by Anne Summers
The knife of the abortionist may have slain Jessie Nicholls, but Society placed the knife in the abortionist’s hands. So long as social traditions make motherhood out of wedlock a social shame, so long will the trade in abortion flourish, and so long will ignorant girls risk death rather than ‘disgrace’. ‘Disgrace!’ The ‘disgrace’ of being a mother, of performing the sacredest and most necessary function of humanity. The ‘disgrace’ of the supreme self-sacrifice which lights the Madonna’s face with its ineffable glow – that mystery of beauty which a thousand men of genius have vainly sought to place on canvas, while Nature mocks them from the eyes of the humblest peasant girl who bends over her babe! The ‘disgrace’ of being a woman, of flowering into perfect womanhood, of going down into the Valley of the Shadow of Death to bring up the jewel of a new life, of making the race one’s debtor, and placing in the hands of Existence another torch to light the path through the voids of Eternity. Motherhood a ‘disgrace’ under any circumstances whatever! What a grotesque perversion of ideas.16
There was loud spoken and authoritative opposition to the use of contraceptives, especially by married women. In his Presidential Address to the Medical Society of Victoria in 1907, Michael O’Sullivan declaimed:
[W]hen a wife defiles the marriage bed with the devices and equipment of the brothel, and interferes with nature’s mandate by cold-blooded preventives and safeguards; when she consults her almanac, and refuses to admit the approaches of her husband except at stated times; when a wife behaves in so unwifelike and unnatural a manner, can it be otherwise than that estrangements and painful suspicions of faithfulness should from time to time occur? Can a home with such an environment be a happy one? Many husbands so situated are, I fear, tempted to seek elsewhere the pleasures denied them at home. Such are nature’s reprisals; such, indeed, her unfailing retributions.17
Condemnations such as this one were more concerned that men were to be denied the opportunities to satisfy their sexual appetites than they were with a falling birth rate or the medical dangers of many contraceptive measures, but all three reasons generally informed most opposition. What was in dispute was not only the size most appropriate for the family form that the authorities wanted established in Australia, but also the extent to which women were to be arbiters of this. In the Victorian middle-class family where the wife was debilitated from annual childbirth and where, in any case, female sexuality was denied, the existence of armies of prostitutes had served to satiate the sexual desires of husbands. The distinction between mothers (madonnas) and sexual creatures (whores) was clear and, as has been argued so far, was embodied in sex stereotypes that categorised and described women’s functions. Once women could control their fertility, this distinction could no longer be so rigidly upheld: the possibility of wives engaging in sexual activities without pregnancy being a probable consequence meant they could start to value sex for its own sake. It also meant that single women could be sexually active without having either to bear an unplanned child or else be forced into marriage.
The idea of wives as sexually active, and moreover, sexually interested creatures, was abhorrent to the God’s Police stereotype as articulated by Caroline Chisholm. Even more so was the notion of single women ‘losing their virtue’ since virtuous wives were seen to be the foundation of ‘the family’ and of the nation. And if women were to curtail their fertility to the extent that they were having only three or four children, instead of the huge families of the mid-nineteenth century, then, prophesied many, the race itself was in danger of extinction. There was a lot of lamenting about race suicide and the dangers of Australia being over-run by the more fertile Asian races to the north, but behind most of this moralising was the fear that ‘the family’ was in jeopardy. If the rigid distinction between madonna and whore could not be enforced, and if women refused to bear more than a few children, how could the mother remain the central figure in ‘the family’ and how, without her dominating maternal presence, could ‘the family’ survive? These were the kinds of reasonings employed by the authorities of Church and State and it was these questions that were to be resolved during the first decade of the new nation.
It is clear in retrospect that what was occurring was a modification in both women’s roles and in the form of family that had been adopted 50 years earlier. Some women wanted changes, especially in their educational opportunities and political rights, but many of the more vocal ones, including many feminists, wanted to uphold the madonna/whore distinction even if in a redefined form. They considered sex to be an impure, animal drive, which it did not become women to indulge in. The Sydney Mother’s Union, for instance, quoted the Bishop of Carpentaria’s opinion that ‘impurity … is eating out the heart and destroying the vitality of the Australian race. It is the national sin. The birth-rate is declining at an alarming rate, and the proportion of illegitimate births increasing as steadily’.18 It was agreed by most authorities that women had to alter their attitude to their maternal vocation while at the same time useful employment or other activities had to be provided for women who could not or would not marry.
