‘Such a world! Such men, such women!’

– Vida Goldstein to Edith How-Martyn

When Vida finally returned to Australia in 1922 after three years overseas, mainly in England, she set up house with Aileen and Elsie and Henry Hyde Champion in a flat at 462 Punt Road, South Yarra. From now on, Christian Science was to be the focus of her life. She became an accredited practitioner – an honourable and respected position, as practitioners had to be endorsed by the Boston mother church. With Aileen, she rented an office in the city as her base of operations. Vida’s many years of political activism, her experience of working with many kinds and conditions of men and women, enabled her to give practical and theoretical advice on a wide range of life issues to the members of the church who sought her help. She was proud of her status as a practitioner and did this work for many years.

According to most accounts of her life, this is the end of Vida’s story. Because her work for the church was carried out for the benefit of a relatively small group of people, it has generally been dismissed or mentioned only briefly. But when she came back to Melbourne after the war she was only in her fifties, and she would live to be eighty. She did step back, as we have seen, but she was still someone who needed, and wanted, to contribute to society.

Vida was twice president of the church in St Kilda Road, which entailed not only helping to guide members according to the precepts of founder Mary Baker Eddy, but chairing meetings to ensure that the business of the church ran smoothly. Having headed organisations and been on committees for most of her adult life, she knew this work and found it satisfying. She continued to exercise her public-speaking skills by reading from the Bible and Science and Health during services.

All these activities kept Vida busy, but she also maintained a close eye on work for the rights of women and children, both in Australia and internationally. The year 1924 marked the foundation of the Australian Federation of Women Voters (AFWV), a lobby group for women’s rights post-suffrage, combining many women’s groups Australia-wide. Though Vida had not been directly responsible for this, she must have been pleased to learn that it had been set up as a national replacement for the Women’s Political Association. The Federation joined the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, whose aim was for organisations of women worldwide to come together to help those who had not yet gained the vote, or were working to make their vote effective.

As proudly noted by Bessie Rischbieth, a leader of the Australian chapter based in Western Australia, the AFWV took ‘united action on the following important matters with excellent results’:

Reciprocal legislation to improve the position of deserted wives within the empire

Appointment of first woman delegate to Third Assembly League of Nations. Australia was the first of the Overseas Dominions to include a woman in its delegation.

At the instigation of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance the Federation, together with other overseas dominions wrote to General Smuts [prime minister of South Africa] urging his government to take measures to enfranchise the women of South Africa [where white women did not get the vote until 1930] bringing them into line with women in other dominions.

Bessie Rischbieth reviewed the Australian-based work of the AFWV shortly before her death in 1967, emphasising the reforms carried out by the affiliated groups. She noted that ‘The preoccupation of these groups as voters has had a direct bearing upon legislative enactments, such as State Children’s Acts, the establishment of Children’s Courts, the appointment of women police, the inclusion of women as Justices of the Peace and women on Jury Service.’¹ Vida and her mother had been at the forefront of some of these reforms for the state of Victoria many years before.

Bessie Rischbieth was only one member of an emerging new generation of women activists, leaders of many new state and nationwide groups, party-affiliated and non-party, religious and secular. These organisations, such as the Australian Federation of Women Voters (AFWV), the state-based National Councils of Women, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and the Housewives’ Associations, introduced many Australian women to political participation. Prominent among these from the 1930s onwards were Jessie Street, Linda Littlejohn and Ruby Rich.

Vida might have stepped out of the limelight, but she had not been forgotten. In 1934, to celebrate the centenary of European settlement in the state of her birth, she was asked to compile a dossier of ‘Women’s Progress in Victoria’. She reminded her audience that ‘when the first women’s franchise league was formed in Victoria, in 1884, the women of the colony had possessed practically no rights beyond the very limited rights embodied in the English Married Women’s Property Act of that time which operated here, and the municipal suffrage’.

