‘Think of us, we are going back into the night.’

– German delegate to the Zurich International Congress of Women, 1919

Vida’s losses because of the war were significant. She had lost a brother, and her opposition to Selwyn’s participation would only have made her sorrow keener. She had been excoriated and ridiculed in the press and had split with colleagues, including the Pankhursts, because of her pacifist views. Former supporters had walked away from her and the WPA because of the anti-conscription campaign. After five attempts she had failed to enter parliament and her electoral support had evaporated. Probably hardest of all, with Isabella’s death she had lost her chief supporter, admirer and ally.

Could she contemplate trying for elected office yet again? She was almost fifty, and tiredness must have started sinking into her bones. It would not have been surprising if she had started questioning the price she had paid for her beliefs and principles. However, she did not. For one thing, her religion continued to be a great comfort and source of conviction to her, and she was also buoyed by her staunch and close friendship with Cecilia John. However, like so many others all over the world, she faced the future without much optimism.

The International Congress of Women had announced a conference in mid-May 1919 to discuss and advance issues of women’s rights. Women from member countries had met from time to time in various European capitals since 1878, and in 1915 delegates from Europe and North America had adopted resolutions calling for an end to the war. The 1919 conference was to involve 146 women delegates from 15 countries, including the USA, Britain and Germany – though not France, whose government had forbidden a formal delegation. Vida and Cecilia John were nominated to represent the WPA and the Women’s Peace Army.

The conference, to be held in Paris, was timed to coincide with the Paris Peace Conference at Versailles, a meeting of the victorious Allied powers – Great Britain, France, Italy, Japan and the United States – to set the peace terms for the defeated nations, comprising Germany and its allies. The Paris conference was, of course, composed solely of men: the ‘big four’ being French prime minister Georges Clemenceau, Britain’s prime minister David Lloyd George, US president Woodrow Wilson and Italian prime minister Vittorio Emanuele Orlando. Billy Hughes represented Australia.

For the women’s conference, WPA members were asked to donate or hold fundraising events so Vida and Cecilia John could afford to attend, or to donate £10 a head.¹ The censor, who was apparently still poring over Vida’s mail three months after the end of the war, thought the effort was ‘doomed to failure’.² And indeed the Spanish flu epidemic had superseded much of the fundraising activity. Because money was tight, the WPA decided that only Vida would go. At the last minute, however, extra cash was somehow found and so on 24 March Vida and Cecilia John were able to leave for Europe, and Paris, on the Orsova.

The ship was so crowded that meals were served in relays. There were ‘swarms’ of children on board and troops were to be taken on in Bombay, placing further strain on the ship’s resources. Vida, proud of her lifelong immunity to seasickness, volunteered to help the overworked stewards look after passengers. She and John had to stay on the ship at Fremantle because of the flu epidemic but were able to leave at Colombo, a place Vida loved even though she greatly disliked being carried through the streets in a rickshaw, as she thought this degraded the driver.³

Problems surfaced when the ship docked in Bombay. Gandhi’s passive resistance campaign to gain independence from Britain was attracting followers, and police were everywhere. The cargo of wool had to be unloaded to make room for 1700 British troops, but the military authorities decided the soldiers would remain in India. Vida and Cecilia John watched the wool being reloaded with some anxiety: the opening of the conference was only a month away and they could not afford to be delayed. But their passage had some lighter moments. When the Orsova was about to pass through the Suez Canal a ship full of Australian soldiers was just before them. The soldiers cheered the Orsova, and Vida and John could not help laughing when they heard a group ask, ‘Have you got Billy Hughes on board? Well, pitch him overboard!’

Vida and John arrived at Tilbury in England on 12 May, the day the conference was scheduled to start. They were handed a telegram stating that it had been postponed for a week and would now be held in Zurich, but when they reached London they were told that visas and tickets for Switzerland would take at least three to four weeks to arrive. This problem was solved with the help of the Australian agent-general, and eventually they were able to board a vessel for Le Havre and then a train to Paris.

In the diary that Vida kept of this journey she does not mention seeing much evidence of war on the train trip from Paris through eastern France to Switzerland. Presumably as she travelled from Le Havre to Paris and on to Zurich, going through cities that were behind enemy lines, she saw little of the devastation to property and livestock wrought by the war. But when she got to Zurich, she had only to look at the German women delegates, scarred and shrivelled and malnourished, to see what effect the war had had on a civilian population.

