Australian Feminism and the British Militant Suffragettes*

Australian Feminism and the British Militant Suffragettes













Australian Feminism and the British
Militant Suffragettes*




Barbara Caine




Although many feminists at the turn of the twentieth century were very strong
nationalists, this did not mean either that they had no international interests or that
they did not welcome others or become involved in the feminist activities of other
nations. On the contrary, the British militant campaign in the years leading up to the
First World War acted like a magnet to feminists from throughout the British Empire
as well as to those from Europe and North America. Australian women in particular
became intensely involved, and their engagement offers an interesting insight both into
the history of Australian feminism and into some of the complex currents of
international feminism in the early twentieth century. Although this involvement often
took the form of a relatively brief and in many cases uncharacteristic episode, it was
usually a very intense experience and had long-lasting and varied consequences.

The early enfranchisement of most Australian women meant that those feminists who
visited London in the course of the militant campaign, between 1905 and 1914,
already enjoyed the rights and privileges of citizens at home. As a result, the suffrage
struggles in Britain had a very special meaning for Australian women, providing them
with their first opportunity to turn the imperial tables as it were, and to offer their
unfortunate British sisters help, guidance and advice. Vida Goldstein exemplified this
privileged status when she visited England in 1911 as a guest of the militant Women’s

* This paper was presented as a lecture in the Department of the Senate Occasional Lecture Series at
Parliament House on 31 October 2003.


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Social and Political Union (WSPU). She had gone, readers of her paper, the Woman
Voter, were told:

in response to repeated invitations … to assist the suffragettes in England
to teach Englishmen, by militancy of speech and the logic of experience,
that the road to chivalry is the road to justice.1

And Goldstein was introduced to English readers of the WSPU paper, Votes for
Women, as ‘the woman who has not only helped to carry the fight for the vote in her
own state, but is one of the foremost leaders of the Australian women’s movement,
and is now helping her sisters in England to win their freedom.’ 2

Goldstein’s visit was a busy one, during which she engaged in a number of different
activities, giving speeches across the length and breadth of England and taking part in
many suffrage demonstrations. She was active in other ways too, enjoying many of the
activities that London offered its feminist community. She met the leaders of almost
all the suffrage organisations, dined and made speeches at the Lyceum Club, and
helped to establish the Australian and New Zealand Women Voters Committee, an
organisation designed to help Antipodean women make their voice heard in imperial
concerns.3 This committee worked to support the suffrage struggle in Britain, but also
kept in contact with suffrage and feminist groups throughout the empire.

Goldstein was perhaps the most prominent, but she was certainly not the only
Australian woman to be in England at that time, nor was she the first to become
involved in the British suffrage campaign. A large number of other Australian women
found themselves in England between 1903 and 1914, travelling sometimes for
pleasure and with family, but equally alone and in search of careers and opportunities4
and were similarly involved. Alice Henry attended mass WSPU protest meetings in
1905 before moving to Chicago, where she became the organiser of the National
Women’s Trade Union League.5 Dora Montefiore and Nellie Martel, both of whom
had been born in Britain and then moved to Australia, returned and became actively
involved in the WSPU.6 Muriel Matters was perhaps the most spectacular of all,
achieving fame in October 1908 by chaining herself to the iron grille of the Ladies’
Gallery in the House of Commons—and distributing suffrage pamphlets from an
airship soon after she was released from prison.7 Although she was imprisoned in
Holloway for one month, her actions did force the dividing grill to be permanently
removed.8 All of these women joined Goldstein in the Great Suffrage Procession of 17

1 Woman Voter, no. 18, 6 April 1911.
2 Woman Voter, 12 May 1911, p. 532.
3 Angela Woollacott, To Try Her Fortune in London: Australian Women, Colonialism and Modernity, London,
Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 105–138.
4 Ros Pesman, Duty Free: Australian Women Abroad, Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1996.
5 Diane Kirkby, Alice Henry: the Power of Pen and Voice, Cambridge University Press, 1991.
6 Dora Montefiore, From a Victorian to Modern, London, E. Archer, 1927.
7 The West Australian newspapers covered Matters’ exploits quite extensively and she became something of a
local celebrity. See the Morning Herald, 23 June 1908, p. 5; 30 October 1908, p. 5; 31 October 1908, p. 9; 3
November 1908, p. 2.
8 Carly Millar, ‘The Making of a Feminist: Bessie Rischbieth Encounters the English Suffragettes’, Lilith, no. 12,
2003.


