by Anne Summers
The second myth is that the awarding of the vote to Australian women was a gratuitous gesture on the part of enlightened legislators and that women themselves had neither requested nor fought for it. Ian Turner, for instance, compounds ignorance of when the vote was actually obtained with this view: ‘“Votes for women” was not the burning question, as it was in the United Kingdom. Unlike their British sisters, Australian women were, in the 1880s, handed the vote on a plate’.4
Related to this is the third myth, which proclaims that Australian women have made little use of the vote:
Australian women have had access to the ballot box for almost three-quarters of a century. But today they have little to show for it. There are currently no women in the House of Representatives. Female involvement in state and Federal parliaments has been pitifully inadequate over the last 70 years. Women continue to encounter discrimination in the workforce. They continue to suffer from laws which unrealistically deny them the right to control their biological destiny.5
While contemporary feminists mourn this state of affairs and resolve to correct it, the detractors of women’s claims declare it is the result of their not having had to fight for the vote; because it was handed to them on a silver platter they have neither appreciated nor used it, the argument goes. The second myth attempts to deny the existence of an Australia-wide feminist movement that which agitated for the vote. The third is a product of this: in suppressing the existence of the movement the myth-makers have buried its ideas, including its views on the uses to which the vote was to be put. While it is true that we have elected fewer women to parliament than have English or American voters, this has not been for the reason suggested above. Rather it can be traced to the role women elected to play in our political life, a role that was defined by the early-twentieth-century feminists and which received substantial support from other women.
Feminism on anything more than an individual scale first appeared in Australia with the demand for the vote, and while not all those who advocated female suffrage were feminists, all feminists wanted votes for women. The campaign for the vote involved thousands of women and many men; suffrage societies existed in all cities and in many country towns and while the agitation never matched the militancy of the English suffragettes*, a relentless and tenacious struggle was carried on for well over a decade in most states. Yet this movement has been neglected by historians of the 1890s: the granting of the vote often rates a passing reference, but the campaign itself and the activities of its most dogged fighters are seldom mentioned.6 Feminism has apparently been viewed as a foreign affliction, which may have been periodically imported to our shores, but it has never been seriously considered by labour historians to have flourished as an indigenous ideology in much the same way, and for very similar reasons, as the movements whose activities they so prodigiously record.
The details of the suffrage campaigns in each state are not widely known, as the pervasiveness of the three myths demonstrates; certainly they are not taught in schools or universities. There are, however, several accounts available and so it is not planned to reproduce them here.7 It is more important in the present context to outline the ideas of Australian feminists, particularly their view on the roles women should play in Australian social and political life, and to examine some of the political issues that engaged their energies. This abbreviated account cannot, and does not pretend to, be more than a fleeting glimpse which attempts to put Australian feminism into its context in the crucible of Australian nationalism. A detailed history of feminism and of the campaign for the vote in this country has still to be published.8
In 1869, in a letter to the Melbourne Argus, Henrietta Dugdale became the first Australian woman on record to advocate full citizenship rights for women but she appears to have received little support until 1884 when she was joined by Annette Bear, who had recently returned from involvement in suffrage activities in England. Together they formed the first Australian group, the Woman’s Suffrage Society. This was followed in Sydney in 1889 by the Dawn Club, formed by Louisa Lawson as a social reform club for women. It aimed, in the words of its manifesto, to ‘gain the definite sympathy and strength which comes from combination, to afford an understood channel for the expression of opinion and translation into practical effort, in connection with Woman’s life and work’, and it intended to discuss such subjects as ‘health, temperance, woman suffrage, social purity, education, dress reform and physiological matters’.9
In May the previous year, Lawson had founded a newspaper, the Dawn, which described itself as ‘a journal for the household, edited, printed and published by women’ and which was to survive until 1905 despite vehement opposition and physical obstruction by members of the Typographical Union, which objected to her employment of female, non-union labour.10 Lawson had little choice in this since the union refused to admit women to its ranks even though she employed women who had qualified as printers overseas. From its inception, the Dawn was abrasively feminist, pointing out the injustices women suffered at the hands of male legislators, demanding that women be given the vote, and proudly listing the achievements of women in any extra-domestic activities.
In 1891, the organisation that became the chief body for suffrage agitation in New South Wales – the Womanhood Suffrage League – was established. The league’s secretary for its entire life was Rose Scott. She and Vida Goldstein, who was initially in Dug-dale’s society in Melbourne but later formed her own Woman’s Federal Political Association, are probably the best known Australian feminists. By the early 1890s there were suffrage societies in all states. They were composed of women who substantially supported the ideas of Scott and Goldstein on the place of women in society and what they hoped to achieve for women with the ballot. Feminism in Australia created and sustained these suffrage societies. They existed for one purpose – to obtain the vote – and, unlike other organisations which also campaigned for the vote, they were not committed to other goals that might clash with their desire to alter the position of women in Australian society.