The president of the conference was the American Jane Addams. Already a distinguished social worker and an activist for peace and the rights of women, she was clearly a woman after Vida’s own heart. Among her other achievements she had co-founded Hull House, a pioneer settlement house in Chicago. Settlement housing was a movement started in England in the 1880s to establish places in poor urban areas where middle-class people could live and work, sharing knowledge and expertise with neighbours on low incomes and providing services such as education, day care for small children and health care. This was a movement of which Vida, not surprisingly given her work in Melbourne’s slums, thoroughly approved. In 1931 Addams became the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her work in education, her social work and her activism for peace.

Addams’ opening speech was as forceful as her personality. The congress, she said, was an alternative to the male-dominated international gathering taking place in Paris. She honoured women from all sides of the world conflict, especially those whose opposition to the war had made them vulnerable to harassment, as well as approval, from their fellow citizens. She had come to Zurich via Paris and had a copy of the draft terms of the Versailles Treaty, and emphasised that the problems facing the men were pretty close to insoluble.

This would hardly have been news to some delegates. As a result of the war, many nations were in turmoil: in Russia alone an alternative government had emerged, one that was already proving attractive to revolutionary forces elsewhere. The prevailing Versailles view was that Germany had to be controlled: the map had to be changed not only to weaken Germany, but to fill the spaces left in Europe and the Middle East by the defeat and collapse of the Russian, Habsburg and Ottoman empires.

The women’s conference – which in due course became the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) and of which Addams was the president for many years – condemned most of the proposals being put forward at Versailles. Many delegates to the women’s conference would surely have agreed with a later historian’s acid observation that creating a series of separate nation-states might look neat on paper, but Paris was a long way from the realities they would have to confront.⁴ Germany’s plight horrified the women too: disarmament, they argued, should not be limited only to the defeated nations. They called for an immediate end to the naval blockade that was preventing Germany and its allies from access to much-needed food and medical supplies.

Two hundred women from seventeen nations declared that the Treaty of Versailles was based on plans that could easily lead to another war. Two years later, in Vienna, the WILPF doubled down on this, passing the resolution: ‘Believing that the Peace Treaties contain the seeds of new wars, this Congress declares that a revision of the Peace Terms is necessary, and resolves to make this its principal task’.

The Zurich conference ended early in June 1919. The Australian Eleanor Moore, who had attended to represent the Australian Church’s group the Sisterhood of International Peace, said that the saddest part of it was having to farewell the German delegates. Those women were under no illusions about the country they were returning to: one said, ‘Think of us, we are going back into the night.’ The spirit of sisterhood was strong: Madam Melin from northern France was presented with a bunch of pink roses, representing the beauty of universal love, by Fraulein Gustava Heymann in the name of German women. As Vida later wrote, ‘Madam Melin, who knows the full horrors of war . . . called upon the women of all countries to pledge themselves to do all that was possible to fight against war. [She said] “It is not your country that is guilty of the crimes against humanity, c’est la guerre, c’est la guerre.”’⁵ Many of the women wept in despair.

On their return to Paris, Vida and Cecilia John had to endure a ten-day transport strike. Vida saw an obviously rich woman punching tickets at Passy railway station: someone suggested that this woman might donate her salary to help set up a soup kitchen for the families of the strikers. For Vida the woman represented everything that was wrong with the country, and in her diary she wrote: ‘The appalling luxury in France is in sharp contrast to the appalling cost of living, The unrest with the soldiers, the dissatisfaction on the part of many workers with the peace terms, their opposition to the Allied policy in Russia and Hungary, are producing a situation full of dangerous possibilities.’

