by Anne Summers
The only way a black woman can find temporary escape from poverty is to follow the vocation that white society has said is all she’s good for and to prostitute herself. But this will only be possible while she is young and still able to attract white men. Within a comparatively short time, the ravages of alcohol and disease are likely to restrict her ability to earn in this way. So for black women, the chances of avoiding poverty are even more difficult than for white women. The sexist stereotypes that are applied to all women in Australia clamp the lives of black women more firmly in one direction than is the case with white women. The stereotypes work as polar opposites, either a woman is a madonna figure or she is a whore and, as we have seen, women are seen as being entitled to income only for mothering. If a woman is precluded from this, as black women have been since white colonisation of this country, she is automatically cast as a whore and will probably have to become one in order to survive. As a whore she receives money from men, but she is not guaranteed an income and is even more dependent upon men than the mother-woman is.
It is impossible to determine just how many homeless women there are in Australia, although their numbers are probably surprisingly high. Women can be found sleeping in parks and railway stations in Sydney, and a social worker from the NSW Department of Health informed me that there are dozens of women who are either temporarily or permanently homeless. As with examining women’s poverty in general, it is necessary to consider the nexus of sex discrimination and the assumptions that underlie it when considering homeless women. Permanently homeless women are almost by definition in poverty. They are likely to be inebriates or women who through some misfortune have been separated from their families and have been unable to gather together the necessary resources for a new start. (There is a small and enterprising group of homeless women in Sydney who do not fall into these categories, who would be best described as gypsies and who have, either through fate or choice, found themselves homeless but who have made this state a positive lifestyle. They are unlikely to have much money but they are rarely destitute because they know the city and its resources well and are always able to find food, clothing and shelter without having to prostitute themselves. Bea Miles, usually described as Sydney’s famous ‘eccentric’, was such a woman but she is by no means a sole example.)
Many women would like to become temporarily homeless while they look for alternatives to unsatisfactory present living situations, but are deterred, even prevented, from leaving the ‘homes’ they are forced to share with brutal and violent husbands because of the virtual absence of emergency shelters for women in Australian cities. In New South Wales a survey of such temporary accommodation found that in October 1973, ‘there appear to be only four hostels for destitute women, and together these can accommodate approximately 73 women and 75 children, whereas for destitute males there are seven hostels providing accommodation for approximately 1,379 men’.30 Since then, Elsie Women’s Refuge has opened in Sydney and it rarely has fewer than 30 women and children there each night and is forced to turn away many others for lack of space. But the experience of the refuge has demonstrated very clearly that the absence of such shelters has prevented many women from leaving home, and that once such a temporary shelter is available to them, it is possible for them to contemplate a clear alternative to their current situation. The number of temporarily homeless women will rise sharply as more refuges open in capital cities round Australia. Over 90 per cent of the women who have sought refuge at Elsie have been totally destitute when they arrived, most bringing only a few clothes with them. Their stories have borne out the contentions of this chapter about the poverty of women. The enormous difficulty these women have in trying to transfer from financial dependence on their husbands to state support reinforces the argument that the state would prefer the poverty of women to remain within ‘the family’, and thereby hidden, rather than have it exposed publicly by adding to the numbers already receiving social security pensions.
The ACOSS evidence found that ‘there is little or no help’ for inebriate women.31 The few night shelters will not take them, arguing that they are dirty, uncontrollable and a nuisance to the other women. Institutional confinement is possible only on condition that the women agree to undergo treatment. Their only other option is a night in the cells and a short jail sentence. Social prejudice against drunken women is so great that it impedes recognising it as a problem when it does occur and thereby prevents special provision being made for short-term shelter for inebriate women.
A further social assumption that has prevented more shelters being made available for women is the sexist view, held by many police and some social workers, that ‘any woman can get herself a bed for the night’. The hypocrisy of this attitude is manifold. Lack of alternatives often ensures that women have to prostitute themselves in return for a bed, but it is the women, not the men, who are then charged with soliciting. Many social workers are quick to condemn the morality (or what they see as the lack of it) of deserted wives or single mothers who move from one de facto relationship straight into another. What these critics do not seem to consider is that given women’s economic dependency and the lack of emergency accommodation and the difficulties of getting social security relief quickly, many women have no alternative. If they can get housing and support from a man who promises to treat them better than the previous one, this is a more attractive proposition than to face destitution and the probable loss of their children to state welfare custody.
In a culture that regards women as objects of sexual gratification – and much of our advertising attests to this being a pervasive feature of Australian society – it is fairly easy for any woman to sell her body in return for money or material support. Many marriages are contracted on this basis: it is mainly when the woman has absolutely no resources beyond her sex that the crude realities of the sexual barter are most apparent. They are also thrown into sharp relief with those women who are unable to obtain male protectorship.
