Contradictory contestations

A review of Debutante Nation

BY TOM O’LINCOLN

Susan Margarey, Sue Rowley and Susan Sheridan (eds) Debutant Nation: Feminism Contests the 1890s, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1993. This review first appeared in Hecate, 19 (2), 1993.

WITH the century’s end approaching and debates about nationhood in the air, it is good too see some critical writing about the 1890s, the decade from which so much nationalist politics takes its departure. This is especially true if the critiques are written from the vantage point of an oppressed section of society which has been denied its fair share of the supposed “national interest”.

In 1988, Aborigines reminded us that we had no business celebrating the European invasion of the continent and the founding of a racist society. The contributors to Debutante Nation, writing from a feminist perspective, seek to challenge the “masculinism” associated with the Legend of the Nineties. They seek to set questions about women and gender at the centre of the discussion, though the editors also state that their intention is “not to propose that the conflict between the sees was the only show on the road in the 1890s. Rather it is to demonstrate that the other shows – nationalism, colonialism, class struggle – look very different when gender relations are included.”

This is a good idea, and I found many of the individual contributions pretty interesting. Take Gail Reekie’s piece. Looking at the conflicts and contradictions amongst female sales staff and customers in clothing shops is a novel way of coming to grips with the interaction of sex, class and commodity relations. Paula Hamilton’s study of cartoons and other portrayals of the “servant problem” in the popular press adds another interesting dimension. Susan Margarey looks at employment trends and suggests that greater job opportunities made it possible for women to stage something of a “strike against marriage” in the nineties. There are several useful literary studies, the best probably being Kay Schaffer’s investigation of Henry Lawson’s drover’s wife, whose image in our consciousness has shifted numerous times as the culture has evolved. Towards the front of the book, Anna Zakhalka’s photographic re-working of paintings about the bush, putting women at the centre, offers a powerful visual indication of what these writers are out to do.

In some ways, to be sure, the project is not entirely original. John Docker has covered a certain amount of the ground in The Nervous Nineties. Still, there is room for more than one discussion of these themes.

By and large, the individual contributions in Debutante Nation are too short and too sketchy to prove a point comprehensively on their own. Consequently, many of the arguments and conclusions are a bit forced. In one of the literary discussions Robert Dixon tries to argue that Rosa Praed’s romance, Fugitive Anne, offers “a starting point for an opposing strategy” to combat sexist literary conventions, but I was unable to find much that was strategic in his four page discussion of Praed’s “generic diversity”. Reading Josie Castle and Helen Pringle’s suggestion that cartoons of cross-dressed politicians such as Edmund Barton dressed as a nursemaid (holding a baby labeled The New Commonwealth) expressed male fears of threatened virility, loss of manhood and even fears of enslavement by women, required some considerable suspension of disbelief. In other cases the conclusions were left rather vague.

Still that needn’t matter if, having read the book, we come away with an overall picture. This, however, is the difficulty. You do get a very fuzzy sort of overall impression. But, as is the case in much recent work, the editors have firmly set their faces against bringing it into focus. They are anxious to “counteract any suggestion that we are constructing a singular analytical position”, though actually they needn’t have worried. While my starting this review with a somewhat random survey of individual contributions made the strengths of the book stand out, anyone reading systematically from page one will be struck by confusions and inconsistencies.

Even the editorial itself contains contradictions. At one point we read that the book will seek to “gender the nation feminine: dancing rather than parliamentary processions” – then in the next paragraph we are told that the book ranges from “bedrooms to parliamentary debates on the state.” Is parliament masculine or feminine, a valid or invalid topic…or just what are the editors trying to say?

More importantly, the impression is created that feminists are the first people ever to mount a critique of the “Legend”. We are told that “feminist critics and historians writing about the 1890s became acutely conscious of how odd, how parochial, how redolent of the backwoods the early patriarchal depictions, from Vance Palmer’s to Russel Ward’s appeared.” But this is hardly a new insight. Similar or related criticisms were made long ago by a range of commentators both left-of-centre (by Manning Clark, and the Marxist Gordon Adler) (1) and further right: for example A.D. Hope savagely mocked the parochialism of “the stock-rail and bowyangs school, the great mateship picnic, and the literary canons of Clancy’s Thumbnail Dipped in Tar.” (2)

