The Truths We Were Not Told

At the end of WW1 Australia was in a bad way and we were looking for an interpretation that made us feel good about ourselves, I think. Some women who had been anti-war and anti-militarization, however, interpreted the situation differently.

Vida Goldstein 1869-1949
Woman Voter 22 May 1919:

‘The old order has not changed... The map will be changed, that is all... The defeated are to be degraded to the utmost in the unarming, crippled in opportunity, and mortgaged beyond reason... language and conduct of diplomacy are still to obtain, the powerful are still to hold, and the small and feeble to be subject.’

Woman Voter 3 July 1919:

‘Peace has come. Let those who can still deceive themselves celebrate it. Of peace I have little to say. It is unspeakable, what there is of it. We have saved the world from Germany. Heaven send something to save the world from us... We are to war or are at war in pretty nearly every quarter of the globe.’

Woman Voter 18 December 1919:

‘The world is sick unto death, and the sources of Government - if we may put it so - polluted. The blockade is the devilish ant-climax of the war, the cold blooded, unimaginative concerted actions of our rulers, into whose hands we, with the other democracies, lie like puppets, dumb and obedient, guiltily impotent, or wickedly acquiescent to the awful horrors done in the name of the expediency by our representatives.

The anti-war Vida Goldstein also suggested in the Woman Voter:

‘The peoples, as well as the Governments, have sown the wind of misunderstanding and of hate and are reaping the whirlwind.’

In an open letter to the women of Australia in 1914 she had appealed to women:

‘History will proclaim you false if you are silent now “Come out and be separate from all that makes for war.’

It was a long time ago, yet so many of their words are so significant today I looked further.

Even by 1916 the Women’s Peace Army of the Women’s Political Association had claimed:

‘We do not say that this war was promoted with the deliberate object of crushing the workers, but we do say that: belief in Might, the fear of enemies without and within national boundaries, the use of the press, of armament firms, of secret diplomacy, under which the great mass of the people live in avoidable anxiety, wretchedness and ugliness, had made such a clash of interests that a clash of arms between nations prepared for war ... become inevitable when circumstances and opportunity sounded the tocsin of alarm.'

The Women's Peace Army, Pat Gowland from Women, Class and History ed. Elizabeth Windschuttle, Fontana 1980 p.220

The Woman Voter 2 October 1916