Bessie Rischbieth takes social consciousness formed in Adelaide to national feminist and widespread activitism
The statue of Bessie Rischbieth at Elizabeth Quay in Perth remembers her, aged 85, standing in front of bulldozers (see inset) in protest at filling in Mounts Bay for a freeway interchange. Urban heritage became one of the many social and feminist issues taken up by Rischbieth (nee Earle) from a social consciousness formed in Adelaide.
Bessie Mabel Rischbieth, an early Australian feminist and activist whose campaigns extended internationally through the 20th Century, had her social consciousness formed in South Australia.
Born in 1874 to Burra Burra farmers William and Jane Earle, Bessie, along with her sister, was sent to Adelaide to continue her schooling. She lived with her uncle William Benjamin “Ben” Rounsevell, a South Australian government minister, also of Cornish Australian parentage, who influenced his niece's social outlook. She attended the Advanced School for Girls in Adelaide city and took part in debates at home on topics including federation and women’s emancipation, with South Australia the first Australian state to grant women the vote in 1895.
In 1898, Bessie Earle married wool merchant (and Norwood Australian rules football club player) Henry Rischbieth at the Wesleyan Church in the Adelaide suburb of Kent Town. They moved the next year to live in Perth where he built Henry Wills & Co., a large grazing and wool business. Living comfortably and without children, Bessie Rischbieth threw herself into causes, starting with helping to found the Children's Protection Society in Western Australia and joining the state’s Women's Service Guilds in 1909.
Rischbieth was in London, with her husband, when women's suffrage was a dominant topic and she was inspired by hearing Emily Pankhurst speak. Rischbieth helped to start, and was first president, of the Australian Federation of Women's Societies in 1921. She was the first female justice of the peace at the Perth Court after a successful campaign to alter laws forbidding women to be on the bench.
Rischbieth's Women's Service Guilds opposed the Western Australian government's Health Act (1915) that called for the public health officials to publicly notify a diagnosis of venereal disease. Women’s movements differed on this issue and Rischbieth’s delegation to the 1923 International Woman Suffrage Alliance assembly in Rome was challenged by other Western Australian and Victorian women's groups who disputed that she represented all Australian women.
Rischbieth, living in the wealthy Perth suburb of Peppermint Grove, was regarded as part of the social establishment with access to Australian prime ministers. But this didn’t her stop her taking on the conservative federal government in 1923 attempt to cut the maternity allowance. Rischbieth also was vice president of the British Commonwealth League of Women in Australia from its start in 1925 and founder, with M. Chauve Collisson, of the Women's Non-party Political Association. She became a board member of International Alliance of Women for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship.
In 1928, she led the Australian delegation to the Pan-Pacific Women's Conference in Honolulu and was on the Australian delegation to the League of Nations. Rischbieth highlighted concerns for Aboriginal women and children, advanced controversial projects such as a maternity hospital that accepted single women, and helped set up and fund the Kindergarten Union of Western Australia. Her book, The March of Australian Women (1964), was a comprehensive survey of the national feminist movement.
A peace activist, Rischbieth was an important member of the Theosophical moevement and her interest in eastern philosophy and culture included staying at Gandhi’s ashram.
Campaigning for urban planning and natural heritage, Rischbieth promoted a citizens committee for the preservation of Perth’s Kings Park and the Swan River and prevented an Olympic swimming pool being built for the 1962 Empire Games in Kings Park. During construction of the Narros Bridge, Rischbieth, aged 85, in 1959, symbolically attempted to block it by entering the river ahead of the bulldozers. She remained active in social issues until she died aged 92.
