Passions of the First Wave Feminists

By S Magarey

This work offers a new view of suffrage-era feminism in Australia, located in rich cultural, social and political context, which also presents a new view of the decades around federation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Feb 13, 2018
• ISBN: 9781742244181

Book preview

Passions of the First Wave Feminists

Passions of the First Wave Feminists

Susan Magarey

A Pluto Press Australia book

Published by

University of New South Wales Press Ltd

University of New South Wales

UNSW Sydney NSW 2052

AUSTRALIA

www.unswpress.com.au

© Susan Magarey 2001

First published 2001

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

National Library of Australia

Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

Magarey, Susan.

Passions of the first wave feminists.

Bibliography.

Includes index.

ISBN 0 86840 780 1.

1. Feminism — Australia — History. 2. Sex — Australia — History. 3. Women — Suffrage — Australia — History.

I. Title.

305.420994

Cover design Anthouse and Justin Archer

Printer BPA

Contents

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

1Introduction: This is How We Forget to Remember

In This Book

Definitions of Some Terms

Some Narratives

SECTION 1: A MOVEMENT OF WOMEN

2The Rising of the Women

The Indecency of Feminism

Sources of Feminism

An Insurrection of Instruction

The New Woman, the Australian Girl and Her Desires

3Women in Movement

Conflict and Cohesion: Rose Scott and the Womanhood Suffrage League of New South Wales

The Goals of the Woman Movement

Desires and Visions: Difference and Equality

SECTION 2: THE WOMAN MOVEMENT’S ISSUES

4Sex

Hydraulic Male Sexuality and Some Hesitations at the Heart of Masculinity

Feminists and Sex: The Personal and the Political

The First Sexual Revolution in Settler-Australia

5Work

Alternatives to Marriage: Women Winning Their Own Livelihoods

Old Men, New Men and a New Nation: Masculinist Reaction

Re-Constructing Separate Spheres

6Citizenship

What We Will Do With the Vote

Votes for Women

Women in Parliament?

SECTION 3: THE ENDS OF THE WOMAN MOVEMENT

7In Conclusion

Passages

A Parable

New Directions

What Difference Did the Woman Movement Make?

Endnotes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Henrietta Dugdale, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

Edith Cowan, reproduced from Peter Cowan, A Unique Position: A Biography of Edith Dircksey Cowan 1861–1932 (University of Western Australia Press), 1978

Louisa Lawson, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

Rose Scott, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

Maybanke Wollstenholme/Anderson, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

Vida Goldstein, reproduced from New Idea, 1 October 1902 61

Domestic battery for intonating or invigorating

William James Chidley, from the Sun, 19 August 1912, State Library of New South Wales

Preventatives, syringes, sold by Brettena Smyth and sundry chemist shops

‘Merry Maid Miles’, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

Women attacking a non-unionist, The Leader, 3 September 1892, from R.H.B. Kearns, Broken Hill A Pictorial History (Investigator Press), Adelaide, 1982

Catherine Helen Spence in Rose Scott’s garden, author’s collection

Mary Lee, Mortlock Library, State Library of South Australia 160

Rose Scott and a canary, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

Elizabeth Webb Nicholls, Mortlock Library, State Library of South Australia

Acknowledgments

Research for this project began longer ago than I like to remember. Nevertheless, I must thank what was, then, the Australian Research Grants Council for the funds which allowed me the privilege of employing, as research assistants, two people of immense capacity. By the time I was finally writing this book, I found that I had all of the material that I could need (and more), assembled and catalogued. For this I owe a very great debt to Robyn Byass, and to Susan Hosking (who has recently won a prize for her teaching in the English Department at Adelaide University). I would like to thank, as well, the custodians of all of the libraries in which Robyn, Susan and I have worked on this project.

Other projects intervened between the initial conception and the completion of this work. One was the compilation of articles about the 1890s which Sue Rowley, Susan Sheridan and I published, with Allen & Unwin, in 1993: Debutante Nation: Feminism Contests the 1890s. I learned a lot from the contributors to this volume, as my endnotes will show. I thank all of them for this. And I thank the co-editors with whom I worked on this volume for an especially warm, pleasurable, and also educational, experience.