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Australian Feminism and the British Militant Suffragettes
June 1911, where she and Margaret Fisher carried the banner instructing England to
‘Trust the women Mother as I have done’.

Even women who were such bitter opponents in later decades—the left-leaning Jessie
Street and the very conservative Bessie Rischbieth—were swept into the militant
campaigns. Street arrived in London at the age of 22 in 1911 and relished her capacity
to become actively involved in meetings, processions, and the selling of newspapers. It
was an exhilarating experience that made an indelible impression on her.9 Rischbieth
visited London a couple of years later in May 1913, and she too was immediately
swept up in the British suffrage campaign. ‘Oh!’ she wrote to her sister, Olive Evans,
‘this is an interesting place and an interesting age to live in.’10 There were few
Australian feminists who came away from their British experience untouched by the
intensity of the suffrage struggle and by its many different symbolic meanings.

One of the things that is most interesting about these Australian women in London is
that all of them became fascinated by and enmeshed in the militant campaigns of the
Women’s Social and Political Union, rather than joining the moderate campaigns of
what is often referred to as the ‘constitutional’, or moderate, suffrage organisation, the
National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies. For the older generation of Australian
feminist campaigners, such as Rose Scott or Maybanke Anderson, it was the
moderates who were natural allies and among whom they found colleagues and
friends. But even those who had gone to London assuming that they would form a
connection with the moderates found themselves swept up by the militants. Some
became disillusioned by the WSPU, but generally they campaigned with the militant
breakaway group, the Women’s Freedom League, rather than with the moderates.

It seems clear that the close involvement of Australian women with the militant
campaign was a result of the intense sense of drama that the militants always
generated. For many of them, the suffrage struggle was an all-consuming affair in
which passion, dedication, self sacrifice and even martyrdom were integrally
connected to politics.11 This attitude was in sharp contrast to the much smaller-scale
suffrage campaigns that had developed in Australia. The drama of the militants,
moreover, was evident not only in their public displays and demonstrations, but in
their ideology, in their structure, and in their development and internal dynamics.

The British women’s suffrage movement had begun in 1866—at a time when the
Second Reform Act raised the question of an extension of the franchise to larger
numbers of middle and working-class men, and thus raised again the issue of women’s
enfranchisement. The philosopher and feminist supporter, John Stuart Mill, was
elected to Parliament in that year, and the first step in the British campaign involved
the gaining of signatures for a petition to support women’s suffrage that Mill presented
to parliament.12

9 Jessie Street, Truth or Repose, Sydney, Australasian Book Society, 1966, p.45
10 Bessie Rischbieth to Olive Evans, 3 July 1913, Rischbieth Papers, MS 2004 /1/10, NLA.
11 Sandra Stanley Holton, ‘In Sorrowful Wrath: Suffrage Militant and the Romance of Feminism’, in
Harold Smith (ed.) British Feminism in the Twentieth Century, Aldershott, England, Elgar, 1990.
12 See Jane Lewis, Before the Vote was Won, London, 1987; Barbara Caine, English Feminism, c
1780-1980 Oxford, 1998, pp. 115–123.


