by Anne Summers
Women’s voluntary work invariably involves tasks that are identical to, or an extension of, the work they do as housewives and mothers: making clothes or food, arranging shelter and other basic needs, comforting people – or else fundraising. None of these activities in any way challenges women’s sex role prescriptions. The UGRM attempted to do so by insisting that all work should receive a wage but, at the same time, the nature of the work they provided and the post-primary courses they taught reinforced the sex status quo. They were in a dilemma: how could they provide enough work except by utilising skills that all women would have, and what was the point of training girls for jobs for which they would never be accepted?
Had it survived longer, the UGRM might have been able to grapple with this dilemma, but in its short life it probably had little effect on women’s self-conceptions about their role in Australian society. The acquiescence or self-abnegation of most women meant that no challenge to the sex division of labour occurred during the Depression. This must often have involved a considerable amount of self-delusion since many women were in effect challenging it by holding a job while the traditional breadwinner was unemployed. Yet the implications of this situation were not pursued and the traditional conceptions of appropriate sex roles remained as forceful as ever, so that even when women experienced the same problems as men – unemployment and trying to obtain sustenance – their suffering was not seen as warranting equal treatment.
Special problems for women
This also meant that many of the special problems women had to deal with – those arising from being women – barely surfaced to be acknowledged as part of the suffering of the Depression even though they must have affected nearly all family groups. Foremost among these problems was the urgent need to avoid unwanted pregnancies. In a time of threatened or actual unemployment and of large cuts in wages and salaries, all but the wealthy had to engage in penny-pinching. For large numbers of people, the struggle simply to survive was a relentless daily battle to find enough food, to be able to pay rents and replace worn-out clothing. There was no money for extras or luxuries. And in a period like the 1930s, even those who had sufficient food and money to enjoy a comfortable life were affected by the uncertainties of the future. It was not a propitious time for marrying, and to have babies seemed sheer foolhardiness.
There is evidence that some people delayed marrying. McCarthy notes that:
From 1928 … the probabilities of marriage began to decline; they rapidly reached their lowest point in 1931 after which they again rose, almost as rapidly, and regained their pre-Depression level by 1935 … The long-term effect of the Depression upon proportions [of men and women] never married … seems to have been virtually negligible.68
This delaying is readily explicable by the large numbers of young, single men unemployed; for them marriage was simply an impossibility unless they married a working woman and were prepared to begin married life as a dependent. To most Australian men this was unthinkable.
But married or not, the most urgent problem was to prevent pregnancy. This meant either abstaining from sexual relations, using contraception or, if this failed, trying to secure an abortion. The two most common methods of contraception used required the cooperation of the man, so it was his problem too. But if an abortion was needed, or even if the pregnancy was brought to term, it was the woman who ran all the risks. The father, married or not, was legally obliged to support the child; but it was the mother who would ensure it did not starve.
The Melbourne survey of the contraceptive habits of married women found that during the 1935–39 period (the earliest time span covered by the survey) only 46 per cent of all fecund married women were using any form of contraception; of these, over half used condoms or coitus interruptus while a further 12 per cent employed the unreliable rhythm method.69 Only a few years before, in 1933–34, the birth rate had plummeted to the lowest ever recorded level of 16.7 births per 1000 population (compared wirh 25.0 births per 1000 in 1920–22).70 This low birth rate is difficult to reconcile with the low use of contraceptives generally and the fact that over 40 per cent of users employed methods (withdrawal and rhythm) that are notorious for their unreliability. Admittedly, by 1935 the birth rate had begun to rise again as the worst years of the Depression were over, but it was not until the post World War Two ‘baby boom’ that the rate ever approached anything like the 1920–22 level. Other explanations have to be sought to account for the low birth rate and the generally low use of contraceptives. It seems likely that large numbers of people were forced to abstain from sexual relations in order to avoid pregnancy.
Safe methods of contraception were not widely available. The Racial Hygiene Association ran a birth control clinic in Sydney and there was at least one in Melbourne, but these tended to play God in deciding who was eligible to receive the methods (diaphragms mainly) they dispensed. Ms Goodisson, a member of Racial Hygiene, in discussing the Sydney clinic, wrote:
We do not advertise indiscriminate Birth Control. We only help people to use the best methods. We consider that – (1) Hereditary Diseases, (2) Mental Deficiency on the part of one or other of the parents or their near relation; and (3) Want of finance to support any further children are justifiable reasons why Birth Control should be used.71
Needless to say, single women were not eligible to receive help from the clinic. Unfortunately, the Melbourne survey did not investigate the contraceptive habits of single women. Yet single women also contribute to the birth rate, and the level of ex-nuptial births declined at about the same rate as nuptial births during the Depression. So it seems that single women, and those married women who did not fit the birth-control clinics’ criteria for eligibility, had to seek other means to prevent pregnancy.
