United We Stand

Sex, class and the road to women’s suffrage

Votes for women was one of the great causes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We won it in Australia relatively early. Yet after years of campaigning finally won it, women’s suffrrage had relatively little impact on our society. To understand why, we need to look once again at class forces.

Between 1860 and 1890, the dynamic of Australia’s capitalist development reshaped gender relations, in some ways limiting women’s rights, but in other ways creating important new opportunities. Theoretically, the nuclear family reigned supreme. Amongst the social elite, this assigned women a rather peculiar role, which Beverley Kingston describes:

The complex business of maintaining caste, status, and hierarchy in society, of ensuring that marriages were arranged that were suitable or advantageous to the family, the business or the property, of celebrating the birth of heirs, entertaining the right people, or keeping the close-knit circles of family and friends fully functioning, was, in the hands of a capable woman, as important and impressive as her husband’s political, diplomatic, or entrepreneurial activity.[1]

The middle classes, as well as the craft unionists and their families who aspired to middle class status, also defined female roles in domestic terms. The jumped up shopkeeper Henry Parkes declared a woman’s ‘high and honourable destiny’ to be duty in the home because ‘men rule in commerce, in the market and in the state’.[2] The fact that his uncertain business only survived because of the capabilities of Clarinda Parkes was not enough to free his mind from dogma.

However social changes were beginning to challenge the family institution. Mass production eroded traditional crafts and dashed the middle class aspirations of the craftsmen. New factories produced simple household items such as bread and candles, which housewives and daughters had previously made at home, creating pressures and incentives for women to go out to work. Demands mounted for liberalised divorce laws, and more couples, mainly in the middle class, began practising birth control in the seventies. Within fifteen years this caused a conspicuous fall in the birth rate, which accelerated in the economic depression of the nineties. These trends aroused fears of ‘race suicide’ that persisted well into the next century, becoming the subject of a New South Wales Royal Commission in 1903-4.

The sex imbalance declined steadily in the second half of the century. In Victoria the number of females was sixty-four percent of the number of males in 1861, but it had risen to ninety-one percent two decades later and was virtually at par in Melbourne. This eroded a long-standing obstacle to marriage for men, yet began to create one for some women: while males were now more likely to find marriage partners, females (especially Irish immigrants) were less likely to do so. Matrimony was no longer automatic for females. At the same time, greater job and even career opportunities began to open up, attracting women away from supposedly natural domestic bliss.

Even in the most conservative decades, there had always been some successful female participants in commerce and the labour force, including pockets where they worked on equal terms with men. These tended to be in places where the family unit was also a productive unit, such as farms. On a small selection, there was less scope to divide the ‘public’ and ‘private’ spheres.

Women who had been equal partners running farms might also find themselves running local post offices. In fact postmistresses earning equal salaries were common in colonial New South Wales, both in country towns and Sydney suburbs. Their husbands, who therefore had an economic interest in equal pay, supported their careers, while country MPs endorsed equal job opportunity, especially at times when selectors faced financial trouble. No one allowed notions of women’s traditional role to get in the way, and not one of several inquiries into the postal system in the fifties and sixties challenged the suitability of women running post offices.[3]

The relative egalitarianism among smallholders also helps explain the Shearers’ Union’s advanced policies on women’s rights. The ‘new unionism’, wrote W.G. Spence, ‘makes no distinction of sex.’ Many union members were small selectors who also sheared part time, so ‘Spence in his appeal to country women to support the ASU also recognized each family as an economic unit, and as such insisted the support of women was crucial to the success of trade unionism.’[4] To be sure, he also took for granted many conventional notions about the female role, but then so did contemporary feminists.

By the late 19^th Century, however, the same industrial development that was challenging the urban family was likewise beginning to undermine these pockets of petit-bourgeois equality. The decline of craft production methods and the advent of the factory system also created routine production jobs, often filled by females and juveniles on a casual basis with high turnover levels.