How things had changed in the past forty years, she said, before listing the gains that had been made and reminding her readers why:

Political freedom, the right to enter the professions; to act as inspectors, Police Matrons, and Justices of the Peace; Widows’ Maintenance; a share in the Custody and Guardianship of their children and every measure of freedom the women of the State enjoy today they owe to the women suffragists, who faced obloquy and the cruellest ridicule in carrying on the educational work in order to rouse the public from its opposition to women’s complete social, political and economic emancipation.²

In the same year, for the anniversary of the Women’s Non-Party Political Association of South Australia, Vida wrote a piece called ‘Towards a new social order’. It was a sober, even sombre article, strongly influenced by the time at which it was being written – that is, during the Depression of the 1930s. She acknowledged that the ‘eager vision’ of her youth – that women would achieve equality and the young would be protected – still seemed a long way off, thanks to the economic problems Australia and the world were then facing.

She asserted – as she always had – that no social, industrial or political question was of greater importance to women than finding work, and that high unemployment damaged women as much as it did men. Developing a theme she had often expressed in the past, she added that any organisation for the betterment of human beings needed to be based on a strong spiritual foundation and that ‘the inspiration, art and beauty that characterised the Suffragette Movement need to be reborn without the militancy of the movement’. If women banded together and supported each other, perhaps there would be no need for aggressive methods in order to gain what they wanted. Drawing on the word of God and the common interests of human beings, women needed to work for social goals, but ‘the only remedy for the existing conditions is the establishment of a Just Social Order based on the Ten C[ommandments] and the S[ermon] on the M[ount].’

Vida’s spiritual certainty, her belief in equality and the comradeship of human beings, were not always consistent; in at least one respect her views had hardened with age. Her niece Leslie Henderson was shocked to learn that Vida supported Elsie in her refusal to employ Catholics in the Book Lovers’ Library. Vida conceded that this was hardly an illustration of inclusive Christian principles, but said it was justified because Catholicism was a false religion, contrary to the teachings of Christ. She told Leslie that the coming struggle in the world would be between Christian Science and Catholicism. (Other fundamentalist religions had a similar view about the dangers of the Catholic Church, convinced that in the future the struggle would be between Catholicism and whatever their own religion was.)

When Miles Franklin’s mother died in 1938 Vida wrote her dear friend a remarkable letter of condolence, which – almost more than anything else she ever wrote – set out the principles she was trying to follow:

With all my heart, dear Stella, I wish one could feel that you feel life has still much to offer you; that you could find comfort and joy in what, to me, are the very fundamentals of being. In these days most people, seemingly, have to meet much that would claim to disturb their peace, but I can assure you that no matter what assails I find life satisfying and enriching – because unharmony of any kind compels one to seek and find the reality of being the Life which is Spirit . . . In the past we have discussed the question, and you have tried to find what we have found so far, without success, but try again, darling, putting away every preconceived idea of so-called ‘life’ and its unending miseries. And whenever you feel like wanting a real talk on paper, write to me – crash, bang, against anything and everything, [Christian] Science included! But let us get somewhere with our long, long friendship; don’t let it hang in mid-air.³

Franklin had always considered Vida the most lovable of the Goldstein sisters, and warm affection between them continued, tempered by shrewdness on both sides. Vida summed up her view of Franklin in a letter to Edith How-Martyn: ‘We are great personal friends – we have known her since she was a girl – but we do not always see things alike. Entre nous, she is an unhappy woman, without any spiritual convictions, and always struggling with a sense of frustration, but when she lets herself go she is witty and amusing.’ It’s a fairly accurate summary of Franklin’s correspondence.⁴

In a piece Vida wrote for the Australian Woman’s World, she insisted that she had wished to enter parliament in order to further her ideals for a new social and economic world order. She had previously said she wanted to provide an example to women, to educate them in their new roles as fully enfranchised citizens. Now those ideals had become stronger and deeper and she sought to realise them in another, non-political way.⁵

In 1922 Vida gave her papers to Bessie Rischbieth, presenting them to her in a brown-paper parcel. She said she had disposed of her WPA badges and colours long before. We do not know how difficult this was for her – it was such a complete admission that she regarded her work as over. But she wanted to ensure that her work would be recognised and preserved, and thanks to Rischbieth and, later, How-Martyn, it has been.

