by Anne Summers
In 1882 tailoresses in Victoria went on strike against sweating in their trade. This strike lasted a long time and was sympathetically reported in considerable detail in The Age and this elicited nearly £2000 in donations to help the striking women. As soon as the strike began, officials from Trades Hall organised the women into a union whose membership soon reached 2000.57 However, it has been suggested that the formation of the union was instigated by male tailors who wanted to protect themselves against being under-sold by cheaper, female labour and was not motivated by a unionist concern for the conditions under which the women worked.58 Two women represented the union at the Second Intercolonial Trade Union Congress in 1884, but they did not appear again – men represented the union at subsequent congresses.59
The much vaunted militancy of early trade unionism in Australia rarely was extended to protect women and this can largely be explained by the ascendancy of the idea that women ought not to work outside the home. The ideology of the bourgeois family was strongly entrenched by 1880, nearly 50 years after the initial efforts of the immigration reformers in the eastern colonies and the establishment of the family-based colony of South Australia; and men now staunchly defended their role as bread-winners. In doing so they ignored the position of the single woman and of those married, widowed or deserted women who were forced into employment.
The God’s Police stereotype had by now become so widely accepted that it was taken to be descriptive of what all women were actually doing as well as being prescriptive about what they should be doing. There had been a radical change in the position of women since the convict days; most women could expect to marry and to acquire a respectable status as they worked as mothers and housewives within their own homes. Once married, the great majority need not work outside the home because they could rely on the economic support of their husbands. The condemnations and abuses associated with the Damned Whore stereotype had been replaced by the respectful tributes seen as being the due of women fulfilling a moral policing and civilising role within family and society. But this change was mainly one of status and in ideas about how women should be regarded; the ideals did not always match the reality.
This is made clear in the idealisation of Australia’s women pioneers. This standard theme in Australian literature and history occurs as a token subsidiary to the romantic idealisation of outback life, which is the basis of the Australian Legend. There are countless tales of the hardships endured by bush wives, Henry Lawson’s ‘The Drover’s Wife’ being but one of the more well-known examples. CMH Clark, in the latest volume of his History of Australia, continues the tradition of idealising the women who lived and bore children in remote parts of the colonial wilderness:
[C]ontemporaries coined the phrase that the bush was ‘no place for a woman’. Yet, paradoxically, those who possessed the pluck and the will to endure acquired a prestige and a power in a society whose composition seemed designed to confer a power on the men even in excess of that on which Moses and the apostle Paul had conferred a divine sanction. Out of such squalor and hardship, which drove the menfolk into erratic, unsteady ways in the primitive huts of the gentry, a matriarch quietly took over the central position in the family, and in the huts of the servants a ‘Mum’ came into her own.60
A curious evasiveness pervades the myths surrounding the outback women: their ability to cope with a hostile environment and to survive months, even years, of unremitting loneliness is acknowledged. What has been glossed over were other hazards these women had to endure: the men of the outback, including, often, their husbands. A savage corrective to the romantic myths of bush life comes from the pen of Barbara Baynton who, in story after story, depicts the hardships, miseries and even murderous attacks experienced by bush women from unsympathetic husbands, lecherous employers and rapacious swagmen. Unlike most male writers of the fiction of the outback, Baynton does not resort to symbolic representations of these threats: she does not write about snakes or fires or Aborigines. Her depictions are real. In ‘The chosen vessel’ she writes of a young wife isolated in terror in a primitive hut throughout the week while her husband was off shearing, terrified of a swaggie who importunes customary bush hospitality from her and who returns that night and murders her:
More than once she thought of taking her baby and going to her husband. But in the past, when she had dared to speak of the dangers to which her loneliness exposed her, he had taunted and sneered at her. She need not flatter herself, he had coarsely told her, that anybody would want to run away with her.61
The myths of the bush women evade such realities and they also ignore the lives of the majority of women in Australia at the time. In 1871 the six capital cities of Australia contained one-quarter of the population; by 1901 this had risen to one-third.62 A further proportion lived in rural towns. A majority of women lived solely in urban areas and their experiences are totally neglected by this concentration on women in the bush. The life of the nineteenth-century suburban housewife remains hidden and unexplored; there is not, to my knowledge, a single piece of writing outside one or two novels that even begins to investigate what women’s new roles entailed.
We have already seen that the working life of the single woman was one of exploitation and trade union neglect; the lives of bush women were fraught with hazards that extollers of the Legend dare not even contemplate (for they would destroy the myths they have constructed about the men of the bush). It would be naive and unrealistic to conclude that the lives of urban married women were as contented and rosy as Caroline Chisholm predicted they would be. Middle-class values now dominated the cities, and these included the God’s Police stereotype of women. Caroline Chisholm had thought that the mere presence of large numbers of women would be sufficient to alter the mores of convict Australia; she was confident that what she considered to be women’s innate desires for marriage, children and homes would, if encouraged by the authorities, secure a reversal of the Damned Whore stereotype. What she did not see was that the God’s Police stereotype was just as much an imposition on women as the one it replaced.
