Damned Whores and God's Police

by Anne Summers

  In 1973–74 the Australian Government spent over $1944 million under the Social Services Act, an increase of 24 per cent on the previous year. This expenditure was distributed as follows:

  Expenditure under the Social Services Act, 1973–749

  Age pensions

  $1 146 387 000

  Invalid pensions

  $226 022 000

  Widows’ pensions

  $180 957 000

  Supporting mothers’ benefit

  $40 586 000

  Maternity allowances

  $7 782 000

  Child endowment

  $225 392 000

  Orphans’ pensions

  $458 000

  Unemployment and sickness benefits

  $106 637 000

  Rehabilitation service

  $7 078 000

  Sheltered employment allowances

  $1 418 000

  Funeral benefits

  $1 578 000

  Total

  $1 944 295 000

  Some of these benefits, such as child endowment and maternity allowances, are paid to all those eligible regardless of income and these need not be considered here except where they apply as supplementary income for women on low incomes.

  Age and invalid pensioners make up the largest group of claimants from the welfare pool and here the majority of the recipients of pensions are women. Although 59 per cent of invalid pensioners are male, 68 per cent of age pensioners are female10, and since the number of age pensioners is considerably greater, we can see that the total percentage of female pensioners is greater: women constitute 65 per cent of all age and invalid pensioners. (They are of course 100 per cent of all widows’ pensioners and those in receipt of the supporting mothers’ benefit.)

  Number of age and invalid pensioners, 30 June 197411

  Female

  Male

  Age

  706 200

  321 400

  Invalid

  64 700

  92 100

  Total

  770 900

  413 500

  The Interim Report of the Poverty Commission found that in August 1973 the pension for every pension-receiving group was below its austere poverty line.12 At that time, the single age and invalid pension was $5.50 below the poverty line, while a widow with three children received $11.90 less than was required to subsist. Also it was found that half of all single age pensioners and just over a third of all married ones were poor.13 The Commission reported that of aged single men, 36.6 per cent were ‘very poor’, that is, below the poverty line, while 13.3 per cent were ‘rather poor’, that is, less than 20 per cent above the poverty line. Thus a total of 49.9 per cent of the men could be described as poor.14 Among the women, 31.0 per cent were ‘very poor’ and 19.8 per cent were ‘rather poor’, a total of 50.8 per cent.15

  Pension rates increased three times between October 1973 and May 1975 and at the last increase the rate for single people was $36 per week while married couples received $60. These rates would need to be compared with a new poverty line to see if there has been any absolute improvement in pensioners’ financial condition. However, it is unlikely that this has occurred and we could not expect it until the final Henderson report is tabled and its recommendations acted upon.

  Although poverty appears to be a highly likely consequence of being a pensioner of either sex, the percentage of women totally dependent on their pensions is far greater than of men. At 30 June 1974, 15.85 per cent of female age pensioners had no means at all apart from their pensions, whereas this was true of only 5.15 per cent of male age pensioners.16 And when we recall that there are two and a half times as many female age pensioners, the actual number of aged poor women is substantially greater. The majority of the aged poor is female.

  The only survey of the plight of single women age pensioners ever, to my knowledge, carried out, revealed that in 1971 elderly single women were living in conditions of appalling poverty and loneliness, neglected or exploited by relatives.17 They were even worse off than childless widows of similar age, sometimes suffering malnutrition and physical neglect. The survey found that high rents were the biggest factor in elderly single women’s poverty but it also pointed to the relentless loneliness that befalls these women and that many compensated for, often at enormous material cost, by maintaining pets. Some of the case histories cited show the devastating deprivation of these friendless old women:

  Age, 78 years; income $19.25 per week (pension and supplementary allowance); expenses, rent $18 a week. No assets. Cared for a blind father for 15 years until his death … rent recently raised from $10 to $18 a week. Will not leave small house with garden because of seven-year-old dog … he is her best friend.

  Age, 76 years; income $19.25, rent $12 a week for room, use of kitchen; food and clothing $6.50. She suffered appendicitis and was admitted to public hospital 18 months ago, transferred to private hospital to recuperate. Is so lonely in her room, and was so happy in the private hospital that she threatened to break her leg to force them to keep her. She fell out of bed every night for a week, so her bed was made up on the floor; she threw herself out of a window on to a concrete path and succeeded in breaking her leg, which secured her a further twelve weeks in the hospital.