Black women and inebriate women have already been mentioned; a further group who are totally ignored by society are women with some kind of physical disability. A surprisingly large number of women seeking refuge at Elsie have been women, often as young as 16, who have been abandoned by their parents and who are totally unable to attract men because of a disability, which lessens their attractiveness. These women are serving life sentences of poverty and neglect. Their only hope is to find sympathetic women companions or supporters. They have to exist on invalid pensions; often they are physically incapable of caring for themselves and rarely have an alternative to an institutional life.
The refusal of the state to pay women pensions if they are living in de facto relationships forces women into prostitution, even if this is glossed over with the label ‘common-law marriage’. The total neglect of women who are unable – even if they wanted – to prostitute themselves is evidence of the view the state has of women and poverty.
The state reflects and reinforces the ubiquitous notion that woman’s dependence on a male breadwinner is the ‘natural’ order of things and that he who pays ought to be able to determine the lifestyle, and hence define the limits of freedom, of the recipient of this protection.
The majority of adult women in Australia spend at least ten years of their lives as dependent housewives – and for many women this is their entire life’s destiny – and this means that their economic wellbeing is totally contingent on whatever amount their husbands choose to pay them as ‘housekeeping money’. There is no minimum amount, nor even a fixed proportion of the husband’s income, that a woman can legally expect to receive in return for her services of keeping house, cooking meals, rearing children, shopping, washing and doing the innumerable other tasks that are the usual lot of the housewife. The determination of the female wage at 54 per cent of the male rate at the beginning of this century – which contained the assumption that since women did not have to support families they needed smaller incomes – could perhaps be said to ha
ve implied that married men were expected to spend 46 per cent of their wages on the extra rent, food, clothing etc. involved in maintaining a family. A certain proportion of this perhaps was designed to be given to the wife for her personal disposal. But Justice Higgins did not specify this when awarding the Harvester judgement, which outlined the basic wage concept, and it has never been publicly demanded of men.
The wife whose husband considers it a mark of his own social standing that his wife be expensively dressed, host exotic parties and embellish his house with costly objets d’art, but who fails to provide her with cash that she may spend in whatever way she pleases, is not rich. Even if her husband is generous and provides her with unlimited cash and credit facilities, she is not economically independent. She may live in a gilded cage but it is a cage nevertheless, and she may be less free economically than the female factory worker who, from her meagre wages, can retain a proportion to dispose of at her whim. Very few women amass money they have earned themselves. Most rich women are rich because they have inherited money that their husbands or fathers earned, or they have been made nominal owners of property and other assets in order to reduce the husband’s tax liabilities. Even though many women do of course reap the benefits of their ruling class husbands’ or fathers’ exploitation of the labour force, very few are actually engaged in that process. While women who hold paid jobs outside the home can be classified in terms of a classical Marxist class analysis, this framework does not fit so easily the situation of women who have no paid employment.
The economic dependency of all wives who do not have their own incomes – and women who have these without engaging in paid work outside the home are rare – reduces them to a common economic status. There is no relationship between the actual work done by a housewife and her husband’s occupation; even when a woman has every labour-saving device at her disposal, and is therefore presumably married to a wealthy man, the actual nature of the work is unaltered. It remains a service job that is unpaid. If a machine or a paid domestic does much of the work for her she may gain extra time, but unless she uses this time to earn an income of her own, her dependent status is unaltered. Thus the wife of the managing director of a multinational corporation is in the same position of economic dependency as the wife of a factory worker.
The social status of the two women is of course very different, but their objective economic position is the same and this is what the traditional Marxist analysis, in its failure to recognise household work as productive labour, has neglected to take into account. Thus while it might be true in a propagandist sense to maintain that the wives of ruling-class men are collaborators with that class, and that they have access to the wealth accumulated by their husbands’ exploitation of other workers, such a statement is not an accurate representation of the economic power and independence of these women. It is necessary to analyse the productive labour of housewives separately and then to assess the class position of women who are at present assigned putative class on the basis of their husbands’ positions.
