Street, Jessie (1889–1970)

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Street, Jessie (1889–1970)

Australian women's rights advocate and United Nations official. Name variations: Jessie Lillingston; Jessie Mary Grey Street; Lady Street. Born Jessie Lillingston on April 18, 1889, in Chota Nagpur, India; died on July 2, 1970; daughter of Charles Lillingston (a British civil servant) and Mabel (Ogilvie) Lillingston; Women's College of Sydney University, B.A., 1910; married Kenneth Whistler Street (a lawyer and later a justice of the Supreme Court of New South Wales), in 1916; children: four.

The daughter of Charles Lillingston and Mabel Ogilvie Lillingston , a descendant of one of the earliest white families to settle in Australia, Jessie Street was born in 1889 in India, where her father was posted with the British civil service. When she was seven years old, her mother inherited a station (ranch) near the Clarence River in New South Wales, Australia, and the family moved to the new property. Jessie was sent to England for her education, returning to attend college at the Women's College of Sydney University, from which she graduated in 1910. Bachelor's degree in hand, Street took ownership of a farm with the intention of proving the virtues of scientific dairy farming. She imported milking machines from Sweden and set up a milk test laboratory to great success. With her point made, she sold the farm and turned her attention to women's causes by becoming a member of the Conference on the International Council of Women. That conference in Rome was the first of many she would attend throughout Europe, America, India and Australia on behalf of both women's and social welfare causes.

Street traveled to the United States to train as a social worker in 1915, putting this experience to good use when she returned to Australia the following year and helped to establish the country's first Social Hygiene Association. She also married lawyer Kenneth Whistler Street that year and soon began a family that would grow to include four children. In 1918, she joined the League of Nations Union while maintaining her activities in various women's groups, including the National Council of Women, of which she served as secretary in 1920, and the Feminist Club. She would later serve as president of that group, which sought equal opportunities, social status and pay for women.

In 1929, feeling that current organizations were insufficient, Street set out to start a women's organization that would have real impact in bringing about equality. Aiming for greater parity in everything from social and moral standards to elected representation and employment and pay opportunities, as well as international harmony, her United Associations of Women (UAW) quickly found like-minded, primarily middle- and upper-class members throughout Australia. Street's social position as the wife of a Supreme Court Justice of New South Wales did not hurt her cause, and she spent most of the next 20 years as president of the organization. Advocating a campaign of gradual reform, she worked to unionize Australian nurses and fought legislation that forced women teachers who married to be dismissed from their jobs. Equal pay for women and wages for housewives were two other causes supported by the UAW.

Street's presidency of that organization led to her participation in the Australian Women's Charter, designed to address the needs of women during and after World War II, and in the Women for Canberra Movement. She also did assembly-line work in a shell factory for several years during the war, becoming a member of Australia's Amalgamated Iron and Munitions Workers Union. While her women's groups were not affiliated with any political parties, Street stood as the Labor Party candidate for a political seat in the Australian Parliament in 1943. Her campaign was unsuccessful (as would be a second run in 1946), but the political experience coupled with her extensive activist work made her the only woman selected to be part of Australia's delegation to the San Francisco conference on the foundation of the United Nations in 1945. Street focused her attention on the inclusion of equal rights for women in the charter of the United Nations and advocated the formation of the Commission on the Status of Women. After its creation, she served as vice-chair of the commission until 1949, when in the increasingly frosty atmosphere of the Cold War she was forced from the post on charges of being sympathetic to Communism. (The main evidence produced by her opponents was her relief work for Russian civilians, begun during the war, when the Soviet Union had been an ally.)

Back in Australia, Street became a constituent member of the Federal Council for Aboriginal Advancement, seeing significant parallels to the women's movement in the struggle of Aborigines for equal rights. "[T]he reasons given … for the discriminations practiced against coloured people were the same, and had the same basis," she noted, "as the discriminations practiced against women. … [T]he reason for these discriminations was to protect the status, rights and privileges of the white man." She became Lady Street in 1956, when her husband was made a Knight Commander of the Order of St. Michael and St. George. Earlier a founder of and frequent contributor (1944–48) to The Australian Women's Digest, Street published her memoirs Truth or Repose in 1966, four years before her death.