A Fascinating Journey: Women and the Workforce in Canberra

by Alex Marsden, (Director, Historic Assessment, Australian Heritage Commission).

Forum at Manning Clark House, 31 May 2003

Introduction

• Women and the workforce, women as workers - is a huge and very much unsung story
• • work in all its manifestations – paid and unpaid – professional, exploited – philanthropic…
  • many different spheres: domestic, labours of love or servitude, hard yakka, public and private, brilliance, leadership, keeping society running, doers and makers, organizers and facilitators, chiefs and Indians, lovers and carers…

Women’s history

• We have an enormous history and heritage of women at work, again, much of it unknown, invisible…
• • role in nation-building
  • key role in establishing the social welfare state
• Women’s history challenges the implicit masculinity of historical concepts - ie work must be redefined to include unpaid labour

Heritage

• I want to talk briefly about heritage – stories and places
• • of course, there are many different types of heritage – places, objects, intangible such as tales, songs – food, music, customs and rituals
    
    
    
    I quote from the National Heritage Convention in 1998:
    
    
    
    “Australia’s heritage, shaped by nature and history, is an inheritance passed from one generation to the next. It encompasses many things- the way we live, the things we hold dear, our histories, stories, myths, values and places…'
    
    
  • I want to focus a bit on places – AHC role
  • big question asked over the last few years is what, exactly, is women’s heritage?
  • And what are women’s heritage places??
  • Are they different to other types of heritage site? Or just hidden values?
  • How/why?
  • As Miranda Morris says:

“ The built landscape embodies … social inequalities. Women, in the 19th century and much of the 20th, had limited access to public space, were barred from most property ownership, and were excluded from architectural and building trades. They had been creators of homes rather than builders of houses. A concentration on fixed and fabric-based heritage disadvantages those whose main contribution has been social and cultural reproduction…’

Australian Heritage Commission (AHC)

• AHC in early 1990s - became concerned with the unrepresentative nature of much of the Register of the National Estate (meant to be comprehensive – inherited grand mansions etc from National Trust etc)
• • this led to the “Balancing the Register” project (migrants, women, social value etc)
  • National Estate Grants Program – 2 projects in Tasmania – Miranda Morris & the Tasmanian Office for the Status of Women
  • Search conference in 1999
  • Wonderful contribution of Dr Dianne Dodd – Parks Canada’s Women’s heritage project (research, histories, people, places, events, different ways of commemorating…)
  • Many recommendations, including re-assessing currently listed places for their other values, and an ongoing research program
  • AHC decided to fund a study of Women’s employment and professionalism.

Women’s work

• Women’s work has been fundamental to the development of Australian society, yet – as we all know – its importance is often overlooked. Inevitably, this has also meant that the heritage places we seek to preserve favour male rather than female occupations.
• There is a real difficulty in finding places to represent many aspects of women’s work, which is diffuse, across many levels of society.
• Therefore, could consider the concept of representative examples versus exemplary examples, eg to commemorate domestic labour, do you do this at a representative site (any house will do) or an exemplary site (such as an institute of domestic science training?)

Or – while the “famous woman” approach has been criticized, it is also more amenable to representation though place. As Dr Dianne Dodd points out:

“ The experience of larger collectivities of women can in fact be explored through “leaders” or trailblazers”

• Although, women are often not acknowledged for their individual contributions, so it is sometimes difficult to trace their careers (eg architects)
• Another frustration in doing women’s history in relation to place is the transience of women’s related buildings – often women’s organizations had no buildings of their own, met in homes, or church basements or moved around a lot.
• • That’s why the Country Women’s Association Hall at Barellan, NSW is such a find - (the first CWA Rest house) - and listed on the RNE!

The book

• This book breaks new ground in linking feminist historiography with heritage methodology. It focuses on the different ways in which women have participated in the workforce over the last 200 years and explores the types of places that reveal their stories. These stories include our struggle to gain equality in the workplace, in society at large and in parliament.
• The emphasis is on paid employment but importantly, the house is redefined as a workplace for women. There are three major themes in the book which encompass the experiences of all women in Australia. They are: domestic work, public work and activism around access and equality.
• As a result of this report, these themes are now a visible part of the Australian Heritage Commission’s thematic framework for historical places, which sets the standard for historic themes assessment in the country.

Places

• Australia does have a rich legacy of heritage places associated with women’s labour. Many of these places are illustrated in the report. They include:
• • the Women’s College at the University of Sydney,
  • Queen Victoria Hospital in Melbourne and
  • the Salisbury Explosives Factory dating from World War II in Adelaide.
  • There is also feminist Betty Rischbeith’s home, ‘Meerilinga’ (in Perth),
  • the Retta Dixon Home in Darwin that was a training school for Aboriginal girls removed from their parents, and
  • Marion Mahoney’s Griffin’s offices in Collins Street, Melbourne.
  • AND A CANBERRA PLACE – GORMAN HOUSE – a hostel built in the late 1920s and later reserved for female officers of various Commonwealth departments.

As the report makes very clear, and as Maria Nugent concludes,

Making the heritage of women’s employment and professionalism visible entails not simply identifying the places where women have worked but also exposing the ways in which they have been denied access for work.

Conclusion

• The nature of women’s history and heritage is such that it is often more amenable to interpretation of recognized heritage sites, such as factories, schools and hospitals - rather than identification of new places.
• However, it is important, I think, to do both – and finding and naming and publicizing new sites, which speak primarily to women’s experience of work, is a worthwhile goal.

A nation’s heritage consists not only of physical landscapes but of social and intellectual environments as well. Our heritage places are therefore much more that what we see at first glimpse – we need the research, the objects, stories, and associations to make visible the many players who have shaped our world today.

References

Australian Heritage Commission, National Heritage Convention: Key Outcomes (Canberra, 1998)

Miranda Morris, Placing Women II: a national framework for ensuring the visibility of women in heritage (Hobart, 1999)

Maria Nugent, Women’s Employment and Professionalism in Australia: Histories, Themes and Places (AHC, 2002) http://www.ahc.gov.au