Damned Whores and God's Police

by Anne Summers

  It was not, for instance, until the Child’s Protection Act was passed in 1899 in England that fathers became legally obliged to maintain their children68 even though until the passing of the Guardianship of Infants Acts, initially in England in 1886 and subsequently in all Australian states, a father had absolute guardianship and custody rights over his children. The latter Act gave the mother some rights in this respect and gave the courts power to over-ride the common-law rights of the father and award the mother custody of the children if it was considered, and it usually was, that it was in the children’s interests to do so.69 This was the first legal acknowledgment of motherhood and its rights and marked the acceptance of the elevation of a woman’s maternal role to the almost reverential status that it came to have in Australia. The idea that some education was necessary for motherhood was an acknowledgment that ‘the family’ was expected to perform the specialised task of socialising its children and that it was the mother who was to undertake major responsibility for this. The older notion that the mother was responsible for a child’s spiritual development was now given a more explicit cast and nurture became child-rearing, a new and exacting science.

  The institution of compulsory education was the major means of ensuring that girls were sufficiently educated to be able to fulfil what was now a vocation: their roles as mothers of the nation. But a range of supporting activities, influenced by the environmental determinists who advocated education for motherhood, reinforced the new conception of the tasks of the family. The Kindergarten Union established in New South Wales in 1895 and Victoria in 190870 founded free kindergartens in inner-urban slum areas, which were designed to compensate for what were assumed to be the inadequacies of the family lives of working-class children. Even before standardised education tried to ensure uniformity of values across class lines, the instigators of kindergartens were trying to instil middle-class attitudes to child care and family living in working-class children and their mothers. Mothers’ clubs were attached to most kindergartens and the teachers – who were invariably the daughters of wealthy parents and were working for pocket-money wages71 – visited the homes of their pupils to instruct the mothers in the emotional and physical care of their children.72 In Victoria, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union established its own free kindergarten in the suburb of Richmond; associated with it was the first School for Mothers in Victoria and at the opening ceremony there was much stress on the power of motherhood and the influence for good that both institutions would have in that neighbourhood.73 In 1903 the Sydney City Council established a baby health service designed to guide mothers ‘in the care and feeding of young children’.74

  Just as Ellen Key had advocated, this renaissance in motherhood was produced by a new attitude to children: they were increasingly seen as weak and malleable creatures who, if exposed to the right influences, could join the ranks of civic-minded citizens. Maybanke Anderson had seen the kindergartens as being ‘for children who might otherwise become larrikins, and eventually criminals’.75 The theories of environmental determinism encouraged reformers to regard working-class children, not as condemned by their birth to physical and social debilitation but, if correctly nurtured, as capable of salvation. By the turn of the century, educationalists were seriously seeking to prevent children from engaging in paid employment before the legal school-leaving age. In country areas, particularly, they met with considerable resistance from farmers who wanted to use their children as cheap labour and even after the principle had been established, a petition was sent to parliament from five school committees in northern Victoria requesting that the Christmas holidays be moved to March and April so that child labour could be obtained during the fruit packing season.76A new protective attitude to children was evidenced in Bills such as those passed in all states to prevent juveniles from buying tobacco, cigarettes or cigars77 and which prevented them from purchasing alcoholic liquor. A special children’s court was introduced in South Australia in 189578 and reinforced the idea that children required special treatment even when they had committed ‘adult’ crimes and that they should be punished less severely. They were considered redeemable while their parents, especially their fathers, often were not.

  The reassessment of the role of motherhood had important implications for ‘the family’ which was now viewed as a key social institution wherein the citizens of future generations acquired their training in civic virtues. Women were seen as playing a vital part in this. Motherhood became a special vocation, which required special, scientific training; it had attached to it a high status since mothers were seen as the people who instilled these civic virtues in their children. Within the new family, parents’ responsibilities were more sharply defined and sexist differences given the validation of legal statute. Men were the providers of financial security while women were responsible for emotional security.

  This sexual division of labour and the new small-size family were explicitly integrated into the Australian economy with the determination of the first basic wage in 1907. Justice Higgins, in handing down judgement in the Harvester Case, said that a basic wage should be sufficient to maintain an unskilled labourer, his wife and three children in frugal comfort. Higgins had used as his evidence of the actual wage necessary the budgets of several labouring families, and in laying down the basic wage had, in fact, formulated a family wage. This concept was clearly accepted by the terms of reference of the 1919 Royal Commission on the Basic Wage, which deputed Commissioner AB Piddington to establish the minimum amount on which an average Australian family could maintain what might be called the Australian standard of living.79 Justice Higgins also stated that women were not entitled to the same wage as men except where they were employed on exactly the same work as men – and were therefore competitors for men’s jobs. In the Rural Workers’ Case of 1912 – usually referred to as the Mildura Fruit Pickers’ Case – Higgins restated the principles of the Harvester Judgement and then said that whereas the normal needs of a man included domestic life and that he was legally obliged to support a family if he had one, the same was not usually true of women. He concluded that women were not therefore entitled to equal pay, but merely to a wage that would enable a single woman without dependents to ‘find her own food, shelter and clothing’. It was only in industries where women competed for male jobs that women should be paid the male rate in order to prevent men from being ousted from those jobs. Higgins did not approve of women being employed and said, ‘fortunately for society, however, the greater number of breadwinners are still men. The women are not all dragged from their homes to work while the men loaf at home’.80

