That Dangerous and Persuasive Woman: Vida Goldstein
By Janette M. Bomford
Melbourne University Press, 1993. 264 pp., $29.95 (pb)
Reviewed by Phil Shannon
In 1913, one conservative rural gentleman in Bairnsdale, Victoria, refused to attend a public meeting for the federal election campaign of Vida Goldstein because he regarded her as "one of those dangerous, persuasive women". As Janette Bomford relates in her biography of Goldstein, by campaigning for the vote for women, and by being the "first woman to stand for Parliament in the British Empire", Goldstein triggered alarm bells in rich, propertied Australia.
Her behaviour was "contrary to the laws of nature and the law of God", they said. Lack of a Y-chromosome apparently fitted women to kitchen and nursery. Behind these ideological splutterings was their real gripe about the material consequences of women leaving the domestic sphere. Women voters would "demand costly welfare reforms", they wailed.
Capitalism thrives on the free provision of domestic services by women in the family, and to divert profits to the public provision of child-care and housework was rightly seen as a threat to the health of capitalism.
Goldstein was, says Bomford, one of Australia's "first-wave feminists", a woman "who dared to go beyond the private sphere" and consequently a public target for the defenders of profit and the subjugation of women.
Goldstein's background — she was born in 1869 to wealthy, Christian parents and educated at Presbyterian Ladies' College — was not one to suggest a later condemnation of her (by the Hobart press) as "a mixture of Karl Marx and Lenin". But, "having tasted all the sweets of society", in the 1890 Depression "the other side of life" forced itself on her following some charity visits to the Collingwood slums.
She "sought equality for women before the law, within marriage and in employment". She was a supporter of "the cause of labour", and was "proud to stand by" the Victorian wharfies in their 11-week strike over food prices and wages in 1917, mobilising the members of her Women's Political Association (WPA) to organise food, clothing and other support for the families of the striking workers.
She was an unshakeable peace activist, opposing the first world war and conscription. Wars, she wrote, are "fought to retain or acquire territory or markets" and should be fought and paid for by the rich who profited from them and not by the poor, who are engaged in "one long war against unjust social conditions".
Though never a Marxist, she lectured on socialism, condemning the "capitalistic system" which consigns "the working classes to one unceasing round of toil, deprivation and anxiety", whilst "producing unlimited wealth for other people".
Goldstein supported the militant suffragists in England led by Sylvia Pankhurst. Their frustrated efforts to win the vote for women made it "evident that neither Parliament nor the Press would respond to reason, logic or argument, therefore nothing remained but a policy of disturbance, of rebellion" — public defiance not demure petitioning.
She supported women's militancy in England, and opposed World War I, "even if it affected her electoral chances" (which it did) — a rare attitude compared to the ALP politicians of her (and our) day.
She had little time for the ALP, refusing to stand down for Labor (to avoid splitting the anti-conscription vote) in 1917 because, she said, the ALP stood for the "greatest institution the capitalist class possesses — the military machine" and because the ALP offered nothing for women.
Truly and honourably did she earn the opposition she got from the pro-capitalist ALP and conservative parties "because I am a woman, because I am a non-party politician, because I am a progressive".
Goldstein's history is thus worth reclaiming and reapplying to today's struggles. But we should learn, too, from the mistakes which hampered her reforming efforts and muted the revolutionary potential of her struggle for women's equality.
Her two WPAs (the Women's Peace Army was set up to oppose the war) were militant, feminist and socialist to a large degree. Many women activists, from the Women's Peace Army especially, joined the CPA in the '20s. Nevertheless, Goldstein was not as militant or red as she seemed. She "very strongly condemned" the food riots of 1917 in Victoria led by Adela Pankhurst (Sylvia's younger and equally radical sister). She saw women as "peace-makers in the class war", and the revolution she believed in was a "bloodless revolution via the ballot-box".
On sexual matters, she "failed to break free of the Victorian sexual mores of her youth". Her ideas on sexuality and marriage "look antiquated and prudish now". Neither did she "significantly challenge the importance of the family and women's traditional maternal role".
She was ahead of her times in many respects but not as far ahead as, for example, contemporaries like Bolshevik women (and men) such as Alexandra Kollontai (and Lenin and Trotsky) who regarded the removal of the constraints of the family and domestic work as crucial to women's emancipation.
Her concept of women's emancipation was flawed. She saw gender loyalty amongst a sisterhood of women as more important than class interests. "I rejoice to see women organising on any lines, even Conservative lines", she wrote.
Yet she had the example of these conservative women opposing the WPA and its program for women's equality. Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst forsook the suffrage struggle in England to support the war, and they urged intervention against revolutionary Russia, thus hindering the revolution's attempts to communalise domestic work. How sisterly are the Bishops and Lawrences and Kirners when implementing austerity programs that attack women's wages and social rights? These women know which side their class toast is buttered on.
Goldstein does, however, have an important legacy for "second-wave feminists". Women, she believed, must organise themselves for their own liberation "but not in bitter antagonism to men". The women's antiwar marches she organised were joined by wharfies and soldiers who helped to provide protection. However, as with women, so too with men was class decisive — Goldstein found that "working men" encouraged their wives to sign petitions for women's suffrage but men in "the more favoured suburbs" did not.
In 1984, the federal seat of Balaclava was renamed Goldstein. They might have had in mind the class-less feminist, the advocate of the ballot-box, the Goldstein who "quietly retreated" from public life in 1920 to the Christian Science faith. But the leader of the struggles by women (and their working-class male allies) for political rights and to oppose capitalist war and capitalist exploitation, is the Goldstein worth remembering.