As the two women travelled across northern France to Calais they were sobered by the impact of the war. They visited Reims, Chateau Thierry and Hill 108, places of heavy bombardment and trench warfare: the Allies had faced the Germans from a complex series of trenches, some sited on the tops of ridges instead of further down the slopes. ‘You have all seen illustrations of each place,’ she wrote to the readers of the Woman Voter, ‘but nothing save one’s own eyes can give one the faintest glimmer of what the scenes of destruction are like. In Reims there were 14,000 houses shelled and fired; of these only 700 can be repaired. In the whole town only seven houses remain intact. The Cathedral, the former gem of Europe, is still gloriously beautiful even in its ruined form. The last shell fired struck the square immediately in front of the Cathedral, and formed a huge hole which is not to be filled up. Though the city will be rebuilt, the hole and the Cathedral will remain as a constant reminder of the havoc wrought by the Germans. In the ruined houses there are pathetic evidences of the hasty flight of the people, and strange to say such flimsy things as lamp shades stand intact.’⁶

After they reached London, John decided to return to Australia but Vida wanted to stay in England for a while. She told the WPA she would not be returning home for some time, and waived a claim for further money from the conference delegates’ fund.

It might have been assumed that Vida was merely taking a holiday, but in fact she was considering a change of focus in her life. She wrote: ‘I could no longer work in the political field, because the people did not seem willing to tread this path.’⁷ It was a life-changing, vital decision, and in hindsight hardly a surprising one. Anyone who has sought to bring about social or political change has been forced to recognise that – as Prime Minister Gough Whitlam observed seventy years later – in Australia the way of the reformer is always hard. For Vida, feeling she had little to show for twenty years of solid advocacy and work for women, this must have been particularly difficult.

However, she had friends and family to visit. She stayed with Selwyn’s widow Minnie and four daughters in Buckinghamshire. Selwyn’s loss only two years before must still have been raw, and perhaps Vida emphasised to his family what she had always expressed in her writing: that soldiers who enlisted were not to blame for the war, and accountability rested solely with the generals and politicians. She might also have urged Minnie to return to Australia and bring her girls up there. Indeed, a few years later the family did return, settling in Perth.

Vida also spent time with Emmeline, Christabel and Sylvia Pankhurst. Now that the war was over, their differences were probably swept under the carpet: in any case, the Pankhursts were getting ready to celebrate the long-delayed granting of the suffrage to British women. This did not mean a complete victory for the suffragettes: the Representation of the People Act 1918 gave the vote only to women over thirty years of age who met a property qualification or were married to a man who did. Only 58 per cent of adult men had been eligible to vote before 1918, and the Act abolished property and other restrictions for them, extending the vote to virtually all men over the age of twenty-one. Men in the armed forces could vote after the age of nineteen. All of this meant that now, 21 million men could vote while only 8.5 million women were able to do so. British women did not achieve exactly the same voting rights as men until 1928.

However, the 1918 Act did mean that some women were eligible to enter parliament. The first to do so was Nancy Astor at the end of 1919. Vida must have had mixed feelings about Astor’s success: pride that the suffragette campaign had triumphed in this even though Australia, whose women had been granted the vote years earlier, did not yet have a woman MP.

Vida attended an enormous Peace Day march in July 1919; she left an account of it in her papers that shows her eye for detail and her skills as a reporter. The decorations were nowhere near as voluminous as they had been during the procession eight years earlier, she thought, but there was a huge range of flags, including those of the Allies and the British Empire. She stood in Vauxhall Bridge Road, south London, surrounded by Australian soldiers on leave, some of whom had climbed trees for a better view:

Trees thick with men, mainly Aussies. Only flies, you would say, could cling there. Australians and little boys can cling where flies cling . . . Behind us were women who had emerged from the domestic sphere to ‘see the boys go by’, they left their housework to take care of itself, for the time being, and carrying a kitchen chair under one arm and a baby on the other they came forth in hundreds, from the areas, from the horrible basement dwellings where live the servants and those who want living places – one cannot call them homes – for the lowest of the exorbitant rentals demanded by landlords. They came from the first, second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth floors above the basements, the dwellings that are the despair of English women.⁸

An immense military procession followed. It was led by the United States Army headed by General Pershing; he saluted the cheering crowds and, Vida thought, looked like a pleased schoolboy. The American soldiers who followed were spruce and well appointed, though Vida noticed that their fixed bayonets were blunt-looking and dull, almost rusty, while other armies’ bayonets shone like silver. The French were led by Marshal Foch on a glossy black horse, one of the most beautiful animals Vida had ever seen, and Foch was cheered as no foreign general had ever been before, she thought. The AIF did not take part – though demobilisation had not officially taken place, many of those who fought were returning to Australia – but when Lieutenant-General Sir William Birdwood, veteran of the Boer War, the Gallipoli campaign and the Western Front, appeared, all the Australian soldiers present ‘cheered like mad’, as they did for General Haig and for the British Navy.

