Vida Goldstein - Suffrage Career

Suffrage Career

In 1891, Isabella Goldstein recruited the 22-year-old Vida to assist in collecting signatures for a women's suffrage petition. She would stay on the periphery of the women's movement through the 1890s, but her primary interest during this period was with her school and urban social causes – particularly the National Anti-Sweating League and the Criminology Society. This work gave her first-hand experience of women's social and economic disadvantages, which she would come to believe were a product of their political inequality.

Through this work she became friends with Annette Bear-Crawford, with whom she jointly campaigned for social issues including women's franchise and in organising an appeal for the Queen Victoria Hospital for women. After the death of Bear-Crawford in 1899, Goldstein took on a much greater organising and lobbying role for suffrage and became secretary for the United Council for Woman Suffrage. She became a popular public speaker on women's issues, orating before packed halls around Australia and eventually Europe and the United States. In 1902 she travelled to the United States, speaking at the International Women Suffrage Conference (where she was elected secretary), gave evidence in favour of female suffrage before a committee of the United States Congress, and attended the International Council of Women Conference.

In 1903, as an Independent with the support of the newly formed Women's Federal Political Association, she became the first woman in the British Empire to stand for election to a national parliament (Australian women had won the right vote in federal elections in 1902). She received 51,497 votes (nearly 5% of the total ballots) but failed to secure a senate seat. The loss prompted her to concentrate on female education and political organisation, which she did through the Women's Political Organization (WPA) and her monthly journal the Australian Women's Sphere, which she described as the "organ of communication amongst the, at one time few, but now many, still scattered, supporters of the cause". She stood for parliament again in 1910, 1913 and 1914; her fifth and last bid was in 1917 for a Senate seat on the principle of international peace, a position which lost her votes. She always campaigned on fiercely independent and strongly left-wing platforms which made it difficult for her to attract high support at the ballot. Her campaign secretary in 1913 was Doris Blackburn, who was later elected to the Australian House of Representatives.

Through the 1890s to the 1920s, Goldstein actively supported women's rights and emancipation in a variety of fora, including the National Council of Women, the Victorian Women's Public Servants' Association and the Women Writers' Club. She actively lobbied parliament on issues such as equality of property rights, birth control, equal naturalisation laws, the creation of a system of children's courts and raising the age of marriage consent. Her writings in various periodicals and papers of the time were influential in the social life of Australia during the first twenty years of the 20th century.

In 1909, having closed the Sphere in 1905 in order to dedicate herself more fully to the campaign for female suffrage in Victoria, she founded a second newspaper - Woman Voter. It became a supporting mouthpiece for her later political campaigns. Of Australian suffragists in this period Goldstein was possibly the only one to garner an international reputation. In early 1911 Goldstein visited England at the behest of the Women's Social and Political Union. Her speeches around the country drew huge crowds and her tour was touted as 'the biggest thing that has happened in the women movement for sometime in England'. Her trip in England concluded with the foundation of the Australia and New Zealand Women Voters Association, an organisation dedicated to ensuring that the British Parliament would not undermine suffrage laws in the antipodean colonies.

She was quoted from the period as saying that woman represents "the mercury in the thermometer of the race. Her status shows to what degree it has risen out of barbarism." Australian feminist historian Patricia Grimshaw has noted that Goldstein, like other white women of her day, considered "barbarism" to characterise Australian aboriginal society and culture; therefore Indigenous women in Australia were not believed to be eligible for citizenship or the vote.