by Anne Summers
This fine ambition did not imply, however, that they had sacrificed any of their feminine qualities, and they claimed that ‘to insist upon our attending dissection, hospital practice and certain courses, or certain portions of certain courses with men would have the effect of rendering the permission you have granted us to study practically worthless, and would be repugnant not only to our feelings, but to those of the majority of this community’.40 This letter was made public and the Argus supported their stance; the Council resolved to grant the women a separate dissecting room and separate hospital instruction. The Alfred Hospital refused to comply with the latter arrangements, but the women were apparently satisfied with the compromise and the separate dissecting room was retained until the mid-1890s.41
Although these pioneer women university students could not fail to see themselves as trailblazers, they were not feminists. As one of the early students put it: ‘Everything was so new and exciting: the lectures and the gay social life, and we as frivolous young girls did not worry too much about the significance of women’s rights’.42 Although they were undoubtedly anxious to see their footsteps followed by other women, they did not perceive their venture as necessarily widening women’s sphere in any way. Almost without exception, they reaffirmed that woman’s basic calling was to motherhood and that their education was important for the way it would equip them to perform this task more adequately.
In her speech at the opening of Sydney University’s Women’s College in 1894, the first principal, Louisa MacDonald, herself a remarkable woman with a distinguished scholastic record, looked forward to a future Australia ‘when the mother may guide her household, and train her children the better in that she has studied more deeply the history and expression of human thought, and has learned the principles of nature’s laws, and the duty of obedience to them’.43 She favoured girls receiving practical training in household arts, and in 1896 put a resolution to the first meeting of the National Council of Women ‘that a knowledge of the domestic arts be included in the curriculum for girls in public schools’.44 In Melbourne, the husband of the main benefactoress of the Women’s College, Lady Janet Clarke, claimed at the opening ceremony that her £6000 donation had been motivated by her ‘strong desire to advance the higher education of women, believing that a well-educated woman made the best wife and the best mother’.45
The early students were generally very successful scholars, most of them taking a postgraduate degree46 and a large percentage of them going on to careers of some kind. The educational achievements involved were considerable, but they tended to be treasured only by the women themselves and by those feminist groups who enthusiastically recorded women’s attainments in public life.47 By arguing, whether from conviction or from circumstances, that equal education for women could best be justified by the way it equipped them more adequately for their mother roles, these pioneers and their supporters established the attitude that women’s intellectual ambitions and accomplishments were not to be valued for their own sake, but for the use they could be in educating a future generation. What was initially proposed as an enlightened liberal measure designed to enable at least a few women to develop intellectually – and, conceivably, to extend the number of activities women were able to pursue – started to assume the proportions of a new form of oppression as two related attitudes were fostered.
First, was the notion that a woman’s academic qualifications were to be measured in terms of her maternal, which then amounted to her marital, status. The educated woman who, perhaps after a short period of pursuing a career, renounced all to become a wife and mother was deemed to have successfully carried out her ‘highest’ vocation, but the woman who chose to follow her profession and did not marry was regarded as not being a ‘real’ woman. While the educational pioneers did establish that it was possible and even desirable for women to obtain university degrees, and to practise careers such as law and medicine, which had previously been closed to them, they made no progress in establishing the right of such educated women to continue at their chosen occupations after marriage. They were in effect denying that women, like men, have multifaceted natures, each part of which desires satisfaction. While it was never questioned that a man had the right to enjoy love, fatherhood, home and the job by which he made his living, the patriarchal assumptions of the nineteenth century attributed to women one over-riding vocational desire and elevated it to the status of an instinct. Motherhood defined women and represented their ultimate fulfilment; any other activity on the part of women was activated by economic necessity or because of frustration of this ‘natural’ destiny. Thus these educated women were faced with what one English feminist labelled ‘the intolerable choice’; the desire for an intimate human relationship with the satisfaction of bringing up children, and the wish to fulfil those ambitions that her vocation-oriented education had instilled in her. Those who chose the latter might be praised for their professional capabilities, as many of our early doctors were, and their altruistic endeavours received high social sanction, but the insulting epithets ‘bluestocking’ and ‘spinster’ were continual reminders that in society’s eyes they were only half-women, part of whose essential natures remained frustrated.
The pervasiveness of this attitude was revealed in a circular appealing for funds for extensions to Sydney’s Women’s College, which was sent out in 1920. It listed the fortunes of the nearly 200 women who had already graduated from the College and contained impressive documentation of their successful careers; it concluded however with effusive praise for those 57 past students who had married ‘to engage upon the most important public service a woman can perform, that of bringing up children to serve their day and generation as useful members of the State’.48 Those who were lecturers, researchers, medical practitioners, welfare officers, teachers, librarians, and headmistresses were being told by their old College that their public services paled in comparison to rearing another generation of girls to face exactly the same intolerable choice.
