by Anne Summers
The insistence that the domestic and social spheres be more closely intertwined did not entail women abrogating their maternal functions. Although the feminists attacked the idea that women should be defined solely in terms of these functions as this cruelly left the single woman without a social function, the import of their demands was to enhance the maternal role for those who chose to adopt it. The plea for the economic independence of the housewife – by means of a maternal endowment – together with their philosophy of the importance for the nation of the socialising of the next generation being undertaken by women who were physically and legally unfettered by the domination of their husbands, was a plea for recognition of what they considered to be women’s unique contribution to humanity. As one feminist put it:
We need not go back to the old fallacy that marriage is the aim and end of a woman’s existence, and absolutely necessary for further happiness. Some women are doubtless called to be mothers of the race, and to do the social work which is so necessary to our complex civilizations. Some women may feel themselves called to some literary or artistic pursuit, for which they require the freedom of unmarried life. But most women will agree that for the ordinary woman marriage is the happiest state, and that she rarely realizes the deepest and highest in her nature except in wifehood and motherhood.48
The desire of fin de siècle feminists for women to retain a separate sense of identity had to be expressed by arguing for social recognition of a claim to expertise that only women possessed. Hence the stress on motherhood, even by those women who were not, and did not want to be, mothers themselves. ‘Separate but equal’ is the phrase used today to express what they aimed for. That the fight for political and social independence was not a fight to be able to do the same things as men was borne out by their attitudes to two important areas. The battles to have the age of consent raised to 17 or 1849 from 12 (in Victoria) and 14 (in New South Wales) and to repeal the Contagious Diseases Act were seen as direct attacks on the double standards of sexual morality, which burdened and prematurely aged women with numerous pregnancies and which prostituted poorer women.
The Contagious Diseases Acts were ostensibly to suppress prostitution and to control the spread of VD. New South Wales, Queensland and Tasmania had each introduced Acts in the 1870s, and while they did not receive the amount of opposition that similar Acts in Britain generated, there was protest from individuals who recognised that these Acts merely victimised women and enabled the male patrons of prostitutes to evade prosecution. These Acts could not suppress prostitution: all they could do was enforce licensing of prostitutes and regular medical examination – for women only. Critics of the Acts rightly pointed out that this was a humiliating, authoritarian and futile means of obtaining either of their stated objectives and that they victimised women while enabling their customers to spread VD with immunity.
The feminists saw prostitutes as victims of male lust and scandalously low wages50 and they wanted both to delay as long as possible ‘the age at which a girl can consent to her own ruin’, as one petition put it, and to prevent the institutionalisation of the double standard that the Contagious Diseases Acts effected. They advocated rehabilitation farms in the country for prostitutes; and their demands that girls receive adequate training for gainful employment, together with their support for institutions like the YWCA and Louisa Lawson’s Darlinghurst Hostel for working girls, were evidence of the comprehensive manner in which they tackled the problem.
The feminists accepted implicitly the social stereotypes of God’s Police and Damned Whore, which characterised women in Australia. It did not occur to them to argue for an amalgamation of the two ‘types’ into an independent, sexually active ‘new woman’ whose maternal status was irrelevant. They had internalised this derogatory dualistic notion of womanhood so completely that they could only envisage trying to totally eliminate the Whore conception and turn all women into God’s Police. They were not prepared to echo societal condemnation of women labelled as ‘whores’ but adopted a redemptive attitude towards them; hence the various rehabilitative measures they proposed or established.
Although in both England and the US, minority groups of feminists argued for, and practised, free love, the Australian feminists’ universally shared conception of the higher mission of women completely precluded the development of a similar challenge to established sexual mores. Vida Goldstein issued a formal repudiation against a rumour perpetrated during the first federal elections that she was in favour of free love.51 Although this was rarely stated outright, many feminists opposed artificial methods of contraception in favour of self-restraint. A rare and courageous exception to this was the Melbourne WCTU activist Ms Bessie Lee, who shocked many of her contemporaries in the early 1890s by advocating that married women restrict their child-bearing by using contraception.52 Birth control was widely practised in Australia by this time and hence the technological means existed for women to start demanding recognition of their sexuality as well as being able to control their fertility. But the cultural means did not yet exist: sexual freedom, or licence as most of the feminists would have it, was too closely associated with the Whore conception for it to be even contemplated. Rather than argue that women enjoy the same sexual freedom as men, the feminists wanted men to acquire the same degree of chastity that they believed women to be blessed with: ‘we believe that the stability of marriage and the home depend on our having an equal standard for men and women’ said an article in the first issue of Goldstein’s post-suffrage paper, the Woman Voter.53
In the birth-rate controversy which raged in the early 1900s – the decline in the birth rate had raised fears of race suicide among some – the feminists agreed that families should be limited in size, mainly because this reduced the physical burden for women. Smaller families meant that women could devote more time to each child and this would ultimately be better for the nation. But when it came to discussing how family size was to be limited, those feminists who tended to view sex as abhorrent, recommended abstinence. Rose Scott thought that ‘licensed or unlicensed vice can only mean evil, and … a really great nation can only be built by inculcating the virtues of self-control and purity’.54 These virtues they hoped to propagate widely as new social norms, not merely for the pragmatic end of family limitation. One feminist wrote:
the sowing of ‘wild oats’ by the young man is regarded as a necessity by some and as a trivial offence by others. And yet there will be no hope of a higher marriage relationship until this miserable falsehood be swept away. When a young man has been trained to rigid self-control before marriage, and has enshrined within his heart a high ideal of womanhood, he will approach the marriage relationship in a very different way to what he does now. He will realize that restraint is as necessary now as before, and his former training will stand him in good stead.55
The second way in which the feminists sought to distinguish themselves from men was by refusing to participate in party politics. Many of them regarded the party system as manifesting the cynical bargaining for party strength at the expense of principle, which had denied women effective representation in the past. Goldstein and Scott were the most trenchant opponents and fought vainly to prevent female enfranchisement from contributing to the perpetuation of the system. ‘Our place as women’, said Scott
is not as camp followers to a corrupt system of Party politics, but as women to be men’s inspiration to higher and nobler methods of governing a country. The blind worship of man and his methods never did any man any good, although it may soothe his vanity, but to help man realize his ideals is the work of every true woman.
