by Anne Summers
What the God’s Police view essentially maintains is that women actively uphold the status quo, that they instil its values in children and that they police adherence to it among the people with whom they are in contact. The status quo is not always easily identified or defined, and since women are seldom given the social or political opportunities to participate in determining its social and ideological perimeters, they must invariably accept what they consider to be an authoritative interpretation. Some women choose a particular religion, others a political party, yet others draw on their family’s inherited values or upon a mixture of sources such as newspapers or other media. The latter is always a voice for already vested interests and so most newspapers never express anything but opposition to any political attitudes or actions that threaten the existing social and economic order. Whatever avenue they seek, women are in the position of accepting – often simply on faith – a set of values that they did not themselves help formulate and yet that they are expected to disseminate and ensure conformity to. They are always deputies and never commanders. The battle for their allegiance is thus a propaganda war in which existing authorities, and those aspiring to replace them, engage in contest to try and persuade the women who will be their faithful deputies that they deserve to wear the crown and that women owe them fidelity.
Given this fundamental disparity in the power of the sexes, what does it mean to apply the word ‘radical’ to women? Is a ‘radical’ woman one who is radical as a feminist, radical in relation to the position of her sex? Or can we call a woman ‘radical’ who merely accepts the values and gives her allegiance to a group or party that is against the existing status quo? Often an aspiring power will try to win women’s allegiance by promising to give them a share in that power once they attain it. Labour and socialist parties particularly have often done this, have promised to give women greater equality or at least to institute certain specific reforms. Such promises are often made for strategic reasons rather than from a sincere desire to change the position of women and rarely are they fully honoured. Because of their powerlessness, women are never able to enforce the keeping of such promises and the crafty politician or party generally awards just those minor reforms that, it calculates, will prevent women from shifting their allegiance and will ensure thereby that its view of the world is disseminated by them and its political power consequently made more secure.
To maintain, as the Women’s Peace Army was inclined to, that pacificism was a particularly female proclivity, was absurd in the face of the reality of large numbers of male pacifists and even larger numbers of female militarists. Australian feminists found themselves in the awkward and damaging situation of using the same arguments for different causes because they had not considered sufficiently how it is that women can be radicals for their sex. Vida Goldstein and several others were aware of the problem and had thought that by being non-party, by making their primary affiliation to feminism, that they could attain independence. This kind of opportunistic stance enabled the Australian feminists to attain many of the reforms they sought but, as I have already argued, it could not enable them to win any fundamental alterations to the sexist division of labour and power. It could not allow them to realise fully the ways in which sex oppression is linked to other kinds of oppression and exploitation. They had no concept of liberation. What they strove for was independence and equality for women, but they failed to resolve the contradiction between independence for individuals – or for a sex – and the interdependence required to maintain a social existence.
Nor did they fully comprehend the implications of demanding equality for women within a society that has many other inequalities besides those of sex. Few political groups have ever been able to devise even preliminary solutions to these contradictions, so it is not surprising that the Australian feminist movement was unable to grapple with them. The overwhelming middle-class composition of the movement, and its upholding of the dual sexist stereotypes, were probably mainly responsible for them not having to confront these contradictions before 1914. There was virtually no class conflict within the movement and where it did erupt it was a clash of ideas rather than a personal confrontation between people of different classes. So long as the feminists subscribed to the God’s Police idea that certain kinds of women were superior – both to some other women, and to all men – and the accompanying moral precept that all women ought to be this way, then they did not have to cope with the reality of the heterogeneity of their sex.
The war shattered their political confidence and underscored the naivety of seeing women’s oppression in isolation. But it also demonstrated women’s powerlessness and the way in which the God’s Police prescriptions perpetuate it. It was possible to see the war ‘from a woman’s point of view’ and support or oppose it on sex-role related grounds, but such arguments were largely irrelevant to what was going on. Woman had little alternative except to attach their allegiance to a pro- or an anti-war group and act as deputies for that group. The only other alternative would have been to disavow the war altogether, to denounce it as a war between men that had nothing to do with women. But such a stance would have totally removed feminists from the political arena and would in any case have been virtually impossible to maintain, since most women had male relatives or friends who were fighting and risking death or who were opposing the war and conscription and risking imprisonment. It is difficult to be detached when people close to you are in danger. Bodies like the Women’s Peace Army or, on the other side, the One Woman One Recruit League, might maintain an independent identity and organisation, but this could not obscure the fact that feminist aims had been pushed aside, that the feminists had been unable to make a connection between their struggle and this international occurrence. All they could resort to was the God’s Police role: to singing ‘I didn’t raise my son to be a soldier’. They were forced to retreat – and found themselves affirming the same attitudes about women’s sphere of influence as their opponents. The chance of formulating a truly radical feminism, which could have entailed as a first step refusing to accept the God’s Police role, had been lost.