Women in Australia who are full-time housewives are engaged in two kinds of productive labour. They perform the socially necessary work of cooking, cleaning, washing etc., which are essential to maintaining the physical and emotional comfort of a household. The second form of productive labour, which the majority of housewives perform, is that of reproduction. The woman who bears children is engaged, as the Italian Marxist-feminist Mariarosa Dalla Costa points out, in the socially vital task of reproducing the labour force:
Woman … has been isolated in the home, forced to carry out work that is considered unskilled, the work of giving birth to, raising, disciplining, and servicing the worker for production. Her role in the cycle of social production remained invisible because only the product of her labour, the labourer, was visible there. She herself was trapped within pre-capitalist working conditions and never paid a wage.32
In fact, in Australia, this is the only part of the housewife’s work that is acknowledged and rewarded, albeit parsimoniously, in monetary terms. All mothers receive a maternity allowance at the birth of each child, and child endowment is paid for each child until at least the age of 16, or 21 if the child remains a dependent student. But these payments are minute in size and have declined enormously in value since they were first introduced. And so while token acknowledgment of women’s mothering role exists, it can hardly be said to constitute a just payment for the labour involved.
Inasmuch as the state does not recognise a woman’s right to an independent income, it assists in the perpetuation of this dependency. The allowances mentioned above are payments for motheringor are intended, as with child endowment, to be spent on the child’s welfare. There is no provision at all for women under 60 to be paid allowances of any kind that are intended purely and simply for their own life’s maintenance. For instance, a housewife who seeks work in the paid labour force but who is unable to find a job can register for work, but if her husband is working and earning more than a pittance she is not entitled to unemployment benefits. An unemployed husband whose wife works is also, in theory, denied this benefit. In fact the incomes of most women are so low that the unemployed husband would usually collect at least a few dollars so that he would rarely be totally dependent on his wife. In any case, it is likely that the entire salary of the wife (because it is generally lower) would be needed to house and feed the family and it is therefore unlikely that she would have any money left for herself. The main point however is that employment services discriminate against women in their definition of unemployment and in the manner in which they fail to recognise the differing needs of male and female workers.
There is evidence to show that even more married women than presently work would take jobs if these were available and if suitable child-care facilities existed. A government publication on female unemployment concedes that during most of the post-war period, the incidence of unemployment in Australia has been considerably higher among women than among men: ‘In 1969, for example, female unemployment averaged 1.5 per cent of the total female labour force while male unemployed averaged 1.0 per cent of the male labour force’.33 A survey conducted in 1969 by the (then) Department of Labour and National Service found that the incidence of female unemployment in four country industrial cities was very high due to a shortage of jobs appropriate to the skills possessed by women in those areas and because fewer jobs for women existed in these towns.34
But, as Steinke points out35, unemployment among married women is likely to be much greater than the official surveys show since they take as their criteria ‘persons who when registering with the Commonwealth Employment Service claimed that they were not employed and were seeking regular full-time work’.36 Many married women who are searching for jobs do not bother registering with the Commonwealth Bureau since, if their husbands are working, they are not entitled to unemployment benefits and their chances of finding a job via this avenue are no greater than pursuing the usual routes of answering newspaper advertisements and applying to local firms.
In any case, several surveys have shown that married women, especially those with young children, seek part-time work37 and such women are not defined as being unemployed. If ‘unemployed’ was defined to mean ‘absence of any income’ then the percentage of Australian women falling into this category would increase dramatically. In February 1973, 80.6 per cent of women working outside the home had part-time employment; and four-fifths of all part-time workers are women.38 The lack of enough part-time jobs prevents many more women from engaging in paid employment. A further deterrent to married women working is the absence of suitable, cheap child-care facilities and there is evidence that this prevents many women who would like to from taking jobs.39 A small survey conducted in a Sydney suburb by the Women’s Electoral Lobby in late 1973 found that 33.9 per cent of married women interviewed would take jobs if they could find suitable child-care facilities.40 A Morgan Gallup Poll conducted in late 1973 found that 32 per cent of women
interviewed said they would go out to work if there was a convenient day-care centre available.41 Thus it is probably impossible to begin to estimate the numbers of women who would like to work, or feel they need (for whatever reason) to work, but who are unable to find either suitable jobs and/or child-minding facilities and who do not register with the Commonwealth Employment Service. The pressures and conflicts facing married women who take jobs, or who are seeking them, are complex, but it is clear that the need for money is one of the major motivating factors. Often a woman will rationalise her working to what she perceives as a critical society by saying that her family needs the money. This is usually quite true, but an important part of earning money for her family is also that it provides the woman herself with at least a few dollars that she can spend on herself, which she does not have to account for to her husband or to anyone.
Almost every survey has shown ‘financial reasons’ to account for the majority of women returning to work. For instance, a 1971 survey on the responsibilities of working women conducted by the Department of Labour and National Service for its Report for the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women found the following reasons:42
Reasons for married women returning to work
Main choice %
Multiple choice %
Money to support self/family
46
59
Children’s education expenses
5
13
Money for extras
16
38
Enjoyment of working
8
35
To avoid boredom
7
31
To meet and be with people
1
38
To use skills and abilities