreme discourtesy’, mostly, but not always, at the hands of men.
When the booths closed and the votes were being tallied, Vida and her supporters shivered under shelter in the pouring rain, waiting for the results to be posted. They did not have long to wait. The first tally showed that Best was ahead by 500 votes, and he maintained his lead. In the end he held Kooyong with 18,777 votes, while Vida trailed with 11,540. Mulcahy was also unsuccessful in the seat of Melbourne.
As ever, Vida was stoic and gracious in defeat. Best thanked her for her ‘courtesy and good feeling’. She congratulated him, but assured her supporters that, ‘We have simply passed another milestone on the road to justice.’ She conceded that her job had been a difficult one because her opponent had been in public life for thirty years and was supported by the Liberal Party and the daily papers.
The results of the election as a whole were much less decisive. Fisher’s Labor Party was defeated by a single seat in the lower house by Joseph Cook and the Commonwealth Liberals, but held a majority in the Senate. All the referendum questions were defeated.
With only a one-seat majority, the survival of Cook’s fragile government for its whole term seemed unlikely. So it proved: on 5 June 1914 parliament was dissolved, and another election was called for 5 September.
Vida decided to have another try at winning Kooyong. Best was standing again, and so was an independent Liberal, E.W. Terry. Once again The Argus accused her of trying to split the vote, but The Age predicted that Vida, the non-conservative candidate, might have a reasonable chance of success this time. There was only one other woman nominating in Australia: the Socialist Emily Paul in the southern Sydney seat of Cook.
Vida supported the same policies as before, adding only a call for the abolition of compulsory military training of men under twenty-one. Because of the threat of war in Europe this was a controversial policy, and the Best camp, supported by the AWNL, made it the basis of an anti-Labor (and anti-Vida) scare campaign. However, for the first time Vida actually won the support of some AWNL members, not all of whom were pro-war, and some from the Labor Party, probably because she was the only non-conservative candidate standing in Kooyong. The Socialist newspaper also fell in behind Vida on the grounds that ‘she would be a prominent and useful figure in a gathering of chiefly male mugwumps’.15 These marks of support gave Vida some solace in the face of the usual criticism she had to endure: that one woman would be unable to achieve anything useful in parliament, women would do more for society by staying at home and training their children, and they should concentrate on state and municipal issues.
Vida’s campaign was going reasonably well until 4 August, when Britain declared war on Germany. It was not a good time to be a pacifist candidate, and her opposition to compulsory military training cost her many votes. The final tallies were Best 18,545, Vida 10,264 and Terry 2420.
Labor won the election with substantial majorities on both sides of parliament.
Despite her optimism, Vida must have known that Kooyong would be a difficult seat for her to win. Most of the voters were small-property owners, caught between high wages and the high cost of living and therefore even less likely than usual to vote for a progressive candidate. And then there was the question of the war – and for Vida that was the major issue. In the Woman Voter she conceded that Best’s majority had been so large because of the ‘wave of militarism sweeping over the civilised world’.
After four unsuccessful attempts to enter parliament, she could have been forgiven for being ready to abandon the fight. She was not: in fact, she was gearing up for a new and greater battle.