Writing about the use, or failure to use, contraceptives among Australians, Dr Norman Haire pointed out that all kinds of homemade contraceptives were in use and also that there was no check on the sale and advertising of mechanical and chemical contraceptives even though many of these were either worthless or harmful.72 He also pointed out that the safer devices available from more reputable clinics:
are sold to the women [at a price] so high as to put it beyond the reach of a great many. Why a contraceptive pessary which can be sold at a clinic in England for is 6d should cost as much as 15s at one in Australia, I cannot understand. Chemists here charge as much as £1 is for the same article … Actually it is manufactured in this country, and, even allowing for higher costs of labour and material, the prices charged here are extortionate.73
He was writing in 1943, but it is unlikely that the situation was very different a decade earlier; where safe and reputable birth control means are restricted, quackery and extortion generally flourish. The same is true of abortion, and it seems probable that a great many women were forced to go to backyard butchers, or else to induce abortions themselves, when they were unable to procure cheap and reliable contraceptives and when safe abortions were prohibited by the Crimes Act.
The high rates of maternal deaths and of stillbirths both suggest that abortion was widespread. Even Ms Goodisson was forced to admit that since the Racial Hygiene Clinic had opened, they had begun to realise just how many women had undergone illegal operations.74 In 1931–32 in New South Wales, one in every 200 women confined died in childbirth, while if the number of women who died after illegal abortions is included, the figure is one in every 180.75 The following table shows just how greatly abortions contributed to maternal deaths in New South Wales during the 1930s:
Maternal deaths76
Between 1922 and 1936, the rate of maternal deaths increased, but began to decrease in 1937.77 It can be seen from the above table that single women – who would have experienced the most difficulty in obtaining contraceptives – died in far larger proportion to their rate of pregnancy as a result of abortions than did married women. The highest rate of deaths coincided with the Depression years and was most probably connected with the desperate need both married and single
women felt to prevent at any cost – even their own lives – the bringing of another baby into a hungry and uncaring world.
The high number of stillbirths in this period could provide another indication of the extent of abortions, especially self-induced ones. Muriel Heagney had commented on how many unemployed women were suffering from malnutrition and other poverty-related forms of ill-health (see quote at beginning of this chapter) and undoubtedly the wives of many unemployed men were in a similar condition, and this could be one factor explaining the high rate of stillbirths. But it seems likely that abortion was also a factor. Women who attempt to carry out an abortion themselves often manage to kill themselves, but they are equally likely to kill the foetus. It was not compulsory to register stillbirths in New South Wales until 1 April 1935 (much later in other states; for instance, not until 1967 in Tasmania) and so reliable figures are only available from 1936 onwards. Between 1936 and 1940, 28.71 in every 1000 births were stillborn and of these, 5.10 per cent were to single mothers.78 The ex-nuptial rate was in fact higher, with 34.45 in every 1000 births being stillborn. It is also probable, especially before compulsory registration was introduced, that a proportion of ostensible stillbirths were actually instances of infanticide.
Whatever means they sought to prevent either conception or giving birth, women during the Depression had to shoulder a burden of anguish and often to risk, or lose, their lives in a form of suffering that men did not have to endure. The constant worry about becoming pregnant, and then of what to do if they did, and the effects it must have had on the psyches of these already overburdened women is probably impossible for us to imagine today. For men who were out of work and who thus felt they were failures as men, sex was one of the few areas left in which they could still assert their masculinity and, because they were not working, they had more free time to engage in sexual activities. For women anxious to try and prevent the total collapse of their husbands’ masculine egos, yet at the same time in constant dread of another pregnancy, the anxiety must have been virtually intolerable. No wonder Heagney noticed that: ‘Nervous and mental disorders are becoming more noticeable amongst the women at the Centres, and [that] several serious cases have occurred’.79
For as well as worrying about unwanted pregnancies, married women’s workload during the Depression increased in commensurate proportions to the rise of male unemployment and its attendant shortages of food and other necessities. Whereas the arena of the traditional male role contracted once a man lost his job, his wife found the arena of hers expanding. This is one reason why women did not exploit the breakdown of the sex division of labour to press for permanent changes: they were just too busy trying to keep their families fed and clothed and their husbands from lapsing into total gloom and despair. Whereas the Depression precipitated one-third of Australian adult males into inactivity, it called upon women to work harder and to exercise a resourcefulness as homemakers that had never before been required of them. One woman questioned about her experience of the Depression said, ‘I believe the Depression was much harder on men than the women. We had to exert our ingenuity and all our powers to survive. The men just rotted, in soul-destroying idleness and frustration’.80 The men might have to go out daily and scrounge food or firewood, but ‘making ends meet’ and keeping up family morale rested mainly with the women. In D’Arcy Niland’s Gold in the Streets there is a description of the imaginative efforts of one housewife:
For months they lived on nothing in the way of meat but mince, and Costello praised his wife for the things she could do with it. He referred to it as the miracle of mince, and he said he would write to the Pope and put in an application to have her canonized on the strength of her ingenuity: What’ll be for Tuesday, Liz? Relief-worker’s turkey. And what for Thursday, just for a change? Dole man’s chicken. And all the time it was mince: mince disguised and travelling to the mouth incognito, hashed, stewed, grilled, curried; back to front mince, upside down mince, mince croquettes, mince a la buggalugs, mince murphy, which owed its great success to its potato content; and much as they got fed up with mince in general, they would have been fed up a lot quicker if it hadn’t been for Mrs Costello’s way with it.81
Women went without so that their husbands could have a bit of tobacco, or enough for a few beers and perhaps a couple of sixpenny bets with the local SP (Starting Price bookmaker so named because he paid the official, or starting, price of place-getters in each race who operated from the front bar of the local hotel; this was the only way to place a bet without actually going to the racetrack in the days before the TAB). Premier Lang says of those years:
One community activity that didn’t seem to have suffered much was horse-racing. Meetings lasted from early morning until dark and attracted big crowds and Randwick, Canterbury and Rosehill racecourses carried on as usual with the bookmakers appearing to have escaped the hardships common to most of their clients. So I decided to introduce a Winning Bets Tax based on bookmakers’ turnover.82
These compensations were not much, but they provided a small escape route for unemployed men; they were able to get together at the pub and maintain some sort of cameraderie as an armour against capitulating to their individual despair.