Rebels in the workforce

Women were some twenty per cent of the overall work force in late 19^th Century Australia, rising to thirty or forty per cent in the main urban centres. Nearly half worked in domestic service, and a sizeable proportion on farms, but that still left a large number employed in the garment and boot trades, in shops, as nurses and as teachers -- though most of the jobs available apart from domestic service were confined to the cities and larger towns. The purely pastoral areas remained overwhelmingly male. Women’s wages were one-third to one-half of men’s, a difference due less to lower skill levels than to socially constructed gender roles and institutional barriers.[5] Within these broad outlines, however, the situation was steadily changing.

Census data indicate a declining number of females employed in domestic service and primary production, and a moderate increase in the industrial, commercial and professional areas. Young women preferred to avoid domestic service with its constraints on personal freedom and potential for abuse. In fact their search for even the worst factory work showed how much they disliked the hardships, long hours and isolation of domestic service. ‘The great attractions of the factory were the company it provided at work, the sense of being one in adversity with one’s fellow-sufferers, the regulated and relatively short hours, and the relatively generous pay.’[6] Outwork also proliferated in the clothing trades, fitting the domestic circumstances of some workers while allowing employers to offer piece work at low rates.

Those who still opted for domestic service were choosier. As early as 1870, when Sir George Stephens offered patronising advice to female servants he found them unreceptive. Worse still, he was ‘informed by several ladies … in search of servants that they have at times found it necessary to submit to examination themselves,’ and even encountered ‘silly young women … who actually stipulated that they should be addressed as ‘Miss Smith’, or ‘Miss Brown’ … Is it possible to conceived of a more absurd request than this? For it amounts to saying, ‘I am as much a lady as yourself …’’[7]

Factory owners still hoped females would be more docile than young males in this relatively tight labour market. ‘Boys are far too independent,’ lamented one industrialist, ‘they will only take work where they like.’[8] Yet as the tailoresses showed in their famous strike, the female sex might be just as rebellious as the male, because their bargaining position was steadily improving. Although the absolute number of women working rose, the eighties still brought a relative shortage of female labour, as increasing prosperity enabled significant numbers to avoid or postpone employment just as demand was increasing.

In particular, they began to avoid domestic service, and this became a long term trend. During the depressed nineties some were forced back into this type of work, and the 1901 census still showed about ten percent of households employed servants. However in the new century the inexorable decline in servant numbers would continue.

In the seventies and eighties, more of those who became housewives could afford to hire ‘help’, and that increased the demand for servants. Others pursued the schooling needed to enter ‘professional’ jobs as teachers or public servants. The shortage of female labour pushed up women’s wages: in Melbourne factories their pay increased by half in real terms between 1871 and 1891.[9] The growth of teaching and nursing jobs created a layer of professionals with a ‘respectable’ status outside the home. ‘The ultimate rate of payment is higher than women can make in any other employment without capital,’ remarked Catherine Spence in the 1870s, ‘while to most of the candidates it is a rise in the social scale; and these two considerations act powerfully enough.’[10] By 1902, forty-five per cent of New South Wales teachers, and twenty-five percent of those in charge of schools, were female. While men dominated at the top of the system, still there were well over two hundred Mistresses of Departments.[11] These were probably the best jobs available for women.

Nursing was also respectable in the post-Nightingale era, but the life was restrictive, the work often menial, the conditions appalling: as late as 1910 the nurses’ quarters at the Royal Melbourne Hospital were known as ‘Ratland’. Other possibilities included retail sales and typing. In the latter field some women established independent businesses for a time, until the cost of typewriters fell to the point where firms could establish their own typing pools. The numbers of unmarried (and to a lesser degree widowed or divorced) working women were substantial enough to stimulate the growth of hostel-type accommodation, including the YWCA with its cheap yet decent -- and above all, respectable -- surroundings.

