People Australia

Harriet Francis Powell, later Kingsbury (also known as Harriett) (1878-1936) court reporter, stenographer, feminist and political organiser

Birth: 16 December 1878 at Ballarat, Victoria, daughter of English-born parents George Burbridge Powell (1849-1909), a bootmaker, from Chester, and Mary Hannah, née Clark (1850-1920), later Simmons, from Manchester. Marriage: 5 November 1914 at San Francisco, California, United States of America to William Kingsbury (1888-1922), a labourer, born in Germany. They had no children. Death: 18 July 1936 at New York city, USA. 

• Joined a local debating and literary society as a young woman.
• Worked as a court reporter in Ballarat and Melbourne. Became a committed Socialist and advocate of equality for women.
• Active in Victorian Australian Labor Party from about 1905. Became involved in the Women’s Political Association’s Women’s Parliament, with which Vida and Aileen Goldstein were associated.
• From April 1905 she spent three months in New Zealand lecturing on “Is Woman Man’s Equal?” Returning to Australia by September that year, she addressed Political Labor League meetings and canvassed door-to-door in outback New South Wales during the following twelve months, including Narrabri, Moree, Warialda, Inverell and Scone. By September 1906 she claimed to have enrolled 3,079 new members.
• Elected a member of NSW ALP executive in January 1906, along with Selina Anderson, Edith Bethel, Kate Dwyer, Annie Gardiner, Mary Ann Grant and Maggie Hall.
• In October 1906 Powell became organiser for Victorian ALP after Lilian Locke's marriage. She was an effective organiser and an impressive public speaker, drawing large crowds. From October 1907 to December 1908, she toured New Zealand for the Political Labor League, and later for the New Zealand Socialist Party, except for a tour of Queensland in July to October 1908. By March 1909 she had returned to Victoria and was advertising her availability for political organising.
• Elected member Victorian ALP central committee in January 1910. She was described in the press as being of pleasing appearance and charming frankness of manner. Remained politically active in Victoria, Tasmania and New South Wales until about 1913. The following year she left Australia.
• On 24 July 1914 Powell arrived at San Francisco, California, USA, from Sydney, aboard the President. In the years after her marriage in 1914 to William Kingsbury she submitted articles for publication and attempted to have a book of verse published.
• Her husband, who was described in press report as “also a public speaker” was killed in an automobile accident in 1922.
• She may have been the Mrs Harriett Frances Kingsbury who, in 1925, applied attempted to accompany Bobby Leach on his contemplated trip over Niagara Falls but was rejected, he said, because “she is not serious in her request” [Buffalo Enquirer, May 09, 1925, p 5].
• In the following years, she occasionally contributed verse to Labor Call (Melbourne), and in 1930 wrote to a Melbourne friend to state that she was “delivering a lecture in Washington and other centres of the United States on ‘Australia Unlimited’”.
• Understating her age by ten years, she applied for US naturalisation at New York on 27 July 1934. She described herself as a widow, gave her occupation as law stenographer and reporter, living at 101 East 26 Street, New York. Gave her race as “Welsh”.
• She obtained relief work at a law firm in New York in February 1936. In a letter from New York to Hobart the previous month she wrote that she was “preparing to establish the great Labour movement here, politically, as it is the only hope for the workers, in every line and kind of labour. The world needs that an A.L.P. here should link up with the A.L.P. at the Southern Cross, and culminate in the universal congress, with all industries and all peoples represented.”
• Cause of death: cardiac valvular disease.

Sources
Tocsin (Melbourne), 16 August and 13 September 1906; Frank Bongiorno The people’s party: Victorian Labor and the radical tradition, 1875-1914 (Melbourne, 1996); B. S. Gustafson, From the cradle to the grave: a biography of Michael Joseph Savage, (Auckland, 1986); Sue Tracey, ‘Harriet Powell: Labor organiser’, in Australian Society for the Study of Labour History: https://www.labourhistory.org.au/hummer/vol-7-no-1/harriet/ .