Sexism in the war effort
A strong sexual demarcation of permitted war efforts was maintained, and when various groups of enthusiastic women militarists sought to translate their pro-war attitudes into concrete preparations for fighting, they were either scorned or firmly dissuaded. Even though women formed an enormous number of voluntary agencies to service soldiers – both those returned and still fighting – with the exception of the Red Cross and the nursing corps, they were not permitted to adopt a uniform.9 Carmel Shute describes the attempts of some women to be active beyond the sock-knitting front: the Australian Lady Volunteers, which formed in Sydney early in the war, ‘aimed to enrol one thousand “efficient” girls who were to train to become “real rifle women and real soldiers under expert tuition”’10, but they were not permitted to do more than welfare work. The Australian Women’s Service Corps began in November 1916 and
its members repeatedly offered their services to the military as ‘woman orderlies, woman clerks, woman cooks, laundry workers, as woman ANYTHING’ and were on every occasion refused with the admonishment that they should devote their energies to some more ‘appropriate’ cause and let the men get on with the real business of the war.11
Shute writes of how the principal medical officer of the Commonwealth forces in Victoria, Colonel Charles Ryan, considered that women were a nuisance on the battlefield – even when fulfilling a truly female role such as nursing – and said that ‘the average woman could do far greater service for her country by making bandages, pyjamas, warm clothing for the men, and by keeping within their own sphere to the best of her knowledge and ability’.12
While men fought the war, women were expected to maintain the home front and this phrase was interpreted very literally. The frustration at not being able to do more must have caused some of the zealous female patriots to feel at least a little impatience at
the limitations imposed by their sex, but all that they could do was to redirect their zealousness. The most obvious avenue, and the one that received positive social sanction, was the home. Women had already learned to see motherhood as a vocation; now, in an effort to accumulate a little glory to reward themselves for four years of waiting, anguish and deprivation, they seized upon homemaking – a rather wider vocation than motherhood – and bestowed upon its mundane labour a spiritual quality.
Homemaking was more than housekeeping: it was the creation of a microcosmic world from which could radiate the love, devotion and labour that the woman poured into it. Complementing perfectly the God’s Police prescription to instil civic values in those around her, the homemaker could create a physical and spiritual retreat from the outside world. This world was symbolised by the hearth, the warmth around which a family clustered in order to escape the cold outside and to forget the horrors of the war. Ethel Turner, author of Seven Little Australians and many other books which made her a popular and much-read writer, endorsed this notion in the introduction to a wartime book, which was designed to raise money to aid returning soldiers:
The Voluntary Workers are men and women who have discovered a very great and very simple truth, viz., that the best stone in the entire structure of civilization is the hearthstone. Seized of this truth they have joined forces to see that the most deserving men of the community, the soldiers who are fighting for our existence, do not go short of one of their very own.13
The view of woman as homemaker was a readily acceptable one, to women themselves (who had little else they could do and had thus to make a virtue of necessity), but also to ordinary men (who had something to come home to) and to the men in power who could, at absolutely no cost to that power, bestow their blessing upon these women who so eagerly collaborated in their powerless situation. They could easily endow it with a semblance of power by disseminating such homilies as ‘The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world’ – a patent untruth as my analysis of the intrinsic powerlessness of the God’s Police role has attempted to show. If women could be persuaded to place credence in such aphorisms, and the fact that they cleaved so neatly with the feminist view of women’s special qualities, ensured that those potential dissidents would be pacified, then any rumblings of female rebellion were unlikely to erupt into a potent challenge to the sexual division of labour and power. It was a cruel and a cheap way to buy women’s compliance.
They were given none of the rewards that the men who went to war received. Those rewards were seldom as munificent as the promises made to enlisting soldiers during frenetic recruiting campaigns, and many returned to poverty, permanent disability and social uselessness. But all were given access to a heroic status, which was permanently enshrined, not just in war memorials all around the country, but in a national day of remembrance and, as the memories of the realities of battle receded further and further, of braggadocio. Women were given nothing. They were prevented from fighting, or from doing more than extending their domestic skills from the home to the war effort, and so there was supposedly nothing for them to remember or to celebrate. Their contribution to the war, and their sufferings – especially the agony of going through casualty lists – were not considered comparable to the efforts of enlisted men.