The feminist critique itself is not so new, either. Reading Debutante Nation, you could easily get the impression that the debate only really got going with the publication of Marilyn Lake’s 1986 essay, “The Politics of Respectability”, which appears here as chapter one. Before that, as Kay Schaffer mentions, Anne Summers and Miriam Dixson wrote books, and other studies followed, but Schaffer asserts that these had “virtually no impact on the debates between men.” Leaving aside the sexist description of a nationalist tradition including Nettie and Helen Palmer and Katherine Prichard as “debates between men”, the claim is mistaken and devalues women’s contribution on all sides of the argument. Certainly Summers and Dixson had an impact. That leading proponent of the radical nationalist school, Ian Turner, conceded in response to Dixson’s indictment: “Confronted with that criticism, I can say only that I recognize its accuracy, and that it hurts. It forces me to rethink many of my positions.” (3)

Most problematic, however, is the editors’ justification for the book’s title. “Our title invokes a rite of passage specific to women across Anglo-Australian society, from Methodist church halls in country towns to the city mansions of the Establishment.” But of course, not only were Aboriginal and non-white immigrant women excluded from this rite of passage, but also female factory hands, maidservants and prostitutes. Avoiding a singular analytical position does not keep the book from adopting a singularly middle class point of view.

Once upon a time, books built up an argument; these days the common practice is to unravel one as you go. At least that can make for an interesting opening. This book starts with Marilyn Lake’s essay, then assigns John Docker to pull it apart. Lake analyses the nineties as a “struggle for cultural control between masculinists and feminists”, seeing the Legend as propaganda for the former side. Romantic images of the independent bushman obscured the oppression of women who were excluded from the fun; publications like the Bulletin were really a “men’s press” projecting a universalised set of male values; and even the labour movement was a male plot. The nineties appear as a triumph for “masculinism”, with feminism apparently not breaking through until the twenties. It is a fairly glib line of argument, which John Docker has little difficulty in counteracting.

Docker is, in fact, the perfect spoiler. His lucid and pleasant prose contrasts sharply with the awkward writing of some other contributors (who start sentences with “significantly” then don’t say what the significance is, and who call everything a “discourse”.) He’s an expert on the cultural issues of the nineties and is emerging as a leading post-modern critic. In The Nervous Nineties he shows little patience with analysts who think they’ve “bitten through to the core”, insisting that there is no core to the issues of the nineties or any other decade. Instead everything is multi-dimensional. The Bulletin of the nineties is a “heady contradictory cocktail”, while Henry Lawson is a “chameleon”; better still, Joseph Furphy’s Rigby’s Romance is “multi-voiced, multi-styled, multi-toned, muti-accented.” (4) Docker and the editors of Debutante Nation share a common approach here, along with many other contemporary critics. We might call it the post-modern orthodoxy.

Docker is on solid ground when he charges Marilyn Lake with constructing a “Feminist Legend” that can’t withstand serious scrutiny. He is able to show that the writers of the time didn’t always romanticise the bush; indeed Henry Lawson often highlighted its drought-ridden, heart-breaking side. He points out that the Bulletin was only one publication among many, and that it wasn’t so bush-oriented anyway. In addition he reminds us that feminism was a force in the nineties – as with Louisa Lawson, or the “practical dress” movement. Docker’s demolition of Lake’s thesis is thorough-going, and it clears the deck admirably for…what?

Unfortunately, for nothing in particular. What follows is just a variety of interesting but sometimes confused articles from differing perspectives. Occasionally the contributors contradict themselves, as when Bruce Scates tells us that poor men demanded work whereas “women argued over rations” – then says one page later that “the women of nineteenth century Melbourne demanded work not bread.” And often they contradict each other. For instance, Castle and Pringle argue that the cartoonists of the late 19^th Century couldn’t come up with a convincing female symbol for the emerging nation. This apparently says something about the uncertainties of the time. Yet in the following chapter Barbara Holloway tells us that among poets, the use of allegorical female representations of the nation was endemic. Is this contradiction real or only apparent? The absence of a common analytical framework makes it impossible for us to tell – or to know whether it matters.

The editors would probably say that it doesn’t. They’re not interested in putting together some “essential” picture of the past, let alone in deciding what to think about it. Not for them the illusion that there is “one window we can press our noses against” to see the truth. They’d rather tell a series of “stories”, each presumably true in its own way. Even Lake’s “Feminist Legend”, despite its deconstruction at Docker’s hands, is apparently still OK – for legends are stories too, and “it is only when legends fossilize into all-inclusive traditions that the process of story-telling is blocked.”