She urged women to ‘think for yourselves, belong to no party, accept no dictation as to your vote’.56
The non-party ideal was strong in all states, and enfranchisement was generally followed by the setting up of organisations designed to educate women in political matters so that they could use their vote discriminatingly. The feminists believed that by being non-party they could al
so be more effective politically. They could lobby all parties without their demands being dismissed as partisan, for they could argue that women of all political colours filled their ranks. But non-party affiliation was primarily an ideal which, as Goldstein explained, could restore principles to politics:
By adopting (a non-party) policy it is not to be supposed that we are a body of gelatinous creatures, who have no definite views. We have all got very decided views as to the merits of the various political parties – some of us are protectionists, some are free-traders, some are single taxers, some are labourites, some are socialists, but we differ from those organized on party lines in one important particular. We believe that questions affecting honour, private and public integrity and principle, the stability of the home, the welfare of children, the present salvation of the criminal and the depraved, the moral, social and economic injustice imposed on women – we believe that all these questions are greater than party, and that in nine cases out of ten they are sacrificed to party interests.57
The SA Women’s Non-Party Association had been founded in 1909 on the principle that ‘women of all parties or none are on common ground in the realization that the things that unite women are greater than those that divide them, and that matters affecting all homes and all citizens should be approached without party bias’, and this principle guided all post-suffrage women’s organisations.
Although they were fighting an already lost battle in attempting to abolish the party system, the belief that women of different political views could fight together for feminist aims was quite consistent with their conception of the role of women. One common feature in the demand for the vote by all feminist bodies was the absence of any claim for personal or group power; they wanted representation and influence and, for most, this simply meant using their votes judiciously. None of the feminists initially sought the right for women to sit in parliament, and only in South Australia was this provision included in the suffrage Bill – an amendment that was in the words of one observer, an ‘invention of the enemy, put in to wreck the measure’58, but which misjudged the political temper of the government and hence misfired.59 Most feminists saw the advantage of possessing the vote to be, as Jessie Ackerman put it: ‘If the social problems demanding legislation do not receive the attention of members, women are in a position to unseat them, and fill their places with men who will carry out their wishes’.60
But there were some, like Vida Goldstein, who not only thought that women should take seats in parliament but who actually stood for election. She argued that having women in parliament would prevent injustices in legislation concerning women and children, which men, however well intentioned, were unable to completely understand, and that such representation would save women’s organisations the enormous amount of time they currently spent ‘on the often Herculean task of educating members up to the point of seeing the injustices in certain measures affecting women’. Her main point, however, rested on an argument, used frequently, though without the conclusions she drew, by other feminists:
It is suicidal to divorce the home and the State, and that is what we have done in the past, in insisting on man-governed institutions. The State is only an aggregate of families, and as the best-governed family is where husband and wife work together in the highest interests of their children, so the best-governed State will be that where men and women work together in the highest interests of the people, the country, the race.61
Goldstein stood as an independent candidate in Victoria five times between 1903 and 1917 and although she was never elected, she polled very well the first time, in the first Senate elections. Her position was shared by Ms Martel and Ms Moore in New South Wales who both stood as candidates; but the majority of feminists felt they should restrict their political activity to voting, pressure group tactics and attempting where possible to act upon some of the reforms they advocated.
In terms of ideas about ‘the family’s’ place in Australian society, the feminist movement signalled the end of a decisive phase. The demands of the feminists coincided with, and when they were implemented, marked the social recognition of, the necessity of certain reforms to the Victorian-era patriarchal family. The feminists had identified as the two most important tasks of the modern family the socialisation of children and the control and confinement of sexuality. They argued that ‘the family’ was in danger of becoming ineffective because these two functions were being jeopardised by the disjunction in the relationship between domestic and political life. Both functions were in need of reform, reinterpretation or reconfirmation and they saw women in their God’s Police role as providing the linchpin to this social renovation. They saw that women needed avenues of political expression to be able to effect domestic reforms.