 

Inevitably, Vida’s friendships frayed or disappeared as people died. One devastating loss for her and her sisters was that of Henry Hyde Champion, who died at South Yarra on 30 April 1928. He had been in poor health for some years, and a severe stroke in 1901 had left him partially paralysed, affecting his speech and meaning he could not use his right hand for typing. But he was tough, physically as well as mentally. It is not known whether he was a practising Christian Scientist or whether he simply rejected medical science, but after his illnesses he decided that continuing to work, and to be interested in life, was much better for him than taking it easy and retiring while being bombarded with medication.

He therefore continued to do as he had always done: helping run Elsie’s Book Lovers’ Library and publishing the Book Lover. This was the monthly magazine he had founded and that for many years was one of the few Australia-based journals dealing with Australian and international literature. He also set up and ran the Australasian Authors’ Agency, publishing the early work of several writers, men and women, who became well known. Probably because he was involved with so many causes, Champion has been insufficiently recognised for his work for Australian literature.

Until almost the end of his life he wrote for the Socialist and The Bulletin. For someone who had once been well off, he squandered an impressive amount of money. He was declared bankrupt in 1922: it’s impossible to know, now, what he had done with his wealth. A man of many enthusiasms, he was described by the historian Geoffrey Serle as ‘Although over-confident in his judgment and lacking in tact and balance, he had great journalistic talent and a pleasant personality despite his capacity for making enemies.’⁶

He, Vida and Elsie had been comrades in arms, friends and mutual supporters for more than thirty years. He had backed Vida’s political work all the way, his indefatigable energy always there when she flagged or needed encouragement. His death left a great gap in the lives of Vida and Elsie.

Not long after Champion’s death, the two sisters decided to go to England together for a holiday. Elsie had never been out of Australia, and Vida wanted her to see new things and have new experiences that did not depend on her work or memories of her husband. We do not really know how well Vida and Elsie got on as sisters – Elsie, with very firm opinions on a variety of subjects, seems to have believed she was the well-organised member of the Goldstein family, though certainly Doris Blackburn, who worked for the bookshop, had considered her anything but. Evidently the sisters rubbed along well enough to contemplate the prospect of spending a few months together. They left for London in early 1929, just before Vida’s sixtieth birthday, leaving Leslie Henderson in charge of the bookshop. They intended to travel to England and then to Boston, where they would visit the ‘mother church’ of Christian Science.

Vida and Elsie happened to travel to London on the same ship as Keith Murdoch, whose newspaper empire based on the Melbourne Herald was growing and who was making a trip to England and the United States to check out possibilities for making further profits. When the ship reached Colombo, Vida and Elsie were keen to spend time in this most exotic of Sri Lankan ports, but Murdoch hated the idea of mixing with the locals in any way. A lifelong hypochondriac with a morbid fear of infection, he asked them to dinner in the leading English hotel instead.⁷

In London, Vida and George Bernard Shaw renewed their warm friendship. If Shaw’s letters to Champion are any indication, the playwright was becoming disillusioned with the theatre generally, and had tried to head his Australian representative away from any entrepreneurial ambitions he might have had in that line. In 1924 he had written to Champion: ‘I am greatly alarmed by your proposal to start a theatre. Don’t. It will leave you without soles to your shoes . . . It is no use saying you won’t gamble when you are running a theatre . . . you do not close down until you have pawned your last collar stud.’⁸ Perhaps Shaw knew about Champion’s inclination to put that last collar stud into hock.

After Champion’s health failed and after his bankruptcy in 1922, Elsie had taken over as Shaw’s agent. Agent and client probably clashed in a minor way – Elsie was always sure of her certainties, and Shaw was very aware of his rights – and neither ever made much money out of his plays in Australia. He wrote to Elsie some years later: ‘Australia has always been so insensible to my merits as a playwright that I am worth next to nothing to you in commission, and as to prestige you will still be my agent.’⁹

Vida and Elsie returned to Melbourne late in 1929, to be greeted by very disappointing news: the economic depression was badly affecting the Book Lovers’ Library. Vida and Aileen tried to help their sister, donating practically all their savings, and the bookshop and library struggled on for a while; but eventually, in 1936, it was forced to close. Elsie, well into her fifties, looked around for a new job. She found one at Collins Book Depot, then with the booksellers Robertson and Mullens, until she was retrenched in 1952 at the age of eighty-three.