Centralisation of the public service undermined equal pay in New South Wales post offices after 1900. Yet at the same time it also created new jobs in which women could begin to assert themselves, often as part of the labour movement. In Victoria, female postal and telegraph workers had long been employed in large numbers in central locations, but at lower levels and subject to severe discrimination. This created both incentive and opportunity to fight back, which they did in the 1890s, winning the right to equal pay via the Commonwealth Public Service Act of 1902.[12]

A major battle took place in the telegraph and postal unions over women’s rights. The leading union journal, The Transmitter, supported equal pay and opportunity, as did the union in most parts of the country – but in Victoria male members were hostile. The main reason was mass sackings during the 1890s, which had cost 1,500 mostly male employees their jobs. When the Victorian Government later carried out a reclassification exercise, the local union boycotted the hearing. An ad hoc committee of women then intervened with a submission which won them improvements in salary -- while males got pay cuts. The men resented this, but they should have blamed the bosses or their own tactical errors rather than fellow workers. Women employees, for their part, were furious with those bosses whom they accused of ‘unbecoming language’, ‘a desire to throw female assistants over the banisters’, and spying on staff through holes bored in a partition.[13] Given the hostility of male unionists, they opted to form their own union.

The growth in female employment provided the material basis for both women’s trade unionism and campaigns for equal rights. Having fewer children left more time and energy for organising and for politics. (Where fertility remained higher, as in Queensland, women’s rights groups were weaker.) With greater access to the public sphere, more opportunities, better education and a sense of being in demand, women grew more assertive. These trends undermined the ideology relegating females to the ‘private sphere’. Thousands trudged daily to the factories, with no collapse of civilisation apparent, though the more downtrodden among them aroused humanitarian concern in middle class reformers.

Teachers and nurses proved they could take on intellectually demanding tasks outside the home -- it is no coincidence that such prominent champions of women’s rights as Lilian Locke and Vida Goldstein both worked as teachers, or that other teachers joined the single tax leagues which supported equality. A trickle of female university graduates appeared once tertiary institutions started to become coeducational, beginning with the University of Adelaide in 1880. It was the Professor of Medicine at Adelaide University, Edward Stirling, who first introduced a motion on women’s suffrage in the South Australian parliament. Stirling pointed to the success of his female students as evidence they were men’s intellectual equals.

Towards women’s suffrage

Economic prosperity, which had widened women’s opportunities, gave way to economic crisis in the nineties. The experience radicalized an important minority:

Self-supporting new middle class and working class women such as Mary Gilmore and Louisa Lawson were part of the large floating population, often from the country, who gravitated to Sydney’s numerous boarding houses … Freed from family and sex role constraints, they contributed to the intellectual ferment that characterised Sydney at that time, playing an active part in the variety of ‘progressive causes’ … [They] were joined by women from elite families who were suddenly thrown onto the job market [and/or] radicalized by the poverty, destitution and exploitation they saw. [14]

They gathered in clubs, literary associations and suffrage leagues. However these ‘feminist’ bodies were often fairly small. Usually this is explained on the basis that potential female activists, busy with domestic tasks and child-bearing, had little time for public activity. [15] However that doesn’t really explain much. If everyone was busy at home, how did they find time for the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union which boasted thousands of members? If they weren’t up to campaigning, how do we explain their participation in the 1874 Moonta strike in South Australia, where ‘armed with brooms and led by the strike committee, the women swept those still working in the engine houses, candle factory, stables and other auxiliaries off the job.’ A manager later said they could be thankful women didn’t always get involved, as ‘those cousin Jennies up at Moonta showed us what can happen if they do.’[16]

The women’s rights groups focusing specifically on suffrage had a modest size and impact partly because of their elite character. This was especially striking among the leading lights in New South Wales: Rose Scott, Lady Mary Windeyer and Dora Montefiore were all rather well off. The main issues pursued by affluent feminists, such as the vote and especially property rights, had less resonance among factory hands or working class housewives, who were often suspicious of the prosperous ladies claiming to champion their cause ¾ particularly in the case of proposals which limited the suffrage to property owners (and to whites).

