JACQUELINE KENT Vida: A woman for our time. Reviewed by Kathy Gollan
In this new biography Jacqueline Kent chronicles the life of political trail-blazer Vida Goldstein and finds parallels with politics today.
Vida Goldstein spent her whole life advocating for the rights of women. She was one of the first women to run for election to Parliament, one year after women gained the right to vote. She stood for office five times between 1903 and 1917, travelling all around Victoria in gruelling campaigns, fronting innumerable country town meetings, facing scorn and condescension. She was never elected. In other contemporary measures of success she never married or had children, in spite of her intelligence, impeccable grooming and deep brown eyes.
Her life spanned a period in Australia’s history, around Federation, when the nation was inventing itself and politics really mattered. Goldstein was never afraid to promote an unpopular cause if it was in support of the powerless and she became a national celebrity, an inspiration to other women. In this new biography, Jacqueline Kent charts that tumultuous time and Goldstein’s part in it. She has accessed Goldstein’s diaries, letters, and personal papers, along with her newspaper and pamphlets, to write, in the spirit of her subject, a fast-moving, lucid and illuminating story.
Vida grew up in a comfortable middle-class family in late nineteenth-century Melbourne. Both her parents were activists, working to provide support and training for Melbourne’s working poor, particularly during the devastating depression and drought of the 1890s. From them Vida learned the value of practical help over pious platitudes and charity.
Before Federation each of the states ran separate campaigns for female suffrage, beginning in Victoria in the 1890s. Vida, in her 20s and a member of the Victorian Women’s Suffrage Society, went door to door canvassing for signatures. She found the great majority of women agreed they should get the vote, but only some men, as she later recorded:
… the feeling of equality between men and women was most vital in the industrial suburbs … if the husband opened the door he would call his wife, saying, ‘There’s a lady who wants to know if you want the vote.’ And invariably she did. But in the more favoured suburbs, a husband would quite frequently refuse to allow his wife to sign, or a wife would say meekly and wistfully, ‘I’d like to sign but my husband won’t let me.’
The Society collected more than 30,000 signatures in favour of women’s suffrage, the biggest petition ever presented to Victoria’s parliament. The subsequent bill passed comfortably through the lower house but was defeated by conservatives in the upper house. This became the pattern in Victoria, on an almost annual basis, for the next 19 years.
In the meantime Vida was finding her voice, as a speaker, an organiser and an engaging, lively writer. She set up a monthly periodical, The Australian Women’s Sphere, which not only promoted the suffragist cause but other causes close to Vida’s heart, such as conditions for women workers and their children, women in prisons and education for girls.
In 1902, just after Federation, women achieved the right to vote in the federal sphere, to the chagrin of many politicians, including one Frank Madden who declared, ‘Woman Suffrage would abolish soldiers and war, also racing, hunting, football, cricket and all such manly games.’ An election was held the following year and there was much speculation in the lead-up about the effect of the women’s vote. The established parties were nervous, but not enough to invite any women to stand as candidates. All of the four women who contested the election, including Vida, stood as progressive independents.
Vida set up the Women’s Federal Political Association and announced her intention to run for a Senate seat in Victoria. For two months she campaigned throughout the state, travelling by train from town to town, speaking to large meetings, dealing wittily with hecklers and not mincing her words. She told her audience at Korumburra:
‘Woman is referred to as the clinging vine, and man as the sturdy oak. Well, I have seen the clinging vine bending over the washtub and the sturdy oak trying to hold up a lamp post in the street. Besides, the sturdy oak at times sees fit to skip to another vine and throw his obligations of maintaining his family on her shoulders …. We women want ourselves for ourselves. We want the same freedom of thought and action as extended to others.’
As Kent points out, the press didn’t know how to respond to a female seeking public office, then or now:
Vida never …. pretended to be less intelligent than she was for the sake of living down to press expectations. Whenever she was interviewed she explained her views clearly and succinctly, and the same was true of the many articles she wrote. And still the press wrote admiringly about jackets with pink silk facings, or coquettish hats. (Not just in 1903 either. The distance between Vida’s coquettish hats and Julia Gillard’s empty fruit bowl or Julie Bishop’s red shoes seems depressingly short.)