  This judgement had, as Norman MacKenzie points out:

  far-reaching implications, for it made the sharp distinction between the rates of pay suitable to ‘men’s work’ and those for ‘women’s work’; it explicitly stated that job protection for males was desirable, and if necessary should be ensured by equal pay; and it expressed the view, still widely held, that if women are offered wages comparable to those earned by men they would be ‘dragged from their homes’ by this inducement and the traditional roles of the sexes and the stability of family life would be imperilled.81

  At the same time the Report of the Royal Commission into the Hours and General Conditions of Employment of Female and Juvenile Labour in New South Wales in 1911 stated six main objections to married women working:

  1 It encouraged the practice of prevention (contraception).

  2 Women risked miscarriage.

  3 Women had to stop breastfeeding and this led to infant mortality.

  4 Their day’s energy was given up to making money to the neglect of the home.

  5 It encouraged idle and extravagant men.

  6 Often married women had a bad influence on single girls.82

  Married women were thus discouraged by social attitudes and by inferior wages from taking jobs and were compelled by the new notion of motherhood as a vocation to devote their entire lives to their families.
>
  Motherhood was seen to be an all-consuming vocation, one that could not properly be combined with any other career. The mother was also urged to be responsible for her own housework, a neat ideological solution to a chronic shortage of women willing to work as servants. The ‘new’ mother of the early twentieth century family was supposed to be a capable, responsible woman who wanted nothing more than to keep her family satisfied: she was cook and cleaner and educator of children as well as wife. Her vocation was clearly defined and socially valued. What was not considered was that, despite the opening of tertiary education and membership of the professions to women, the lives of the majority of women were more governed and determined by sexist notions than ever before. While a handful of women could receive an education and follow a career, most women had absolutely no choice but to adopt the career of motherhood which, society said, was their ‘natural’ vocation.

  In the early years of this century a rampant puritanism descended upon Australian society. It was the product of a family-oriented petty bourgeois mentality and its object was to promote and protect family life and, particularly, to enforce its morality on single women. The pervasion of this puritanism marked a victory for Church and State and signalled its success in having imposed upon a substantial segment of the population the view that ‘the family’ was an institution to be elevated to the highest national respect. As the next chapter argues, much of the pro-family crusading was undertaken by middle-class women in the feminist movement. They particularly concerned themselves with advocating the God’s Police role for women and with attempting to redeem those women who were characterised as Damned Whores. But the pro-family puritanism was not confined to women; by themselves women lacked the power to enforce change. Its prevalence was a class phenomenon, an indication that the middle-class had achieved political and economic power and had ousted the last remnants of the pre-capitalist squattocracy. This class, as was shown in Chapter Six, required a small privatised family whose internal organisation was based on a sex division of labour. This conception of ‘the family’ had been promulgated in Australia since the 1840s: 60 years later it was firmly entrenched and its advocates and practitioners felt able to enforce this family form and its supporting mores on those remaining recalcitrant areas of society.

  The early years of the twentieth century saw a mass of puritanical legislation introduced. Bills to raise the age of consent (for girls) were introduced in all states. The advertising of contraceptives, abortifacients and birth-control information was suppressed. Brothels were outlawed. When in 1907 the South Australian Parliament passed a Suppression of Brothels Bill, the Premier, Tom Price, moving the second reading, said there was no necessity to discuss the Bill since it was not wise to advertise the evil, and that although he was tabling a report on the subject he hoped that no unmarried members would think of reading it.83 Such reticence at times proved dangerous. Immediately after the war it was realised that an enormous proportion of the population of Melbourne was infected with venereal disease. The Committee Concerning Causes of Death and Invalidity in the Commonwealth reported in 1916–17 that ‘fully 25 per cent of the sick children in Melbourne are tainted with Syphilis and that about 10 per cent of the total number of children are syphilized’.84 Between 1 July 1917 and 30 November 1918 there were nearly 10 000 registered cases of venereal disease in Melbourne but since only a fraction of infected cases were registered, it has been suggested that there may have been as many as 80 000 people (of a population of 743 000 in 1919) afflicted.85 However when the suggestion was made in the Victorian Parliament that medical examination of both parties be compulsorily effected before marriage, the response was that it was more important to protect the modesty of decent women than to protect society from the contamination of promiscuous ones.86

