by Anne Summers
One important consequence of this has been that large numbers of women who undoubtedly were living lives that did not conform to the God’s Police stereotype have been hidden within our history, and we can guess that they suffered the miseries, self-denigration and uncertainties that attend being excluded from socially valued groups. Single women could hover on the fringes of families and be granted the honorary membership status of maiden aunt. Those who chose more independent lives were regarded as eccentric spinsters to be pitied or, if their lives touched the daring or the unrespectable, relegated to black-sheepdom.
If they were lesbians, they would have had either to disguise this, their lovers referred to always as secretaries, companions or such-like, or to face ostracism. Most seem to have chosen the former and there are innumerable instances in our history and literature of celebrated women who lived with other women under a variety of pretences. Jill Johnston makes the point that until very recently there was lesbian activity but no lesbian identity64, and such women would probably not have called themselves lesbians even if they were involved in a close emotional and/or sexual relationship with another woman. It simply would not have been possible to forge a positive, strong and assertive lesbian identity in a culture that was so insistent that women ought to be wives and mothers. The consequence of this for a self-styled lesbian was to face a life of risk and no doubt a fair amount of mental anguish. Some tried to live as men. It is not possible to guess how many women would have done this since it is only the few who were charged with some criminal activity or whose transvestitism was publicly exposed who are known to us, but one can speculate that the two who became notorious about the turn of the century were not isolated cases.65
Generally though, women were not aware of any alternatives to the God’s Police role and the majority seem to have adopted it or at least aspired to it. After the initial movement of large numbers of mainly single girls into the workforce in the 1880s, the number of women working outside the home remained fairly constant and small until the war. At the 1891 census, 82.6 per cent of all women were classified as dependents. The 1901 and 1911 censuses both showed 82.4 per cent of all women in this category. The major changes in the female workforce had occurred within the categories of those employed, with the percentage employed as domestic servants declining slightly while the percentage engaged in industrial work rose.66
Once the vote was granted, organised labour continued to criticise the feminists for being bourgeois, but it could find few among their policies to disagree with apart from the non-party stance. Since the 1870s Labor had seen the bourgeois family as a desirable lifestyle for Australian workers. Labor men had opposed the importation of cheap coloured labour on the grounds that it would undermine the structure of the workforce: this now reflected the division of labour between home and work, which reinforced the bourgeois family. Men worked, some single women worked – but only until they married. Married women were full-time mothers and housewives. An influx of single men to a country where there was already a shortage of women could undermine the stability of family life, the Labor men argued. Their racist sentiments meant they could not sanction the possibility of Asian labourers marrying Australian women so they drummed up the Yellow Peril scare and propagandised against these men entering Australia. They would turn young girls into opium-smoking prostitutes, thereby reducing the number of women available for marriage and motherhood, and threatening the newly established stable relationship between family and workforce.
Although Labor might describe things differently, in their support for ‘the family’ they and the feminists were fighting for the same thing. In the historical context in which it occurred, feminism was a reformist ideology, one that insisted on women’s equality as citizens while maintaining their different (and superior) qualities. It was also a remarkably successful movement in that it managed to obtain most of the legislative changes it sought. ‘By 1914’, writes Joan Cobb, ‘the women’s movement in New South Wales had achieved most of its immediate aims in regard to legislation affecting the social and legal status of women. It had done so without particularly altering the ideals of those concerned with it or enlarging their vision of themselves’.67 The Annual Report of the Women’s Political Association for 1916 claimed success in the following areas:
• the retention of British nationality by women marrying foreigners
• equal pay for equal work (had been awarded to commercial clerks in Victoria)
• equal property rights (under the intestacy laws) for children under 21 years
• equality of measures for the prevention of vice (the introduction of compulsory cures for venereal disease for both sexes)
• protection of children (four female WPA probation officers had been appointed)
• the appointment of women police (this had been promised by the state government).68
Many of the ideas and institutions that today’s radical feminists decry are the inheritances of the first feminist movement. They fought hard for women’s prisons, and women police, and to discourage women from enjoying their sexuality. They wanted special regulations for women workers and separate syllabuses for girls at school. They fought for the dignity of womanhood, but their ideal of womanhood was one that still depended heavily on the Victorian characterisation of women as pure and noble, as superior to men and as needing special protection. There was a contradiction between this characterisation and the ideal of independence and self-determination they sought, but their failure to delve more deeply into the causes of women’s oppression, and to examine the differing aspirations of women themselves, obscured this. They should have realised that the readiness with which the male legislatures acceded to their post-suffrage demands signalled their failure to provide a radical alternative vision for women.