Another was the workshop for which Anne Edwards and I finally gained approval from the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. This process required what would now be called ‘a steep learning curve’. Our first proposal was rejected on the grounds that it had no men listed to speak (it had, but only two among some 20 women). When a new regime was established at the Academy, we were encouraged to submit our proposal again and that was successful, but ran into difficulties over numbers. When we suggested that, since all of the paper presenters (by then) were to be women, we could double up in the accommodation provided by the Academy at University House, we encountered such shock and outrage that we could only think that the Academy thought that we would bring all of their projects into disrepute because we proposed to share our bedrooms! The workshop was finally held, late in 1994 (with everyone in separate rooms, in their separate double beds), with enthusiastic participation by many beyond the realms of academic discussion, as well as within. We finally published papers from that workshop, again with Allen & Unwin, in 1996: Women in a Restructuring Australia: Work & Welfare. I enjoyed the collaboration with Anne on this, and thank her for it, and for her continuing support and friendship. I also learned much from the contributors to that work, and that will show in the endnotes here, too.

A third project was called ‘Sex and Citzenship: A History of the Women’s Movement in Australia’. After consultation with Marilyn Lake and Ann Curthoys, I submitted an application to what had become by then the Australian Research Council, for nearly a million dollars. This was ambitious. We got almost a quarter of a million, which was a major achievement. After three years’ work, research on this project is complete, and we have divided the writing into periods, one of us to be responsible for each. It is too early yet to congratulate ourselves on the pleasure of this collaborative work, since our writing is all ahead of us, but I am confident that we will be able to do that. At this stage, though, I want to record my shock and grief that Sarah Zetlein, an honours graduate from Adelaide University, by then a postgraduate student at Sydney University, who had worked on our project from its beginning as a research assistant, took her own life at the end of 1996. I know that my own feeling was shared by the other research assistants. I want to thank them for their support, and for their strenuous, inventive and responsible work: Kate Borrett, Liz Dimmock, Ruth Ford, Ann Genovese, Judith Ion, Tristan Slade, Lizzie Summerfield, Inara Waldron and Deborah Worsley-Pine. They were a wonderful team. And they will want me to express gratitude from all of us to everyone who helped with this research project, and especially to Dr Sue Wills, one of the custodians of the Sydney First Ten Years Collection, who for three years regularly had two, sometimes three, research assistants in her own house, for most of the week. We all owe her a great debt. As this book will show, I learned from their work on late twentieth-century feminism, just as I was considering the feminism of the late nineteenth century.

I want to thank people who have given me particular professional support, sometimes also protection. I want to thank Penny Boumelha, Gary Martin, Robert Ewers, Judith Brine, Lynn Martin, Ric Zuckerman, Andrew Watson, Jonathan Pincus, Clem Macintyre and Deane Fergie — all of Adelaide University — for their continuing support and encouragement. I want also to thank Jill Roe, of Macquarie University, for her willingness to take risks for me, and Marian Quartly, of Monash University, for her praise at the launch of Australian Historical Studies at the Australian Historical Association conference at the University of Melbourne in 1996; it was particularly timely.

There are other people who have helped me over the years of this project, with support, hospitality, wonderful meals and general encouragement. I want to thank Julie Holledge and Mary Moore for emotional succour, as well as the intellectual and gastronomic delights of their friendship. Judy Smart has always brought me intellectual — and oenological — pleasures. Anne Edwards and John Mottram have been good mates, and Mottram’s cooking has been an additional, and initially unexpected, delectation. Newer friends, Mary Spongberg and Guy Fitzroy, and Robyn Ferrell, introduced me to the pleasures of the Korean Baths at Kings Cross, as well as to an array of Sydney eateries, most particularly Guy’s Lolita’s in Glebe Point Road. To Margaret Allen, Suzanne Franzway, Mary Anne Binn-Sallick and Fay Gale (in Adelaide), to Jill Matthews (in Canberra), and Gretchen and John Poiner, and Colleen and Mike Chesterman, (in Sydney), to Anna Davin and Raphael Samuel (in London), and to Liz Wood and Catharine Stimpson (in New York), I will also, always, owe a special debt. Lyndall and Julia Ryan have been good and important friends for a long time; they have done much to expand the political education that I began acquiring in the classrooms of Daphne Gollan at the Australian National University. And I would like, too, to thank Daphne for all that she taught me, not only in those classrooms. I am sad that I will not be able to give copies of this book to either Raphael or Daphne.

Three friends undertook the task of reading this work in manuscript. This is a considerable chore for busy academics, and requires great generosity. Ann Curthoys read it amid preparing lectures for first-year Australian History teaching, and running the History Department at the Australian National University. John Docker read it at a time when one of his eyes was just beginning to recover from treatment described as having knitting-needles stuck into it! Joan Wallach Scott read it on the ‘plane to a conference in Budapest. I am immensely grateful to all three, for the labour itself — especially in such inordinately difficult circumstances (and I think someone should give John a medal!) — and for their constructive and helpful comments. They have, significantly, shaped the finished product.

Susan Sheridan has lived with this book for more than a decade. We climb the stairs to plunder each other’s libraries, bore our friends with esoteric discussions, irritate each other rehearsing long-familiar arguments, share the luxury of reading the same novels and discussing them, and disagree — sometimes quite sharply. Nevertheless, Sue has, generously, had faith that I would finish this book, has even read it in manuscript (some parts more than once!) and offered advice and encouragement just as I was about to give it up altogether, and has expressed quite enough scepticism about what I told her I was arguing to provide a significant goad. I dedicate this book to her. After all, it was supposed to be hers at its beginning.

FOR SUSAN SHERIDAN

Chapter 1: Introduction

This is How We Forget to Remember

‘Wowsers’ they were called, because some campaigned against drunkenness. ‘Moralistic’, because they were opposed to men’s casual sex. Anne Summers made them the turn-of-the-century version of her God’s Police stereotype. I remember, myself, early in the 1970s, dismissing them because they did not question the institution of marriage; they could not even see the bars of the cage that imprisoned them, I argued. We thought their aspirations limited: they campaigned for the vote, and the vote alone. They were ‘ladies’, Germaine Greer told us; they were anxious to point out that they did not seek to disrupt society or to unseat God — although she did seem to be concerned with suffragettes in Britain, rather than suffragists in Australia. Even in the far better informed and theoretically sophisticated histories that have been published since the heady, arrogant 1970s, the women of suffrage-era feminism in Australia — the Woman Movement — have had a bad press. Patricia Grimshaw maintained that it was only as mothers that they campaigned for female suffrage. Marilyn Lake described them as ‘spoilers of men’s pleasures’.¹ Our image of them, collectively, has been of women who were fearsomely respectable, crushingly earnest, socially puritanical, politically limited, and sexually repressed.

And how astonishingly wrong we have all been! The women engaged in the Woman Movement — what today is most often called First Wave Feminism — were as various as we are, their politics complex and wide-ranging, usually far more adventurous than current representations of them could even begin to suggest. It was the sexual double standard governing heterosexual relationships that they objected to. Not sex itself. Indeed, rather than being opposed to sex, they were centrally preoccupied with sex, and with the pleasures as well as the dangers of heterosexual union. Rather than being grim and earnest, they were passionate, and passionately engaged in their political campaigns. Rather than being socially puritanical, they challenged social convention on every side. Rather than being repressed, they were utopian visionaries.

This book will redress an imbalance which has persisted for far too long. It will do this by focussing on the passion which drove the political mobilisation of women, as women; on the changes that they desired in the ordering of their worlds; and on the centrality of sex and sexual relations to those changes. Passions of the First Wave Feminists offers a new view of suffrage-era feminism in Australia. It is a view that allows the feminists’ passions an appropriate emphasis and shows how integral those passions — both as fervour and as a preoccupation with sex — were to their other campaigns concerning marriage, work and citizenship.

They were preoccupied with sex — because everyone else was, too. This was a period when, across the Western world, a discourse on health brought into prominent focus the health of national populations — as producers of cannon-fodder in imperialist wars, as producers of healthy industrial workers and prolific consumers in an increasingly competitive capitalist world. Because it was concerned specifically with reproduction, this discourse positioned women and men as polar opposites. An emphasis on sexual difference and heterosexuality necessarily followed. And from that, complementarily, emerged a solidarity between members of one sex as opposed to the other.

This was a discourse which positioned women primarily as women, as members of a sex, rather than primarily as, say, middle class or working class, English or Scottish, Catholic or Protestant. The same discourse, similarly, positioned men primarily as men. In Australia, this discourse acquired particular force as it combined with the nationalist project of forming a new and modern, prosperous and healthy white nation — rising above the ills and decadences of old Britain and Europe, competing with the newer ills and corruptions of North America. The ‘hysterisation of women’s bodies’ that French historian of ideas, Michel Foucault, has so famously observed occurring throughout the West in the nineteenth century certainly took place.² A complementary biologisation of men’s bodies was no part of Foucault’s story; like so many white male philosophers, he made no distinction between the universal human and the male. I will argue, here, that in Australia, at least, the ‘hysterisation’ of women’s bodies was matched by what can only be called a ‘testosteronisation of men’s bodies’, a complementary assumption that men’s sexuality was ‘hydraulic’ (automatically aroused; irrepressibly ejaculatory) and insatiable in what Foucault called the ‘socialisation of procreative behaviour’ (that is, an array of fiscal, political, medical and social incitements and restrictions brought to bear on the reproductive couple).³ Indeed, men’s sexuality was held to be ‘hydraulic’ in relation to any sexual expression by men, reproductive or not. However, as Foucault has also famously noted, wherever there is power, there is also resistance. Some people objected to such subject positions, indeed the scope of their lives, being defined primarily by their sex. Among them were some of those involved in the Woman Movement.

