Dora Montefiore, suffragist, socialist, journalist and pamphleteer, was the eighth of thirteen children and the daughter of surveyor Francis Fuller and his wife, Mary Ann nee Drew. Devoted to her father, she was educated by governesses and tutors at Kenley Manor in Surrey and a school in Brighton. In 1874 she went to Sydney to keep house for her eldest brother. On the 1 February 1881 she married a wealthy Jewish merchant, George Barrow, son of Joseph Barrow Montefiore, and had two children. Her husband died at sea on 17 July 1889 and on discovering she had no automatic right of guardianship of her children, Montefiore became a strong supporter of women's rights. The first meeting of the Womanhood Suffrage League of New South Wales was held at her home on 29 March 1891. She became its corresponding secretary, but by 1892 had returned to Europe where she lived for some years in Paris before making her home again in England. In 1898 she had a relationship with a married Independent Labour Party organiser, George Belt, formerly a bricklayer's labourer, which scandalised more bourgeois members of the labour movement.and led to a libel action against Ramsay MacDonald's wife, Margaret, over discriminatory treatment of Montefiore at the International Women's Congress of 1899.
Montefiore's support for suffragism led her to join the National Society for Women's Suffrage, the League of Practical Suffragists and the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU). She was on the executive of the first, wrote a pamphlet, Women Uitlanders (1899), for the second and was an active WSPU organiser in London. In May 1906 she refused to pay taxes without representation and her home was besieged by bailiffs for six weeks. Later that year she was imprisoned for demanding votes for women in the House of Commons. Disillusioned with the WSPU, Montefiore joined the Adult Suffrage Society in 1907 and became its honarary secretary in 1909. Montefiore shifted towards a woman-centred socialism and joined the Marxist Social Democratic Federation (SDF). She was a founding member of the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1920.
Internationalism was an important dimension of Montefiore's politics; she attended many international suffrage and socialist congresses; travelled through the United States, Australia and South Africa from 1910 to 1912 and edited the International Socialist Review of Australasia in 1911. Her editorials condemned the introduction of compulsory military training for school age boys, generating public controversy. World War I was a difficult time for Montefiore as a strong anti-militarist whose son, Gilbert, was severely gassed while serving in the Australian Imperial Force. He was to die in 1921 and Montefiore made a last visit to Australia to see his grave and meet her grandchildren. It required the intervention of W. A. Holman to persuade the Australian government to allow her visit after a written guarantee she would not promote communism. In 1924 she represented the Communist Party of Australia in Moscow. Montefiore spent her last years in England.
Montefiore's writing brought together all her political activities. Although she published poetry and translated Maxim Gorky, most of her literary energies went into a women's column in New Age (1902-06) and Justice (1909-10). She also wrote many pamphlets on women and socialism.
(Source: Judith Allen, 'Montefiore, Dorothy Frances (Dora) (1851 - 1933)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 10, MUP, 1986, pp 556-557; Christine Collette, 'Socialism and Scandal: the Sexual Politics of the Early Labour Movement' History Workshop Journal 23 (1987): 102-111; Karen Hunt, 'Montefiore, Dora Frances Barrow (1851-1933)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Volume 38, Oxford University Press, 2004, pp.787-788).
