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NLA News - home August 2005 Volume XV Number 11

The Legacy of Jessie Street

click to enlarge
Jessie Street representing Australia at the United Nations, 1940s
From the Jessie Street Papers (1889–1970)
Manuscript Collection, MS 2683/11/5
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Portrait of Jessie Street c.1930s
gelatin silver photograph;
21.1 x 15.3 cm
Pictures Collection
nla.pic-an23371692

Lenore Coltheart researches the papers of the indefatigable Jessie Street and reveals an exceptional woman of diverse activity and influence

Original documents are a fascinating legacy. While sifting through box after box of folders and folios is so often frustrating, suddenly there is the gleam of gold that makes research like prospecting, if more comfortable. And who is not drawn to play detective, looking for vital clues where the colder the case, the greater the thrill? Sometimes research is more like covert surveillance in a spy drama. Documents are also the ultimate silent witness, where forensic skill is paramount. How long before a series on documentary research becomes the newest genre of popular television?

For the researcher whose subject is Jessie Street, there is no simple answer to the fascination of her papers. Although a lifespan from 1889 to 1970 is no more interesting an era than any other, the landscapes of her life are a rich setting. Born in north-eastern India, she grew up in the upper Clarence region of New South Wales, went to school in Buckinghamshire and then to university in Sydney. For someone who arranged her address books alphabetically by country, the planet was far from lonely.

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Mrs Jessie Street speaks to delegates of the United Women’s Conference in San Francisco, 19 May 1945
b&w photograph; 12.6 x 19.4 cm
Pictures Collection
nla.pic-vn3288769

Researching the life of Jessie Street offers all the thrills of prospecting, of detective work, of forensic science, of spy stories—and of compelling travelogue. But the real fascination is not the process of the research, but the subject herself. From the documents, photographs, audio and film records, Jessie Street’s world springs to life in a way that catches, and holds, attention. In her work as a campaigner for justice, for equality for women, for peace, there are many ‘firsts’. She was the only woman on Australia’s delegation to the conference to establish the United Nations in 1945, and a founder of the Commission for the Status of Women. She was one of a group of women who helped draft the Charter of the United Nations; Article 8 on the status of women is their doing. Jessie Street was also influential in the drafting of the Declaration of Human Rights, even after the Chifley Government withdrew her credentials to attend the Paris meeting to finalise the Declaration in 1948. And Jessie Street is still the only woman to have initiated the draft of a successful amendment to the Australian Constitution—the 1967 change that removed the provisions discriminating against Aboriginal people.

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Delegates to the second Australian Women’s Charter conference in Sydney in 1946
From the Jessie Street Papers (1889–1970)
Manuscript Collection,
MS 2683/11/11

There were peaks of achievement, but there was also a sinister undercurrent. Like some other prominent political reformers, Jessie Street was a target of criticism for her support of the Soviet Union from her first visit there in 1938. During the Cold War years she was ‘Red Jessie’—a supposed threat to the security of Australia, and at the same time a state ‘second lady’, as the wife of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of New South Wales. It is the life itself, and not the research, that held the elements of covert intelligence gathering.

Even a brief exploration of the documentary trail shows just how extraordinary a life this was. The National Library holds the main collection of Jessie Street’s own papers, arranged in 12 series, at MS 2683. Among the personal items are address books, passports and personal letters revealing Jessie Street’s place in the international networks of feminist and pacifist reformers underpinning the League of Nations in the 1920s and 1930s, and the United Nations from 1945. Jessie Street’s own writing comprises the second series, including her lyrics of ‘Australia Happy Isle’, a collaboration with composer Lindley Evans that won Victoria’s sesquicentenary song competition in 1934.

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Jessie Street addresses ‘Save the Peace’ meeting in London’s Trafalgar Square, 5 September 1948
From the Jessie Street Papers (1889–1970)
Manuscript Collection, MS 2683/11/3
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Jessie Street addresses the crowds at the Budapest peace rally, June 1953
From the Jessie Street Papers (1889–1970)
Manuscript Collection
MS 2683/11/11

The substance of the life work of Jessie Street forms the main part of this manuscript collection, covering feminist activities from 1916. Newly married and living in Sydney, Jessie Street joined the Feminist Club, the Women’s Club, and gave a paper on venereal disease at a Workers Education Association conference, a busy and a formative year. Over the next half-century she wrote thousands of letters lobbying the governments of nine prime ministers, and as many premiers, on equal citizenship for Australian women. She was one of many active women reformers but, unlike most, many of the records of her work survive. This is partly because for a time she rented a city office and paid a part-time secretary, systematically keeping records, just like a business or a government department. This organised and professional approach also shaped the work of the United Associations of Women Jessie Street founded in 1929 and built another important collection of records, held in the Mitchell Library in Sydney. Through vital collections like these, we have a window into the remarkable interwar era of feminist campaigning in Australia and internationally.