But just as Docker’s insistence on multi-layered and flexible approaches eventually settles into a curiously uniform pattern, so these anti-dogmatic intentions do not prevent some radical feminist dogmas from repeatedly intruding.

Consider the contributors’ attitudes to organized labour. Marilyn Lake announces in chapter one that “the Labor movement was a men’s movement”. Docker challenges this notion obliquely, but that has little impact on the other writers. Bruce Scates describes working women as “dispersed and disorganised”, while Gail Reekie apparently thinks that only “working men were part of a world-wide socialist movement”. Thus Alexandra Kollontai, Sylvia Pankhurst and Rosa Luxemburg are written out of history along with Prichard and the Palmers.

True, some contributors grudgingly acknowledge that individual members or sections of the labour movement weren’t anti-woman. Patricia Grimshaw recognises that the journal Tocsin supported equal rights for women in many fields, and had female correspondents. But by the end of her chapter Grimshaw is back to the clichés: “male labour analysts…male labour movement”.

Let me take just a moment to suggest just how one-sided this is. Tailoresses in the Melbourne and Sydney clothing trades played an important role in the growth of the trade union movement, with their 1882 Melbourne strike in particular spurring on the proliferation of unions and even giving rise to the term “log of claims”. Their delegates were acclaimed at the 1885 Inter-colonial Trade Union Congress. The Australian Workers’ Union, under socialist influence, stated explicitly that women were welcome in its ranks; it established women’s divisions in Queensland and NSW and employed female organisers, as well as subscribing to women’s co-operative laundries in Sydney and Wagga. William Lane ensured that the Australian Labor Federation included female suffrage in its platform and assisted financially in the formation of a women’s union.

Two all-female public sector unions secured the insertion of equal pay into the 1902 Commonwealth Public Service Act and, in Sydney, in 1903 the established hotel union successfully opposed registration of a new union in the industry, part of its argument being that the new union was for men only. In 1904 the NSW Shop Assistants’ Union registered an award providing equal apprenticeship opportunities for girls and boys. Moreover large numbers of working class women had an interest in the success of even the all-male unions, given their frequent dependence on the wages of male relatives and husbands. (5)

It’s also true that there was immense sexism, especially in the craft unions, which feminists (and socialists) have rightly criticised. But what is objectionable in Debutante Nation is that most of the writers who set out to “gender feminine” the world of the nineties largely ignore the role played by women in the labour movement. Consequently they largely ignore the fact that women contested this arena too, and not without male support. The reason I emphasize this issue is because I think that, in the long run, the labour movement can contribute more to changing society for the better, including for women, than any social force. This reflects, of course, my own Marxist perspective with its singular analytical position and desire to put together a coherent view of the world.

It’s probably because of this orientation that when reading and re-reading Debutante Nation I kept delving into one chapter or another with great interest, yet ultimately putting the book down with a sense of frustration. Post-modern modes of analysis can tell us any number of “stories”, but is that good enough when we’re addressing the oppression of half the population? Don’t we need to make sense of all the issues, in order to develop strategies to fight back? I think we do, which is why in the end I came away from this book with enduring enthusiasm for only one chapter: Marilyn Lake’s essay on “The Politics of Respectability”. Yes, the analysis is wrong. Yes, Lake crudely attacked the “male labour movement”. But at least she was striving for a coherent understanding of society, and you get the feeling that was because she wanted to change it.

In this sense, if no other, Lake was on the right track. The book as a whole isn’t on any track, and that is what makes it ultimately disappointing.

Notes

1. Manning Clark, A Short History of Australia, New York, Mentor, 1980, p. 90-91; Gordon Adler. “Nationalism in Australian Literature”, Socialist Worker (Sydney) No 3, August-September 1987.

2. A.D. Hope, Native Companions: Essays and Comments on Australian Literature 1936-66, Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1974, p. 92.

3. Ian Turner, Room For Manoeuvre: Writings on History, Politics, Ideas and Play, Melbourne, Drummond, 1982, p. 13.

4. John Docker, The Nervous Nineties: Australian Cultural Life in the 1890s, Sydney, Oxford University Press, p. 69, 122, 120.

5. For details on women in the labour movement see Tom O’Lincoln, United We Stand: Class Struggle in Colonial Australia, Melbourne, Red Rag, 2005; and Sandra Bloodworth and Tom O’Lincoln (eds) Rebel Women in Australian Working Class History, Melbourne, Red Rag, 2008.