Vida Goldstein - Later Career

Later Career

Throughout the First World War she was an ardent pacifist, became chairman of the Peace Alliance and formed the Women's Peace Army in 1915. She recruited Adela Pankhurst, recently arrived from England as an organiser. In 1919 she accepted an invitation to represent Australian women at a Women's Peace Conference in Zurich. In the ensuing three year absence abroad her public involvement with Australian feminism gradually ended, with the Women's Political Association dissolving and her publications ceasing print. She did however continue to campaign for a number of public causes, and continued to believe fervently in the unique and unharnessed contributions of women in society. Her writings in latter decades became decidedly more sympathetic to socialist and labour politics, and many of her later articles discussed the desirability of a new social order based on socialist and Christian principles.

In the last decades of her life her focus turned more intently to her faith and spirituality as a solution to the world's problems. She became increasingly involved with the Christian Science movement - whose Melbourne church she helped found. For the next two decades she would work as a reader, practitioner and healer of the church. Despite many suitors, Vida never married and she lived in her last years with her unmarried sister Aileen and her widowed sister Elsie. She died of cancer in South Yarra on 15 August 1949 at the age of 80.

Although her death passed almost unnoticed at the time, Goldstein would later come to be recognised as a pioneer suffragist and important figure in Australian social history and a source of inspiration for many female generations to come. Second Wave Feminism lead to a revival of interest in Goldstein and the publication of new biographies and journal articles.

In 1984 the Division of Goldstein an electorate in Melbourne was named after her. Seats in her honour have been established in Parliament House Gardens, Melbourne and in Portland, Victoria. The Women's Electoral Lobby in Victoria has named an award after her. 2008 was the centenary of woman suffrage in Victoria and Vida's contribution was remembered.