There was an important difference, of course, in that the new stereotype was seen, especially by women themselves, as a vast improvement. But the situation was a very rigid one, which allowed only two possible choices to women about what to do with their lives. They could be wives and mothers, or workers in surrogate-mother jobs, and win respectable status – and lose all independence to the authority and economic support of their husbands. A subtler form of exploitation but exploitation nevertheless: because women were doing what was supposed to be ‘natural’ to them, they were not expected to want any monetary reward or even any independent identity. They had status and the kind of power, formerly held by priests, that is acknowledged but resented by men, but their lives were now firmly circumscribed by the limits of home and family. They had lost all powers of self-determination. There remained another alternative, although class and other factors mediated to determine the extent of choice involved in its adoption. The Damned Whore stereotype did not disappear but was now applied to women who were outside the confines of family and maternity; it applied to the demi-mondaine who were, by definition, unrespectable. These were the women who worked in pubs, or as prostitutes, who were sexually free, who had ‘illegitimate’ babies. They were still victims of exploitation although, ironically, many of them were more independent than their more respectable counterparts.
In the 1880s, women who worked as nursemaids or in similarly esteemed jobs earned from £18 to £25 per annum; by contrast, women in such disreputable occupations as barmaid earned between £40 and £70 per annum.63 Thus, while the women who fulfilled the God’s Police role were idealised and given a token status, they had no economic independence, and there has been a steadfast refusal to investigate just what their lives entailed. It is these women who are the predecessors of the majority of women in Australia today: economically dependent and culturally impotent, their activities and their influences were hidden within th
e home and hence could be overlooked. The price of being rescued from the ignominious fate of the female convicts and immigrants was to disappear from society, and from history.
CHAPTER TEN
Education for motherhood
[T]hough we do want a higher standard of female education it is not in order to fit us for professions, but that we may better perform those home duties that are undoubtedly a woman’s work.
Ladies’ column in The Australasian, 27 April 1872
As bearing upon the subject of child-birth, it may be mentioned that the conditions of life in Australia necessitate much separation of husbands and wives. On the night of the Census of 1901, 30,379 husbands out of 206,186 in New South Wales were not under the same roof with their wives and this is the habitual condition throughout Australia. The advent of a more settled life will prevent this breaking up of families and conduce to a higher birth-rate. But … these remedies, if operating to their full extent, would not go far to restore the former birth-rate nor would anything be effective unless a radical change takes place in the mental and moral attitude of women towards child-bearing.
TA Coghlan, The Decline of the Birth-Rate in New South Wales, 1903
Among the most neglected areas in the study of Australian nationalism has been the radical reappraisal of the role of women and the place ‘the family’ was to occupy in the new nation in the period that began in the 1880s and continued to the beginning of the First World War. This period of the gestation and birth of the nation was characterised by a self-consciousness that prompted the critical examination of the institutions and ideas that had evolved during the past century. The devastating depression of the 1890s had called into question the effectiveness of existing economic arrangements, while the political and social ferment of the 1890s had given lie to the consensus that complacent colonials assumed to govern their social existence. An urgent soul-searching ensued by those who were determined to launch a nation that would leave behind it forever the uncertainties of the previous decade.
Although this process was by no means confined to determining the future of ‘the family’, and women’s role in relation to it, ‘the family’ was viewed as a fundamental unit of social organisation and changes that occurred in its role had implications for many areas of life. These changes are important in illustrating that sexism in Australian society has not been static. The dominant ideas about women’s role in society and ideas and practices affecting relationships between the sexes have been reappraised several times in the past 200 years. These reappraisals have produced some important changes, but they have not led to the erosion of the fundamental sexist assumptions that have always circumscribed the freedom of women. The changes that occurred during this period are especially relevant to today because although many of these changes paralleled those of other countries, the context of conscious nation-building in which they were forged were to endow the resulting ideas and practices with a distinct and enduring character. Almost all of the social and ideological factors that are seen as constraining women today were fashioned during this period and thus their development is of more than historical interest.
The bourgeois form of family, as described in Chapters Six and Nine, was advocated by State, Church and other bodies and individuals with power to influence social relations, as the most desirable way for people to live and reproduce, and this form of family was being adopted by more and more of the population. But although the outlines of this family form were generally agreed upon, many of its details were still in dispute. If the populace were going to be marshalled into predictable patterns of behaviour and response – which a newly formed nation obviously sought as desirable – these details had to be resolved and this required State intervention. This family form, with its strict sex-based division of labour and responsibilities, was still not structurally integrated into the Australian economy. The God’s Police ideology, which prescribed the roles of women that underpinned this family form, still required precise definition. Although it was by now the dominant stereotype, it was being interpreted in a variety of ways by women themselves and in ways that the authorities considered could undermine its basic rationale.
It was the area of birth control and family size that saw the most decisive clash between women and the State. Between 1886 and 1901, the birth rate in New South Wales declined by nearly one-third.1 Similar falls were recorded in all states and as there had been no significant decline in the marriage rate to account for this, it was evident that women were controlling their fertility themselves. Neville Hicks, the writer of an excellent doctoral thesis on the subject, remarks that between 1888 and 1903 the fall in the Australian crude birth rate was as great as any Western nation except France had known in modern times and it was even more rapid than the French decline had been.2 There is evidence that women used contraception, abortion and infanticide to limit their families.
