by Anne Summers
The main image we have of the Depression is of thousands of (male) breadwinners out of work. Our knowledge of women’s activities during this period is confined to the information provided by census reports and one or two books, and so it is not possible to postulate theories with great certainty. But it does seem to have been the case that, in the two most populous states at least, the employment of women actually increased during the Depression. The 1933 census revealed that since the previous census in 1921, the total number of male breadwinners in Australia had increased by 15.4 per cent whereas the total number of female breadwinners had risen by a massive 27.9 per cent.45 The figures for Victoria showed that the percentage of female breadwinners had increased by 2 per cent since 1921 and that there had been a similar decline in the percentage of female dependents; there was an exact reversal of this position in the figures for male breadwinners and dependents.46 The figures for all occupations in Australia showed that the proportion of women to the total number of persons employed in various occupational groups had increased in almost all groups, with the largest increases being in transport and communication (an increase of 63 per cent), commerce and finance (56 per cent) and in public administration and professional occupations (28 per cent).47
While these figures for the 12-year intercensal period do not reflect rises and falls in employment, and could therefore be seen as applying mainly to the increased entry of single women into the workforce during the 1920s and not reflecting a rise in women’s employment during the critical Depression years 1931 to 1933, this possibility seems unlikely for several reasons.
Throughout the Depression, the percentage of female breadwinners who were unemployed was far smaller than the corresponding percentage of men. In 1933 for instance, 24.9 per cent of male workers were recorded as being unemployed compared to only 14.7 per cent of female workers.48 Moreover, the duration of women’s unemployment tended to be shorter, which suggests that it was easier for them to obtain work. The reason for women being able to find jobs while large numbers of men were out of work lies in the by then well-entrenched, sex-demarcated division of work and remuneration in the Australian workforce. Unemployment during the Depression was greatest in the areas of manufacturing, heavy construction and building. Women were totally excluded from the last two occupations and so were not subjected to the vagaries of those sectors of the economy. They were employed in manufacturing, but mainly in the production of textiles and light consumer goods. These areas suffered a great decline in the first year of the Depression, but an increase in tariff protection and the 1931 devaluation produced increased demand and re-opened employment opportunities in what were female-intensive manufacturing occupations. At the same time, other occupations that engaged large numbers of women workers, such as domestic service and public administration, did not produce wide-scale unemployment although in many cases wages were drastically reduced.
A further and equally cogent factor in explaining the lower rate of unemployment, and the possibility of increased employment opportunities for women, lay in the almost ubiquitous practice of paying women only a little over half the wages that could be demanded by men. These factors were all overlooked and instead unemployed men bitterly accused women of taking jobs that rightfully belonged to them. Muriel Heagney, a socialist and feminist who spent her life fighting for equal pay for women attempted to refute this accusation in her book Are Women Taking Men’s Jobs? which was published in 1935. Her main argument was that it was the tardiness of unions in supporting equal pay that had produced the situation of women being kept on while men lost their jobs. She pointed out that the Clothing Trade Union’s claim for an equal basic wage in 1926 was refused by Judge Drake-Brockman who set the female basic wage at a little less than 55 per cent of the male wage.49 Other applications for equal pay during the 1920s generally had a similar result. The only exception was one section of the metal trades industry. In 1925 a Victorian firm, HV McKay, had introduced girls to work on small cores and on nut and bolt machines; the men working at the firm threatened to strike against this encroachment of cheap labour. Both employer and employees agreed to have the matter subjected to a government investigation, and in 1927 the Minister for Labour appointed a special committee of women, which included Heagney, to look at the question of the employment of women in the iron, steel and other industries at the works of HV McKay. The committee recommended certain safety features and a male rate of pay for all operations. This was accepted by the firm and by the male employees.50 Despite this finding, however, equal pay was not granted to women in other areas of the metal trades industries.
The position Heagney chose to argue in her book was a difficult one – especially during an economic crisis. Many men were happy to support equal pay on trade union grounds, as they had at HV McKay, because it prevented the use of cheap labour and thus secured men’s jobs. But Heagney believed in ‘The right of every woman to economic independence … Every worker should enjoy the highest possible standard of living in her own right, and not merely share in the pleasures and comforts of life through the beneficence of her menfolk’.51 Such an argument propelled her into outright confrontation with the sexist division of labour and all that it implied for the cultural and social traditions of Australian life. As had happened during the war, many feminists found it difficult to maintain their militancy in the face of great suffering being endured by men. Heagney was obviously reluctant to push her point too far, but the material she presented spoke for itself. It was not women’s fault that because they had to work for 54 per cent of the male wage, many women still had jobs while men had to subsist on the dole. But nor would she concede that, even if equal pay existed in all occupations, women should necessarily step down from their jobs in periods of wide-spread male unemployment.
