Bella Guerin

She taught first at Loreto College, Victoria,[4] urging higher education scholarships for Catholic girls to produce 'a band of noble thoughtful women as a powerful influence for good'.

She married civil servant and poet Henry Halloran at St. Patrick's Cathedral, Melbourne, on 29 June 1891. Halloran, then aged 80, had addressed a laudatory poem to her after seeing a graduation portrait in 1884. He died in Sydney on 19 May 1893, leaving her with an infant son, Henry Marco. A second marriage at Christ Church, St Kilda, Melbourne on 1 October 1909 to George D'Arcie Lavender, thirty years her junior, was apparently short lived.[2]

Returning to teaching from financial necessity, Bella taught in Sydney, then Carlton, Prahran and East Melbourne. From the mid-1890s she frequented suffragist circles, becoming office-bearer in the Bendigo Women's Franchise League while running University College, Bendigo from 1898 - 1903. From 1904 to 1917 she taught at Camperdown and in a succession of small Melbourne schools at South Yarra, St Kilda, Parkville and Brunswick with diminishing success. Her increasing political activity and disputes over conditions with the Education Department probably contributed to this outcome.[2]

As vice-president of the Women's Political Association in 1912 - 1914 Guerin co-authored Vida Goldstein's 1913 Senate election pamphlet, but dual membership of non-party feminist and Labor Party organizations proved untenable. From 1914 she wrote and spoke for the Labor and Victorian Socialist parties and the Women's League of Socialists, and was recognized as a 'witty, cogent and instructive' commentator on a range of controversial social issues; they included the rights of illegitimate children, "brotherhood and sisterhood without sex distinction" and defence of English militant suffragettes.[1][2]

An ardent anti-war propagandist, she led the Labor Women's Anti-Conscription Fellowship campaign during the 1916 referendum and spoke in Adelaide, Broken Hill and Victorian metropolitan and country centres against militarism and in defence of rights of assembly and free speech.[2]

Appointed vice-president of the Australian Labor Party's Women's Central Organizing Committee in March 1918, she aroused censure and controversy for describing Labor women as "performing poodles and packhorses", under-represented in policy decisions and relegated to auxiliary fund raising roles. Henceforth she organized for Labor "only so far as it stands for those principles represented by the Red Flag", believing in the parliamentary system but desiring capitalism's elimination.[2]