The Women’s Christian Temperance Union, formed initially in 1882 in New South Wales and in all other states within five years, was an important element in the suffrage campaign, but its influence is often overstated. It has been the only women’s organisation of that period to leave extensive records of its activities – there are official histories of each state branch – and some writers have tended to equate the amount of written material inherited with its influence on the feminist movement. There was usually cooperation between the temperance women and the suffrage societies, and many of the former would have considered themselves feminists, but to designate the suffrage societies as front movements for temperance reform is inaccurate. The two bodies had very similar views on the role they hoped women would play in political life, however. Only those organisations formed by, or existing under the aegis of, existing political parties had different opinions.
The Women’s Equal Franchise League, created by the Labor Party in Queensland and the Australian Women’s National League, which was closely connected with the Liberal Party in Victoria, were more concerned with organising women and channelling them into useful political activities – useful politics being defined by the parent party – than with pursuing feminist policies. One exception to this was the NSW Women’s Liberal League which, under the presidency of the indomitable Ms Molyneaux Parkes, firmly resisted any party directives to its all-female membership.
Feminism in Australia developed within a few years of the first women graduating from university, although few of the early graduates associated themselves with the movement.11 Although the feminists supported the opening of the universities to women, they saw as their special task the reappraisal of the whole range of activities then available to women. This involved challenging the male hegemony, which was reflected in the legal and social system, and demanding that women’s interests be heard and heeded. Women’s total dependence on men in every sphere of life was illus
trated somewhat sardonically by Louisa Lawson when she was asked to write for the Red Page of the Bulletin, not because she had struggled against every possible form of opposition in her attempt to lead an independent and fulfilled existence in her own right, but because she happened to be the mother of a well-known Australian writer.12 Anticipating the introductory editorial paragraph, which patronisingly noted that ‘many gifted men have had remarkable mothers’, she wrote:
Women are what men make them. Why, a woman can’t bear a child without it being received into the hands of a male doctor; it is baptised by a fat old male person; a girl goes through life obeying laws made by men; and if she breaks them, a male magistrate sends her to a gaol where a male warder handles her and looks in her cell at night to see she’s all right. If she gets so far as to be hanged, a male hangman puts the rope round her neck; she is buried by a male gravedigger; and she goes to a Heaven ruled over by a male God or a hell managed by a male devil. Isn’t it a wonder men didn’t make the devil a woman?13
Feminism has always been sneered at as Messianic man-hating. The most common charge against the suffragists was that they were soured spinsters. The Bulletin labelled them ‘disappointed childless creatures who have missed their natural vocation, the ill favoured ones, the bitter hearted’14 who assuaged their frustrations in acrimony. These charges provided a convenient justification for both ignoring the criticisms of the social system advanced by feminists and for refusing to consider feminism as a valid ideological position in the way, say, socialism is.
The critics have consistently avoided recognising the distinction between hatred for a male-dominated system, which denies women recognition as complete human beings, and hatred directed against the male sex per se. Both responses can be, and often are, considered justifiable in other circumstances; the socialist has never questioned the reasonableness of the industrial worker’s hatred of an exploitative factory owner, but somehow a woman’s hatred of a particularly oppressive husband, or of a legal system that systematically refused to recognise the individuality of women is considered irrational. The former is considered a valid response to an intolerable situation and it is even encouraged by those socialists who consider hatred a decisive spark in fanning the flames of class struggle. Women are expected to respond to similarly intolerable situations with resignation, if not with magnanimous love for the oppressor. Too often those demagogues who maintain that a happy slave is a contradiction in terms and that no Negro could have had anything but hatred for the plantation owners, adroitly shift their ground when the slave analogy is applied to women. It is usually denied that the analogy is even justified, for the sufferings of women are not real sufferings; if the occasional injustice is revealed we, your benevolent protectors, can be relied upon to remedy it. One speaker in the Victorian Parliament in 1901 epitomised this argument when he proclaimed, ‘If we look at our legislation, we see that a lot has been done by men for women: married women’s property act, local government act, divorce law … They only had to ask for anything reasonable, and men were only too glad, on all occasions, to pass what was necessary for their well-being’.15 Such a statement in defence of black slavery even in 1901 would not have been tolerated; it was an indication of how petty and unimportant the demands of women were seen to be that such a speech could have been made.
The labour movement in Australia refused to recognise female suffrage as a legitimate demand until it had first obtained its prime objective: the abolition of plural voting. Immediately after its inception, the WSL wrote to the Parliamentary Committee of the Trades and Labour Council asking that womanhood suffrage be included in the labour platform; this was refused point blank16 and it was not until 1894 when one man one vote was established that Labor would alter its platform. It would be difficult to find a clearer example of male affirmation of the inconsequential nature of feminist demands. The meticulously literal way in which one man one vote was interpreted by the labour movement exemplified the contempt in which the women’s demand was held. The principles of equality and justice were not apparently seen to apply to women, the matter of their political representation could be attended to after the important demands had been won. In a characteristic display of forbearance, the WSL expressed its disappointment at this response but its conviction that women would have to do their own fighting was doubly reinforced.