During the 1880s large numbers of single women had moved into the workforce as the State Public Services opened a range of commercial employment to women. Four high schools for girls were established in NSW after the passing of the 1882 Public School Act19 and they provided their pupils with an identical education to that given in boys’ schools and thus were a real alternative to the various academies and young ladies’ seminaries that, during the 1870s and 1880s, groomed their students in accomplishments but did little to stimulate the intellect. These newly opened avenues accommodated only a small number of women but they pointed to the need to reformulate the kinds of vocations women should be free to pursue and to alter women’s opportunities accordingly.
The issue was first raised with the struggle to have matriculation examinations and then the universities open to women. It was not a feminist consciousness that informed the campaign to admit women to universities. This is not to say that women did not want this avenue opened to them, or that there was no opposition to the proposal, but the move was not seen as improving the status of women generally. It was probably because it arose before discussion of women being given political rights was widespread and before secondary education was made compulsory (and thus only a very small number of middle-class women were involved) that it was achieved relatively easily. All but the most reactionary legislatures could respond to the appeal that higher education would provide them with more stimulating female companionship. One champion of the cause in Victoria, CH Pearson, made this point to the parents at the opening of the first school in Australia to provide girls with an education equal to that of boys, the Presbyterian Ladies’ College (PLC), of which he was the first headmaster: ‘Dismiss all theories about the admission of women to political rights. Assume that the married will remain as in England, barely able to own property … still women exercise … a most tremendous direct influence over children, husbands, lovers … ought we not … to “educate” our rulers?’20
The University of Adelaide had permitted women to attend lectures from its opening in 1874, but it decided to withhold issuing them with degrees until ‘the event of the existence of a clear and general demand on the part of Female Students for admission to Degrees’, provided that the Legislature and the colony deem it advisable.21 Both conditions were apparently met by 1880 when the Act of Incorporation was amended to enable the University to confer degrees of Bachelor and Doctor of Science, and to confer degrees on women.22 The year before, the liberal schoolmasters on the Council of the University of Melbourne had taken advantage of the absence of half of their reactionary colleagues to sneak through ‘two of the most significant motions in the university’s history: one admitting women … and the other recommending the creation of three chairs in the pure and applied sciences’.23 It was a further two years before Pearson, now a parliamentarian, was able to get his University Constitution Amendment Bill pass
ed in the Legislative Assembly and thus remove any legal doubts about whether women could attend university, but by this time the first female students had already begun their courses. The question of admitting women had first been raised in 1872 by Dr John Madden and the nine-year Victorian campaign made it the longest in Australia: ‘No campaign in the university was fought so doggedly, or faced such indifference and so many untenable prejudices’.24
Sydney was the last university to admit women when, three years after the matter had been first raised in 1878, the Chancellor, Sir William Manning, decided to declare the principle of women’s rights to equality within the University: ‘it would be better to open the portals at once, so that the sex might plainly see their way to enter whenever they should be disposed to climb up to it by the necessary paths of preparation – rather than that the Senate should wait till they came to our gates knocking for admission’.25 Once the established universities had conceded the principle, all future universities automatically followed suit and women were accepted as equal students from their inception.
The paternalism in Manning’s declaration was also evident in the other states where almost all the men who shepherded in the reforms had daughters, sisters or students who were qualified for university. These men were generally acting in accord with JS Mill’s conception of equality between the sexes as well as from a narrower concern for the women of their immediate acquaintance to be able to acquire an education. The linking together of the admission of women and the granting of degrees in science in Adelaide and Melbourne suggest that it was viewed as an enlightened and progressive measure, an opinion that is strengthened by the fact that the University of London had admitted women to degrees in 1878 and liberals in both these colonies were anxious to follow England’s lead in legislation in respect of women as rapidly as possible.26 But economic motives were also important in the decision, as more and more women were being forced to earn their own income or at least to prepare against this possibility, while women themselves had publicly deprecated the ‘accomplishment-oriented’ education they were expected to endure. As early as 1841 a Sydney woman had complained that ‘the pursuits of poetry and romance … instead of filling [women’s] minds with useful knowledge – instead of fitting them to become agreeable companions to men of sense and education, have merely been training them for a romantic existence in the land of Utopia’.27 In 1878 the South Australian feminist Catherine Spence claimed that changes in population growth and movement were forcing unprecedented numbers of women into the labour force and that they, as well as the housewives being left increasingly idle as mechanisation reduced housework, should have access to a more useful education than ‘the pretentious programme of the young ladies seminary’.28
These advocates of vocational education for girls were not thinking only of tertiary education. In 1875 Pearson delivered a lecture entitled ‘The higher culture of women’ in which he attacked the conservative view that women should not be trained for those professions, such as teaching and nursing, which many of them were destined to pursue. But his progressivism was tempered by his conviction that ‘four-fifths of women would marry and spend the greater part of their energies in rearing their family, and that, even when the university did come to admit women to degrees, no more than a tenth of their number would wish to avail themselves of the opportunity’.29 Like many of his contemporaries, Pearson was prepared to argue for the right of women dispossessed by demographic accident of their opportunity to marry to receive an education, which would equip them to support themselves. He also followed through his conviction by providing afternoon lectures at PLC for older women who wished to continue their education, especially those who wished to gain sufficient proficiency to undertake work as teachers or governesses.30 But, being a true nineteenth-century gentleman, Pearson could not conceive of any woman actually choosing this independent path in preference to marriage; nor was he prepared to allow that it might be desirable for a woman to do both.
