A Brief History of Australian Women
- Significance of Sexual Imbalance. - The Morality Debate - The Legal Stratus of Women - Women and Politics -
The circumstances under which white settlement occurred in Australia and the way in which that settlement spread throughout the continent continued to influence the role of women in Australian society at least until the early years of the twentieth century.
For most of that time there was an imbalance in the ratio of men to women in the population. During the convict period this imbalance was caused by the relatively small numbers of women convicted of crimes for which they could be transported, but later, the constant flow of young, mainly male immigrants into the goldfields worked against the hope for a more even distribution of the sexes.
|
|
During the convict period men outnumbered women by about four to one. Special efforts were made at government level in the 1820's and l830's to encourage the emigration from Britain of lower class women, ostensibly to work as servants in the colonies, but in practice to improve the sex ratio.
Female immigration was also encouraged by private individuals and voluntary associations like Caroline Chisholm and her Family Loan Colonisation Society. To a large extent, however, it was the Aboriginal women who bore the brunt of the sex imbalance in the population, especially in areas of recent settlement.
The squatting movement continued to attract young, unmarried males, thereby creating social problems easily imagined by a gentleman with the tastes of E.G. Wakefield, transported for abducting an heiress, when he wrote his treatise on colonisation, A Letter from Sydney (1829). As a result, plans for the systematic colonisation of Western Australia and South Australia contained elaborate arrangements for bringing at young female emigrants in proportion with the male emigrants.
The sex imbalance in the old convict colonies was rekindled during the gold rushes and exaggerated for much of the rest of the nineteenth century by the attraction for young men of rural and outback Australia where there was little prospect of employment for young women, though prospects of marriage were good for the bold or the desperate.
Caroline Chisholm’s early scheme for placing women in remote situations, and later associations which sought to place governesses and other approved ‘gentlewomen” in suitable situations in the bush, over-came the problem of propriety. The numbers assisted in these ways, were, however, very small in comparison with the sex imbalance in Australia and the “surplus woman” problem in Britain.
Australia’s coastal cities were the first and last resort for most of those women who did emigrate. The cities came, also, to contain disproportionate numbers of wives and children whose husbands were away from home — up country — for longer or shorter periods. For most unmarried women there was a better chance of employment in the cities in domestic work, or later, in light industry, or in the lower professional or clerical positions, but the prospects of marriage were not as good as legend had them.
Significance of Sexual Imbalance.
This long-lasting shortage of women was of great significance, both for the attitudes of women towards their role in society, and for the place which was accorded to women by men. It gave rise to the myth that not only was marriage easy for women in Australia, but a good marriage at that. This may have been true during the convict period when women seem to have been very sensible about preferring to marry men who could provide both economic security and social status, but it ceased to be true by the mid-nineteenth century and upwards of 15 per cent never married.
Men also were becoming more fussy about the kind of women they wished to marry. A certain amount of anxiety about the quality of the women who had come to the colonies survived from the convict period. This was combined with a sense of protectiveness about what was after all, a scarce resource, and widespread unease about how to treat women in a society which was still unused to taking the presence of the female sex for granted.
By the end of the century the contrasting use of the word “men” for men and ‘ladies” for women indicated that the worlds of the two sexes were not only geographically separate. They belonged almost in different classes, and were certainly expected to abide by separate creeds of behaviour.
This was particularly evident with regard to sexuality, but it applied also to work and aspiration. Purity and innocence were admired in a girl before marriage, but they made her seem formidable to a shy suitor. The high re-marriage rate for widows and other women who had lost their husbands suggested that many men were intimidated by the standards of morality set for women.
Such thinking certainly lay behind the lack of provision for widows in colonial society and the kind of divorce legislation introduced in the various colonies in the later part of the nineteenth century. "It was unnecessary and undesirable that governmental or charitable support be found for women who, once freed of an unsuccessful marriage, could easily find another husband."
In such ways, marriage was established as the major career for most women, and both institutional and legislative pressures encouraged women to think in this direction. Although the extreme suggestion widely discussed about the turn of the century of placing a tax on men who chose to remain unmarried was never implemented, economic arrangements gradually came to favour the married man.
The family, represented by its male head, became the base unit of an economic and legal system which sought increasingly to regulate the activities of society in the name of fairness and equality. For men, failure to marry and thus achieve the benefits bestowed on the head of the household was seen as trading comfort and responsibility for freedom. A woman who failed to marry was reduced to the level of what was really chronic unemployment. Even though she was financially supported by a father, a brother, or her own strenuous exertions in a labour market which aimed to drive her into marriage, her status was tenuous and anomalous. The 1907 Harvester Judgment set a family wage to support a man, wife and three children in “frugal comfort”. No female rate was set, though the custom of paying half the male rate was later formalised.
The Morality Debate.
There has been considerable (and not very helpful) debate about the moral virtue of the first and subsequent generations of Australian women settlers. The superior gentlemen of the early settlement who dismissed the female convicts as “damned whores”, however, were largely outnumbered by those who were happy to cohabit and form families with or without the legality of marriage.
Much of the subsequent debate about the morality of the settlement and the virtue of the women convicts has been based on profound ignorance of the marriage customs of the lower orders of British society at the time. A "traditional church wedding" was a middle class custom, and in many ways a statement of aspiration the Upper Middle status at that time.
