Vida Goldstein

Vida Goldstein around the time of World War I

Vida Jane Goldstein (born April 13, 1869 in Portland , Australia; died August 15, 1949 in South Yarra ) was an Australian social reformer , pacifist, and suffragette who voted five times in Australian general elections.

Life

Goldstein was the eldest of five children of the Irish-Polish immigrant Jacob Robert Yannasch Goldstein (1839-1910), who had lived in Portland since 1858, and his wife Isabella, née Hawkins (1849-1916), eldest daughter of the squatters Samuel Proudfoot Hawkins from Scotland, who married on June 3, 1868. In 1877 the family moved to Melbourne . Vida's father was a lieutenant in the Victoria Artillery Garrison and held various honorary positions in the Melbourne charity; the mother was an early feminist and socially engaged in her community. Her family was thus rooted in the upper middle class.

Vida Goldstein participated in the social activities of her mother Isabella in the community of the Australian Church of the liberal-Presbyterian preacher Charles Strong . The hallmark of this social commitment was that help should not be given out indiscriminately, but according to scientifically developed criteria. The young woman also got to know the downside of Melbourne's booming economy . Their parents became estranged from each other, because Jacob Goldstein was one of the critics of the suffragette movement, whereas his wife was an abolitionist and feminist. Nevertheless, the couple enabled their four daughters to get a good education, which Vida was the first to complete in 1886. The sisters Lina and Elsie married in 1892 and 1898 in well-off circumstances; the brother Selwyn became a mining engineer; Aileen and Vida remained unmarried. As a well-behaved, intelligent and beautiful young woman, Vida was courted by various admirers, including John Monash .

At the end of the 1880s, however, Vida Goldstein made the decision not to get married in order to be fully available for charitable work. She finally made the decision in 1891 when she helped her mother collect signatures for the “Monster Petition”, which won 30,000 supporters for women's suffrage within six weeks. She became a member of an anti- sweating league and various other charities promoted by the Australian Church. During the Melbourne banking crisis from 1892 to 1898, Vida Goldstein earned her living as a teacher in the mixed school in St Kilda that she ran with her siblings . In 1899, her older friend and mentor Annette Bear-Crawford died , and Goldstein followed in their footsteps as the leader of the Melbourne suffragette. In the following year she represented the case of the young child murderer Margaret Heffernan, who was sentenced to death, and accused the Victorian society of her day of being complicit in the circumstances of the case. Well-read, shrewd and politically and rhetorically trained, Goldstein received a great deal of attention. Heffernan's verdict was reversed as a result of the letter and media campaign, and Goldstein's reputation rose, especially as it did not fit the common stereotypes of Australian suffragettes .

Goldstein and her associates persisted, and women's suffrage was gradually introduced at the state level in the 1890s. In 1902 the (white) women of Australia were granted the right to vote and stand for election at the national level, after New Zealand Australia was the second state in the world in which this was made possible. In 1902 Goldstein represented the former British colonies of Australia and New Zealand at a women's suffrage congress in the USA, also toured the country and met President Theodore Roosevelt , among others . Returning home, Goldstein ran alongside other candidates ( Nellie Martel , Mary Moore-Bentley and Selina Anderson ) in the general election in December 1903 as an independent direct candidate, but none of the women was elected. Goldstein himself received over 50,000 votes, just under 5%. It was not until 1943 that a woman was finally to move into the Australian Senate.

In the following two decades until the early 1920s, Goldstein was seen as the figurehead of Australian feminism. She headed the Women's Political Association and published Woman's Sphere (1900-1905) and later Woman Voter (1909-1920), two journals on women's political education, with which she wanted to prepare the ground for future, more successful elections. She toured the country, led rallies and spread her message of feminism and, increasingly, pacifism and social equality. However, this also helped her to become prominent opponents in politics and government, whom she described as an enemy of the state and who had her monitored or censored. She ran four more times as a candidate for parliament: in 1910 and 1917 for the Senate, in 1913 and 1914 for the House of Representatives. Her positions included: equal rights and equal pay for women; Filling public offices by women; Redistribution of goods in order to enable poorer social classes to participate in society; Restriction of immigration; End of a capitalist and racist politics for the white upper class. However, her insistence on running independently of parties and possibly becoming prime minister also frightened voters. In the press, which was often taken against them, their appearances were sometimes incorrectly or not at all. Hostility that she was a socialist was clearly fended off: she was a democrat and was fighting for equality.

Her social reform writings as well as her lively lobbyism influenced numerous contemporaries and supporters, including Prime Minister Alfred Deakin . At her instigation, the Children's Court Act was passed in Parliament. She successfully propagated raising the minimum age for marriage and sexual maturity , restricting the exploitation of women at work, equal property rights in marriage and measures against food adulteration . The longtime judge in the Australian High Court , HB Higgins , is said to have used her 1907 published calculation approach for a living wage in his landmark harvest helper ruling of 1908.

Goldstein planting trees at Eagle House in England. Photography by Colonel Linley Blathwayt.

She herself helped found numerous associations, including the National Council of Women (as Australia's representative on the World Women's Council ), the Women Writers 'Club and the Victorian Women's Public Servants' Association . In February 1911 Goldstein was invited to England, where she could appease the militant suffragettes, but at the same time inspire them. Before her departure, she was still a co-founder of an association with the aim of protecting Australian and New Zealand women's suffrage from reactionary politics in mainland England. In 1915, under the influence of World War I , Goldstein was co-founder and first president of the Women's Peace Army together with Adela Pankhurst , a peace movement which, among other things, called for citizen surveys before national declarations of war. Her beloved, only brother Selwyn Goldstein died during his ANZAC mission at the front.

From 1919 to 1922 she traveled through Europe, spreading a pan-national message of peace, including at the WILPF's first post-war congress in Zurich . She advertised the "Australian experiment" of women's suffrage, which has proven itself over almost two decades.

Returning to Australia in 1922, however, she was disappointed and disaffected and withdrew from the public eye. Their journals as well as the Women's Political Association have been discontinued. She continued her lobbying for social reforms only quietly. The defining model of her later years was an “international sibling based on Christian values”.

For the Christian Science Church in her parents' home in South Yarra, where she lived with two of her sisters, she still practiced as a healer and temporarily as a community leader. She died, largely unnoticed, in 1949 of cancer. Their ashes were scattered in the wind. The Australian League of Women Voters donated a literary commemorative award the following year. It wasn't until several decades later that a wider public began to remember Goldstein.

literature

• Janice N. Brownfoot: Goldstein, Vida Jane (1869-1949) . In: Australian Dictionary of Biography , Book Publication 1983, accessed online August 18, 2019.
• Clare Wright: Goldstein, Vida Jane , in: The Encyclopedia of Women & Leadership in Twentieth-Century Australia , accessed online August 18, 2019.

Web links

Commons : Vida Goldstein  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

1. ^ Marilyn Lake: Getting equal. The history of Australian feminism. St. Leonards, Allen & Unwin 1999, p. 24.