It was raining heavily, but thousands of men stood with their heads bared while 10,000 voices sang Handel’s ‘Hallelujah’ chorus. Then someone shouted, ‘The Queen!’ and the crowd stampeded towards where they thought Queen Alexandra was. Vida noted sardonically: ‘At any hour of any day Londoners of every class will wait and wait and wait in sunshine or storm if they think there is a chance of getting a glimpse of the King and Queen or either one of them.’ The crowd massed around the Queen’s motor car, impeding any progress, and despite the weather Alexandra ordered the window covers to be lowered so the people could see her. Vida heard one woman saying, ‘She’s nice, but I like Mary and George, they’re the sort for these times.’

Not all the Londoners were enthusiastic about royalty or the procession; close by Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square, Vida heard one woman say, ‘Peace! I don’t know why they’re celebrating peace. It’s a wonder Nelson doesn’t fall down. Just as well he’s only got one eye!’ The woman made ‘some other remarks which we could not hear, but which gained the approval of those around her. “You seem to be a sensible woman,” said one man. “I should think I am. I’m a suffragette. I can see what’s going on even though I have got a Tory husband.” “So had I,” said another woman. “But I converted him after twenty years, he’s all right now but it was a tough job.”’

In June 1920 Vida travelled to Geneva for the eighth conference of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance. She joined delegates from thirty-one countries, nineteen of which, she noted, had given the vote to women since 1914. This fact cheered her up somewhat. ‘The spirit of the new world was rising from the ashes of the old,’ she declared. ‘The enfranchised women sat in a large half circle at one end of the platform, wearing their national colours, their chests puffed out like pouter pigeons, their faces beaming; the unenfranchised, a small group, sat at the other end, their drooping shoulders and dejected countenances being a delightful piece of play acting.’

The president of the conference was the American Carrie Chapman Catt, with whom Vida happily renewed acquaintance. Dressed in black and surrounded by women, Catt said, ‘I never thought I should live to see the day when I should have to ask enfranchised women to hurry up with what they had to say because there were so many of them!’⁹

The British National Council of Women, whose conference Vida also attended, dealt with the proposal to set up the League of Nations, the intergovernmental organisation founded in January 1920 with the aim of maintaining world peace by promoting collective security and settling international disputes through negotiation and arbitration. The league, many thought, was a ray of hope for peace in the world, and to some extent Vida agreed, but she deplored the fact that so few women – if any – had taken part in the drafting process. At the British Dominions’ Women’s Citizens’ Union she said she thought the league would never succeed unless women were part of it. But at a meeting held at the London headquarters of the Society of Friends, she was delighted when the Quakers joined everybody in singing ‘The Red Flag’.

Her views about the League of Nations hardened as the weeks passed. Idealism, she felt, was all very well, but the league had been set up according to pre-war ideas of nationhood and patriotism; the founders seemed unaware that the world before 1914 had gone and would never return: ‘In public affairs there are such wheels within wheels, such violent clashing of interests, that it becomes more and more difficult to see where right lies . . . Those who want to oppress will always endeavour to find a way to make war . . . will always argue that the end justifies the means.’ She had to wait less than twenty years to see the truth of her words.

Vida’s interest in world politics had been growing in scope and intensity for some time, and now she wanted her thoughts and observations to be more widely known. She wrote to Henry Hyde Champion asking for his help in getting her writing published, partly because she felt the Australian press was being far too celebratory about the Versailles peace treaty and she wanted to express a countervailing view. She suggested Champion might approach eight left-wing papers, including ‘[later Labor PM John] Curtin’s paper in Perth’: it’s impressive that there were so many socialist and labour papers in Australia at the time. Vida told her brother-in-law:

I feel it is imperative that Australia should be given a general survey of conditions here by one of their own women . . . because they are equally responsible with Europe for future moves or not towards peace, and they had better be ready for the new order because democracy as we know it is doomed, and those who do not recognise that fact and prepare the way for the new order can blame no one but themselves if it comes not in peace but violent revolution.¹⁰

This was hardly a message to be embraced by an Australia shattered by war. Typewritten drafts of Vida’s articles are among her papers, suggesting that she did not have her work published or that Champion was unsuccessful in having them placed. In hindsight, however, it cannot be denied that her articles offer some pithy, well-written and useful insights into the geopolitics of the time.