The women who received the most opposition were those, like Vida Goldstein, who transgressed some or all of the sexist conventions about what was appropriate behaviour for women. In standing for parliament she cut through the prescriptions of both stereotypes and was, theoretically, in a good position to decry sexist categorisation. She and several others did succeed in winning approval for their individual stances, but they were unable to establish these as the bases of a new tradition of what was permitted to women. Reasons for this were suggested earlier.
The early Australian feminists succeeded in defining, and acquiring social approbation for an enlarged sphere of special women’s activities, rights and privileges, but they did not recognise that it was the very fact of erecting such special realms that constituted a large part of female oppression.
They had no consciousness of what is now called sexism and it is because they did not recognise that while society divides power and responsibility on the basis of sex, some of their sought-after aims were impossible to achieve. While they advocated a God’s Police role for women, arguing that they were morally superior to men, they could not then expect to make public life more moral since men were, by definition, morally inferior. Nor could they remove the double standard or attain real independence for married women while they extolled ‘the family’. They had equated these aims with changes in legislation, not recognising that factors other than simple male dominance were involved.
*The term ‘suffragette’ was not used in Australia until the vote had been obtained here; Australian suffrage fighters were known as ‘suffragists’. The term ‘suffragette’ is reputed to have been coined by a London newspaper in 1907 as a pejorative attempt to trivialise the militant agitational tactics of Ms Pankhurst and the radical members of the Women’s Social and Political Union. The WSPU, however, decided to take up the term themselves and used it proudly and defiantly to distinguish themselves from the more conservative, constitutional reformers, the suffragists. ‘Suffragette’ was used in Australia after 1907 to describe the Pankhursts and their followers, but was not in currency when the main Australian battles were under way.
*Annie Kenney was a militant English suffragette. She
was a cotton mill worker in Oldham until she met Christabel Pankhurst in 1905 and became a full-time worker for votes for women. She was the only working-class woman to hold a prominent full-time position in the Women’s Social and Political Union.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The mobilisation of mum
They sit and spin together, this fair united band,
Not to dispute on politics and laws,
But to sit and work each day, for dear lads far away,
Just spinning, spinning for the Cause.
National Leader, no. 9, 1916
The percentage of women out of work has never been as great as that of men in Victoria, nevertheless there are many women, particularly those between the ages of 18 and 25, and those over 40 years who require assistance … health problems amongst unemployed girls and women constitute one of the greatest difficulties. When serious ill-health or even minor illnesses are associated with bad housing and inadequate food, medical treatment becomes practically ineffective … Nervous and mental disorders are becoming more noticeable amongst the women.
Muriel Heagney, Are Women Taking Men’s Jobs?, 1935
Men have always endeavoured to restrict the field of women’s employment and now that the war is over there is an effort being made to push women back into what is called ‘her sphere of influence’ – the home, its cares and its manifold duties – and thus ignoring the fact the majority of women who do work, work because it is an economic necessity. Women have been forced into a kind of ‘blackleg’ position in industry in that man has determined that they are inferior workers and therefore should be paid less. It is this exploitation of cheap labour, female labour, which, I believe, affects the position of the male. This is particularly evident in periods of depression when women are usually retained in jobs because their labour is cheaper. Hitler’s cure for unemployment was to confine women’s interests to the home. We have fought the bloodiest war in history to demonstrate the wrongs of Nazism, among them surely, the doctrine of women as breeders of warriors. Women of the United Nations in this war have been subject to conscription, service and death and have endured these things as fellow citizens with the men. They have earned rights as citizens and therefore their economic position should be no less secure.
Grace J Cuthbert, ‘Filling Australia’s empty cradles’ in WD Borrie, A White Australia, 1947
The First World War did not provide an opportunity for Australian women to step beyond their traditional roles. Unlike the situation in Great Britain, there was no wide-scale mobilisation of the civilian population, which would have enabled large numbers of women to undertake occupations or engage in activities previously barred to their sex. Instead, the Great War – as it came ironically to be called – had the effect of cementing and consolidating the notion that women’s main social function was to bear children and to influence those around them into dutiful civic submission. The war elevated the God’s Police role of women to semi-heroic status, ensuring that it became incorporated into that body of war-generated cultural canon and mythology, which was seen to be almost sacred, certainly unchallengeable, for at least three decades.