A few months after her return from England, Vida published a long article in the Melbourne Herald setting out her views on the current state of the suffrage in both Australia and England.¹⁰ What, she asked, had Australian women done with their right to the franchise, and had this differed in any way from the work of their suffragette sisters? She believed that suffragists in Australia had never considered the gaining of the vote as something that in itself would change society, but only as a lever for introducing into government concerns that especially affected women. And now of course the British parliament, unlike its Australian counterpart, had admitted women to its ranks.

She said she was delighted with the way English women were using their right to vote. ‘What impressed me more than anything was the fact that the younger women are not shirking their political responsibilities,’ she wrote. ‘There is in England today among young women an enormous amount of unselfish consideration for others, and a determination by very many to pull their whole weight, as their best contribution to the solution of England’s difficulties.’

She could not say the same for Australian women – and to some extent her comments presage the criticisms that 1970s feminists have levelled at their younger counterparts, though Vida’s reasoning was slightly different:

When I look round at the women who are doing unselfish, exacting public work, I see the same women who were doing it years ago. Hardly any change in the personnel of public workers has been made . . . I do not blame Australian young women for this. One reason is geographical. Australia lies so far off the main course of the world’s rushing progress that there is little need to wonder that we live very much to ourselves. Indeed, the indifference to what is happening abroad extends far beyond the ranks of women, old or young.

Unless Australians understood that they were part of a larger world community and their own concerns and problems were subsumed in those of a wider world, Vida wrote, Australia would always remain a small, parochial country. English women, like English men, understood the concept of service to a larger whole.

As a long-standing internationalist, she would have followed with interest women’s attempts to be included in the Australian delegation to the annual League of Nations General Assembly. PM Billy Hughes had reluctantly conceded that in 1922 the Australian delegation would include a woman as an ‘alternative’ (read ‘token’) delegate to represent the country in questions relating to women and children. The first was Sydney feminist Marguerite Dale, who accompanied three men.

From 1922 until 1939, a woman ‘substitute’ was included in the Australian delegation, nominated by local women’s organisations and chosen by the federal government. Australia was one of the few countries that consistently included women in its delegation. They were usually prominent social reformers such as Bessie Rischbieth, the founder and president of the AFWV; pioneering doctor Roberta Jull; and Melbourne Argus journalist Stella May Allan, who wrote under the nom de plume of Vesta. These women and their successors did not necessarily speak only on ‘women’s issues’: in 1927 Alice Moss became the first woman appointed to the league’s finance committee. All these women were real-life prototypes of Edith Campbell Berry, the Australian diplomat in Geneva between the wars who is the main character in Frank Moorhouse’s celebrated trilogy of novels Grand Days (1993), Dark Palace (2001) and Cold Light (2011).

In 1943 Australian women reached another milestone when women were appointed as cadets in the diplomatic service. In 1946 Julia Drake-Brockman, who was part of this first intake, was named third secretary in the Australian delegation to the brand-new United Nations. Here she worked alongside noted feminist Jessie Street towards the principle of gender equality in the UN Charter. The first Australian ambassador was appointed in 1974. She was Ruth Dobson, sister of the poet Rosemary Dobson, and she took up her post in Denmark.¹¹

 

At the age of seventy-five, Vida joined a deputation to the Australian federal parliament protesting against the non-extension of grounds for divorce as they affected women. She thought it iniquitous that the only grounds for divorce a woman could bring to court was her husband’s adultery (this was true until 1959) while men were not similarly circumscribed. It is likely that her long-standing and vehement opposition to the way divorce laws worked for women came from observing her parents: Jacob and Isabella Goldstein had not ended a marriage that was difficult for both of them.

But she was heartened to see that at last – at last – women were being represented in Australian parliaments. The first woman elected to parliament anywhere in Australia was sixty-year-old Edith Cowan of Western Australia in 1921. Cowan, who was a conservative heavily engaged in social welfare and women’s rights issues, was one of five women who ran for state parliament that year. She won the prosperous middle-class seat of West Perth, narrowly defeating the attorney-general, and became a solid promoter of migrant welfare, infant health and women’s rights. The Women’s Legal Status Act, a private member’s bill she introduced in 1923, opened the West Australian legal profession to women.