Enabling a few women to receive an education that was substantially the same as men’s raised questions about the kind of education the majority of women should have. Theoretically the ‘free, compulsory and secular’ Education Acts, which were introduced in most states in the early 1870s, had conceded the principle of equal education. But because they provided only for an elementary education designed to provide basic literacy and because it proved impossible to enforce the compulsory clause anyway31, the question was discussed and resolved at the tertiary level. The attitude to female education that emerged influenced the entire direction of girls’ secondary schooling when it came to be discussed in the early years of the twentieth century, and it is for this, if for no other reason, that the entry of women into higher education is more properly discussed in the context of the evolution of the Australian education system than in connection with the campaign for women’s rights. Although the two are ultimately part of the whole question of the roles women were expected to play in the new nation, the two issues were worked out separately.
The critics of women’s entry into universities were concerned mainly with whether or not such intellectual exertion would decrease a woman’s capacity to fulfil her maternal responsibilities, and the defenders of the women went to great lengths to argue that this would not happen. Carruthers, the NSW Minister for Public Education in 1889, concluded his introduction of the Bill to provide an endowment for the proposed Women’s College at the university – the first women’s college in the Commonwealth to be of equal status with male colleges32 – by saying:
We must recognize the fact that the women are the mothers of the nation … it behoves us to see that we strengthen their judgement; that we so improve their mental faculties and so raise their intelligence that they will be better able to perform their duties in training the rising generation. If we wish to have better men we can only hope to have them by giving our children better proclivities, and giving their mothers increased powers to promote their intelligence.33
This kind of argument was sometimes used by those who believed in women’s right to an equal education per se in order to win over opposition, but it soon became the major argument for girls’ education and, as an article in the Bulletin demonstrated, began to replace the earlier ideal:
Women cannot be too learned, provided the learning she has helps her to fulfil her varied functions of mother, nurse, educator and trainer of her children … Woman, as woman, cannot be too much or too well educated; but her education must have the future well in view. On her the nation’s future depends. Any education which unfits her for the fulfilment of her maternal responsibilities is not only useless – it is most emphatically a curse.34
The advocates of equal education had to be careful to demonstrate that what were seen as women’s essential qualities of gentleness and refinement would in no way be subverted. The Board of Studies at Sydney University, which had approved the admission of women to the same lectures as males in all subjects, undertook to censor classics texts when there were objections to women being expected to read what were considered ribald passages in mixed company.35
In such actions they received the complete support of the women students themselves. Bella Guerin, the first woman to graduate from an Australian university – she received her BA from Melbourne in 1883 – wrote in her old school magazine in 1886, ‘This Arts course is one against which the most jealous conserver of purely feminine graces can find no just objections. The subjects are elevated and ennobling in themselves, and their study in the chaste atmosphere of a convent, must be productive of solid benefit on the character of girls thus trained’.36
Most controversy had occurred on the question of admitting women medical students to mixed classes. In Melbourne, a clause in Pearson’s 1881 Bill leaving it to the discretion of the University Council to exclude women from any lectures it chose was used to prevent women from doing medicine until 1887.37 When the first women demanded admittance, Professor Allen, Dean of the Medical Faculty, express
ed the fear that teaching before mixed classes might embarrass the lecturers who would be inclined to avoid delicate subjects, such as venereal disease, and thereby narrow the range of teaching38; but he supported the application of women students for admission to the medical school. Allen claimed that to duplicate the lectures in question would be too expensive; enquiries to Sydney had revealed that mixed classes were held there and this apparently made Allen adamant that women should do likewise in Melbourne.39 He had already admitted the first female students before the question was finally resolved and it was the intervention of the women themselves that eventually decided the issue. They wrote to the University Council on 27 September 1887 explaining that they had chosen to study medicine
believing that there is an urgent need of educated women to attend women, and that very great suffering, and, in some cases, death even occurs through such attendance not being available … As women, we claim therefore the right to qualify ourselves to attend upon the sick and suffering of our own sex.