by Anne Summers
Even the Bulletin was forced to agree that this judgement was correct. In 1880 it calculated that Victoria had managed to outdrink the other states and that judging from the total amount of liquor consumed annually in that state, ‘The average drinker filled himself 96 times with beer, 12 times with whisky and water and 6 times with wine, 114 times in all or about once every third day’.25 A practice that required the investigation of several Royal Commissions – there was another one in South Australia in 1906, commissioned to collect evidence as to the cause and cure of inebriety in Victoria, NSW and SA26 – could hardly be dismissed simply as people having a good time. Alcohol was used in voluminous quantities for medical purposes; in 1882 the Melbourne Hospital prescribed 350 gallons of wine and spirits and about 3000 gallons of porter – small wonder that the outpatients department was regarded as a free grog shop.27
As well as objecting to the free availability of alcohol – it was on sale to anyone, including children, virtually 24 hours a day – the temperance women decried the use in hotels of barmaids who were, they claimed, employed solely as sexual objects to attract drinking customers. They also thought that hotels were no place for women because they were forced to witness swearing, gambling and other forms of ‘moral danger’. Even Labor should have been alerted to the employment conditions of barmaids. Since women did not use hotels there were no lavatories provided, not even for employees; the Victorian Royal Commission on Employees in Shops in 1883 heard evidence that one barmaid had died from constipation because of long hours at the bar.28 The WCTU women were not alone in their attack on intemperance, and local option polls and Sunday closing had been established before women were enfranchised. A referendum on six o’clock closing held in 1915 in South Australia surprised even the WCTU, which had agitated for it, when 100 418 votes, a clear majority over all other options, were recorded in favour of early closing.29
In drawing attention to and campaigning against the evils and injustices they identified, these women transgressed the boundaries of womanhood as it was then defined. The Australian feminists regarded the vote as a potent symbol of the freedom to determine issues that they thought were women’s special preserve, but few of them equated suffrage itself with emancipation; it was only a precondition, a necessary tool with which to force legislatures to recognise their demands. These were raised continually during the suffrage campaign but tended to be overshadowed by the polarisation of opinion that surrounded the issue of giving women the vote.
One member of the Victorian Parliament in 1896, by which time women in two states were already enfranchised, objected to handing over the destinies of this country to ‘the most unthinking portion of humanity’.30 When the feminists had to contend with opinions such as these, it was only to be expected that they would spend most of their time simply arguing for the justice of the vote. They did so defiantly, scorning the reprobation they knew would follow, for it had become evident that if women were to have any kind of freedom, if they were to break through the paralysing effects of the polarised stereotypes of womanhood, they would have to define and seize a new life for themselves. Maybanke Anderson, a prominent and vocal member of the WSL, pointed this out in a pamphlet she published anonymously in answer to anti-suffrage attacks:
Women ask to be enfranchised because they see that just as class rule in the past was fatal to freedom and to progress, so sex-rule is still fatal to the woman, hindering her development, marring her usefulness, and injuring her children; while it is equally fatal to the moral and spiritual development of the man.31
The English common law principle as enunciated by Blackstone that ‘husband and wife are one, and that one is the husband’ denied women any personal, social or political rights. Once women realised the injustices of this situation and saw that it was not an inevitable human condition, they were inspired to do something about it. This perception was precipitated by the extension of personal liberty to American slaves and of political liberty to working-class men. The agitation for women’s rights began in the US with the fight for the abolition of slavery, and the first women’s rights convention, held in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848 was organised by veterans of that campaign. It was to take nearly 40 years before the same consciousness of their slave-like status in relation to men emerged in Australia, and by this time there was already a history of agitation for female independence in both England and the US with which the Australian feminists could identify. The slow process of altering the legal status of women had already begun in England and those Acts that had been passed, for example, the Married Women’s Property Act and the Guardianship of Infants Act, had been quickly copied by the colonial legislatures.
These legal changes undoubtedly aided the awareness of Australian women of their own position. Once a few concessions were made, women were quick to perceive that extensive changes were possible, especially when the new legislation was, as in the case of the 1873 NSW Marriage Act, still discriminatory. This Act, a close copy of the English one, did establish the position of the wife as femme sole in respect to her property, enabling her to dispose of it herself, a right that was fully conceded with the Married Women’s Property Act; but the grounds for the dissolution of marriage still favoured the husband and perpetuated the notion that the wife was his property. He could divorce her on the grounds of adultery alone – that is, property tampered with – while she was obliged to prove adultery plus incest, rape (of another woman – wife-raping was, and still is, permissible), bigamy, sodomy, cruelty or desertion for two years without reasonable cause.