At the federal election in 1943 Enid Lyons, widow of Tasmanian-born prime minister Joseph Lyons and the mother of ten children, narrowly won the division of Darwin in north-western Tasmania for the United Australia Party (which became the Liberal Party two years later) and became the first woman to enter the House of Representatives. Vida wrote to Lyons on 20 September 1943: ‘As the first woman nominated for the Commonwealth Parliament, I gladly welcome the first woman to succeed in the House of Representatives.’

In the same year that Lyons entered parliament, Dorothy Tangney was elected as a Labor senator for Western Australia, the first woman senator in Australia; again, Vida wrote her a graceful letter of congratulation. The first independent woman member of parliament was Doris Blackburn, elected in 1946 to her husband’s former seat as an independent for Labor.

Vida was disappointed and frustrated because she felt that the new generation of women, though in parliament, did not seem to want to change too much. She was clearly remembering the fierce crusaders of her own generation, women such as Catherine Helen Spence and Rose Scott. She wrote to How-Martyn that Tangney had ‘valiantly’ raised the question of uniform divorce laws but had failed to urge equality of men and women in the legislation. She added, ‘Perhaps she was not fully reported but she was reported as repeating her previous emphatic statement that she was not a feminist!’¹² Lyons, Vida thought, would do pretty much what her party told her. And while she hoped her former campaign secretary Doris Blackburn would accomplish something worthwhile, Vida thought she ‘seems to lack driving force’ and would be subservient to the Labor platform. Furthermore, she thought it was tragic that the lobby group the Federation of Women Voters, established in 1921, had consistently failed to campaign effectively for equal pay: ‘One would think they were better tacticians than that!’

With the outbreak of World War II – or, as Vida might have phrased it, when the Great War continued – and especially when Prime Minister Robert Menzies introduced conscription for service within Australia, Vida must have felt a weary sense of déjà vu. This time, however, she did not campaign against conscription. She allied herself with her old supporter Maurice Blackburn, who in 1941 was expelled from the Labor Party for his association with the Movement Against War and Fascism. She had always agreed with his opposition to the ALP’s insistence that members follow everything about the party platform. Blackburn was also the only MP to vote against the Curtin Labor government’s bill introducing limited overseas conscription in 1943. Vida was outraged because PM John Curtin had been a firm anti-conscriptionist during World War I.

So Vida continued to be engaged politically, though on a limited level. She wrote to Keith Murdoch stating that God’s word was more important than anything else, and volunteered to select appropriate spiritual messages to be placed in the Herald every day. She failed to pick her mark here: Murdoch replied politely that such messages were simply not newspaper material, especially as newspapers were suffering space constraints.

Time continued its implacable march, causing Vida more personal losses. Lizzie Kavanagh, who had been a member of the Goldstein family since Vida was three, died at a great age in 1941. Cecilia John had settled in England in 1921 to pursue her interest in music and movement, particularly Dalcroze eurhythmics. Maurice Blackburn died in 1944; Miles Franklin’s and Vida’s great friend, Mary Fullerton, in 1946.

After London was bombed during the Blitz in 1940 Vida, Elsie and Aileen sent food parcels to England every month. The recipients, who included Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, were very grateful, with Pethick-Lawrence confessing to ‘quite childish’ pleasure in receiving them. Vida was also in contact with the suffragette Jenny Baines. She had lost contact with Adela Pankhurst and her husband Tom Walsh; Adela had been briefly interned in 1942, accused of espionage. ‘Poor Adela Pankhurst,’ Vida wrote to a friend not long after the war. ‘What a miserable life she has led. She has had no vital principle to guide her. I wonder what her politics are these days.’ She seems to have been unaware that since the 1920s Adela had swung sharply to the right.¹³

Vida and Miles Franklin continued to be in touch, though ‘dear little Stella’ was growing more cantankerous about many things, including Christian Science. At one point Franklin asked whether the soap and washing powder Vida and Aileen had sent her were intended to wash away her sins, and accused Aileen of living in a nunnery. She agreed with Vida, however, that the new generation of women did not seem to be much of an advance on the previous one in terms of activism.