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The mid-Victorian suffrage movement, despite the radicalism of its demand for
equality for women, was a fairly cautious one. It was composed largely of middle and
upper-middle class women and, in order to maximise support for the cause, every
effort was made to shock the sensibilities of the British middle class as little as
possible. Under Mill’s stern guidance, the campaign worked through drawing room
meetings held in respectable homes. When a public meeting was held, every effort was
made to ensure that the platform was graced only with attractive and decorous women,
who looked as if they enjoyed what were termed ‘the normal pleasures of
womanhood’. Anyone who looked strong minded was required to sit at the back of the
hall. The British suffrage movement had a somewhat troubled history for all of this,
and was subject to a number of divisions over questions about whether or not to
protest at the regulation of prostitution through the Contagious Disease Acts, or about
the differing views of supporters on major imperial questions including Irish Home
Rule in the 1880s and the Anglo-Boer War in the late 1890s. There were questions
also about how the suffrage movement related to the labour movement, especially in
light of conflicting views between middle class feminists and trade unionists
concerning how best to protect or to empower women workers. At the turn of the
twentieth century unity had been restored, but there was a general sense that, although
some women had become prominent in national politics over imperial questions, the
suffrage struggle itself was rather in the doldrums.

The women’s movement had made some progress in the United Kingdom as
elsewhere: there had been marked improvements in women’s education both with the
establishment of academic secondary schools and with the admission of women to
universities, and women had gained access to some professions—although not to all
and not on the same terms as men. There had also been some moves to extend the
legal rights of women in marriage and their custodial rights over their children once
marriages came to an end.13 The demand for women’s suffrage, however, had
advanced little in Britain and the suffrage campaign continued to be organised as it
had been for several decades—through the setting up of local organisations to attract
members and to call meetings, on the one hand, and through private members’ bills in
parliament, on the other. It received little publicity—indeed, it was of almost no
interest to the press.

The British press and public, like the Australian women who found themselves in
London at the time, were all galvanised with the advent of the militants. The primary
militant organisation, the WSPU, was founded in Manchester in 1903. It began
essentially as a breakaway from the labour movement: the Pankhursts left the
Independent Labour Party and set up the WSPU when they discovered that women
were not to be admitted to the new branch of the Independent Labour Party being set
up in Manchester. From the start, the militants eschewed the genteel approach of the
National union off Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS). They regarded private
members’ bills as a waste of time and insisted that all campaigns had to be directed
against the government in power. Their first public appearance, which involved the
interruption of a campaign meeting being addressed by the Liberal Home Secretary,

13 David Rubinstein, Before the suffragettes: Women’s Emancipation in the 1890s, NY, St Martins
Press, 1986.


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Australian Feminism and the British Militant Suffragettes
demonstrated the effectiveness of this approach. Christabel Pankhurst and her friend,
Annie Kenney, interrupted the meeting to ask whether the Liberals would grant votes
for women. The two women were rapidly hustled out of the hall, and spat at police
and attempted to address the crowds as they were ejected. They were arrested for
disturbing the peace, and their subsequent court appearance, and imprisonment for
seven days, was extensively reported by the national press.

The publicity generated by this event made clear the importance of courting arrest,
which allowed for dramatic speeches from the dock and the appalling spectacle of
middle class women in gaols. After this first national success, the WSPU moved its
headquarters to London, where they extended their range of activities. They continued
to interrupt political—and especially campaign—meetings, but also arranged street
corner speeches and meetings, suffrage caravans, marches and large scale public
meetings and demonstrations. They showed considerable imaginative flair in their
approach to campaigning, and injected drama into everything through the dramatic
ways in which they played out their own sense of the brutality of women’s oppression
and the immediate need for their emancipation.

The older suffrage organisations benefited greatly from all the publicity generated by
the WSPU, both in terms of donations and memberships. They, like the militants,
began to engage in more and more public demonstrations, especially marches,
pageants and vast public meetings. Women took to the streets in ever greater numbers
making full use of colourful clothing, banners and music, serving, as Lisa Tickner has
argued, to transform the face of political campaigning.14 Indeed, it is clear from recent
research that it was the moderate suffragists who benefited most from these
developments, increasing hugely in numbers and in wealth, something which allowed
them, amongst other things, to pay significant numbers of women, especially working
class women, as full time suffrage organisers. All the British suffrage organisations
showed a wonderful capacity both to create new approaches and to draw on labour
traditions and on the Edwardian fascination with pageantry in their use of banners,
costumes, music and special formations. They were fortunate to have teams of artists,
actresses and musicians to draw upon, who greatly enlivened the spectacles they
created.