  Age, 67 years; income $19.25; expenses $12 a week for rent for one-bedroom house. No bath in house, only a coldwater tap in bathroom, floorboards rotten. Refused to move because of her four cats.18

  Women in situations such as these probably constitute the worst instances of poverty among women. Physical frailty accompanying old age becomes yet another scourge they must endure: it prevents them from having access to those supplementary welfare agencies that do exist, unless the agencies are somehow led to them, and where they have neither friends nor family to help them, they are likely to be totally dependent upon their pensions. The few dollars left over after the rent has been paid allow no indulgence in luxuries and, on current prices, would preclude many basic foodstuffs. Thus when a coat becomes so threadbare that it no longer serves its purpose, or a pair of shoes wears paper-thin, the woman in poverty must choose between replacing them and eating that week. If she is fortunate enough to live within walking distance of a second-hand clothing place and if she can find there a garment that fits her and she can afford, her plight may be less drastic. But for many women, old age is likely to exacerbate their poverty. No longer fit enough to be able to chase up bargains in food or clothing, they must patronise the nearest shop. I have often watched elderly ladies in neon-lit supermarkets clutching a tin or two under their arms, their myopic eyes unable to focus properly on the prices, searching pitifully among well-stocked shelves for a product that is recognisable to them, their eyes resting for a wistful moment on those laden trolleys wheeled past by women for whom each purchase is not a matter of vital calculation.

  Many of the non-rent-paying women, that is, those who are living in houses they have either purchased themselves or they have acquired through marriage, are also likely to be living in some degree of poverty. A woman who owns her house would be expected to be better off since she pays no rent, some rates and taxes can be deferred and paid from her estate and she is in possession of a realisable asset. But unless she rents rooms to boarders, a house provides no current income. Her assets may preclude her from receiving a full pension and she could be as poor as a rent-paying woman who receives the full pension. Many old women cling tenaciously to dilapidated and deteriorating homes, often living in only one room, the garden an overgrown jungle, because this constitutes an ever-present reassuring reminder of days past when things were better, a psychological prop against capitulating to the despair of their current deprivation. They could sell and use part of the money to buy their way into a retirement village or similar form of housing for the aged – assuming they have had the foresight to put their names on a waiting list, for these are often five or more years long – but many old women resent being forced to do this. Just as many single women pa
y high rents so they can keep their pets, often the widow will live in poverty in a house she has known for many years rather than risk a major rupture at this stage of her life.

  A further group of women who are likely to have to subsist in material poverty are those who head what are referred to as ‘fatherless families’, the negative description aptly summarising the situation of the mother who has no husband.* She is removed from dependency on her husband’s bread-winning but must now supplicate for state largesse, her entitlement resting solely on the fact of her never having, or having been deprived of, a male provider. Thus widows, deserted wives, wives of prisoners and de facto wives in each of these categories have been able to receive from the Commonwealth Government a widows’ pension.

  A total of 115 200 women were receiving widows’ pensions and 26 268 were getting supporting mothers’ benefits at 30 June 1974.19 Women eligible to receive these pensions include widows, divorcees, women whose husbands are in prison or a mental hospital and deserted wives. The maximum amount payable to a woman with one dependent child in May 1975 was $52.50, made up as follows:

  Standard rate

  $36

  Mothers’ allowance

  $6 (if the mother has custody of at least one child under six or a child who is an invalid; otherwise the allowance is $4)

  Children’s allowance

  $5.50 for each child

  Supplementary assistance

  $5 (available if the mother pays rent and meets a stringent means test)

  $52.50

  Obviously many supporting mothers receive less than this: $2 less if her youngest child is over six, a further $5 less if she is living in her marital home – even if it has not been paid off. A woman trying to rear a growing child on about $45 a week will experience almost insurmountable difficulties: children’s clothes become too small with alarming rapidity, our ‘free’ education system makes continual demands on parents’ purses, children demand entertainments which invariably cost money. And a majority of widows are solely dependent on their pensions for income. In June 1974, 52 per cent of Class A widows20 had no means apart from their pensions, and 63 per cent did not own homes.21 But until recently, the widow with dependent children was the only one who had even a chance of survival. It is only since December 1972 that Class B and C widows have received the standard rate pension ($36 in May 1975); prior to that they received a pittance of about 75 per cent of the standard pension, an amount that must have made eking out an existence a precarious undertaking for even the most frugal woman. But the rationale behind it was clear.

  Women’s main function in Australia has been defined as child-raising and they are seen as being entitled to support while they carry out this task; if the husband or father fails to provide it, the state will step in. But support from the public purse is neither automatic nor immediate. The Social Services Act, 1947–72, which sets out widows’ pensions defines a deserted wife as one ‘who has been deserted by her husband without just cause for a period of six months’.22 One effect of this definition is to exclude the deserted wife from assistance from the Commonwealth for the first six months of her husband’s desertion. During this period she can apply to state welfare agencies for assistance and the amount she will receive will vary, depending on the state where she lives, but will always be less than the widows’ pension.23

  As one researcher into state welfare relief found:

  The (means) tests ensure that no recipient of State assistance (typically a deserted wife or unmarried mother) is able to rise significantly above the poverty line, even if she is willing to enter the work force. The tests reinforce the feelings of humiliation, utter dependence and hopelessness that often characterize persons driven to seek relief in circumstances of extreme personal distress, by imposing near (or complete) destitution as a condition of assistance. The unstated assumption behind the tests appears to be the notion that the recipient has only herself to blame for her predicament and consequently she must accept as her lot a perpetual state of poverty, with little or no incentive or opportunity to improve her economic position.24

  All the states require women to have dependent children and to be virtually destitute before they will render assistance. For those who qualify for the widows’ pension, this period of state-sponsored mortification will last six months and then they can transfer to the better-paying and more liberally administered federal scheme.

