Ladies in the House: Episode 4: Adela Pankhurst
Intro (music)
Hi, this is Kelly Chase and you are listening to Season 2 of a Museum of Australian Democracy and History Detective Collaboration: Ladies in the House. In this 3-part series we are going to celebrate the lives of three incredible women and how they contributed to Australian democracy.
In this episode I would like to introduce you to Adela Pankhurst Walsh.
If you have not heard the name Pankhurst before, it belonged to an incredibly famous suffragette in England. A suffragette was a woman fighting for the right to vote. Adela’s mother, Emmeline Pankhurst, fought for decades to get women the right to vote in England. Adela dutifully worked for her mother’s women’s rights organisation the WSPU which stood for the Women’s Social and Political Union. She was even sent to prison several times for her protesting. The problem was that Adela disagreed with the militant methods that her mother and sisters were using to fight for their rights.
Some of those militant tactics involved, smashing windows of shops and offices, cutting telephone wires, burning down houses of politicians, slashing paintings in art galleries and planting bombs in cathedrals. When Adela spoke out about the militant tactics, her mother bought her a one-way ticket on a boat to Australia. She gave her ￡20 and a letter of introduction to a famous Australian women’s suffragist Vida Goldstein.
When Adela arrived in 1914, white Australian women already had the right to vote, but 1914 marked the beginning of another global event, World War I. And one thing that both Adela Pankhurst and Vida Goldstein opposed was conscription. Conscription is when the government makes it an official policy that people must join the army. Adela was a passionate public speaker and as the war went on, she became more vocal in her opposition to the war. In 1917 she was arrested for openly protesting against the war. Although in Australia we have the right to protest, during the war the government introduced a War Precautions Act, to ensure that the war effort was not undermined. The Prime Minister of the day, Billy Hughes, offered to release her from prison, if she promised not to protest against the war anymore, but she refused. And so, she spent 4 months in jail for that protest.
Not only did Adela make speeches opposing the war, she also focused on issues such as equal pay, working conditions and children’s rights.
It would be easy to only show one side of Adela’s life and put her on a pedestal as an activist for human rights, but it is always important in history to try and show a balanced perspective and also explore the different aspects of people’s pasts.
In 1920, Adela and her husband, a well-known union leader, became founding members of the Communist Party of Australia. However, within 3 years they decided that their ideals didn’t align with the Communist Party anymore.
One problematic part of Adela’s political career came in the early 1940s during the Second World War. You see Adela and her husband visited Japan and fell in love with the country, and when they came back to Australia, they began publishing pro-Japanese and anti-American pamphlets. It was also around this time that Adela and her husband joined the Australia First Movement. This organisation was aligned with the belief system of Hitler and the Nazi Party. In 1941, after the Japanese had bombed both Pearl Harbour and Darwin, Australia officially declared war on Japan. In March of 1942, when Adela was 57 years old, she and some other members of the Australia First Movement, were put in an internment camp under suspicion of working for the Japanese government. Although she requested early release to see her dying husband, she was denied release and remained there for around 6 months.
Throughout her life, Adela remained optimistic about human nature and had faith that society could one day operate with equality for all.
Call to action (music)
What is important to remember is that underneath almost all renowned historical figures, is that often in the moment they think they are doing the right thing. However, we can all benefit from reflecting on and learning from the past. What I would like you to think about today, is a time in your life when you thought you were doing the right thing but upon reflection perhaps it was not the right thing to do? But more importantly, what have you learned from reflecting on your past?
This is Kelly Chase, on the case.
Before I go, if you are a teacher and would like a free lesson plan for this episode or any of the Ladies in the House season one and two episodes, you can head to the Classroom Resources page on the Museum of Australian Democracy website to download the lesson plan. Lessons include pre-listening vocabulary, reflection questions, a call to action activity and the transcript. You’ll find a link to the page in the show notes.
See you next time!