As Vida’s social circle grew smaller she felt, as reformers often do, that fewer and fewer people understood her work and what it had meant, let alone the importance of continuing the fight for women’s rights. The newspapers, when they mentioned her at all, were beginning to describe her as a lovely old lady who had once been important. ‘Miss Vida Goldstein a few years ago was one of the foremost women in the fight for suffrage,’ ran one caption under a rather grim photograph of her in the Melbourne Herald in 1930. ‘By her pen, her voice and her personality, she materially helped to win victory for women in Australia.’ Another piece, also intended to be complimentary, described her as ‘a woman whose vital and charming personality would still make of her an invaluable leader’.¹⁴ Always her personality, never a list of her achievements. Vida could be forgiven if she grew weary of being called ‘charming’.

One colleague who seemed truly to understand Vida’s work was the Englishwoman Edith How-Martyn. She had been the first university graduate – she had a science degree – to be imprisoned in the suffragette campaigns, having been arrested in 1906 for attempting to make a militant speech in the House of Commons. How-Martyn had broken with the Pankhursts the following year over their militant tactics and co-founded the Women’s Freedom League, which sought to gain the suffrage through nonviolent means, but she had resigned after the defeat of the Conciliation Bill in 1912. Vida had evidently met How-Martyn during her visit to England in 1911. How-Martyn, who campaigned for more effective birth control with the American pioneer Margaret Sanger, worked in India and eventually, on the outbreak of World War II, came to Australia.

She became increasingly important to Vida, who wrote to her in 1944 after Australian women had entered parliament: ‘I told you once that I know no one here, no woman I mean, with whom I can discuss the questions in which you and I are interested. No woman at all to whom the moral and legal status of women, their spiritual value in human affairs, the welfare and rights of the so-called “common man” and the interdependence of nations, is really vital.’ And then she asked the question that was becoming more and more urgent for her: ‘Who is going to rouse the women of Australia, indeed the women of the world, to such devotion to and sacrifice for freedom as inspired the Suffragettes?’¹⁵

How-Martyn invited Vida to write about the pioneering days of the suffrage in an article for the WCTU jubilee in 1948. Vida duly outlined the history of the struggle for the suffrage and summarised its achievements: ‘The woman’s point of view has found expression in special legislation affecting the interests of women and children, but it was never expected that in any country governed by party politics, and the political machine methods used to secure the domination of party interests, women would, as a body, prove themselves to be different from men in regard to party affiliations.’¹⁶ She still regretted having lost the fight to make non-party politics a force in Australia.

It is noticeable, through all this, that Vida’s later writing and correspondence lost little of the fire and energy she had displayed as a young suffragist. She certainly regretted the way things had turned out, but she had not entirely crumpled into complaint and bitterness. This might have had something to do with her adherence to the tenets of Christian Science, but it is also a strong expression of her equable temperament and her ability to think clearly. Though Vida felt general relief when World War II ended in 1945, she believed that the peace had not solved anything. She wrote to Franklin:

Well, what do you think of our post-war world? Doesn’t Hitler seem to have won the war? He said something to the effect that if he didn’t win it, he would bring civilisation down with him. As you know, I have not a fraction of sex antagonism in me, but one is almost driven to think that men are absolutely unfit to govern. They seem incapable of thinking and acting on other than belligerent lines . . .

But what about women also? I feel that they, too, have failed humanity in two world wars. They proved their ability to help their country in a time of national crisis, but have done nothing to prevent crises recurring. Where are the women’s demands and organisations for a practical humanitarian programme, a ‘fighting’ programme to make the world a fit place to live in? I marvel at the silence and inaction of women. Why don’t they rise and war against war, call it by its right name, mass murder, strip it of its ‘glory’, expose the vice, the political and economic and financial corruption that go with it, above all the trade policies that make war inevitable? Sometimes I wish I were thirty years younger, and could have a say and do again on behalf of the common people.’¹⁷

Vida died aged eighty on 15 August 1949 at her home in South Yarra. She had, according to Aileen, suffered from cancer for some time. Quite possibly she had rejected what medical help was available – cancer therapy was rudimentary and even more painful than it is today – and decided to follow only the principles of Christian Science, hoping that the body would prevail but, like her mother, being resigned to letting nature take its course. She was cremated at a private service at the Springvale crematorium two days after her death, and her ashes were scattered. Aileen wrote to Franklin that Vida had been ‘mentally vigorous’ to the end. Vida had obviously not allowed a small matter such as terminal cancer to affect her energy any more than absolutely necessary.