  Until 14 June 1973, single mothers were completely excluded from the federal benefits and for them perpetual poverty was their only prospect. Under legislation introduced into the Australian Parliament in 1973, single mothers became eligible from 3 July 1973 for the supporting mothers’ benefit, which is paid at the same rate as the widows’ pension, but they still have to endure the first six months after their child’s birth under the parsimonious patronage of the states.*

  While the Commonwealth benefits are, in comparison to those proferred by the states, rather more generous financially, they are by no means a step towards relieving women from the paternalism that their dependency status entails. To obtain these benefits and pensions, women have to sign maintenance orders against their husbands or the child’s father and they will not receive payment if they refuse to do this. They are thereby forced to retain a relationship with that man and to remain financially dependent upon him, the only difference being that the government becomes an intermediary and supplements the amount if the husband cannot afford the full pension payment.

  A censorious and oppressive moralism pervades the administration of the Commonwealth scheme, the effect of which is to turn the government into the most rigidly authoritarian of husband/providers. Under the Social Services Act an applicant is not to receive the pension ‘(a) unless she is of good character; (b) if she is not deserving of a pension; or, (c) if she directly or indirectly deprived herself of property or income in order to qualify for a pension’.25 The first two conditions in particular are obviously open to abuse, for they require that the administering officer adopt a judgemental attitude on factors other than the applicant’s basic situation of having lost her husband. If a recipient of a widows’ pension gives birth to a child after the death of the man with whom she was living, and the child’s father was not that man, that child is ineligible for benefits.26

  Further, the government has an evident horror of being cuckolded; it requires the undying sexual fidelity of the women it is supporting. One of the strongest complaints of single-mother claimants of welfare has been the practice of welfare officers searching their houses for evidence of a man’s presence; if such evidence is discovered welfare payments are stopped.27 The Commonwealth Minister for Social Security gave no assurances that this practice would stop when single mothers began to receive the widows’ pension, and recent protests by single mothers indicate that such snooping is still practised. Indeed it can be surmised that this practice will be retained as a political defence against those critics who abhor what they see as the government condoning immorality.28

  The morality of forcing women into what is a situation of virtual prostitution by demanding that a man with whom they may have formed only a temporary alliance support them does not seem to perturb the government, yet this is the effect of the practice of stopping welfare payments if it is decided (often on very meagre evidence) that a single mother or a deserted wife is living with a man. The government demands that that man pay for the woman’s sexual favours by undertaking to support her and her child(ren). It is an expensive proposition for any man and one that few would willingly accept. Thus a single mother receiving a pension is forced to engage in clandestine affairs, ever fearful of that early-morning knock on the door, to embark upon a forced-choice marriage, or else to live in nun-like chastity. The social security agencies of this country exact a merciless penance from women who have, willingly or otherwise, borne a child out of wedlock or have been deserted by their children’s father.

  Three other groups of women who are likely to be poor but the extent of w
hose poverty we know very little of are Aboriginal women, derelict or inebriate women and women with physical disabilities of some sort. All of these women are victims of race or circumstance in such a way as to be automatically precluded from obtaining the financial support of men and therefore, on the argument advanced here, can be said to be almost by definition in poverty.

  According to the ACOSS submission to the Poverty Commission:

  [P]erhaps nowhere can be found more horrifying examples of deep poverty than among Aborigine women. They are discarded by the community for not being the right colour, the right sex – lacking in language, in education, in training, in available or accessible job opportunities, ill-prepared to function in a white society, unable to get into the white service systems, unreached by birth control methods, producing children many of whom are destined for early death and the rest to live a life of poverty. If she does have the support of a husband it is 90 per cent sure that he will be a minimum wage earner.29

  White men in this country have almost always treated black women as whores, as women to have sex with (and maybe leave with half-caste babies) but not as women to marry. So black women have, almost by definition, less chance of finding a white male protector than white women. While they may marry black men of course, as the ACOSS submission points out, black men are rarely likely to be earning more than the minimum wage themselves, and are subject to all the vagaries of the unskilled job market, and if they have more than one or two children are likely to be below the poverty line themselves.