People Australia

May Pitt, n.d.

May Pitt, née Giles, late Goodman (1889-1957) feminist, Labor party activist and alderman

Birth: 1889 at Coyal, via Mudgee, New South Wales, daughter of native-born George Giles (1865-1932), maintenance man, and Jessie, née McGregor (1870-1958), born at Monifieth, Forfar, Angus, Scotland. Marriages: (1) 1906 to Reginald Goodman (1883-1965), a miner, born at Mudgee. They had four daughters and two sons. The marriage ended in divorce in November 1921. (2) 1922 at Marrickville, NSW, to Alfred Joseph (Curly) Pitt (1887-1951), a storeman who worked at a wool store and took “no part in public affairs”. They had three daughters and one son. Death: 13 December 1957 in her usual residence at Broughton Street, Glebe, Sydney, NSW. Religion: Anglican. 

• Lived at Lithgow and Mudgee after her first marriage. Moved to Glebe, in Sydney, apparently with the younger children about 1920 and “took an active part in local organisations”.
• During World War I, her brother and her second husband had served in the Australian Imperial Force. Alfred Joseph Pitt, then a hat maker, had enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force on 13 March 1916, served in France with the 17th Battalion, was captured at Lagnicourt on 15 April 1917 and held as a prisoner of war in Germany until repatriated to England on 25 December 1918; he was discharged in Sydney on 10 June 1919. Thomas Kenneth Giles (1887-1967), a railway fitter, enlisted in the AIF on 19 August 1914, served with the 3rd, was wounded in action at Gallipoli in April 1915 and in France in August 1916 and in April 1917 and discharged on a pension in March 1918.
• May Pitt was prominent in the Glebe branch of the Australian Labor Party in the 1940s and was a dominant figure in the branch.
• She was elected as an ALP alderman on the Glebe Municipal Council in 1941. Interviewed the following year, she opined that “A woman runs a home better and cheaper than any man could – and I am sure she could run the country just as well. . . The present mess that the world is in is the result of men’s efforts, so why not let the women try”.
• With other leading women, she took strong exception to the refusal of Minister for Immigration Arthur Calwell to grant passports to four Guides to visit Malaya, on the grounds that “women are not allowed to leave Australia”. She responded “Women are not inferior beings and they will not be pushed around”. She resigned from the council in November 1946.
• Cause of death: coronary occlusion, arteriosclerosis an chronic myocarditis.
• Her son Melton Richard (Benny) Goodman (1920-2006) a publisher, served from 1941 to 1946 with the Australian Military Forces.

Sources
Max Solling & Peter Reynolds, Leichhardt: on the margins of the city (St Leonards, 1997), p 187.