  These measures to suppress what was seen as illicit sex were accompanied by attempts to limit the availability of alcohol. A large number of temperance groups were in existence and they pressed, among other things, for provision for local option polls to enable residents to determine how many hotels should operate in their area. The temperance groups and their supporters succeeded in winning several victories against the powerful liquor trades. For instance, in New South Wales the 1905 Liquor Amendment Act increased ratepayers’ local option powers; this Act reflected a growing public concern about the free flow of alcohol and its effects on families. Between 1907 and 1913 three local options were held and resulted in the closing of 12 per cent of hotels in New South Wales.87 The birth rate did not rise significantly but the numbers of ‘illegitimate’ births and births occurring within nine months of marriage declined markedly. Although contraceptives were no longer advertised in the daily press, women now had the knowledge that control of fertility was possible and they could still buy contraceptives or devise their own. None of these methods was totally reliable, and some were medically dangerous, but gradually contraceptive technology became more sophisticated and developed products, such as the diaphragm, which if used properly afforded a greater degree of protection from unwanted pregnancies. Abortion was always available, although it was removed from shopfront to backyard and women required know-how and money to find a safe operation. But it also seems likely that, in accordance with the descent of puritanism, women who wanted to avoid pregnancy abstained from sexual intercourse. ‘Illegitimate’ births and ‘shotgun’ marriages now carried even more social stigma than previously and signalled a victory for those who wanted sexuality restricted to a procreative act. A good mother could not also be a sexually active person: God’s Police and Damned Whores women were seen as polar opposites.

  Women who wanted to share the status now attached to maternity had to take care not to preclude themselves with an illicit pregnancy. Those who feared race suicide had to bow before the evidence of a new family size, a size that was pioneered by Australian women, and was evidently more suitable for local economic and social conditions than the large Victorian family, which still straggled on in Britain. They were forced to recognise that the new small family heralded an expanded maternal role for women and not, as some traditionalists had feared, a decrease in women’s responsibilities. Women were now expected to be far more conscientious mothers and to attend to the child’s social as well as physical formation. This increase in maternal responsibilities enabled the State to exert a greater degree of control over the entire population. Women’s economic dependence on men was now enshrined in the wage structure and women were thus firmly tied to their husbands and families. They now had a strong vested interest in ensuring the fidelity of husbands (and hence their opposition to alcohol and prostitution) and the perpetuation of ‘the family’.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Feminism and the suffragists

  We women must bring a new element into political life, an element which no sectional party can represent … Remember that a woman’s mission is to inspire man and to help him build up our young nation upon all that is righteous. Brute force and intellectual force have in the past dominated the world. Let us control both these forces with moral force. The safeguards of the nation will then rest on the individual conscience of its women.

  Rose Scott, writing in The Australian Woman’s Sphere, December 1903

  What we want is not less parental responsibility, but more, and the great aim of the Woman Movement is to secure equal justice between man and woman, and to uplift the sacred responsibility of parenthood, which has too long been sacrificed to the insatiable Moloch of Lust.

  Letter signed ‘A New Woman’, the Bulletin, 12 October 1895

  The story of the entry of Australian women into political life has been distorted by three persistent myths. The first, still perpetrated by politicians of all persuasions who seem to think it absolves them from initiating any further progressive legislation, is that Australian women were the first in the world to obtain the vote. Apart from the imputations of masculine benevolence contained in this claim, there is the further implication that all Australian women
received the vote simultaneously. This is true of the federal sphere where all women were enfranchised in 1901 and were able to vote in the first federal elections of 1903, but what was considered more important at the time, the right to vote in state elections1, was obtained slowly state by state, often after protracted campaigns, which were hampered by considerable resistance. The women of South Australia had the vote for 14 years before their sisters in Victoria were finally enfranchised in 1908. Australia was the second country to give women the right to vote at national elections eight years after New Zealand, but several American states and Finland had enfranchised their women before the state right to vote was obtained throughout Australia.2

  The claim that we were the first to enfranchise women is partly true if we consider the badly drafted Victorian Electoral Act of 1863, which enabled all those on municipal rolls to vote at parliamentary elections. The honourable gentlemen had overlooked the fact that they had given some women the right to vote in municipal elections earlier that year and that the names of women possessing property were on the rolls. When it was realised that a large number of women had thus been inadvertently enfranchised, the provision was repealed on the grounds that ‘women had not obtained it through deliberate intention’.3 Those who boast of our pioneering effort in this field generally omit to add that this legislation was an accident and that it was repealed two years later – in time to prevent those women from exercising the franchise.