Labor’s antagonism to feminism was, it claimed, based on class objections. The suffrage organisations were composed of middle-class women and Labor was unable to reconcile itself to an alliance with the wives, mothers or daughters of its class enemies. Both the WCTU and the major suffrage organisations were almost exclusively middle-class in membership, but this did not signify an automatic anti-labour bias. The feminists represented their policies as being in the interests of women of all classes and certainly as long as they were the sole champions of female suffrage and a host of other issues affecting women, it was not possible to assign a class label to any of these policies. It was as much Labor’s intransigence on the question of female suffrage, and its continued suspicion of feminists’ efforts to organise working women, as any ideological position that led the feminists to view men, and organisations composed mainly of men, as their enemy.
Certainly, many of the more prominent feminists came from families of high social standing. Lady Windeyer was the first president of the WSL and both she and Rose Scott were on personal terms with a large number of parliamentarians. Rose Scott’s celebrated Friday night salons were frequented by politicians of all persuasions and it is reputed that the Early Closing Act was actually drafted in her home.17 Scott worked hard to convince these men that shorter hours for shop assistants were necessary. She arranged for shop girls to come to her home on Sundays – their only free day – and recount the details of their industrial conditions to the law-makers. This tactic proved so successful that the Bill was drafted on the spot – in her sitting room. Similarly, Henry Parkes who was friendly with the Windeyer family, is supposed to have asked Lady Windeyer to draw up the Boarding Out Bill.18
Yet even this degree of intimacy with the framers of legislation was insufficient to ensure the passage of the Women’s Suffrage Bill. By 1895 there appeared to be sufficient support from liberals in NSW to carry it, but no premier was willing to make it a government measure and although the Labor Party by this stage supported the principle, it was not prepared to assist the Bill through the House.19 In this way, the measure was delayed until 1902 when the Labor Party finally agreed to actively support it. In NSW, the WCTU was one of the few supposedly middle-class organisations that sought, and was refused, vice-regal patronage.20
The inability of the feminists to influence their male class com-patriots – and this influence would on paper appear formidable as the wives of the editors of both the Sydney Morning Herald and the Daily Telegraph were involved in the suffrage campaign – to grant them one of their most sought-after objectives should have convinced the Labor Party that other factors besides class were operating here. Instead it continually condemned such organisations as the Factory Girls Club, and the Women’s Industrial Guild because they were organised by middle-class women.21 Such bodies undoubtedly were limited because of this, and probably reached only a small number of working-class women, but the point remains that at the time, such middle-class women were the only ones who were aware enough of the difficulties experienced by their sex to even attempt to alleviate them, and they alone possessed the resources of time, money and organising abilities to be able to try.
The Labor Party came eventually to support female suffrage as a matter of principle, but it was scarcely able to comprehend the general case for independence from male domination that the feminists presented. In the early 1890s unionists had expressed their opposition to the numbers of single women who were taking jobs in shops and offices and, they argued, depriving men of work. Their response to this situation was either to deny that women should have equal employment opportunities, or to urge that women receive eq
ual pay. This they knew would almost guarantee an all-male workforce since employers were more attracted to the greater value they obtained from their female staff than to the notion of the right of women to economic independence.
The other main source of opposition to suffrage came from the powerful liquor interests and others who, like the Bulletin and John Norton, editor of Truth, managed to tar all the feminists with the temperance brush and declare them to be a bunch of man-hating kill-joys. Although they were to lose the battle to have unlimited alcohol flowing freely at all times, they were so successful in their propaganda campaign against the feminists that the image of them they created still lingers on today. In 1895, the Sydney Licensed Victuallers’ Association declared themselves against women’s suffrage, while later in the year a much stronger protest was recorded by the Newcastle branch of the association, which declared that suffrage would ruin their trade as, they believed, it had already done in New Zealand.22 Their identification of the suffragists and the WCTU was incorrect for they were never organisationally linked and dual membership appears to have been rare, but it is true that many feminists tended to attribute to alcohol most of the abuses women suffered from their husbands.
But if the temperance women were misguided in their attributing of practically all social evils to the demon drink, nor is it easy for us today to appreciate the extent of the alcohol problem. The term ‘wowser’, which Norton is reputed to have coined to denigrate those who would deny a man his few beers, has now attained such powerful imagery that we can only conceive of anyone described by that term as being solely intent on preventing people from enjoying themselves. But Australia had long been renowned as an inebriated island. When in 1854 the Victorian Parliament had appointed a select committee of the Legislative Council to inquire into intemperance, the president of the Victorian Liquor Law League claimed that one in ten of the population had been committed for drunkenness; this compared with one in 220 in London and one in 25 in Glasgow and we had even managed to outdrink the Irish who recorded only one in 14 arrests.23 Thirty years later an English visitor, REN Twopeny, noted that although statistically drunkenness in Australia was not very much worse than in England ‘the difference lies in the class who gets drunk. Here it is not merely the lower classes, but everybody that drinks’.24