Further, the unwillingness to distinguish between the kinds of complaints made about the female convicts and those made about female immigrants (brought out at government expense during and after the convict period to make up for the shortage of women), shows that it was not the legal status or morals of the women which caused concern. It was rather the breakdown of traditional methods of managing courtship and marriage which caused trouble. Men and women both felt uneasy about marrying persons whose family, background, and origins were quite unknown to them. The educated classes solved these problems easily by writing letters, producing family records, and, very often, by arranging marriages through distant branches of their families. This again had much to do with protection of, or aspiration to social status in England. For ordinary people here in the colony however, marriage was set about with great uncertainty. Men had a little choice, but women were thought unwise to reject any offer.
Yet most of the women who came to Australia as settlers shared the ambitions of male immigrants for a better standard of living, security, and greater comfort than they could expect at home. They demonstrated this by the practical way in which they approached the business of marriage, by their acceptance in the early days, for example, of defacto arrangements with high-status men where their convict status made legal marriage unlikely; and by the way in which they faced hardship, loneliness, and childbirth in huts in the bush.
Questions about the morality of women were raised again towards the end of the nineteenth century when it became clear that the birthrate was declining in Australia despite favourable economic conditions and the presumed vitality of the population. Women, it was suggested, were derelict in their duty. Unnatural practices such as contraception and abortion as well as selfishness and an inordinate love of pleasure were mentioned as the main reasons why the average number of children born into each Australian family declined from around 7 in 1891 to 5 in 1911.
Australian women were showing themselves to be very modern in their appreciation of the cost of providing each child with the care and education it needed. The visiting American VCTU organiser Jessie Ackermann remarked in 1913 on the amazing ability of Australian women to cope with their families of four and more children without either domestic help or modern conveniences.
An unacknowledged contest between women and policy makers over the quality versus the quantity of population became one of the main themes of Australian history in the twentieth century. Governments sought to increase the birth-rate and to make up losses caused by wars by constant exhortation to “populate or perish”, and through a series of welfare measures such as the “baby bonus” in 1912 and later, child endowment.
Most of the social security measures for women, as widows, deserted wives, and more recently, the single mothers, have been essentially to provide for and protect their children. Yet women have continued to practise birth control despite earlier attempts to suppress knowledge or ban it for religious reasons, and increasingly women have accepted abortion as a secondary form of family limitation, again in defiance of Church rulings and attempts at legal suppression.
The birth rate did rise after World War II, peaking in 1960; but by 1986 it was half the 1960 figure, and at only 90 per cent of the level necessary to maintain the population. The average family size was 2—4 children and the proportion of women remaining childless fell to an all-time low of eight percent in the 1970's.
The Legal Stratus of Women
For most of the nineteenth century the legal and political position of women in Australia was very different from that of men. A woman’s legal position depended largely on whether she was a wife or daughter. A married woman was not legally able to make contracts, hire servants, incur debts, assume custody of her children, dispose of her own property or her own earnings on her own responsibility.
An unmarried woman without living male relatives, or a widow, had greater responsibility for her own actions in the eyes of the law. Marriage confirmed a woman’s legal status as comparable with that of a child. Only the unmarried mother was entitled to custody of her own children and to make decisions about their education or religious upbringing. Until early in the twentieth century, 14 remained the legal age of consent for a girl. It was raised to 16 in 1910.
Gradual changes were wrought in the legal status of women in the later part of the nineteenth century, especially in relation to property, earnings, and the right to sue for divorce and custody of the children.
A further set of reforms in the early twentieth century strengthened women’s claims to equal citizenship. As well as becoming entitled to vote at some elections, they were also permitted to enter universities and the professions and to serve on juries.
|
|
Women and Politics
It has been a matter of national pride that in admitting women to the franchise in 1894, South Australia was one of the earliest governments in the Western world to do so. Only New Zealand and some States of the United States of America preceded South Australia. Western Australia followed in 1899, and the Commonwealth in 1902. Other States fell into line, Victoria being last in 1908, though the right to participate in municipal politics and to stand for election was delayed longer. It was 1923 before a woman could seek election to the Victorian State Parliament.
The pride which accompanied enfranchisement and the formation of women’s sections of the main political parties was not carried through into early or significant political representation. Three women presented themselves for election to the Senate in 1903, and one for the Federal House of Representatives. None was successful.
It was not until 1921 that a woman was elected to an Australian parliament. In that year Edith Cowan became a member of the Lower House in Western Australia. The first women did not go to Canberra until 1943 when Dorothy Tangney was elected to the Senate and Enid Lyons to the House of Representatives.
Until the early 1980s, only 23 women had represented the Australian electorate in Canberra and a similarly small number had been elected to State parliaments. However, in the 1987 Federal election, 26 women were elected, making up around 10 per cent of the total. This figure was much the same in the State parliaments and in local government around Australia at that time.
In general, women have been more successful in the conservative parties, suggesting perhaps a class component in attitudes to women in politics. However, different methods of election and pre-selection have also assisted women into Upper Houses. In the 1987 Federal election, there were 17 women in the Australian Senate, but only 9 in the House of Representatives.
The common wisdom in the mid-20th Century was that women had not tried hard enough to get into politics, that they were an electoral liability because other women would not vote for them. Only latter was it acknowledged that the processes of pre-selection and the sources of support are severely weighted against women in all major parties, and even that politics have been more concerned with masculine problems and modes of behaviour than with feminine ones.
The formerly discreet roles played in Australian politics by such groups as the United Associations of Women, the Housewives Association, the Australian Federation of Women Voters, or the Country Women’s Association, as well as the women’s sections of the main political parties, gave way to the more dramatic politicking of the Women’s Electoral Lobby and more feminist groups on one side, and organisations like the Right to Life movement and Women Who Want to be Women on the other. in the '80's and beyond.
Beverley Kingston; Lois Byron - The Australian Encyclopedia - National Geographic Society, Terry Hills, NSW, 1988.