In terms of material possessions, she did not leave a great deal. Her financial assets were modest: furniture, a tea set, a ring, about £400 in shares, a small amount in the Commonwealth Savings Bank, Commonwealth bonds and war savings certificates. The total value of her estate was £1029 9s 4d.¹⁸ Her will, made about three weeks before she died, left £100 to Elsie and £50 to the First Church of Christ, Scientist in Melbourne, ‘for the Gifts and Endowment Fund’. Everything else was to go to Aileen, to Elsie if Aileen died before her – or, if both predeceased Vida, to her eldest niece, Selwyn’s daughter Minnie. Aileen was named as executor.

One of the witnesses to Vida’s will was a fellow Christian Science practitioner, Nola Joske. Vida was described in the probate jurisdiction as ‘Church of Christ Scientist deceased’. Evidently she wanted to be remembered primarily in terms of the service to the church she had faithfully served for almost fifty years. However, that is not how Edith How-Martyn described her in a clear, concise and sympathetic obituary:

The older generation of feminists in Australia, England and the United States will remember Vida Goldstein with admiration and affection and will mourn her recent death. She was born in 1869 in Portland, Victoria, Australia, and early showed an interest in political affairs and social work. In 1899 on the death of Mrs Bear-Crawford she closed her co-educational preparatory school in order to be free to carry on the political work Mrs Bear-Crawford had initiated. For the next 25 years Miss Goldstein was absorbed in very active work for the women’s cause and was soon recognised as a most gifted leader.

The Federal vote was gained for women in 1902 and in 1903 Vida Goldstein was the first woman in the British Empire to be nominated for Parliament. Standing as an Independent candidate for the Senate her constituency was Victoria, a state about the same size as Great Britain [evidently this obituary was written for an English newspaper]. Without any support from the Press or either of the Political Parties Miss Goldstein polled very well securing nearly 600,000 votes [How-Martyn added an extra zero to the tally] but alas! Not enough for a victory. Two more attempts for the Senate and two for the House of Representives [sic] ended unsuccessfully chiefly because she stood as an Independent. During these years Vida Goldstein made a close study of parliamentary procedure and was constant in her attendance at the State Parliament when Suffrage and other bills for the welfare of the people were being discussed, and many were the alterations and amendments she suggested to the Government members.

As early as 1902 Miss Goldstein was known internationally. She was invited to a Suffrage Conference arranged by the American Women Suffrage Societies at Washington DC and had the honour of being appointed Secretary. She represented the Women’s Societies of Australia and New Zealand and being a voter was the centre of great interest.

The following year Miss Goldstein founded the Women’s Federal Political Association. It took five years of strenuous work to gain votes for women in the State of Victoria. Thus in 1908 was completed the political enfranchisement of women for the seven Parliaments of Australia.

Responding to an invitation to help the women’s suffrage cause [in England] she had a triumphal campaign and was exceedingly popular as a speaker.

The Peace movement had her devoted support and she spent some years in Europe working for it. On her return to Australia she withdrew from political work almost entirely and gave her attention and work to the Christian Science religion.

By her death in August 1949 Australia has lost one of its most distinguished pioneers.¹⁹

Two years after Vida’s death, a group of colleagues planned to commemorate her life and work by setting up a permanent essay competition in her name. A memorial fund was to be established, publicised – oh, the irony – by The Argus, Vida’s sworn enemy for so many years.

There is another, more contemporary irony. In 1984 the federal seat of Goldstein was created, taking in some of Melbourne’s bayside suburbs. Given Vida’s views on male-centred party politics, it is ironic in the extreme that the seat has always been safe for the Liberal Party. It has always been held by a man.