This is why activists associated with the workers’ movement sometimes kept their distance. In South Australia Mary Lee, secretary of both the Women’s Suffrage League and the Working Women’s Trade Union, announced that she was not a ‘women’s rights woman’;[17] while in Queensland, the well known labour activist and travelling union organiser Emma Miller led a working class breakaway from the official suffrage organisation. In New South Wales the more labour-oriented activists also split with Rose Scott in 1901.

If what we now call ‘first wave feminism’ was nevertheless a significant factor in late 19^th century Australia, it’s because of the organisational strength and continuity provided by the WCTU, which began to campaign seriously around the suffrage issue in the eighties, hoping women would vote to restrict alcohol. In Tasmania, it virtually was the movement. Only in Victoria, with its strong progressive liberal currents, and in liberal-Christian South Australia, did any significant women’s rights groups form earlier than the WCTU. The temperance movement drew its members mainly from nonconformist churches and their social background seems to have been lower-middle class. They were well organised because of the church framework and because they were supported by a previously existing male temperance movement.[18] When agitation focused on the question of national suffrage in a federated Australia they could speak -- unlike the suffrage societies -- with a national voice.

Unfortunately, the WCTU was also a right-wing influence. Temperance was associated with efforts by the upper and middle classes to bring the unruly lower orders into line. In Tasmania, running the suffrage movement went hand in hand with other preoccupations: ‘In 1898 the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, wanting to clear all youngsters, especially girls, off the streets at night, proposed that a curfew bell be rung at 9:00.’ This was part of a general tightening up associated with the centralisation of the police force.[19] Like campaigns against prostitution, with which it was sometimes linked, the temperance crusade was a Protestant middle class response to the growth of turbulent (heavily Irish Catholic) working class communities in Australian cities. It had little to do with women’s rights and much to do with social control.[20]

Still the campaign for voting rights pulled together something of a women’s movement across Australia. In Victoria, the WCTU took the lead in gathering a monster petition of 30,000 signatures. Among the canvassers was the young Vida Goldstein, just beginning her remarkable political career. Goldstein later commented that ‘the few women who refused to sign the petition were, almost without exception, those whose interest ended at the garden gate.’[21]

This suggested that to be more than a marginal force, the women’s movement needed to gets its constituency active in the public sphere. Yet as the WCTU connection suggests, it was hampered by its own social outlook. A final reason for the small size and impact of the women’s rights groups was the influence of what has been called ‘domestic feminism’.

No leading figure in these circles, even Rose Scott or Vida Goldstein who personally chose not to marry, questioned the view that woman’s place was in the family sphere. Arguments for suffrage typically appealed to woman’s moral role as guardian of the home, suggesting that female suffrage would help civilize society at large and claiming conversely, in Goldstein’s words, that ‘stability of marriage and the home depend upon our having an equal standard for men and women.’[22] Similarly, campaigners for practical dress and against tight lacing stressed the importance of women’s health for their maternal role.

These arguments relied on notions that women were inherently more responsive, caring and nurturing – what Scott called the world of a ‘wide, loving heart and sheltering arms’[23] -- which were to find an echo in the feminism of a century later. They were also associated with moralistic campaigns for sexual puritanism, which in turn had considerable common ground with the temperance agitation and the Salvation Army. In addition, they meshed with the racist and militarist ‘populate or perish’ mentality of the era. This is why at least two key New South Wales suffrage societies publicly disowned Bretena Smyth for promoting birth control. Ordinary people flocked to hear her, but respectable suffrage ladies were appalled.

It also explains many campaigners’ reluctance to support divorce reform, and the emphasis they placed on mothers’ right to custody of children. ‘Did she not bear them?’ asked Louisa Lawson’s crusading paper, The Dawn. ‘Did she not merge her individuality into that of the helpless babe over whom she hung in its ailing weakness? It is time men acknowledged the meaning of motherhood.’[24] How this outlook limited the campaign’s horizons emerges strikingly from the Queensland Women’s Suffrage League’s 1890 annual meeting, where Alderman J.A. Clarke suggested there was nothing wrong with women entering parliament. His wife promptly contradicted him, declaring that the vote was quite sufficient.