The issue of equal pay obscured then, as it still does today, the more fundamental question of women’s right to work and right to economic self-sufficiency. This was the thorny path through which Heagney tried to steer her argument. Where equal pay was sought or opposed in the Arbitration Court, these considerations were never voiced. Most unions supported the principle – because they saw it as protecting men’s jobs. It is less certain, however, whether most unionists saw it this way. For the male worker on low wages, any decision for equal pay would be likely to have direct consequences in his own home; his wife and daughters might find jobs they would otherwise have rejected attractive for economic reasons, his own status as breadwinner would be eroded and the one area of his life where he had any power would be cut from under him.
The employers opposed equal pay, citing the judgement of Mr Justice Cullen in March 1913 who had stressed the lower physical strength of women, which supposedly made them less productive and efficient and of inferior endurance; he had also pointed out that if equal pay were granted, men would be employed in preference to women.52 The employers of course did not mention such trivial considerations as the fact that they could often extract almost twice the productivity, as the experience of HV McKay had proved, for only half the cost. Their arguments were couched in terms that evoked a mute sympathy from many a basic-wage-earning male unionist, and even if equal pay were a union aim, no union ever took the kind of industrial action to fight for it that they would take to secure or improve men’s jobs or wages and working conditions. What was really at issue in the discussion about equal pay, although it was rarely articulated in these terms, was whether relationships between the sexes should be premised on the traditional breadwinner/dependent arrangement where there was a clear division of labour, status and power based on sex, or whether a new form of relationship, based on the economic independence and freely chosen interdependence of each sex, should be permitted to evolve. But the early 1930s was not a good time to be proposing such radical changes even though it was largely the traditional division of labour, and the expectations it had created for and from each sex, which caused a great deal of misery. Both sexes were accustomed to seeing the male as breadwinner, and one
judge of manliness was whether or not a man could provide for his family. If a man were out of work and his family suffering because of it, he and those around him felt he had failed – as a husband, as a father, and as a man. Such a judgement was harsh and unrealistic since the unemployed men were mostly victims of economic processes they could in no way control. Nevertheless it was a prevalent one. Men felt shame and frustration if they could not find work and the family had to be supported by the earnings of a wife or daughter.
The Depression could have provided an occasion for rejecting the traditional means of dividing and judging people on their sex-role prescriptions. Instead, it tended to reinforce them.
The way unemployment relief and rations were distributed to men mirrored the basic wage concept of the man as breadwinner and, relegating his wife to half-person status, assumed her needs to be less. A single man received 5/10d worth of food rations a week in New South Wales in 1932; a married couple got only 9/5d, while a man with a wife and one child got 14/8d.53 It was apparently calculated that while a man needed 5/10d worth of food, and a child 5/3d worth, a wife could get by on 3/7d worth. The allowable incomes per fortnight, before the food rations were reduced, assumed that double a single man’s earnings would support three people: husband, wife and child. Rather than economic necessity forcing role-sharing or even swapping – which could have been a prelude to a questioning of their justice and utility – the men tended to wallow in their supposed personal failure. This was partly because women allowed them to. One woman, herself a breadwinner, and unemployed during the Depression, said:
I felt more sorry for the men, somehow. I found that men on the whole felt worse about things than women. For a man there was always the feeling of personal failure in losing his job even though it wasn’t his fault. And all most of them wanted was a job and a chance to earn a living – not this humiliating charity.54
It was the by now deeply internalised God’s Police view of women’s role and responsibilities that led most women to disguise their own hardship and suffering, to pity the men’s plight and to act as props for their fractured egos despite the additional burdens it endowed them with and the injustices it exposed.
Unemployment of women
Historians’ preoccupation with men’s sufferings has meant that many economic injustices endured by women during the period have been totally ignored. Even though women were not threatened with unemployment to the same degree as men, there was still considerable female unemployment. Much of it was simply not recorded. Then, as now, unemployed women could drop from sight back into the home. Yet in certain occupations women were the first to be dismissed – again reflecting the widespread conviction that men must be breadwinners. The passing of the Married Women (Lecturers and Teachers) Act in New South Wales in 1932 led to the dismissal of about 220 women from the permanent staff of the Department of Public Instruction55, and from this time until the Act was repealed in 1947, women had to resign from the permanent teaching staff upon marriage. This Act, however, specifically allowed for the continuation of the practice of certain teachers’ wives giving instruction in needlework or domestic arts in fifth or sixth form schools. Their wages for this work were paid to their husbands. A Trade Union Women’s Committee Report on Sustenance for Unemployed Women estimated that in 1930 there were between 5000 and 6000 unemployed women in Melbourne alone.56 Yet unemployed women found that their eligibility for sustenance (unemployment relief) was more tenuous than men’s. Rosalie Stephenson claims that single women were simply not eligible for the dole.57 In Victoria, the one state for which detailed information exists, women discovered that their assumption that they would be eligible for sustenance was unfounded. The Trade Union Committee quoted above stated that in most municipalities, ‘the bodies distributing sustenance are under the impression that provision for unemployed women is not their function’.58 Women were shunted from municipal body to head office to charity organisation to trade union before they received any assistance. In an attempt to alleviate the dire economic position of these unemployed women and to draw public attention to this injustice, Muriel Heagney and Ms GC Henderson organised a ‘Girls’ Week’ fund in August 1930, which resulted in direct contributions of £5000 in less than a month.59 This facilitated the inauguration of the Unemployed Girls’ Relief Movement (UGRM); it was to work in conjunction with the Minister of Sustenance and was organised by a committee consisting of six women and one man. Heagney acted as organising secretary and handled all claims.