The legends of the Depression accord the greatest quotient of suffering to men; they take no account of either the similar or the additional suffering that faced women, nor of the efforts women made to prevent men from feeling that they were failures. The God’s Police role took on a more intensive and urgent cast during the Depression. Its essence had always been to maintain the status quo, primarily ‘the family’. Now it had to do this while the traditional division of labour, which was the basis of that institution, had, at least temporarily, broken down. Women immured themselves from this reality and enhanced their efforts to maintain a semblance of ‘the family’s’ traditional forms by insisting that their unemployed husbands still receive the benefits they were used to as breadwinners. Hence the sacrifices so the husband could still have his few beers. They suffered their own anxieties and deprivations in silence – which is one reason why they have never been recognised, applauded and incorporated into the lore of the Depression.
What took place during those years was a massive but mute mobilisation of Australia’s housewives to fight for the survival of the institution that gave them their special role in society. Its effect was to prevent the temporary collapse of the male breadwinner role from developing into a permanent erosion of the traditional sex division of labour. In this way, women helped ensure that even during a period of economic turmoil, some basic form of social cohesion was maintained and that any threat of widespread revolt against the political and economic order, which had caused the Depression, was contained.
Those married women who had paid jobs during the Depression probably did not see them as permanent, but merely as one further means of providing for their family’s wellbeing. They were encouraged in this attitude by the Australian Women’s Weekly, a revolutionary new publication in the area of women’s magazines because of its use of colour and its topical news content, whose first issue appeared in 1933. It had declared:
There are plenty of papers that deal purely with social events. We deal with these also. But no other paper surveys the important field covered by women’s organizations. There are powerful organizations in every State in the Commonwealth working to improve women’s status. The work and problems of these organizations will be effectively dealt with in our columns.83
But this promising, almost pro-feminist, beginning did not last once the Depression receded and men resumed their traditional roles. In 1934 the Editor wrote: ‘The partnership of man and woman is the real meaning of sex equality. It implies equality in two separate but inseparable spheres. To ask for anything more is to ask for sex abolition; a race of neuters, like working bees’.84
Those women’s organisations that engaged in political activities directly connected with protecting their families’ interests were encouraged. For instance in
1935, the Housewives’ Progressive Association of New South Wales decided to fight the federal government’s decision to ratify a new sugar agreement with sugar combines, which involved a tax that made sugar a very expensive commodity. Urging women to boycott sugar until the price dropped, and pointing out that sugar consumption was much higher in Australia than any other country, the HPA recommended: ‘Do not be a slave to the sugar habit. Cut your sugar bill in half or less. Eat honey, dried and fresh fruit. This is your fight – you pay the tax. Join us now, do not delay. 100,000 members speak louder than words to politicians’.85 The same issue of the journal carried articles on bee-keeping and extolling the virtues of honey; the cooking page compiled a collection of recipes using honey as a sugar substitute. The Association’s efforts against the Colonial Sugar Refinery received high praise from the Womens’ Weekly.
Once the Depression was over, however, the magazine began to reinforce the old stereotype of woman as full-time and busy housewife. Andree Wright in her study of the Women’s Weekly’s history described the change:
As the Women’s Weekly had always been divided into sections – each under the control of a sub-editor – which had to be planned around advertising quotas, increased sales meant that more firms wished to advertise their products in the magazine, especially those wishing to make a direct appeal to homemakers with their household goods. Therefore the Homemaker’s Section introduced in October 1934, expanded rapidly. It centred around homemaking advertisements, and articles on personal appearance, child care, cooking, knitting, sewing, interior furnishing, decorating, and other aspects of housekeeping. It catered for the woman who felt that she belonged at home. Children were regarded as a full time occupation, otherwise they grew into ‘nervous, restless, irritable little beings simply because they are deprived of their mother’s care and attention’. Such a mother would one day be punished for her negligence: ‘The time comes when the mother craves for the love she has pushed aside, and who can say that which is the sadder – the almost motherless child, or the almost childless mother.’ (AWW, 2 November 1935, p. 35, Homemaker’s Section) Advertisements encouraged women to emphasize their femininity and wifely capabilities. They made feminine subservience and masculine dominance appear legitimate.86