The domestic feminist outlook distinguished Australian campaigners from many of their British and American sisters, who embraced a vigorous liberal philosophy emphasizing individual rights. The American movement had a strong association with earlier anti-slavery agitation, while the British movement reflected the existence of a sizeable surplus of single females. By contrast Australian marriage and fertility rates were still relatively high. The institution of marriage appeared to most people as the only realistic possibility. These social conditions gave rise to a strong family orientation which the women’s rights activists could not transcend.

Of course such views were hardly confined to feminists. On the contrary, they were the dominant social ideology, and the labour movement was also deeply imbued with them. A leader of the Australian Workers’ Union, which supported women’s rights, argued in 1889 that unionism would reduce sexual immorality by increasing wages and thereby allowing more marriages.[25] But such an outlook was particularly limiting for a movement whose success depended so specifically on getting women to look beyond the garden gate. Moreover, as the Women’s Liberation Movement was to recognise many decades later, an end to female oppression depends on challenging the capitalist family, within which sexist ideas and roles are reproduced.

In the absence of such a challenge, demands for equal rights were easy to contain or co-opt. Consider the case of married women’s property. The issue mainly concerned the middle classes who had property to worry about, though there was also a philanthropic concern for the poor. Introducing a reform act in the Victorian parliament, Mr J. O’Shanassy announced that its ‘most prominent function’ was ‘the protection of the entire fabric upon which society rests’, to be achieved by ensuring that wives without property and their children did not become a burden on the state.[26]

Similarly, women’s suffrage went through Australian parliaments more easily than Britain or America partly because it was promoted as a means to safeguard and elevate the existing social order, which the middle class naturally endorsed. The limited impact of this reform is evidenced by the fact that no woman sat in an Australian parliament until Edith Cowan in 1921. Betty Searle writes of Australia’s middle class suffragists:

It was their class, and particularly its women members who most strongly promoted the ideology of motherhood and the idea of family nurturing as women’s natural role which unwittingly imposed ‘domestic feminist’ policies on working class women … [I]n the long run women’s suffrage contributed to a more orderly and stable middle class society, and helped promote legislation to benefit women and girls without upsetting the traditional sexual division of labour.[27]

Sex and class

The family, and the social roles it cements, are a big part of holding together nation states. Australian politicians, consumed with pulling together a federation, paid a lot of attention to this around the turn of the century. So did trade unionists. One reason was that family breakdowns had become more common in the 1880s and 1890s. Pressure had grown for the liberalisation of divorce and the birth rate had fallen. New South Wales government statistician Timothy Coghlan even published a pamphlet, which helped bring on a Royal Commission on the Decline of the Birth Rate.

The semi-panic over fertility reflected the close links between family, gender issues and White Australia. Trepidation about the huge coloured populations to the north meant that falling Australian birthrates raised the spectre of ‘race suicide’. If there were not enough white people to occupy the continent, the ‘yellow races’ would invade it sooner or later.

On the eve of federation, a round-table discussion in The Worker complained of the ‘villainous wrong inflicted upon womankind by the continuance of [Melanesian] labour in our midst’.[28] Similarly, agitation against the Chinese returned again and again to their supposed designs on white females. In the labour press, ‘articles dealing with the question of the Woman’s Movement focussed on the Asiatics as sexual exploiters, and urged housewives to become politicised and boycott Chinese vegetable vendors.’[29] That such racism did not in fact protect white women from abuse was demonstrated by the white Lambing Flat rioters, who showed a particular enmity toward the European wife of a Chinese: ‘she was narrowly saved from being raped and her infant child from being burnt alive.’[30]

