Jessie Street

Jessie Street (née Lillingston, 1889–1970), feminist and activist, had a 50-year career encompassing achievements on landmark issues such as family planning, equal pay and equal employment. Becoming interested in women's issues in her twenties, in the interwar years she intervened in unemployment relief, the plight of Jewish refugees and Indigenous rights. She stood unsuccessfully as a Labor Party candidate in the federal elections of 1939 and 1946; in between, in 1945, she was the sole Australian woman delegate to the founding of the United Nations, where she pressed for women's rights. Street first visited Russia in 1938, and was president of the Australian Russian Society from 1946; as the Cold War developed, she was (falsely) accused of communist sympathies. In 1949, expelled from the Labor party, she stood unsuccessfully as an independent candidate. Street's husband, Sir Kenneth Street, was Chief Justice of NSW from 1950, and for much of the 1950s she worked for the World Peace Council in London. Her son, Laurence, became Chief Justice of New South Wales in 1974.

Reginald Henry Jerrold-Nathan, a friend of Kenneth and Jessie Street, painted this portrait of Jessie (and that of her United Associations of Women co-founder, Linda Littlejohn) for entry in the 1929 Archibald Prize. It was a finalist in the exhibition under the title 'Mrs Kenneth Street'. As with many of his portraits of female sitters, it demonstrates Jerrold-Nathan's facility and apparent preference for depicting women in their finery, even though Jessie Street is said to have been more comfortable wearing a suit, blouse and sensible shoes.

Gift of the Street family and the Jessie Street National Women's Library 2010
© Estate of Reginald Jerrold-Nathan