The UGRM set up 21 centres in Melbourne and in several large country towns, to which unemployed women could come and work in return for a small amount of money. Women living with their families or relatives could work one day a week at a sewing centre and received 7/6d; women living in lodgings were entitled to attend twice a week and were paid 12/6d. Women from families whose combined weekly income exceeded 20/– were ineligible. The women worked at sewing garments for unemployed families and produced an average of 4000 items of clothing each week. Between 10 000 and 12 000 women attended the UGRM centres between their inception in August 1930 and July 1932. The movement received government funding to pay the women’s sustenance and to provide materials for the sewing centres, but had to raise all other income itself; in May 1932, however, the government began to meet the administrative costs of the centres as well. As well as maintaining these centres, the UGRM started a jam-making centre, which during the first 23 months produced 163 120 pounds of homemade jam. The UGRM also arranged employment for girls, ran post-primary courses to retrain women for employment as domestic servants and organised a great many fundraising functions.60 Heagney felt that their effort ‘in building up a women’s co-operative movement … is without parallel in Australia’.61
Despite its demonstrable success, the UGRM’s life was short. The May 1932 state elections saw the government ousted by the Nationalist Party and the new Minister for Sustenance (Wilfred Kent Hughes) was of the opinion that ‘whilst domestic work was available at any wage, under any conditions anywhere in Victoria, the Government was not obliged to provide assistance for unemployed women’.62 The types of houses where domestic service was still available generally imposed such a draconic order that few women were prepared to submit to it: they had no days off, were expected to give extra service and devotion during entertainments or sickness (for no extra wages) and usually had to endure intolerable loneliness and monotony. The new government had little sympathy for such problems. Kent Hughes changed the name of the UGRM to ‘Girls’ Employment and Welfare Movement’, sabotaged the old committee by creating an advisory board consisting of six men and five women, and displaced Heagney with a conservative member of a benevolent society whose only previous experience was honorary charity work. The sewing centres were closed and what was left of the UGRM was transferred to the Sustenance Department to the ‘charge of a male clerk whose experience in pre-depression days comprised that of an obscure railway clerk’.63 All the social services for women that had been fought for in 1930 were withdrawn by 1935, although the government continued to accept a nominal responsibility for the employment of out-of-work girls – as domestic slaves. Whereas in 1931 one woman was claiming sustenance for every 14 men, by 1935 the ratio was one woman to every 140 men.64 The days of the dole for women were over.
In her book, which was written at this time, Heagney was defiant and determined. She argued that the day for philanthropic and unofficial handling of this problem was past, and that the Victorian Government must be forced to take responsibility for establishing a central organisation to work for the welfare of unemployed women, and that such a body must be staffed by young women with business training and experience.65 But there was little she could do, for she had virtually no support. She railed against the women’s organisations of Victoria which, she felt, had betrayed the unemployed of their sex by their apathy and indifference to the changes in the government’s administration of relief.66 Heagney was exceptionally astute in her analyses of the situation and
the means needed to remedy it; few other feminists at the time, and certainly not the majority of women, would have agreed with her. Her ideas implicitly challenged the existing sex division of labour, and although some other women might have agreed in principle with her about women’s right to economic independence, few were able or prepared to do much about it at a time like that. Most of them were too busy – helping their families survive or else engaged in voluntary relief work.
The Depression, like the Great War, provided an opportunity for women to ‘help’ others in distress and most of these women were either so busy or so self-congratulatory about their benevolence that they seldom had time to consider the political implications of what they were doing. Governments were prepared to endorse the efforts of women who gave unpaid labour to relieve the distress of others – especially if it involved helping their own sex – so long as their work did not involve a perceived threat to the existing social order.
In 1930 a group of Sydney Labor women who were alarmed at the number of unemployed girls sleeping in parks and doorways approached Premier Lang for help. He sent them to the Repossessed Buildings Commission and the women were given the use of part of the MLC Building on the corner of Martin Place and Elizabeth Street. They ran it for eight years as a hostel able to accommodate 40 homeless women, without any further government assistance.67 (Just as, 92 years earlier, Governor Gipps had given Caroline Chisholm the use of a government barracks to start her Female Immigrants’ Home – see Chapter Nine.)
In most cases, the voluntary relief work done by women acting out of concern for their sex helped obscure glaring disparities and injustices in the entitlements of women in distress. They unwittingly collaborated in the perpetuation of these injustices by devoting their energies to trying to alleviate the symptoms of that distress, rather than fighting for social changes that might remove them. They responded to appeals in situations of crisis, agreeing to forget their long-term aims for the duration, not recognising that it is the very disruption generated by such crises that often enables radical proposals to become palatable to people who in periods of stability would reject them.