If the female role underpinned nationalism and racism, so, inevitably, did the contrasting male role; as when a politician insisted that the new nation state must be ‘a federation of the manhood of Australia’.[31] South Australian MP Alexander Hill showed how this complex of ideas ran counter to female emancipation, when he warned of the danger posed by women’s suffrage: ‘...imagine a female brigade going into the House of Parliament when some great question was under discussion, such as whether we should declare war against Russia ...’[32]

Sexism fed on and contributed to the political and industrial weaknesses of organised labour. Recent work on gender and class often gives us a picture of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries in which women confront a hostile male-dominated labour movement, while the latter collaborates with the bosses and the state to exclude them from paid employment and union membership.[33] Some unions certainly did exclude them, but we have seen that in other cases male unionists made determined efforts to help them form unions and to back them in disputes. Still, the exclusion was inexcusable, and not in the unions’ long term interest.

Why then did it happen? In some cases, it arose from fears that employers would use females as cheap labour to break the unions. Reporting on plans to employ female clerks in 1900, the New South Wales Public Service Board argued:

No doubt the employment of women … will have the effect of curtailing to some extent the employment of men; but this will produce a result beneficial to the State, because an equal number of men will be compelled to seek positions which women cannot occupy, and therefore will be available to engage in occupations tending to develop the resources of the Colony. [34]

Here we see a direct threat to men’s jobs. Yet in other cases the threat was not so clear. In 1889, the Typographical Society organised a boycott of Louisa Lawson’s paper The Dawn for using female printers. On the one hand, Lawson had sacked male printers and replaced them with females whom she paid less than union rates.[35] On the other hand, Lawson was pro-union and it was not unusual for radical journals to pay below union rates. The boycott was based as much on sexist ideas as defence of workers’ jobs or living standards. We might simply denounce male prejudice and move on, except that so many sexist ideas were embraced by the most politically aware women of the time, not only in the suffrage groups but among female employees directly affected.

When the New South Wales post office dismissed married women in August 1896 there was little resistance to this by women’s groups, even though one prominent female official to be retired, Lizzie Ferris, was later a member of the Womanhood Suffrage League. Even worse, ‘Louisa Dunkley of the Victorian Women’s Post and Telegraph Association agreed married women should resign and did so herself when she married Edward Kraegen in 1903’; and it appears that single female teachers endorsed and even campaigned for a ban on married women in the years before 1910.[36] Presumably they saw the married women as unwelcome competitors.

Like racism, hostility to women’s employment was linked to economic fears, but can only be fully understood in the context of social conditions and the dominant ideas in society as a whole. These ideas relentlessly reinforced women’s domestic role. A labour movement unable to defeat capitalism on the industrial or political battlefields would hardly be able to break free of its dominant ideology.

The trade unions which initially set the tone for labour fell mostly into two categories: urban craft unions, with their petit-bourgeois aspirations; and the bush unions. The craft unions were highly exclusive and tended to mimic the middle class faith in the conventional family. Keeping women at home and out of the trade flowed naturally from this (they also wanted to keep most males out of the trade). If the bush unions were more sympathetic to women’s rights, this flowed partly from the more egalitarian attitudes of their small farmer members, a product of the rural ‘family economy’. In any case, both the exclusivism of the crafts and the rural egalitarianism of the small holders represented social formations fated to decline; urban mass production and mass unionism were already on the rise, drawing women into production alongside men. The first signs of this, in the eighties and nineties, sparked labour’s first serious efforts to organise women workers.

The fact that most women couldn’t join unions -- because of sexism, being housewives, working in non-union sweatshops, doing outwork or domestic service -- didn’t necessarily mean they were excluded from the labour movement. They made their presence felt in a variety of labour disputes and campaigns, organising petitions and physically confronting scabs. This was noted at the time. For example Tasmanian MP Charles Grant opposed female suffrage on the grounds that women were more emotional, as shown during strikes where ‘the women, generally speaking, are the chief disturbing cause, and they hold on … for longer than men do.’[37] The conventions of the time ensured their actions seldom made it into the historical record in this way, but that very fact suggests their role has been understated. It is likely more women were active in the labour movement than in, say, the suffrage societies.