The harmonising of the relationship between domestic and political life, which occurred in Australia prior to 1914, was not principally due to pressures from the feminists – they never attained that degree of influence. But they were important in enforcing some legal reforms in women’s status and family responsibilities. The modern family is the creation of the middle class and any changes that have occurred in its organisation or prescribed functions have been initiated by that class. Middle-class feminism can thus be viewed as one stage in the reform of ‘the family’ to a more egalitarian unit where spouses were legally equal and where children were considered to be in need of special treatment for a protracted period of time. As pointed out in the last chapter, theories of child care began to be expounded at a popular level about this time.
The Australian feminists quite consciously wished to retain and strengthen ‘the family’. The kind of criticisms of the institution launched in Australia by Tom Mann62 and other radicals received no support from any feminist. They were influenced by the same ideas that motivated the advocacy of specialised education for girls to enhance and perfect their performance of the mother role. Motherhood as a vocation was a late-nineteenth-century invention; the feminists argued for legal changes that would enable women to fulfil this vocation more effectively and at the same time elicit from society just recognition of their contribution to the world. It was the link between family and society that the feminists perceived, which enabled them to declare that women were performing their duties as citizens by producing and educating children who could contribute actively to the development of the nation.
But the feminists carried this further than the educational reformers. They insisted that marriage should not be necessary for women to gain social recognition of their individual worth and they argued very strongly for the right of women to support themselves. They also demanded the opportunity to express opinions and take actions in government matters, which they saw as germane to their ideal of raising the status of women, children and the family. The Women’s Political Association, formed in August 1909 in Victoria to educate women in the use of the vote, had the following platform:
1 Equal Federal Marriage and Divorce Law
2 Equal Parental Rights over Children
3 Equal Rights in the Disposition of Property after death
4 Equal Pay for Equal Work
5 Pure Food and Pure Milk Supply
6 Education Reform
7 Protection of Boys and Girls to the age of twenty-one against the vicious and depraved
8 Reforms of Methods in dealing with neglected and delinquent children
9 Establishment of a State Children’s Council, a Central Children’s Court, and the appointment of a Special Children’s Magistrate
10 Stringent Legislation to protect the child wage-earner
11 Appointment of women as: (a) Police Matrons, (b) Sanitary Inspectors, (c) Inspectors of neglected and boarded-out children, (d) Inspectors of State Schools and Truant Officers, (e) Inspectors of all State Institutions where women and children are immured, (f) Members of Council of Education, (g) Members of Municipal and Shire Councils
12 Reform in the Liquor Traffic
13 Cessation of Borrowing, exc
ept for reproductive works
14 International Woman Suffrage
15 International Peace and Arbitration.63
What the feminists failed to perceive was that their two ideals were contradictory. They could not strengthen ‘the family’ and also win for women the right to a new independent identity. In practice, this was solved by elevating motherhood – a reformed idea of motherhood as a vocation deserving high status – to a universal ideal; but what this did in effect was to ensure the perpetuation of a considerably strengthened sexism, which differed little in substance from the older variety. Women were still seen as being able to be encompassed by one of two stark categories, something that the feminists themselves contributed to by their missionary-like attitudes to women classed as Damned Whores.
It is telling that most feminists seemed to be more concerned by this division between women than by any other and this would constitute one explanation for their tardiness in trying to attract working-class women to the movement. They had perhaps unconsciously retained the middle-class assumption that all lower-class women were Whores unless they proved otherwise and while they were ready to bestow benevolent advice on working-class women, they do not seem to have actively solicited them to join the movement. There were no Annie Kenneys in the Australian movement.*
And so the feminist movement did not succeed in carving out an alternative option for women. This would be partly explicable by demographic factors. In Britain where there was a large excess of single women over men, it was necessary to create a lifestyle for such women, and their numbers were sufficiently large and included enough forceful individuals to endow it with legitimacy and respect, even if its status never matched that of the married brigade. In Australia, however, there was still a shortage of women at the turn of the century and so most women had at least the theoretical opportunity to marry. There was little demographic stimulus to argue that a single life could be a rewarding state for a woman and feminism created little cultural impetus for such an argument. The feminists insisted that a woman need not marry and most of the leading feminists remained single, but their continued emphasis on the God’s Police conception as the sole desirable one for women, married or single, neutralised the possibility of women being able to choose from a wider variety of sociocultural options. Instead of enlarging the sphere of sexism, as it could be argued British feminism did, Australian feminism had the perhaps unintended effect of strengthening the old dualistic mode. Women were classified as being different from men, with numerous social and personal consequences for behaviour attending this difference, and women themselves were still viewed as being able to be categorised by two stereotypes.