Contraceptive devices and abortifacients were freely available in Australia from the 1880s. They were sold over the counter at chemist shops and were explicitly advertised in newspapers and magazines. The most commonly advertised artificial contraceptives and abortifacients were condoms (‘French goods’), pills (to ‘prevent irregularities’), pessaries and vaginal douches. Also available were primitive intra-uterine loops and spermicidal solutions designed to be soaked up by a sponge, which was inserted in the vagina prior to intercourse. Newspapers carried large advertisements such as the following:
LADIES! MARRIED OR SINGLE can Obtain Immediate Relief for irregularities etc., by Sending for Dr C’s Famous Treatment. No Failures. PRICE: 10s; and Extra Strong £1. It is Perfectly New, and is as much Superior to the Remedies usually advertised as the Express Train is to the Mail Coach. They act within a few hours with Perfect Safety and Comfort, and a Positive CURE is effected in EVERY CASE undertaken. This Treatment is prepared with the advice and under the immediate supervision of a Legally Qualified Medical Man. All Consultations by Letter or Personally are FREE. Call or write, as a Friendly chat costs nothing. Send stamped addressed envelope for Testimonials and particulars. DR CARTWRIGHT, 7 Wynyard Square.3
Contraceptives and abortifacients of all kinds were sold in copious quantities. In October 1903 more than 21 000 sheaths and pessaries were imported to New South Wales, and three wholesalers in that state reported sales of more than 200 000 items each year.4 Since they were sold openly, these contraceptives and abortifacients were available to all classes, and women had no hesitation about going to chemists and asking for them ‘as openly and indifferently as they would ask for a toothbrush’.5 There is also evidence that women were adept at making their own contraceptives from the basic ingredients used in those available commercially.
A special Commonwealth Royal Commission on Secret Drugs, Cures and Foods, established in 1907 to investigate the plethora of patent medicines and other goods freely available in Australia at the turn of the century, reported that many of these devices were injurious to women’s health and could impair their reproductive capacity.6 This was undoubtedly true7, but the zealous moralism and insistence that a high birth rate was essential to national greatness, which pervaded the report, must have left women feeling sceptical. The depression of the 1890s had made it economically impossible for large families to survive. Infant mortality in all states but South Australia was very high, and the numbers of women dying in childbirth had increased significantly between 1880 and 1900.8 Women must have recognised the futility of enduring endless pregnancies, which risked their own lives, often produced a stillborn child and where, even if mother and child survived, the opportunities for feeding and clothing them adequately did not exist. Thus women were forced to use contraceptives and abortifacients or, if these failed, to resort to surgical abortion and infanticide.
In 1898 the Australian Medical Gazette editorialised alleging that surgical abortion was widely available and sought after in Sydney.9 Advertisements from ‘accouchement’ and ‘lying-in’ homes, claiming to have qualified nurses and mi
dwives in attendance, appeared in newspapers beside the contraceptive advertisements. A letter to the Bulletin in 1895 claimed:
[I]n a recent Saturday issue of a Southern daily there were 20 advts. from well-known abortionists. In the majority of cases, a stranger may call, and, on payment of 10s down, the balance by instalments, time-payment in fact, without any inquiry, the operation will be performed there and then. The majority of these practitioners live along the train-lines, and, the other week, one woman operated upon experienced the result before she was able to get to her home!10
Although many doctors performed abortions, the methods used were primitive and undoubtedly were not conducted in sterile conditions and it is probable that large numbers of women were inadvertently sterilised as a result.
Infanticide was widespread in Australia at the turn of the century.11 It was still not legally proscribed to kill a child in the process of birth; and death certificates were not required for stillborn babies, nor did they have to be buried in a cemetery. It is highly probable that ‘a high proportion of the “still-born” were killed in the process of birth or shortly afterwards, while in some cases, children of one, two or even three years old were classified in this way’.12 Another form of infanticide was to give children overdoses of various patent medicines. ‘Mother’s Friend’ and other ‘soothing syrups’ contained chloroform and opium, and as the Royal Commission on Secret Drugs, Cures and Foods reported that 15 000 babies died each year in New South Wales from these formulas, ‘it is reasonable to assume that many of the deaths were deliberate’.13
The use of these remedies to limit progeny was not confined to married women, and there is evidence that single women were not inhibited about engaging in sexual activities. Between 1891 and 1900 one-quarter of all first births were ‘illegitimate’ while a further quarter were born within nine months of marriage.14 The percentage of ex-nuptial births in relation to population between 1900 and 1910 was higher than it was in 1967 – in the so-called ‘permissive’ society.15 Yet there was little overt condemnation of this. All the public controversy raged over the propriety of limiting births per se and it was even intimated that single girls could contribute to the falling birth rate by having babies. Although illegitimacy and forced marriages were not condoned, some quarters considered that the resulting births compensated more than adequately. The Bulletin waxed eloquently with this opinion when it editorialised over the death of a young girl from an abortion: