by Anne Summers
These are all difficult issues, but they are in a sense the price of our success. They need to be worked out, and they will be, however slowly and painfully, and we will all be better off as a result. But we must not forget, you especially must not forget, that there are two even more fundamental freedoms without which everything else is merely academic. If you cannot control your fertility, and you have no means of economic sustenance, you can control nothing else in your life. You only start to have choices about your lives once you control these essentials. It might sound so elementary as to be barely worth saying, but I have to remind you because for most women these are very recent accomplishments, and for still too many women, they have yet to be won. If you are not in control of when and if you become pregnant, either by contraception, abstinence, or abortion if birth control fails, you are not in control of your life. An unintended pregnancy can end, or at least interrupt, your education, derail your job or career and, if you proceed with the pregnancy, burden you with a whole set of unavoidable responsibilities, which will alter your life forever.
Similarly, if you are not economically self-sufficient, if you are financially dependent on another person, your ability to make decisions about your life is likely to be restricted. I saw this time and again with the women who came to Elsie. They had had no choice but to stay with violent husbands until the women’s refuge movement offered them an alternative. A woman who has an income, even if it is a moderate income, can walk away from an intolerable situation; a woman who is dependent is destitute. It is obviously no simple matter for women to achieve economic self-sufficiency, especially when we still mostly do not receive equal pay, but it has to be part of the life goals of any young woman who wants to be in control of her life to try to get as much education and training as she can to allow her to earn sufficient income to be in charge of her life.
There are many other matters I could raise. I am all too aware that we still have to contend with ubiquitous sexism (in conversations, in advertising, in the media, in the arts and in most areas of our lives); violence against women, including sexual abuse of little girls (and boys), seems to be increasing; employment discrimination, including sexual harassment, persists despite laws intended to prevent it; women are still a tiny minority in most areas of public and corporate life. I could go on. But I decided to concentrate on what I see as the fundamentals because I want to urge you never to lose sight of them. We have to be clear-headed about what is important – and what is essential. Once we understand that we must grasp the essentials and never let them go, the rest will eventually follow. I hope it will still happen in my lifetime, but I know it will happen in yours.
The march of women [2002]
It is a mere 100 years since 1902 when Australia became only the second nation in the world in which women were able to vote in their country’s national elections. Not all Australian women, however: Indigenous women were excluded from suffrage as they were to be from so many of the innovations pioneered in early-twentieth-century Australia such as child endowment, the maternity allowance and the old-age pension. Political enfranchisement was gradually matched by economic opportunities, which gathered pace in the 1970s and which created a revolution that seemed to change everything.
The result was that Australian women in a comparatively short time – no more than about 30 years really – seemed to shuck off the dependencies that had shackled women for centuries. Freed from involuntary pregnancies and able to support themselves economically, young women today experience a freedom that still astonishes their grandmothers and that even the most progressive women 100 years ago would have found almost impossible to imagine. Women today expect to be able to pursue an education commensurate with their interests and abilities, and to be able to work at a job of their choosing. For the most part, they assume they will hold a paid job for the greater part of their adult lives.
These changes have been so dramatic that they colour and shape almost every discussion we have about women in Australia. The whole conversation is about progress; about barriers being broken; about women moving into previously all-male domains and their horizons being progressively broadened. We have become obsessed with measuring change. In the 1970s, the women’s movement certainly saw this as the way to go (as had the earlier women’s movement at the turn of the century). We hailed each breakthrough, especially each time a woman became the ‘first’ to do something, be it appointed to the High Court Bench or the Anglican priesthood, as evidence that our whole sex was moving forward. The timeline that follows is a compendium of such ‘firsts’. This preoccupation with progress was understandable: it gave us something tangible to measure. But the emphasis on measurable progress has led us to concentrate on visible achievements, which almost by definition are confined to a small number of individuals. They do not necessarily reflect the true picture of what has been happening with the vast majority of women.
So the timeline comes with a caution. It is only part of the story.
In addition to the main timeline, I have also provided separate chronologies of the progress in four key areas for women: equal pay, political rights, fertility control and child care. There is considerable consensus among feminists that these are the necessary preconditions to equality, the threshold to being able to participate fully in our society. Virtually all would agree that economic self-sufficiency is a primary goal, in many ways a precondition to everything else. The American feminist Betty Friedan is famous for saying, back in the 1970s, that every woman ‘is just a husband away from welfare’, and most of us recognised the truth in this. If women have the financial means to support themselves and their children, they have choices and a freedom that is simply not available to the woman who must rely on a husband or partner, or a government welfare cheque, for basic survival. (Thus education and training – the pre-requisites for getting a job that pays well – have always been key demands of the women’s movement.) Women themselves nominate child care as essential if they are to be able to work or pursue education.
The ability to control one’s fertility is the other primary pre-requisite. In the 1960s, with the introduction of the contraceptive Pill, birth control began to be widely practised by single women – who often had not had access to earlier forms of contraception. What has been widely referred to as the ‘Sexual Revolution’ of that era ought, more accurately, be seen as the ‘Contraception Revolution’. Women were far less likely to have to face an unintended pregnancy once they had access to the Pill. Of course, not all women could or were able to take it and unintended and unwanted pregnancies continued to occur, making abortion an essential backup. As a consequence, the campaign for safe, legal and affordable abortion has been a major feminist activity since the early days of the second-wave women’s movement in the late 1960s.
Economic independence, control of one’s fertility, access to education and to child care – these, then, were the early goals of the women’s movement. They seemed to be the minimum that was required for women to be able to participate equally in society with men. In order to achieve them women needed access to the political system, and so the battles for political equality that began in the 1880s with women demanding the right to vote have been an integral part of women’s story. In the context of the political agenda laid out almost a century later, it made sense to find ways of measuring how much political equality had been achieved. We young feminists of the 1970s were also very impatient. Once we had identified the obstacles to women’s equality, we wanted them removed. Immediately.
As the timeline shows, a lot was achieved – and in a very short time. In fact, if the timeline were converted to a bar chart using dates as the main markers, it would be apparent that the vast number of achievements are bunched together in the 1970s and 1980s. Before then progress was very gradual, often snail-like, with years passing without any wins. Since then the pace has slowed to a virtual standstill. This partly reflects the fact that many of the minimum conditions for equality were, at least to some
degree, achieved. There is no doubt that for many women, their lives have been transformed. Women in their early 20s or even younger today are amazed to learn what life was like for women only three decades ago: a world of illegal abortion, wages set at 75 per cent of the male rate, many jobs that women were simply not allowed to do, and places such as bars where they were not permitted to go. Yet despite these positive and welcome changes, total equality still eludes us. The political climate in the late twentieth century and opening years of the twenty-first was no longer as positive for women. Although the number of women elected to state and federal parliaments continues to grow, this representation has not so far been translated into significant representation in the Cabinet or other areas of political leadership. After the 2001 federal election, women constituted 26.5 per cent of the parliament but only 13.3 per cent of the third Howard Ministry. Labor women did not fare much better, winning only 16.1 per cent of positions in ALP Opposition Leader Simon Crean’s front bench lineup. The most recent entries in the timeline are mainly about individual appointments of women to positions. The political momentum for broad change has slowed, perhaps stopped. Yet the battles are not all won, and some of those that we thought had been, need to be defended or fought for again. The really hard part still lies ahead of us and it will be up to the women who are young at the beginning of the twenty-first century to find the ways to make the progress of the past 30 years apply to all women. I hope the timeline proves to be a useful tool.
Timeline of achievementsby and for Australian women 1788–2015
Note: This chronological timeline incorporates themed sections, including ‘equalpay’ and ‘fertility control’, for ease of reference.
1788
Rebekah Small is the first white person born in Australia.
1801
Elizabeth Macarthur takes over running the family’s sheep property when her husband returns to England; she begins breeding Spanish merinos, thus becoming the founder of the Australian wool industry.
1811
Mary Reibey, a former convict transported for horse-stealing, assumes control of her husband’s trading business after his death and goes on to become one of the colony’s most successful businesswomen.
1871
Sister Mary McKillop, founder of the Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart, is ex-communicated from the Catholic Church by Lawrence Sheil, Bishop of Adelaide.
1881
The University of Melbourne is the first in Australia to admit women students.
1882
Victorian tailoresses successfully strike against ‘sweating’ in their industry and afterwards form a union of 2000 members.
1883
Married Women’s Property Act 1883 of South Australia enables divorced women to retain property.
Julia Bella Guerin becomes the first woman graduate when she receives her BA from the University of Melbourne.
1884
Henrietta Dugdale and Annie Lowe form the first Australian women’s suffrage society, in Melbourne.
Dagmar Berne becomes the first woman medical student when she enrols at the University of Sydney, but hostility from male students forces her to complete her degree in London.
1887
Nellie Melba makes her debut in Brussels, launching what will be a 38-year-long stellar career in opera.
1888
Louisa Lawson establishes the strongly feminist magazine the Dawn.
1890
Constance Stone, who had had to gain her degree overseas, becomes Australia’s first registered woman doctor.
1891
Female Employees Union, a newly formed union of waitresses, barmaids and laundresses, stages a strike over the dismissal of a union member believed to be victimised for union membership.
EQUAL PAY
‘Equal pay was “won” in 1969 and again in 1972 and yet again in 1974.’
Justice Mary Gaudron, 1979
1907
Justice Higgins of the Commonwealth Court of Conciliation and Arbitration in the landmark Harvester Judgement establishes Australia’s first basic wage, which lays down that women are not entitled to the same wage as men except where they are employed on exactly the same work as men.
1912
Justice Higgins in the Rural Workers’ Case, which becomes known as the Mildura Fruit Pickers’ Case, argues that women are not entitled to equal pay with men since, unlike men, they are not legally obliged to support a family. ‘Fortunately, for society,’ he pronounces, ‘the greater number of breadwinners are still men. The women are not all dragged from their homes to work while the men loaf at home.’ He determines that women are entitled only to a wage that would enable a single woman to ‘find her own food, shelter and clothing’.
1926
Clothing Trades Union application for an equal basic wage refused by Justice Drake-Brockman, who sets the female basic wage at just under 55 per cent of the male wage.
1937
Council of Action for Equal Pay (CAEP) formed by Victorian campaigner for women’s wage justice, Muriel Heagney.
1938
First International Conference on Equal Pay held in Sydney.
1941
Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) adopts the equal pay principle.
1942
Women’s Employment Board established to regulate the wages of the many women working in jobs previously done by men now enlisted in the armed forces. In its first judgement, women employed in the metal trades are awarded 60 per cent of the male rate in the first month, and 90 per cent thereafter.
1954
International Labour Organisation (ILO) Equal Remuneration Convention No. 100 (Equal Pay) is ratified by Victoria.
1957
First ACTU delegation to the Commonwealth Government presents a petition of 61 000 signatures asking for equal pay.
1958
New South Wales introduces legislation phasing in equal pay for teachers over a three-year period, the first state to do so.
1963
Women’s Bureau established by the Menzies Government in the Department of Labour and National Service to promote women’s employment; it takes up the cause of equal pay.
1966
‘Marriage bar’ in the Commonwealth Public Service abolished, enabling married women to have access to permanent jobs; lifting of similar restrictions in the state teaching services and in banks soon follows.
1968
Victorian women teachers achieve equal pay, phased in over three years.
1969
Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Commission introduces equal pay for equal work – except for work that is ‘essentially or normally performed by females’.
1972
Conciliation and Arbitration Commission awards women ‘equal pay for work of equal value’.
1973
Elizabeth Evatt is the first woman to be appointed Deputy President of the Conciliation and Arbitration Commission.
1974
National Wage Case awards women an equal minimum wage, to be phased in over two years.
1986
Conciliation and Arbitration Commission affirms the principles of the 1972 Equal Pay Case but rejects the notion of ‘comparative worth’ (a mechanism for equating jobs not done by both sexes).
1990
Equal Pay Unit established within Department of Industrial Relations to provide advice to government and increase community awareness of pay equity issues.
1997
Women’s Bureau, in the Department of Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs (DEETYA) as the department was called by then, which had monitored women’s employment since 1963, is abolished by the Howard Coalition Government.
2009
Queensland Industrial Relations Commission increases pay rates for employees in social and community services.
Fair Work Act 2009 implements a national workplace relations system including national employment standards and minimum wage
orders, and establishes Fair Work Australia to administer the system.
2012
Fair Work Australia awards pay rises between 19 and 41 per cent to community sector workers and finds that gender is one of the reasons their work is undervalued.
2015
Men earn 18.8 per cent more than women, based on the average weekly earnings of full-time workers.
The Australian women’s soccer team (the Matildas) becomes the first national team to go on strike, over a pay dispute: their basic contract is $21 000 per annum, two-thirds of the minimum wage.
1894
Women in South Australia, including Indigenous women, become the first in Australia to receive the right to vote in and stand for election in parliamentary elections.
1895
Kindergarten Union founded in New South Wales; establishes the first free child-care centre for children in inner-city slum areas, in Woolloomooloo.
Children’s Court introduced in South Australia, the first in the country and, quite possibly, the world.
1899
White women in Western Australia awarded the vote in parliamentary elections.
Queen Victoria Hospital in Melbourne is the first in Australia run by women, for women.