Suffrage demonstrations of all kinds were very much costumed affairs.15 Unlike their
latter day counterparts, early twentieth century feminists regarded fashion as very
important. Indeed, Christabel Pankhurst issued a stern injunction to her followers:
‘Suffragettes must not be dowdy’, and enjoined them to outfit themselves
appropriately at Selfridges. Every suffrage or women’s organisation seems to have
developed a close relationship with a particular West End department store, which
provided them with the appropriate apparel—and also offered sufficient advertising in
the pages of their weekly papers to allow the development of a suffrage press. Even in
their dress, however, one can see something of the differences between the moderate

14 Lisa Tickner, The Spectacle of Women, London, Chatto and Windus, 1987; and Barbara Green,
Spectacular Confessions: Autobiography, Performative Activism, and Sites of Suffrage, 1905–1938,
New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1997.
15 See W. Parkins, ‘What to wear to a protest march: Identity politics and fashion in the suffragette
movement’, Southern Review, vol. 28, 1995, pp. 69–82.


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and the militant suffrage organisations. Thus the moderates chose as their stores Derry
and Thom, or Swan and Edgar, or Burberry—stores that provided sensible coats and
skirts, and silk blouses or overcoats, ‘serviceable attire at moderate prices’. This was
the kind of garb which women normally wore in their daily round of shopping, work
or social visits, and which, as the advertisements stressed, allowed for walking or free
movement. The militants chose the rather more up-market Selfridges which offered a
far more elegant array of clothes. Selfridges advertised regularly in the suffragette
paper Votes for Women, featured the suffragette purple, white and green in its
windows, and offered many different designs in white with delicate stripes of
suffragette colours to wear to demonstrations.16 The store went out of its way to court
suffragette support—even donating a smart white military style costume to Flora
Drummond, who was the chief marshal at the WSPU events.

What is particularly notable here is that the Selfridges garments usually chosen by
suffragettes were not the hardy beige or brown outdoor coats and skirts, but rather
white suits or delicate white tea gowns, of a kind normally worn indoors. The white
garments emphasised the physical fragility of women and contrasted strongly with the
heavy and dark clothing of male suits and jackets, enabling the suffragettes to play out
in a visually dramatic form the confrontation between pure and ethereal femininity
and gross brutal masculinity which underlay so much of their rhetoric and imagery.
London streets offered the most fitting backdrop to this kind of demonstration.17 The
stress on femininity was evident in many activities of the suffragettes—embodied by
the beautiful and often frail-looking Emmeline Pankhurst, who was both the leader
and the most potent symbol of the movement.

The militants referred often to their sense of women as being threatened by male
violence—and, from the very start, violence was evident in their campaign. Members
of the WSPU were often subjected to brutality of a marked kind, being literally thrown
out of meeting halls, and attacked by irate members of the public. In their
demonstrations, some were subject to sexual assaults and possibly even rape from
bystanders, and apparently on some occasions by police. This was something that
seems never to have happened to the moderates. In some ways it seems clear why this
was so. Those who organised the demonstrations of the NUWSS went out of their way
to establish friendly relations with the local police forces and other relevant officials—
something the militants never did. There have also been suggestions that the militants
courted violence. Cicely Hamilton, for example, who was first attracted to and then
left the WSPU, commented on the fury that she had felt when her views were never
able to be heard, and suggested that the militants perfected a way of heckling that left
no alternative for their opponents apart from violence.18 But this is not a sufficient
answer. One has a sense here that there was something about the militants that was
deeply discomfiting to audiences, perhaps connected to their own sense that the fight
for women’s suffrage was a life and death struggle.19 This approach was seen perhaps

16 The best discussion of this whole question is in Joel H. Kaplan and Sheila Stowell, Theatre &
Fashion: Oscar Wilde to the Suffragettes, Cambridge University Press, 1994.
17 Barbara Caine, ‘Feminism in London, c1850-1914’, Journal of Urban Studies, vol. 27, no. 6, 2001.
18 Cicely Hamilton, Life Errant, London, J.M. Dent, 1935.
19 Martha Vicinus, Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women, 1850-1920, London,
Virago, 1985.