The work that women did, the money raised, the voluntary soldier service organisations they operated mostly went unrewarded. Some women did an enormous amount of physical work as their contribution to the war effort: one Sydney woman, for instance, knitted 600 pairs of socks and sent a personal message with each pair as she despatched them.14 But such efforts were rarely acknowledged. It was what was expected of women. And even when they did receive official acknowledgment, it was generally a lower order than that which men were awarded. The Order of the British Empire system of honours had been established in 1917; the following year it was divided into military and civil divisions. The latter had six rankings for civilian war effort, but when the first list of honours was published, most of those women whose work for Red Cross and similar bodies was acknowledged were concentrated in the lower rankings.15
Although Anzac Day is purportedly for servicewomen as well as men, the First World War did not allow Australian women to serve in the only way that was recognised as important, and so for two decades it was solely a male affair. In that time it accumulated a mystique that was so identified with what men did that even when, during the Second World War, thousands of women were mobilised into active service and hence theoretically received the right to regard Anzac Day as theirs too, they could never be seen as anything more than intruders – or else as irrelevant. The women who patriotically battled on at home during the First World War were given nothing. Not even thanks. After 1918, what else could women do but fervently affirm the role and the work that they had no option but to accept?
The 1920s: Generation of homemakers
During the 1920s women were visible mostly in connection with their efforts to perfect the role of homemaker. Early in the decade, Housewives’ Associations were formed in all states. Their function was explained by Ms Polkinghorne, President of the South Australian Association:
There is … one striking difference between the Housewives’ Association and other amalgamations. The housewives do not (as well they might) agitate for higher wages or shorter hours. The old saying that ‘women’s work is never done’ is as true now as ever it was, and, as for wages, well, they are still non-existent. No, we have to admit that this organization, now quite a power throughout the Commonwealth, is out purely for the good of the community at large, to protect first the sanctity of the home, and after that to fight the consumer’s battle against wrong conditions. And we are all consumers.16
The Country Women’s Association was formed after a meeting in Sydney in April 1922.17 The meeting, which was organised by Robert McMillan of the Stock and Station Journal and Florence Gordon, editor of its women’s page, decided to form an organisation that ‘pledged to break through the wall of isolation that hemmed in so many women’. Later that year a similar body was formed in Queensland, in Western Australia in 1924, South Australia in 1926 and Victoria in 1928. (The Tasmanian branch was established in 1936 while the Northern Territory’s Country Women of the Air was not set up until 1953. The CWA of Australia organised itself as a federation in 1945.)
More women were now housewives than at any time earlier this century. Although the percentage of women workers in relation to the total workforce had remained static since 1901, in 1921 a smaller percentage of women were in employment as the following table sets out.
Women in the workforce18
In 1925 Ms Flora Mackay formed the Business and Professional Women’s Club in Melbourne with the object of providing a link for girls who were beginning careers with women who were already established in different businesses and professions.19 But while this infant association implicitly asserted women’s right to work – or at least recognised that many women had to do so from necessity – from other quarters came cries for women to stay at home. These pleas emerged in the debate about whether or not women should receive equal pay, and followers of this controversy were subjected to the strange spectacle of one-time feminists arguing a case that implied that women ought not to be employed. Florence Gordon who was quoted in the last chapter decrying the scandalously low wages of working girls, in 1923 was bemoaning the situation of single girls earning a wage high enough to bedeck themselves with finery while married men were unemployed. She supported the principle of equal pay in order to eradicate the practice of using women as cheap labour, which she saw as depriving men of jobs, but her reasoning was not based on the desire for wage justice for women. Rather, she saw female employment as
a serious menace to the race. While marriage itself offers less attraction, [since these young women would no longer be able to afford to adorn themselves with the latest fashions], the actual chance of marriage is lessened. There is less material prosperity for married people in the l
ower ranks of the industrial class, while there is greater hardship in bearing and rearing children, owing to the difficulty in obtaining domestic assistance.20
Gordon’s fears that young women would not want to marry were unwarranted. The rate of marriage increased sharply in 1921 and continued to rise until 1928. Women began marrying at a younger age than in previous decades and the proportion of women remaining unmarried declined.21 True, the hopes of traditionalists that after the war women would revert to having nineteenth-century sized families were not to be fulfilled. The small Australian family of only two or three children had definitely become established as a norm. Quality, not quantity, had come to be seen as the most desirable state to strive for as women’s maternal and domestic responsibilities could not be discharged adequately if they had to bear and raise large numbers of children. This view of ‘the family’ was, as we have already seen, one that the middle class had tried to promulgate to all sections of society during the early 1900s. The efforts of these reformers, who included many feminists, continued during the 1920s. But whereas before the war the feminists especially had concentrated on trying to improve the relationship between mother and child, their postwar efforts were more concerned with fighting for social changes that they believed would enable ‘the family’ as an institution to flourish, especially among economically or physically disadvantaged groups. The three major campaigns were concerned with preventing race degeneration, with fighting to have the sale of liquor prohibited, and with trying to have a child endowment scheme implemented. Each of these reforms, it was felt, would undermine or eradicate evils that were seen as threatening the stability, or even the very existence, of family life.