Female political figures conventionally viewed (through modern eyes) as ‘feminists’ frequently identified in some way with labour or its objectives. Vida Goldstein, for example, stood for parliament in 1903. The Labor Party was hostile to this venture, a fact commonly seen as evidence of a ‘class/gender’ conflict. In reality it had more to do the parliamentary ambitions of a political machine. The ALP rank and file, including many women, also regarded Goldstein’s campaign as a threat to labour unity. They were suspicious of leading women’s rights advocates who employed domestic servants, had no experience of hard work, and displayed patronising attitudes towards working people. However we should not forget that Goldstein’s election platform included such classic labour movement demands as nationalisation of coal mines, public transport and lighting. The gap between the two sides was not so immense.

The well-documented debates over female suffrage offer a precise and detailed example of the interplay between class and gender at the end of the colonial era. The new Labor Party was lukewarm about the suffrage, unless it offered clear electoral advantage. To understand why, we need to consider the social basis of the vote in 19^th Century Australia. There were property requirements of some kind in every colony, which ended around the turn of the century for the lower houses but remained in the upper houses. Electors with property in more than one place had more than one vote. Colonial elites claimed property brought an insight into, or a commitment to public affairs. But implicitly, and sometime explicitly, the real meaning was a commitment to the existing social order.

The labour movement and progressive opinion generally, acutely aware that the upper houses had blocked popular reforms, placed great emphasis on abolishing property-based and plural voting. Conservative forces, aware that they were gradually losing ground, sought after almost any device to shore up the same practices. One of these was votes for (selected) women.

South Australia was the first colony to adopt female suffrage. However the initial moves made in 1886 would only have given the vote to unmarried women with assets. The underlying argument, repeated in subsequent debates around the country, was that voting rights should represent property. Wives’ assets were represented by their husbands’ ballot, but single female property owners needed a vote of their own. South Australia had never had property-based voting for the lower house, so this was an obviously reactionary measure.

The trade unions countered with a mass petition demanding votes for all women. The conservatives tried various other measures over several years, such as extending the vote just for the upper house -- sometimes stating openly that this would give the upper house greater power, and ‘if they did not take this opportunity perhaps they would not have it again’.[38]

Despite the impassioned arguments of Mary Lee, both the Suffrage League and the WCTU initially supported the bill. Then, however, the Trades and Labor Council bluntly told the League it would only support full adult suffrage. The unions’ firm stand pushed the Suffrage League to change its approach, and even the WCTU eventually recognised the manipulation behind the property vote. In other words, it was the labour movement that took the most progressive stand. The resulting united front between labour and the suffrage movement contributed to all South Australian women getting the vote ahead of any other colony.

The issue was posed in fairly similar terms in other colonies. In New South Wales, Henry Parkes impressed Rose Scott with an 1890 bill to abolish plural voting and give women the vote. The background to the bill is obscure, but probably Parkes’ real intention was to preserve plural voting; he hoped that linking it to women suffrage would reduce its appeal in sections of the parliament. Had he sincerely wished to introduce the suffrage, or to end plural voting, he could have introduced each as a separate bill.[39] In Queensland, there were many stories of squatters arranging multiple property votes through offspring and relatives.

It should now be clear that the labour movement was on solid ground opposing partial suffrage. In Queensland, it should be noted, labour pioneered the women’s suffrage issue in the pages of William Lane’s weekly Boomerang. Both Lane and Leontine Cooper contributed articles on the subject; Cooper also argued openly that not all women had to become wives and mothers, pointing to the large numbers who had jobs.

Labour was on weaker ground when it came to another much-debated issue of the time: whether the women’s vote would be conservative. There were people on all sides of the debate who put this forward, as an argument for or against. The Australian Socialist League fretted in 1891 that ‘if we have reason to believe that women would use voting power to keep us in our economic Slough of Despond, it is better to withhold the principle.’[40] Years later a speaker urged the conservative Australian Women’s National League to support the suffrage because its members could use their votes to oppose socialism. But then again, there were some on all sides who thought the female vote would be left of centre.