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Australian Feminism and the British Militant Suffragettes
in its most dramatic form in the death of Emily Wilding Davison, who ran in front of
the King’s horse at the Derby on 4 June 1913, suffering a fractured skull, from which
she died five days later. Davison regarded herself, and was seen by her colleagues, as a
martyr for whom death was the appropriate way to show the sufferings of
womanhood. This death of course allowed for an immense funeral procession, which
was held from Victoria Station to St George’s Church in Bloomsbury, with Davison’s
coffin surrounded by thousands of suffragettes all clad in white. 20

The extent to which violence was endemic to the militant cause was made even more
evident in the ways that it increasingly became a feature of militant activity as the
campaign developed. The militant campaign began in what is often thought of as a
defensive way, and one in which the militants themselves were the victims of
violence. But the militants soon escalated both their disruptiveness and the violence of
their own activities, at the same time exposing themselves to greater violence. Thus in
1908, the militants began to engage in new activities including throwing acid at
polling booths or breaking shop windows, or burning sporting fields and mail boxes.
At much the same time, imprisoned suffragettes protested against the refusal to them
of the status of first class political prisoners, by undertaking hunger strikes. The
government responded by ordering them to be forcibly fed—an undertaking
sometimes depicted as being very like rape. Forcible feeding led to renewed public
outcry and increasingly to a sense of heroic martyrdom amongst the suffragettes
themselves. In 1913, there was a further escalation with the start of an arson
campaign.21

The moderation of Australian suffrage campaigns makes it very intriguing that
Australian women were drawn so very strongly to the militants rather than the
moderates. Older Australian women’s rights pioneers often voiced negative responses
to the militants. Maybanke Anderson had little time for the suffragette campaign,
remarking that ‘If you can’t convince an Englishman by argument, you certainly won’t
do so by breaking his windows.’ Rose Scott, too, harboured misgivings about
militancy. Considering physical force to be ‘the weapon of the Barbarian’, in 1910 she
wrote a letter to the Daily Telegraph condemning the actions of the suffragettes.22 But
this had no impact on their younger colleagues.

One of the things that clearly intrigued Australian women was the dramatic and
extreme sense of sexual antagonism and conflict that was integral to the WSPU and
the militant cause. Of course the women’s suffrage movement in Australia had drawn
attention to discrimination against women in the legal, economic and educational
sphere, and to the ways in which women suffered from a sexual double standard and
from domestic violence. Rose Scott certainly had a strong sense of the ways in which

20 Liz Stanley with Ann Morley, The Life and Death of Emily Wilding Davison: A Biographical
Detective Story, London, The Women’s Press, 1988.
21 For recent discussions and evaluations of the Pankhursts, militancy and the whole suffrage
campaign, see Martin Pugh, The Pankhursts, London, Allen Lane, 2001; June Purvis, Emmeline
Pankhurst: a Biography, London, Routledge, 2002; and June Purvis and Sandra Holton (eds) Votes
for Women, London, 2000.
22 Jan Roberts, Maybanke Anderson: Sex Suffrage & Social Reform, Avalon, NSW, Ruskin Rowe
Press, 1997, p. 96; and Judith Allen, Rose Scott: Vision and Revision in Feminism, Melbourne,
Oxford University Press, 1994, pp. 205–6.


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marriage and heterosexual expectations oppressed women. However, there had been
rather less emphasis on this amongst many feminists who sought rather to stress the
need for a more general form of social transformation. Vida Goldstein, for example,
rejected the very idea of sexual antagonism as an issue. With her simultaneous support
for the labour movement and her concern about the oppression of women, she shared
with other Australian feminists, like her friend Alice Henry, and with British socialist
feminists, a belief that ‘the woman movement and the labour movement must advance
in combination.’23 Looking back in later years, Goldstein characterised her early vision
as one involving ‘the complete equality of men and women, of absolute protection of
children and young people, of peace and good will between nations, and of justice and
economic security for all.’ 24 Her enthusiasm for women’s suffrage co-existed with her
advocacy of a non-revolutionary form of socialism based on ‘the collective ownership
of the means of living’. Goldstein argued that it was class privilege, rather than male
dominance, that maintained the oppression of women—and indeed, that the
enfranchisement of women in Australia has depended largely on the generosity and
support of working men.25