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Jessie Street inspecting sheepskins at the Sydney woolstore in 1943
From the Jessie Street Papers (1889–1970)
Manuscript Collection
MS 2683/11/11

Jessie Street’s papers in the National Library also enable us to trace her work during the World War II years, helping to explain her rapid rise in the Society for Cultural Relations with the Soviet Union and her persistent defence of the society during and after the war. Here too is held the story of the hugely successful aid program she developed after Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. Dubbed ‘Sheepskins for Russia’, this campaign meant accumulated Australian woolstocks were shipped to Soviet ports to become Red Army greatcoats and blankets. Among other important records of these years are those of the government appointments Jessie Street held, including work as an investigator assessing the evidence of internees in the wartime camps.

In 1943, when Enid Lyons and Dorothy Tangney became the first women elected to the Australian Parliament, Jessie Street almost became the third. The records of her campaign reveal how nearly she won the ‘blue ribbon’ Wentworth electorate—and she is still the only person so nearly to remove the sitting conservative there. Her second campaign for the ALP in 1946, and her 1949 bid to win Phillip as an Independent can also be followed in these papers, but one intriguing record is missing. There are examples of the promotional photographs and leaflets from all three elections, but not one campaign button. A single one of the 1943 buttons seems to have survived—60 years later, it was found by a collector in the United States of America.

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Mrs Jessie Street presiding at a meeting of the United Associations of Women
From the Jessie Street Papers (1889–1970)
Manuscript Collection
MS 2683/11/11

Jessie Street’s papers in the National Library include a mini-archive of the founding years of the United Nations, with printed material copiously annotated in her (almost) indecipherable handwriting. There are official United Nations photographs of the San Francisco conference and of the 1947–48 sessions of the Commission for the Status of Women when Jessie Street was vice-president. The same blend of photographs with both printed and original records tells the story of the ‘ginger group’ at San Francisco—the women delegates from Scandinavian and Central and South American countries Jessie Street joined—which ensured the status of women became a commitment of the new United Nations. Among these records is a copy of ‘the big cable’ that Jessie Street circulated in San Francisco, sent from 68 Australian organisations to the Secretary-General requesting support for the elimination of sex discrimination.

Such rare and invaluable records of Australian political history and international relations make this an important and rich collection. Here we can review the Australian Women’s Charter movement Jessie Street founded; the campaigns on behalf of nurses, of servicewomen, of teachers; the work for a social insurance scheme; and Jessie Street’s prominent role in the postwar peace movement. Among many intriguing documents are those dealing with her participation in campaigns for Aboriginal rights, such as the original 1957 draft of her suggested amendment to the Australian Constitution. This was effected 10 years later, after the most successful constitutional referendum in Australian history.

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Cartoon, “Smith’s” Socialite. “Status for women, indeed. I am not going to permit Jessie Street to do anything to my status.”
From the Jessie Street Papers (1889–1970)
Manuscript Collection, MS 2683/5/2

Jessie Street’s papers link with other National Library collections, like the oral history holdings, or the papers of another leading Australian feminist, Bessie Rischbieth. Then there are the wider connections, for instance with records held by the National Archives of Australia, particularly the substantial ASIO files on Jessie Street. There are recordings of some of the many radio broadcasts Jessie Street made, also held in Canberra, at ScreenSound Australia. In Sydney the Mitchell Library has collections on the families of Jessie Street’s husband, Kenneth Street, her father Charles Lillingston, and her grandfather, Edward Ogilvie, founder of Yulgilbar station on the Clarence River, where Jessie Street’s mother was born and where Jessie Street grew up.

The papers also have connections to further material in the international collections of the archives of the League of Nations in Geneva and of the United Nations in New York. Other national collections include the Fawcett Library in London, which holds the papers of Jessie Street’s colleague Edith How-Martyn, and the headquarters of the National Women’s Party in Washington, which has the records of Jessie Street’s collaboration with its founder, Alice Paul.

This worldwide dispersal of fragments about the life of Jessie Street indicates the reach of the networks through which she worked—and suggests their important role in the 20th-century development of human rights. Following this trail certainly makes the researcher feel at different times prospector, detective, spy, forensic surgeon, and travelling companion. But exploring the documented life of Jessie Street draws attention away from these fascinations of the process, to the practice of that life, with powerful effect for the researcher.

Jessie Street’s legacy is neither her achievements, nor their documentary record. Through both of these that extraordinary life still has the capacity to challenge a world where there are more rewards in resignation, than in the courage to seek justice.

LENORE COLTHEART is a Visiting Fellow in the Research School of Social Sciences at ANU, where she is completing a new biography of Jessie Street

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