Introduction
Tom O’ Lincoln’s 2005 book United We Stand: Class Struggle in Colonial Australia chronicles the development of capitalism following invasion and the rise of unions and other organisations in response.
The following excerpt from a 2024 edition published by Interventions discuss women’s resistance to workplace exploitation during a period of rapid industrialisation.
Book Extract
Women were some 20 percent of the overall work force in late 19th century Australia, rising to 30 or 40 percent 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. 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. 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.’
Outwork also proliferated in the clothing trades, suiting 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 conceive of a more absurd request than this? For it amounts to saying, ‘I am as much a lady as yourself.’”
Factory owners still hoped that 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.’ Yet the tailoresses showed in their famous strike that 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 1880s still brought a relative shortage of female labour, as increasing prosperity enabled significant numbers to avoid or postpone employment just as demand was increasing.
Domestic workers at Como House, Melbourne, circa 1890
In particular, they began to avoid domestic service, and this became a long-term trend. During the depressed 1890s, some were forced back into this type of work, and the 1901 census still showed about 10 percent of households employing servants. However, in the new century, the inexorable decline in servant numbers would continue.
In the 1870s and 1880s, 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.
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.’ By 1902, 45 percent of NSW teachers and 25 percent of those in charge of schools were female. While men dominated at the top of the system, there were well over 200 Mistresses of Departments. 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 and 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 NSW post offices after 1900. But 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 ultimately led to considerable militancy and determined organisation, and women won important concessions, including legal guarantees of equal pay.
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 that 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. Given the hostility of male unionists, they opted to form their own union.
Melbourne telegraphist and union activist Louisa Dunkley
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, although the more downtrodden among them aroused humanitarian concern in middle-class reformers.
Teachers and nurses proved themselves able to 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 that 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 that they were men’s intellectual equals.
Book Description
From Interventions’ website, where the book can be ordered:
In the state-run prison that was early New South Wales, pockets of capitalism sprang up like sturdy weeds. With them came wage labour and class struggle. Australian workers were organising well before the gold rushes, and later a mass labour movement confronted the employers across the continent, opening the way for bitter confrontations. Controversy surrounds the colonial labour movement because of its racism and sexism, but this book sheets home the main blame for both reactionary ideologies to the ruling class. And despite many criticism, the author renews pioneering labour historian Brian Fitzpatrick’s argument that ‘the effort of the organised working class’ was an effort to achieve social justice’.
About Interventions
Interventions is an independent, not-for-profit, incorporated publisher. They publish left-wing, radical and socialist books by Australian authors. They have kindly shared excerpts from their range of books for the Commons Library community to read.
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