Feminism in Australia was an indigenous response to indigenous conditions. Where there were similarities with England, this was because the legal position of women was identical. When Australian feminists explained what inspired their involvement it was almost always because of a sudden realisation of their inferior legal position. Dora Montefiore, who convened the first meeting of the WSL, discovered when her husband died in 1889 that because his will made no provision for guardianship of their children they were allowed to remain under her care – he could, if he had chosen, entrusted them to some other person and she would have had no legal redress. She told the lawyer who informed her of this: ‘You don’t know how your horrible law is insulting all motherhood’. ‘And from that moment I was a suffragist (though I did not realise it at the time) and determined to alter the law.’32 It was not until 1916 and the introduction of the Testator’s Family Maintenance and Guardianship of Infants Act that widows in NSW automatically became their children’s legal guardians.33
Rose Scott’s induction into public life came when she joined a committee that was agitating for the age of consent – and consequently the age at which girls could legally be employed in brothels – to be raised from 14 to 18. When the Bill was introduced into the NSW Legislative Assembly in 1890 it was greeted with gales of laughter: ‘Then came the thought that if women had the vote children would be protected, and such insulting conduct could be put a stop to for ever! I read all I could, for and against the Woman’s Vote and finally John Stuart Mill’s “Subjection of Women” made me a convert and an enthusiast!’34
Australian feminists were extremely prolific in their production of journal articles, speeches, propaganda leaflets and contributions for their own publications. Several of them left personal accounts of their involvement in the movement35 but none of the major figures apart from the South Australian Catherine Spence (and her pioneering efforts were largely before a wide-scale movement arose) left autobiographical accounts of their intellectual development as feminists. It appears that some contact with overseas activities was maintained and the Australian women read John Stuart Mill, Mary Wollstonecraft (whose A Vindication of the Rights of Women published in 1792 was one of the first feminist tracts), Henrik Ibsen36 and Olive Schreiner.
The formation of the Women’s Literary Society in NSW in 1891, a prestigious and intellectually lively association, which had the distinction of being the first women’s organisation to meet
at night37, had encouraged women to read critically and to write papers on a variety of topics. The program for 1894–95 shows that the society discussed such subjects as the life and work of George Sand, contemporary women writers, Elizabethan dramatists and Emerson.38 Many of the women in this society joined the WSL. Each issue of Vida Goldstein’s paper the Australian Woman’s Sphere carried an advertisement for the Woman’s Journal, a US feminist magazine founded in 1870 by Lucy Stone, a pioneer American woman’s rights worker, and reprints from this and similar journals as well as tributes to American activists were frequent. When Adela Pankhurst, daughter of the British suffragette, migrated to Australia she was enthusiastically welcomed into the movement by Victorian feminists.
But the Australian feminist movement was above all an activist body. The women were reacting to injustices they readily perceived and fighting for ideals they wished to implement: reading theoretical tracts could only reinforce what they already knew from observation to be true.39 Their campaigns were mostly pragmatic exercises designed to introduce, or to repeal, specific pieces of legislation. They wanted the vote because they saw this as a weapon in that struggle: until they had political representation and thus at least theoretical power to influence election results, they recognised that they were destined to remain in bondage to the paternalistic whims of all-male legislatures.
Thus the campaign for the vote became symbolic of the self-determination that women sought in all areas of life. Enfranchisement would mean the recognition of their political independence and, it was hoped, this would provide the leverage for demanding independence in other spheres. There was also the fundamental principle of justice, of women being denied the vote when every man in the country could vote. While the franchise applied only to propertied men, women could be persuaded that the theory of representation had some merit, but once working-class men obtained suffrage, both class and race prejudices were revealed. Ms Euphemia Bowes, a leading member of the WCTU, protested during a delegation to the premier that every larrikin in Woolloomooloo could vote but that she, a lady, could not. And both NSW and Victorian feminists objected to Chinese and ‘Blackfellers’ being able to vote when they could not. The issue of the Australian Woman’s Sphere for 8 April 1903 carried a front page poster showing a huge procession of men of all colours and classes marching under a banner emblazoned with a brimming beer mug and opium pipes. The heroine of the poster, an upright young woman was chained to a convict and a demented old woman under the banner, ‘Thou shalt not vote Womanhood, Madness, Criminality’.
Prior to suffrage women had no equity in the political system and in the case of women with property, this involved a blatant contradiction of the principle that had been violently established by the American War of Independence, although it was partly resolved by giving propertied women the vote in municipal elections.40 But women with property were still subject to the iniquitous ‘taxation without representation’ in relation to parliament and this motivated some women to join the suffrage agitation. A printed letter addressed to the Commissioners of Taxation and stating that the Land Tax was being paid under protest was made available by the WSL to women who wished to make a point about this injustice. But for the majority of women, who had no property, this was no argument of course and it was never advanced as the major reason for wanting the vote by any group.