Exposure to London itself played an important role here. Goldstein certainly seems to
have become much more intensely aware of the dangers which masculine sexual
privilege and the whole sexual double standard posed for women in London than she
had been in Melbourne. Like Bessie Rischbieth, she was forcibly struck by the extent
of poverty and of prostitution in England. Rischbieth, who visited London in 1913,
wrote to her sister of the 300 000 women in London, estimated to be earning two
shillings per day. There were, she added:

25,000 people in London earning a living by the proceeds of the white
slave traffic. That does not include the girl slaves but people earning
money at this traffic and I forget how many small girls they reckon are
outraged every month. Some of our laws relating to our state children and
destitute mothers are far in advance of the laws here and I can see the
influence of the women’s vote in Australia..26

Goldstein, like Rischbieth, saw Australia as better than England in regard to the
question of women’s employment and their sexual enslavement. But the intensity of
concern with these questions amongst English feminists had their effect in making her
far more sensitive to the many cases of women’s sexual abuse which occurred in
Australia. Her discussions of the suffragettes place great emphasis on the importance
of women’s chivalry to other women and serve to illustrate her increasing concern
both about the extent of women’s sexual oppression and her growing sense that the
emancipation of women had elements which could not be contained in a general

23 See Diane Kirkby, Alice Henry: The Power of Pen and Voice. The Life of an Australian-American
Labor Reformer, Cambridge University Press, p. 81; Barbara Caine, ‘Vida Goldstein and the English
Militant Campaign,’ Women’s History Review, vol. 2, no. 3, 1993, pp. 363–376.
24 Vida Goldstein, ‘Towards a new social order’, undated typescript, Rischbieth Papers, MS
2004/4/211, NLA. For Strong, see C.R. Badger, The Reverend Charles Strong and the Australian
Church, Melbourne, 1971.
25 Vida Goldstein, ‘Socialism of Today—An Australian View’, Nineteenth Century, vol. 62, 1907, p.
410.
26 Bessie Rischbieth to Olive Evans, 3 July 1913, Rischbieth Papers, MS 2004/1/10, NLA.


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Australian Feminism and the British Militant Suffragettes
program for greater social justice. The experience of cities like London or Liverpool
brought her and other Australian feminists into contact with urban life and with social
and sexual problems on a larger scale than they had ever known in Australia.

The issue of prostitution in particular and of sexual abuse in general was the subject of
widespread comment in the daily and in the feminist press—as well as being discussed
by conferences and public meetings run by a range of social purity and feminist
organisations, most particularly by the National Council of Women. The passionate
concern of Christabel Pankhurst with the consequences for women of male sexual
promiscuity evident in The Great Scourge had not yet been published when Goldstein
was in England, but there was constant discussion nonetheless of the ways in which
male sexuality contributed to—even underlay—women’s oppression. While these
issues had certainly been canvassed in Australia, often in Goldstein’s own papers, they
were not as widely discussed either in the general press or as subjects of feminist
debate as they were in England. Goldstein’s depiction of the militant campaign tended
to stress the martyrdom and the purity of the militants as they fought against sexual
oppression and exploitation. In response to those who attacked the destruction of
property perpetrated by the WSPU, especially in 1912, she insisted, in language
strongly reminiscent of the Pankhursts, that ‘we must remind critics that the choice for
the suffragettes lies between broken windows and the broken lives of helpless women
and children.’27

The dedication and the intensity of the suffragettes was also very attractive to
Australian feminists, some of whom felt that their countrywomen were less engaged
with their new rights and duties as enfranchised citizens than they should be. Very
shortly after Goldstein arrived, she commented on her wish that some of her followers
could be with her and be able ‘to get an insight into the working of the offices at 25
Clement Inn and at 14 Charring Cross Road’ (the headquarters of the WSPU). ‘I wish
too’, she wrote, ‘that all members of the WPA [the Women’s Political Association]
could be transhipped here so that they might learn what devotion to a great cause
means. The spirit in these women is simply heroic.’28