They also show how strongly Vida was embracing socialism. The capitalist system, she asserted, was in its death throes, and the workers needed to prevail. This view was by no means endorsed by all her supporters and colleagues. Edith How-Martyn, a friend who became Vida’s archivist, appended a note to Vida’s papers in the Women’s Library in London, pointing out rather crossly that she didn’t know why Vida had found it necessary to emphasise the role of the workers, since bosses were also needed to make the economy succeed. How-Martyn was clearly worried about her friend’s posthumous reputation.

But Vida was not entirely one-eyed about a possible socialist revolution. She also had a fine and realistic scepticism about human nature:

The dictatorship of the proletariat will not make the liberties of future generations any more secure. Every dictatorship, every responsible government, no matter how honest it may be, contains within itself, unknown to itself, the seeds which self-seeking, utterly unscrupulous forces can tend in secret until they fructify in an all-powerful instrument of tyranny . . . No people is stronger than its weakest individual citizen.

There was no guarantee that things would improve for the people of Europe. She quoted Red Cross doctors who said that children in Germany and Czechoslovakia, who had never had milk of any kind, had bones so soft that they could be bent. In some places postwar conditions were worse than those during wartime. ‘The dictates of our common humanity should prevent us, now that peace is signed, from making war on babies.’

Vida also believed that nothing had changed for the better as far as British workers were concerned. More than a million men, including many soldiers, were now unemployed, and strikes were frequent. Trade union leaders suspected that the government was thinking of attacking them. Vida pointed out: ‘These are the men who are denounced as agitators and Bolsheviks by their bitterest political opponents, yet they always act as a restraining rather than an agitating influence on the members of the organisations of which they are the official heads.’ But their conditions were very bad. ‘Houses are not to be got, in some districts the beds are worked on the three-shift principle, rented to different occupants three times in twenty-four hours, eight hours at a time.’

Even though she had quietly decided that the time had come to retire from active advocacy, Vida was still happy to give advice. When an English women’s organisation asked her to comment about Australian women’s organisations’ approach to venereal disease, she replied with some indignation that most Australian groups recognised it as a scourge of the late war but were unwilling to learn more about it. And she was still keen for Australian women’s groups to band together so they could be directly represented at world congresses: women of the world still, now more than ever, needed to unite effectively, she believed.¹¹

Like many of her contemporaries, especially in war-exhausted Britain, Vida looked to America, believing that with its wealth, entrepreneurial spirit and idealism it might show the way for the rest of the world: ‘The cargo of conviction and conscience that the Mayflower carried to America, its greatness, the simplicity, the invincible integrity of Lincoln, remain for all time, and League of Nations or no League of Nations are gradually drawing the Anglo-Saxon peoples together, encircling them with invisible cords that are stronger than all the armies of the world.’ Here for once Vida showed herself in agreement with the views of Billy Hughes and many others who believed in drawing the white nations – Australia, Canada, England, the United States – together in a strong and great ‘Anglo-Saxon Empire’ united by ties of blood and race.¹²

As so often before, Vida found the news from Australia not to be encouraging. The Woman Voter and the WPA had both dwindled to nothing: proof, yet again, that her personal intervention was needed to keep them going. She might have regretted this disappearance of part of her legacy, but there was an argument that the newspaper and the WPA had served their turn. The acting editor of the Woman Voter wrote in the final issue, dated 18 December 1919:

The step [of closing down the paper] has been well considered on the part of Miss Goldstein and is endorsed by the Association, whose individuals, by the passage of events, feel with her that the changing of the old order calls for a more comprehensive outlook upon the world’s affairs than ever before . . . The aftermath of the war, even more than the war itself, has shown us the utter futility of the tinkering processes of reform that each and all of the methods adopt that do not aim at a complete upheaval and reconstruction . . . The world is sick unto death, and the sources of Government, if we may put it so, polluted . . . The present intention of the Association is to go into recess (not to vegetate, but to possess our souls) into what we shall then emerge it doth not yet appear. But we MUST not, DARE not be idle.’¹³