My argument is that it was the discourse on health that generated the subject position which made it possible for the Woman Movement to emerge as a political mobilisation based in sexual difference, in the sexually specific conditions of women’s lives. It ensured, complementarily, that at least some men — as men — would mobilise, too. But the Woman Movement’s campaigns over the 30 years between the 1880s and World War I were most often campaigns to resist or contest these discursive imperatives. When feminists sought change — to conditions of marriage, to conditions of work, to rights to citizenship — they were also, and simultaneously, seeking new definitions of womanhood, definitions of women as ‘human beings’ rather than as ‘the sex’. ‘In the old order,’ wrote feminist Vida Goldstein in 1914, ‘the old chattel idea of things’ prevailed. ‘Women were regarded primarily as sex creatures … to be chosen by men as sex mates … as outlets for the impulses and alleged needs of men.’ But women had rebelled against ‘exploitation of her body in and out of marriage’, and their rebellion had brought into being a ‘new and sweeter order’ in which ‘women would attain a greater degree of independence, marriage would be placed on a higher plane and self-restraint would prevail’.⁴ ‘Self-restraint’ did not necessarily mean abstinence; it was more usually code for mutual care and consideration.⁵ Feminists’ campaigns for equality between women and men were campaigns for new civil and political rights, to be sure. But they were also campaigns for new definitions of sexual relationships between women and men, definitions which would allow women pleasures which the current discourse denied them.

In This Book

The Woman Movement emerged in Australia in the 1880s as one crucial element in a general social, political and cultural upheaval, characterised by an immense and visionary optimism coupled with profound anxieties about change. Its central focus was the campaign for votes for women in the various British colonies on the island continent of Australia. The earliest organisation to work for female suffrage was the Victorian Women’s Suffrage Society, formed in Melbourne in 1884, initially with the exotic Henrietta Dugdale at its helm. Others included the Women’s Suffrage League, founded in South Australia in 1888, driven along by fervent Irish-born Mary Lee, and the Womanhood Suffrage League of New South Wales, established in Sydney in 1891, over which beguiling Rose Scott assumed leadership. The landmark dates in the campaigns for female suffrage surround the federation of the colonies into a semi-independent nation, the Commonwealth of Australia — in 1901. South Australia enfranchised women in 1894; Western Australia in 1899; Australia in 1902; New South Wales also in 1902; Tasmania in 1903; Queensland in 1904; and Victoria, finally, in 1908.

But, if a narrative about votes for women provides the chronological skeleton for any discussion of First Wave Feminism in Australia, then its bloodstream, flesh, muscle and mind become visible in looking at other activities associated with it. These must include what feminists were reading, writing and publishing. In Chapter 2 I examine two kinds of reading: advice manuals; and new novels in which Australian women novelists were creating ‘the Australian Girl’, the Australian version of ‘the New Woman’. Women usually identified themselves in relation to the men in their lives, as daughters, sisters, wives, mothers; or in relation to their economic circumstances, as middle class or working class; or around their beliefs and religious communities, as Protestant or Catholic. It is necessary, then, to try to explain how the condition of womanhood — being members of a social category defined by its sex — became central for some women, and their source of social critique and political activism. This chapter’s consideration of what women might read, and how they might read it, is part of that explanation. A major point in its argument is the centrality — in both the conditions against which women protested, and in feminist visions of possible futures — of change in the conditions of heterosexual sex.

It is necessary, too, to understand how First Wave Feminists organised, how they defined the nature and goals of their social and political movement, and how they developed the utopian visions which gave them such certainty that they were right. Chapter 3 looks at the process of organising in the 1890s in one feminist organisation, the Womanhood Suffrage League of New South Wales, arguing that conflict and cohesiveness within it were two sides of the same coin and that that coin was about ways of defining feminism. The differences in definition, I argue, arise from differences over political allegiance based in solidarity on the grounds of sex. The same chapter examines three feminist periodicals for their depictions of the nature and goals of the Woman Movement. Faced with the apparently unresolvable contradiction of arguing for sexual equality on the grounds of sexual difference, feminists sought to transcend that contradiction by introducing a third term, ‘evolution’. This was the concept which also fed and helped frame feminist utopian desires, desires which included — centrally — radical transformation in sexual relations.