For the first two years of the war, enlistment in the armed forces was voluntary and pro- and anti-war forces both mounted determined campaigns to try to influence able men’s decisions about whether or not they were going to fight. Women entered these campaigns with a vigour and an assertiveness that probably had some source in their still new status as fully enfranchised citizens. In each case, they invoked their maternal status and responsibilities in their efforts to persuade men to enlist, or to desist from participating, in the imperialist war. Carmel Shute says of the effects of the war in Australia:
The mythology engendered by the Great War affirmed the dichotomy of the sexes and re-established and enshrined the inviolability of the traditional sexual stereotypes of man, ‘the warrior and creator of history’, and woman, the mother, the passive flesh at the mercy of fate (or rather, man). The nature of womanhood was stripped of any remaining pretence of emancipation and reduced to its quintessential biological function, that of maternity. The battlefield, the new symbol of sexual definition in imperialist mores, was proclaimed the sole preserve of man and thus while men went off to war, to decide the fate of nations and to achieve ‘fame, glory and manhood’ (and incidentally, death, injury and disease), it was the lot of modern women, as it had been through history, to deliver up unconditionally to the ‘Moloch of War’ the fruit of their wombs.1
The pro-war, and thus generally pro-enlistment, women maintained that the supreme sacrifice for women was to persuade the men they loved to go and fight for King and Country. As one woman, who signed herself ‘Sister of Soldiers’ when she wrote to a Brisbane newspaper in 1916, expressed it: ‘Any right-minded woman would rather be the mother or sister of a dead hero than a living shirker … If we fail in our duty by wanting to keep our men at home then we do not deserve the name of British women’.2 Women were encouraged in this attitude by the authorities and other pro-war forces. A 1917 issue of the National Leader, the organ of the Returned Soldiers’ and Patriots’ League of Queensland, carried an article that enthused:
The mother who gives her son in war is noble, sublime … the noblest thing on earth today … sometimes I go to the Coo-ee cafe and I chat to women who are suffering a noble martyrdom and my heart thrills with pride at a heroism that seems to me to be stupendously great. They tell me of their boys, of the letter they have had from them and I feel that I am breathing in an atmosphere cleansed by the spirit of a nobility that is sacred.3
Feminism and pacifism
Anti-war women held similar assumptions about the centrality of motherhood in women’s lives and of mothers’ prerogative to try to influence their sons’ actions. Adela Pankhurst and Cecilia John, two English suffragettes who came to Australia and became activists in the feminist and anti-war movements, used to sing the following song at anti-war rallies:
‘I didn’t raise my son to be a soldier
I brought him up to be my pride and joy,
Who dares to put a musket on his shoulder,
To kill some other mother’s darling boy?’4
The government evidently found this particular form of exploiting maternal sentiments unpatriotic, and was doubtless perturbed by the great popularity of the song. It was banned under the powers of the 1915 War Precautions Act, but this authoritarian proscription was seen as a challenge by the singers of the song who defiantly sang it, and persuaded huge audiences to join in, whenever they had the opportunity.5
As argued in the preceding chapter, the Australian feminists’ ideas and campaigns gave impetus and validation to the emerging orthodoxy that women’s special social function was to nurture and influence the young through what were supposed to be their unique civilising and moral proclivities. When war broke out, the feminist movement divided into pro- and anti-war factions but, because of their common assumptions about women’s powers and responsibilities, were able to use similar arguments to support their differing conclusions. The fatuity of ascribing to women certain innate qualities and then using such ascriptions as the sole basis for political judgements was underscored by this situation. The Victorian National Council of Women, a post-suffrage association of various women’s groups, resolved in 1917 to discourage women and girls from playing tennis or any other kind of sport with eligible men who refused to serve6, while the Women’s Political Association, which Vida Goldstein had formed after the vote was given in Victoria and which had always been strongly pacifist, split on the issue of support for the war.7 Goldstein then formed the Women’s Peace Army, which was militantly anti-war and which, despite continued police harassment and censorship of its newspaper the Woman Voter, formed branches in Sydney and Brisbane and did not cease its campaign for peace and against war.
Vida Goldstein, Adela Pankhurst, Cecilia John and the other members of the Women’s Peace Army were brave and determined fighters who all endured abuse and insult and
some of whom, once the anti-conscription campaign unfurled in all its vitriolic civil-warlike fury, were imprisoned for their fight against the war. Yet they did not appear to recognise the irony and the ultimate anti-feminism of their basic assumptions. Goldstein declaimed rhetorically, ‘What can a boy think of the mother who teaches him one thing, and then countenances this legalized murder? The time has come when the women, the mothers of the world shall refuse to give their sons as material for shot and shell’.8 Although she was a political radical on the issue of the war (and on many other issues), Goldstein and the other members of the Women’s Peace Army were endorsing a conservative, if not outright reactionary, view of women and their social functions. What feminism overtly sought was independence for women. I have already pointed out how most feminists’ upholding of the structural inequalities of ‘the family’ (however much they sought to obtain legal equality and special protection where it was necessary for wives) contradicted this aim. The anti-war campaign made graphic a further contradiction between this aim and the upholding of the God’s Police view of women’s role.