The early female university students did establish the right of women to obtain an equal education with men, but it was a pyrrhic victory. Those who succeeded in the male academic world and who wished to reap the benefits of this success in a profession were banished to an existential limbo. They paid dearly for that right to education. For those women who decided to use their education in professional employment, it involved abdicating the right to marry and inevitable social disapprobation. These women tried to alter the social image of the single woman, to establish by their example an alternative image of an independent and fulfilled existence. But their efforts were not assimilated into the repertoire of roles available for future generations of Australian women; the pervasiveness of the God’s Police stereotype condemned these women to defensive eccentricity. The social world they constructed around themselves was either ignored or ridiculed; they were pitied because they did not have children, they were assumed to have no opportunities for sexual expression and were categorised as frustrated. They were pointed out as warnings to young girls who read too many books or entertained ideas of professional achievement.
The two ideals, the right of women to remain single and not become social pariahs, and the right of married women to work, involve a similar set of assumptions. Both require the erosion of the sexist characterisation of women in terms of their relationship to a man, and in terms of their success in the motherhood stakes. Women must have the same freedom to combine various sets of activities that men do and not have their social worth assessed by one suffocating standard. The battle for the educational rights of women did very little to change this. That the struggle was not carried through is hardly surprising for it was not difficult to perceive the social revolution involved in that proposition. Those who argued for women’s equal education on the grounds that it would better equip them for motherhood helped ensure that the battlegrounds would not be drawn. It was conceded that women might have to support themselves if they were unable to find husbands, o
r if they were widowed, but this contention simply reinforced the idea that women, particularly middle-class women, worked not from choice but through personal misfortune. The rights of the single woman to a secure social status were rarely discussed except in terms of the ‘problem’ they posed to embarrassed families. By the early 1890s it was starting to be recognised that married women might engage in a wide range of activities outside the home, but these must always be altruistic activities performed in a spirit of bourgeois benevolence and never for monetary reward.
The second attitude engendered by the campaign for equal education was that it was not only desirable that women be educated for motherhood, but that it was necessary. This perception was shaped gradually but its first manifestations were in criticisms of girls receiving equal schooling. The Church of England Messenger on 12 October 1885 decried the amount of school work demanded of girls as it encroached ‘perilously on the home life’.49 This line of attack was developed by those who thought that excessive schooling was detrimental to girls’ health. In this view conservatives were able to cite the authority of Herbert Spencer who had claimed that health was more important than intellectual training for women. Social Darwinism, which relied heavily on Spencer’s sociology, was part of the armoury of Australian conservatives at the beginning of the 1890s.50 Pearson had had to reassure parents of students at PLC that he was well aware of the tendency of the girls to overwork and that provision would be made for physical culture to ensure a well-balanced development.51 A Sydney doctor, Walter Balls-Headley, claimed in his Evolution of the Diseases of Women, published in 1894, that modern education placed physiological restraints on a young woman and ‘should she have capacity for higher mental attainments, her nervous system is apt to develop at the expense of her body’, and had concluded that ‘high mental culture is antagonistic to healthy sexual development and child-bearing’.52 The solution to this alarming prediction entailed the repudiation of the earlier principle that girls receive equal schooling, and the introduction of special syllabuses that explicitly prepared girls for their future mother roles and did not involve heavy intellectual exertion.
Part of the post-1890s self-examination by the architects of Australia’s future involved a thorough scrutiny of the education system, and, by every possible criteria, it was found to be a dismal failure. The Fink Commission into the general administration of public education in Victoria in 1899 had concluded that ‘there could be no doubt that as far as public education was concerned this colony has been living in a fool’s paradise’.53 A similar condemnation of the New South Wales system was made in 1901 by the Professor of Philosophy at Sydney University, Francis Anderson, who claimed that ‘a radical alteration’ in the whole system was needed.54 The entire public system of education was completely reformed in every state and the comprehensive system that we have inherited today was instituted in the early years of the twentieth century. Teacher training was introduced, the syllabus was revised and diversified to cater for a wider range of subjects and levels, the compulsory nature of education was strictly enforced and a series of State-controlled examinations ensured standardised progress of all children up to school-leaving age.
The fate of the girls within this new system was influenced by several factors. In October 1898 the National Council of Women had sent a deputation to the NSW Minister for Public Instruction requesting that domestic arts be included in girls’ curriculum in State schools.55 Their frequent representations to this effect received support from some teachers; a Ms Chandler told a meeting of the North Sydney District Teachers’ Association in 1910, ‘The real direction of a girl’s education must be towards the house. We are developing the home workers of the future in whose hands will be the well being of our nation’.56 This view that girls should be educated for motherhood received wide support. The heavily vocational nature of the entire education system since its inception in Australia57 gave impetus to the notion that girls’ education could perhaps be tailored to meet their natural vocation, and this view received final confirmation by the experiences of the depression.