The contrast between English and Australian feminism was of course particularly
marked at this point, as Australian women were grappling with the inevitable
fragmentation that followed the granting of the suffrage and the attempt to establish
what a female vote or a woman citizen might mean, while their English counterparts
were in the throes of the most intense stage of their suffrage campaign. In the 1920s,
after the granting of partial women’s suffrage, the English women’s movement went
through conflicts and faced problems considerably greater than those evident in
Australia in the first decade of the twentieth century. In 1911, however, Goldstein was
struck by the concentrated energy of the English militant movement in contrast to her
own organisation, the Victorian Women’s Political Association. She explained:

Concentration is the watchword of the WSPU and its leaders. They do not
dissipate their energies taking up other questions besides the suffrage, and
this is the rock which might endanger the future of the W.P.A. if it is not

27 Woman Voter, 12 April 1912, p. 29.
28 Woman Voter, no. 20, 1 June 1911, p. 2.


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careful ... The W.P.A. cannot become a strong self-supporting
organisation without a fighting platform. 29

Involvement in these activities was a risky business and those who undertook them
often literally thought of themselves as devoting their life to the campaign. This sense
of self-sacrifice and martyrdom was constantly reinforced by Christabel and Emmeline
Pankhurst, who used millennial images, suggesting somehow that their fight for the
vote was connected with a second coming or a complete transformation of humanity.

Although moderate British feminists were often attracted to and welcomed the
militants in the early stages of their campaign, by 1908 when the WSPU turned to acts
of violence and destruction, they distanced themselves very markedly from them.
Some Australian women did too, but others did not. Bessie Rischbieth is an interesting
case in point, and indeed is in some ways the most interesting case of an Australian
entranced by the militants. Although a prominent feminist activist in the inter-period,
Rischbieth had not seriously become involved in feminist campaigns before the First
World War. At the time, she was quite well known, but as a prominent wealthy young
Perth matron, who arranged her elegant dinner parties and dances, and had exquisite
taste in clothes. She was also a public-spirited woman, interested in philanthropy. She
was a foundation member of the Children’s Protection Society in 1906, the National
Council of Women (WA Branch) in 1911, a Vice-President of Women’s Service Guild
in 1909, and Honorary Secretary of the Kindergarten Union of Western Australia in
1911.

Initially, Rischbieth had applauded the dedicated work toward enfranchisement of the
constitutional suffragists of the NUWSS and was equivocal about the WSPU
stratagem. She readily acknowledged the momentum of the militant campaign. Indeed,
the Women’s Service Guild even sent a message of support and sympathy to the
WSPU in 1910. But she expressed apprehension as to their direction: ‘of course the
militants are going strong and will be going stronger’, she wrote, but ‘I really think
there will be murder before things get much further.’ Nor could she condone the
violent conduct and lawlessness of the WSPU, bemoaning the fact that ‘nothing but
militant methods are reported in the English Press. All the great Constitutional
Societies and the magnificent educational work they are doing lies unreported.’30

Rischbieth’s attitude changed markedly when she found herself in London in 1913.
She was there accompanying her husband, who had business interests in Britain, and
had originally intended to spend her time studying developments in kindergartens.
Soon, however, she found herself entirely caught up in the suffrage struggle and other
feminist activities. Her frequent letters to her sister detail the activities and the fate of
the Pankhursts and the WSPU to the exclusion of almost anything else.

The year of Rischbieth’s visit was a dramatic one in the suffrage world. The WSPU
had declared a truce in 1912, while the government considered a ‘conciliation bill’ that
promised a measure of women’s suffrage. The failure of the third Conciliation Bill in
March 1912 and then the withdrawal of the Reform Bill in January 1913 led to a

29 Woman Voter, no. 22, 1 Aug 1911, p. 1 (italics in original).
30 Quoted in Millar, op. cit.


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