Her policies were practical, well thought out and offended both parties. She supported women’s rights in marriage and divorce, and the payment of a baby bonus. She favoured compulsory arbitration to avoid strikes and lockouts. Like all politicians at the time, she was in favour of restricting immigration from Asia, but she linked it to a call for mandatory equal pay for equal work.
She was criticised for not joining an established political party, although no party was courting her. The Labor Party even produced a pamphlet warning voters not to vote for her, ‘declaring that if electors wanted to vote for a woman they should choose the Labor Party, which was “fighting humanity’s battles for all women and all men”.’
In the end, as she had feared, women did not flood to support a female candidate and she finished fifteenth of 18 candidates.
Vida ran again in 1910, in 1913, 1914 and 1917. Although she was unsuccessful each time, she gained a national and international profile. In the US and UK she was a celebrity, promoted as the pioneer she was, the first woman to run for elected office. Invited to both countries, she met the leading politicians of the time, as well as fellow suffragettes, and returned full of ideas.
With the entry of Australia into the First World War Vida once again found herself promoting unpopular policies. She founded the Women’s Peace Army, and later the Australian Peace Alliance, to oppose conscription and pursue a lasting peace. In the fervid militarism of the time it was dangerous to be a pacifist and she and her supporters faced down angry crowds and government surveillance. Her final election campaign in 1917, on an anti-conscription, anti-war platform, was perhaps her most controversial
… the British Empire, she declared, was a warmongering institution, the curse of the world, and Britain was an abominated nation. Even though audiences in several places began walking out when they heard this message, Vida refused to change it.
In that election, for the first time, she lost her deposit.
It wasn’t until 1943, 41 years after women gained the vote, that two women were elected to Federal Parliament. They both had party backing, Enid Lyons standing for the United Australia Party and Dorothy Tangney for the Labor Party. Vida wrote to congratulate them. But despite declaring that she was ‘quite content to be a pioneer, to blaze the track for other women’, she regretted that the electorate had never favoured her proudly non-party independence.
Along with hostility from the establishment, Vida inspired great loyalty. She was close to her sisters, and her brother-in-law financed her newspapers. Many strong-minded, passionate women were part of her circle at different times, including Adela Pankhurst and Cecilia John. Overall a picture emerges through the book of a woman of great strength of character and energy, even if she set up so many organisations with similar names it’s hard to keep track of them. Despite a couple of proposals, Vida never married. If she had a romantic life, or yearnings, we don’t hear about it. Perhaps her family and her faith were enough.
Kent gives due weight to Goldstein’s involvement with Christian Science. Like so much else in her life the church was outside the mainstream in its belief in the equality of all people, and in the efficacy of spiritual healing. It was a source of strength to her, especially as she got older. The final 25 years of her life were spent working for the church, although she continued to be engaged politically. At the age of 75 she took part in a deputation to Parliament protesting the injustice of divorce laws for women.
In an epilogue Jacqueline Kent, who has written a biography of Julia Gillard, surveys the progress of women in politics from Vida’s time until now. It’s largely a story of modest gains that provoke a furious backlash, of undermining and aggression, of mistakes amplified and achievements dismissed. Vida would not have been surprised by any of that. She agreed with her contemporary Catherine Helen Spence that there is ‘an innate conservatism and prejudice against women in public life, which is much more noticeable in Australia than in either America or Great Britain.’
Many of her radical policies seem like common sense now. Others, such as abolishing the states, are still radical today. And her techniques for handling the hostility she aroused, her use of humour and charm, and calling it out when nothing else worked, would resonate with female politicians today. Independent in her politics, lifestyle and philosophy, Vida Goldstein was way ahead of her time. Is Vida a woman for our time, as the title claims? I think Kent has proved that she is.
Jacqueline Kent Vida: A woman for our time Penguin 2020 PB 336pp $34.99
Kathy Gollan is a former executive producer and editor for ABC Radio National.
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