Chapters 4, 5 and 6 are about the Woman Movement’s central issues: sex, work and citizenship. These chapters set out to explain how the apparent victory of the feminists in gaining the vote for women — white women — all over Australia by 1908 could have become, by the beginning of the Great War in Europe in 1914, so partial and unsatisfactory an answer to suffrage-era feminists’ desires.

Chapter 4 looks at the exhortations to heterosexual union and marriage pronounced by the medical profession, as a particular manifestation of what Foucault called ‘the hysterisation of women’s bodies’. It considers, as well, how the same exhortations produced the ‘testeronisation of men’s bodies’, a discursive positioning of men which, logically, complements that of women. But then — all exertion of power producing resistance — this chapter also looks at resistance to (or fears of) such positioning among men, and at ways in which late nineteenth-century feminists both critiqued and refused such imperatives. This chapter argues that relationships between women and men were far richer and more varied than their positioning in the discourse on health — as compulsorily heterosexual breeders — would allow. One dimension of that richness appeared in the fertility figures. During the three decades around the turn of the nineteenth century into the twentieth, women in general were following the same imperatives as represented in arguments of feminists concerning their right to reproductive control, at least as much as they were conforming to their positioning in the prevailing discourse. This is not an argument that feminism caused the Australian ‘family transition’. Rather, it is an argument that both the Woman Movement and the widespread desire among women for sexual autonomy arose from the same source, from the current discourse on health.

Chapter 5 begins the explanation of what went wrong for First Wave Feminists. It argues that at the same time as the feminists were successfully challenging patriarchal domination over women’s sex lives, in the 1880s and 1890s, women were also moving into paid employment of a kind that allowed them a measure of economic ‘independence’ from men. For a time, particularly in the 1890s, marriage was no longer the principal means to economic security for adult women and a large proportion of women chose not to marry.

However, men — equivalently positioned as primarily members of a sex — worked to counter these shifts. Old men schooled in the traditions of the craft unions expressed outrage at reorganisation in the labour market which turned women into competitors for jobs. New men, armed with a particular nationalist fervour, set out to secure the health of the new nation — specifically in terms of relations between the sexes. A solidarity — brotherhood — united them. Masculinist negotiations counteracted feminist challenge and labourmarket change. Demographic definitions, legal determinations, workshop confrontations and resolutions during the first decade of the twentieth century set up new barriers between women’s and men’s work, and between women and men in the labour market. These were barriers set up specifically on the basis of sex: they defined work as masculine and the worker as male. They reconstructed the separateness of the ‘separate spheres’ of women and domesticity, men and affairs of state.

These barriers worked to limit the emancipation that women had been achieving. They restricted the employment opportunities which had provided women with an alternative to marriage as a livelihood, thereby undercutting the force of feminist campaigns for a new order of power in the marriage bed. They relegated women once again to the category of economic ‘dependent’, regardless of the care-giving work that they did in households, and even if their work in the labour market made them the principal breadwinners for their families. One way of determining an individual’s claim to citizenship has been based, as feminist political theorist Carole Pateman has argued, in that individual’s right to work, to economic independence.⁶ It followed, then, that by redefining women as economically ‘dependent’, these resolutions eroded a whole dimension of the citizenship women had gained by winning the vote.

In Chapter 6 I consider the question of women’s citizenship directly, and as a way of continuing the explanation of why First Wave Feminists felt they had been defeated, even though they had won the vote. First, I present a discussion of a novel which depicts the concerns that women expected they would be able to address once they had gained the vote. Second, I offer a comparison of two events: the passage of the female suffrage legislation in South Australia in 1894, and the passage of the female suffrage legislation for the new and fervently nationalist Commonwealth of Australia in 1902. The comparison highlights the difference between the two. For, while the legislators may not have thought of such a consequence in South Australia, the 1894 legislation enfranchised Aboriginal women as well as settler women throughout the colony. But when it came to legislating for the whole nation, those legislators, who had just passed an Act installing the infamous White Australia Policy, explicitly disenfranchised those Aboriginal women admitted to the vote in South Australia and Western Australia, and those Aboriginal men who had, as long as they had been able to gain a place on an electoral roll, been enfranchised since the achievement of manhood suffrage decades earlier. My argument here is that by 1902 citizenship, at least as defined by the right to vote, could be defined as sexually in-clusive because it had, with the same legislation, also been made racially and ethnically ex-clusive. The Other of the new Australian nation was to be defined by skin colour, rather than by sex-specific reproductive capacities.

This development was paradoxical, though, because such inclusiveness for women carried with it the seeds of its own limitation. Being included harnessed the new white women citizens to a thoroughly racist national agenda in which it was their reproductive capacities that would become white women’s most important contribution to the nation. Citizens only for a