On June 12, 1902, Australian women became the first in the world to win the
right to vote and to stand in national elections. That historic achievement was
partly due to the efforts of pioneering feminist Vida Goldstein, who became the
first woman in the British Empire to be nominated and to stand for election in a
national parliament when she put herself forward as a candidate in the 1903
poll. In some ways Goldstein's subsequent fortunes reflect the contradictions of
women's suffrage in Australia. She did not join an existing political party
because she believed women's issues would be subsumed by them, but as an
independent candidate and a woman she was too far outside the political
mainstream to be elected. Each of her five bids to join the Federal Parliament
failed. According to her biographer Janette Bomford, Vida Goldstein's physical
appearance attracted as much attention in the press during her first election
campaign as her policies. (In the 1903 campaign, one reporter said of Goldstein
"she quivers with life and energy, and from her dark head to the tip of her
dainty buckled shoes there's not the slightest suggestion of 'mannishness', not
even that faint aroma that clings to the golf girl.") Many of her ideas
were ahead of their time. She was a pacifist and opposed, in principle to the
White Australia policy, although she believed alien immigration should be
restricted until equal pay for equal work had been achieved. Although Goldstein
remained a strong believer in the equality of the sexes throughout her life, she
also imbibed the belief that women were morally superior to men.
It was not until 1943 six years before Goldstein's death that Edith Lyons and Senator Dorothy Tangney became the first women elected to Federal Parliament (and true universal suffrage was not achieved until Aborigines received the right to vote two decades later). Of the 61 women in Federal Parliament today, four are ministers, one is the leader of a minor party and five are shadow ministers. They are greatly outnumbered by their 166 male colleagues however and still fighting some of Goldstein's battles: the mainstream parties continue to be experienced as "men's clubs", the physical appearance of female candidates attracts more attention than it deserves and women politicians still struggle with the unfair expectation that they will bring a different moral quality to the political arena.
But over the past century women's gains have also been immense. A social revolution has taken place over that time and has transformed schools, the family and the workplace. The immensity of that social change and its many manifestations, can be brought back to the once radical idea that a woman's vote is equal to the vote of a man. Australia today owes a great deal to the courage and vision of the suffragists.