Experience was to confirm none of these hopes or fears; as far as we can tell, women voted very much like the men of their own social background. ‘To add a million women to the register is the same as to add a million men,’ wrote Vida Goldstein in 1911. ‘Each party gets its share.’[41] Class remained the defining feature of Australian politics.

Let there be no doubt: neither the Labor Party nor most socialists actually opposed women’s suffrage out of fears about how they would vote. On the contrary Labor, like most liberal politicians, was broadly on the pro-suffrage side of the argument. But in allowing this vague concern to impinge at all on an issue of principle, Labor and especially the socialists showed how much they were relying on votes and elections to change society. Parliamentarism and sexism went hand in hand. In the aftermath of disastrous strike defeats, and in the absence of practical experience to demonstrate how little could be expected from parliament, this was understandable. It was still mistaken, but this was a mistake shared – in inverted fashion – by the feminists, who likewise hoped the women’s vote would achieve wondrous things.

So the divisions between Labor and the suffrage groups should not be exaggerated. To some degree they reflected justified worker suspicions of the leading women’s rights figures; and to some degree they reflected the conservative aspects of each political current. In the case of organised labour, the conservative elements became far stronger after the defeat of the Great Strikes.

Within the labour movement, socialists stood -- in principle -- for women’s equality. In practice their advocacy of female emancipation was flawed, like that of the feminists, by a strong attachment to the conventional family and the division of labour that flowed from it. They might defend female workers’ rights to join unions, without always understanding the importance of actively fighting to organise them.

What of the left organisations’ own activities? Here some historians have made sharp criticisms. Joy Damousi presents a damning indictment of the ‘strict division of labour and the organisation of space within left-wing groups’ :

The public realm of speaking, proselytising and agitating was perceived to be the preserve of male activists ... women’s political work was largely confined to the private, feminine and domestic space of organising fund-raising activities, such as concerts, picnics and bazaars and preparing programs and decorations for May Day celebrations. [42]

Of course there is some a factual basis for this, but the argument is completely ahistorical. Taken in context of their time, the early Australian socialists were very advanced. The European socialist ‘bible’ on female emancipation, August Bebel’s Woman, Past, Present and Future had a considerable readership on the Australian left. So did William Lane’s novel The Working Man’s Paradise, which challenged gender stereotypes. Lane’s heroine Nelly is a union activist and the intellectual equal of the men; and she forsakes marriage for the sake of the struggle. Bruce Scates points out that both leading characters, Ned and Nelly, deviate from conventional expectations about male and female appearance and behaviour. Lane advocated equal pay, and challenged the editors of the Typographers’ Journal when that union refused women entry to the trade, writing that ‘a woman has every bit as much right to work and to live as a man has’.[43]

Socialist groups debated birth control and abortion as well as that perenniel favourite, ‘Woman Under Socialism’ . Left wing trade unionist John Fitzgerald insisted working women should ‘be free of the meddling of male officials ‘and come forth as the organiser of their own bodies’’, while his comrade Con Lindsay saw childcare as a union issue. Socialist women like Rose Summerfield and Creo Stanley spoke from public platforms and tried to organise female trade unions, in the face of widespread public disapproval.

Even women’s heavy involvement in the ‘social’ side of left activities looks different in its historical context. Virtually all progressive opinion accepted this division of labour at the time. Moreover, the social events were more central to political life than they are today. Socialists, and the labour movement generally, relied on such activities to sustain morale and to provide an alternative to bourgeois culture. They saw the participants as making a political contribution; and in a society still hostile to women intervening in public, these were ways in which ‘women traded the home for the meeting and exercised the right to speak and be heard. In this community of socialists, women claimed equal citizenship with men.’[44]

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