Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
By Jacqueline Kent, Viking, $34.99.
Vida Goldstein remains Australia’s most celebrated crusader for the rights of women. Blazing her trail at the dawn of the 20th century, Vida was an advocate for women’s rights, a campaigner for peace, she fought for the distribution of wealth and was a trail-blazer who provided leadership and inspiration to innumerable people.
Her life — as a crusader for the suffrage in Australia, Britain and America, an advocate for peace, a fighter for social equality and a shrewd political commentator — marks her as one of Australia’s foremost women of courage and principle.
Vida came to national prominence as the first woman in the western world to stand for a national Parliament, in Victoria, for the Senate, in 1903. She quickly established a pattern of working quietly against men’s control of Australian society as a fighter for equal rights for women, and as a champion of social justice. Her amazing work for the peace movement and against conscription during the heightened emotions of World War I showed her determination to defy governments in the name of fairness and equity.
Vida learned the value of practical help over pious platitudes and charity from her parents who were activists, working to provide support and training for Melbourne’s working poor, particularly during the devastating depression and drought of the 1890s.
Vida came to adulthood when Australia was in the process of inventing itself as a new nation, one in which women might have opportunities equal to those of men.
No matter how enlightening the realisation is into the work Vida did for her own sex, especially her battles for equality in politics, it’s unnerving to comprehend why those issues still persist to this day.
Award-winning Kent has also written other acclaimed biographies of Julia Gillard, pianist and social activist Hephzibah Menuhin and pioneer book editor Beatrice Davis.
