Vida: A Woman of Our Time by Jacqueline Kent (review)

Jacqueline Kent has written a number of acclaimed biographies of prominent women, perhaps the most notable for labour historians being The Making of Julia Gillard. It was the writing of this work about Australia's first (and thus far only) woman prime minister that led Kent to Vida Goldstein, wrongly claimed here (as elsewhere) to be the first woman to stand for election to a national parliament. She was in fact the first woman to be nominated to stand for election to the Australian parliament in 1903 but shared the honour of actually standing with three others. Certainly Goldstein was the most notable and successful of the four.

Along with South Australia's Catherine Spence and New South Wales' Rose Scott, Vida Goldstein stands out as the most important of Australia's first-wave feminists and suffragists and is perhaps the best known of the three. A federal electorate in Melbourne's south-eastern suburbs is named after her. All three have inspired extensively researched full-length biographies as well as many journal articles. Janette Bomford's fine examination of Goldstein's life, That Dangerous and Persuasive Woman: Vida Goldstein, published by Melbourne University Press in 1993, is no longer available for purchase. One has to fossick in university libraries or the few remaining second-hand bookshops to find it. Kent thus has a point in writing that Goldstein's "name is not particularly well known outside scholarly circles" and asks, "given all the things she achieved, why haven't we heard more about her?" (xv). Her book, she says, is "an attempt to answer that question." Kent does not actually deal with the "why" question at all, but her book nevertheless provides a very readable examination of Goldstein's life and work, organised in four chronologically ordered sections – "Young Vida," "Apprentice," "Candidate," and "Activist." Covering 80 years from her birth in 1869 to her death in 1949, it traverses Goldstein's family background and education, her induction into social welfare and temperance work alongside her mother Isabella, and then her engagement in suffrage politics and preparation for a leadership role by the charismatic Annette Bear Crawford, whose premature death in 1899 thrust Vida into the limelight and saw her represent Australian women at the first International Woman Suffrage Conference in Washington early in 1902. With federation and the legislation that gave Australian women the right to stand for parliament as well as vote, she was thrice an independent candidate for the Senate and twice for Kooyong in the House of Representatives. As an activist her focus beyond suffrage and the rights of women was opposition to participation in World War I, including in the two conscription referendums, defence of workers' rights and standard of living, and dedication to national and international peace organisation. From the 1920s, while not eschewing these causes, she devoted more time and energy to the spiritual side of her feminism expressed through the Christian Science values she had espoused since 1902.

The question for historians is whether this book adds significantly to what we already know of Goldstein's life and work? In particular, does it advance Bomford's research, which though it has been extended and complicated by other scholars is not seriously disputed? In my view the answer is generally no. Bomford's biography covers the same ground in more detail, and much of the evidence and many of the quotations employed by Kent have already been used by Bomford. The same applies to the photographs, even down to the books' covers. Bomford's contextualisation of Vida's suffrage and wartime work is much clearer and more sophisticated than Kent's. That said, Kent's discussion of Vida's early life is more extensive than Bomford's, especially her revelations about the alcohol-induced domestic violence her maternal grandmother suffered – clear motivation for Isabella's and Vida's early temperance activism and Vida's continuing fight for legal protection of girls and women. Kent too pays more...