The leaflets produced by the various suffrage organisations covered every possible reason, polemical or otherwise, for enfranchising women. There was basic agreement between them; and the following, selected from WSL, WCTU and the Australian Women’s Franchise Society leaflets provides a fair selection:
Because women are equally entitled with men to ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’. Because the denial of this right is a denial of justice to half the human race. Because no social system which represses one-half of the community by unequal laws can be just, wise or safe. Because no truly free race of men can be reared from slave mothers. Man claims the Vote for his PROPERTY and upon his MANHOOD: it is conceded to Women in Municipal Matters Only, on the first, and denied her, either as a property holder or her Womanhood in all Matters Political.
Because it is the foundation of all political liberty that those who obey the law, should be able to have a voice in choosing those who make the law. Because a Government of the people by the people, and for the people, should mean all the people and not one half. Because some [laws] set up different standards for men and women. Because the vote of women would add power and weight to the more settled communities. Because the possession of votes would increase the sense of responsibility amongst women towards questions of public importance. Because, to sum up all reasons in one – it is just.41
In 1891 the Woman’s Suffrage Journal of NSW ran a competition inviting women to write in giving their reasons for wanting suffrage. The printed replies covered the arguments most commonly used by the feminists. They ranged from asserting enfranchisement as a fundamental principle of justice, ‘because I believe in equal liberty and opportunity for every human creature, male and female, and because I have never seen the document by which God authorised men to decide what women may or may not rightly do’, to pointing out the injustices women suffered under laws they could not influence, to the hope that ‘the spirit of purity and unselfishness, with which women have inspired domestic life, will in its expansion, now inspire public life; changing the guiding principle of nations, classes, and individuals, from self interest to love’.42
Each of these three reasons was considered important by all advocates of suffrage, but the last is especially significant as it gives expression to the conception of women, and to the relationship between domestic and political life, which the feminists sought to universalise. They saw women as a moral force for good within ‘the family’ and they wanted this influence to filter through into political life. They considered that ‘the family’ was the most important of society’s institutions and that the superior qualities they believed women to possess emanated from their constant involvement in family life. Margaret Windeyer had pointed out, in a paper delivered to the Dawn Club, that the life of girls from childhood onwards showed ‘a common tendency to be helpful, sympathetic and self sacrificing in the service of Mother, Brother and Husband’.43 There were no similar observations made about boys’ socialisation, but they did assume that men were victims of a social process that few of them had power to alter, and whenever any individual or group of men sought to alter the status of women this met with their approval. Loud applause followed the announcement at the first annual general meeting of the WSL that ‘the adventurous pioneers who are shortly going from Australia to form a communistic settlement in Paraguay all sign articles of association which will give the women equal rights with the men in the “New Australia”’.44
Their prime objective, however, was to enable the civilising and humane influences, which they considered to be women’s special virtues, to have as wide an influence as possible. In advocating this, the feminists were restating Caroline Chisholm’s theory of women’s mission, which had formed one of the fundamental bases of the Australian family. This notion of women’s contribution to society had been absorbed into the value system of the country and so was widely accepted in principle, if not always interpreted in the same way. When the Bulletin finally reversed its editorial opinion on female suffrage, which it had previously opposed, on the grounds that ‘the evil is evidently becoming unavoidable and must be endured in the best way possible’, it bemoaned the fact that the woman’s vote would be a ‘danger to the cause of Democracy. The tendency of the feminine mind is almost invariably towards Conservatism’.45 But the feminists, many of whom were radical politically, saw conservatism as a positive virtue. Maybanke Anderson wrote:
Every woman knows that she is fulfilling one of the highest, if not the very highest, of her possible duties to her country and herself when she maintains in purity the home whence good and healthy children pass into the world. The women’s vote
must evidently be so far as the home is concerned, conservative in the highest sense.46
The God’s Police conception of women was still valid as far as the feminists were concerned, but changes in the social system were required if it was not to be neutralised. One of the constant complaints of the feminists was that the good work they performed in socialising their children, especially their sons, was undermined by the free availability of alcohol and by the sexual double standard. Not only were mothers denied legal guardianship of their children but their moral influence over them was constantly subverted. The feminists were demanding nothing less than a radical reappraisal of the relationship between domestic and social existence and they realised that, as their protectors-in-law were not going to act without a good deal of prompting, it was necessary for women themselves to take public, political action.
Lady Beaumont, the President of the Sydney Women’s Club in 1901, said to a meeting of the club:
[I]t is most important that at this period of the country’s history that its women should stand clearly for the highest standards in everything. The responsibility of keeping up such standards lies always very largely with the women of any land … woe the land whose women are less high minded than the men.47