During the 1890s teachers’ salaries had been cut, and female teachers had been dismissed, teacher training had been restricted and school building had been limited.58 Even more importantly, the view of education being directed towards purely pragmatic ends was vindicated by the fight for economic survival; there could be no question of enabling women who were not economically distressed to compete for male jobs. The traditional male/female division of labour was asserted to be the only possible way to arrange the economy, and if education for girls was to be compulsory then it would have to be a form of education that would equip them to perform their traditional female functions. Thus schools providing technical and domestic arts training for girls were introduced in all states while the syllabuses in high schools were altered for those girls who did not plan to go to university.
The old principle of equal secondary education was reversed and the majority of girls, their future vocations assumed, received what was considered appropriate training for fulfilling their female destinies:
The old system with its divisions into full high schools, intermediate high schools, domestic science schools, involved far more differences than mere changes of names. The actual content of education differed, subject matter varying both in nature and degree of treatment. Mathematics, science and languages were three important areas that were treated superficially or ignored in the intermediate highs and domestic science schools catering only for girls. Even in such an apparently common subject area, English, vast differences in types of text books were clearly evident. The whole stress in girls’ education in such schools was on a commercial/ domestic level, but with a commercial course designed to produce lower level office personnel, certainly not executive staff, and a domestic course basically designed as a general background course for girls who would eventually marry, having filled in their time up to then in that vast army of unskilled female labour on which many areas of our economy still rely.59
This course of events was influenced by more than the depression. By the turn of the century, Social Darwinism in Australia had moved from being a conservative rationalisation for laissez faire economics to justifying radical State interventionist policies.60 Those people who advocated education for motherhood were radicals who based their demands on what they saw as the firm scientific ground provided by Darwin and Spencer tempered by Rousseau’s notions of education. The unit of analysis in the survival of the fittest moved from the individual to the State and the theorists concerned themselves with ways in which the new nation could produce a fine race of civic-minded Australians.
In its more radical version, the idea of education for motherhood was pinned to firm feminist principles and it was a variety of this notion, propounded by the Swedish writer Ellen Key and supported by Havelock Ellis61 that was argued for in Australia. Key’s main principles were that children were to receive fuller attention from their mothers than had hitherto been the practice and, to attain this, she advocated ‘a renaissance of motherhood’. The latter could only come about, she claimed
through a new marriage, where the perfect equality and liberty of both husband and wife are established; through a strict responsibility towards society in regard to parentage outside as well as within marriage; through education for motherhood; and, lastly, through rendering motherhood economically secure, recognizing it as a public work to be rewarded and controlled by society.62
A major exponent of such theories in Australia was Maybanke Anderson, wife of Francis Anderson. She recognised that the claims that had been held out for the old public education system – that it would substantially reduce crime – had not been successful, and proposed that a new approach be tried, ‘the building of character in the home, by the person who alone can lay its foundation – the mother’.63 She was active in a wide range of social and political activities, from the Kindergarten Union to the Womanhood Suffrage League and edited the suffrage newspape
r Woman’s Voice from 1894 to 1895, and so it can be assumed that her views were widely known and supported. It was she who stated the Australian version of the Key/Ellis recipe for successful social evolution:
In an ideal State every prospective mother should be so educated that she may not only bear a healthy child, but may also know how to train her family in virtue and the duties of citizenship. Without such an education a woman is only partially qualified for the duties and pleasures of life.64
She was sufficiently feminist to avoid arguing that all women should bear children; she argued, however, that ‘preparation for the woman’s natural duty’ would do no harm to a woman who chose to remain single, but would ‘tend to make her more sympathetic, a more useful member of society’. Such views were widely endorsed and the teaching of Domestic Economy was considered to be as important as any other subject.
One of the earliest courses had been introduced in 1887 at Loreto Convent in Victoria – it was set up after the school principal returned from Europe where she had seen similar courses in operation. It was seriously thought out and was considered to be parallel to a university course.65 During the first years of this century it was advocated that a chair of Domestic Economy be established at Sydney University. The proposal was backed by the Women’s Progressive Association – a post-suffrage feminist group – by the Women’s Central Organizing Committee of the Labor Party and by the Women’s Liberal League.66 By 1914 the idea had even been endorsed by the state Liberal Party of New South Wales.67
The support given to the idea of education for motherhood indicated that society was acknowledging certain changes in the structure and functions of the family. Since the early Industrial Revolution, the family had been defined by the gradual differentiation from the wider society of the conjugal couple and their children, and by their assumption of specialised functions which had been performed in a haphazard way previously, by a variety of agents or not at all. One of these functions was the children’s material and spiritual welfare. In practical terms this was coped with by a division of labour between husband and wife whereby in the ideal-typical family (that is, one that had emulated middle-class practice), the husband worked to provide the economic support for the children and for the wife, who in return performed domestic work for him and attended to the spiritual and perhaps elementary educational development of the child. This arrangement characterised the ideal family in the mid-nineteenth century where economic and other circumstances permitted and it was given implicit social sanction, but it was not until the last two decades of the century that the precise boundaries of these obligations were spelt out and their concomitant responsibilities defined.