Event
Date
by Dr Maria Nugent
Presented at a MCH seminar on Women and Work in Canberra
Thanks for inviting me. This is just the type of event that I hoped the project might foster.
I thought I might use my time this afternoon to talk about researching and writing this report (which has been billed as inspiring this gathering). I have to admit that I took the project on somewhat naively. It only took a very short time to realise why others far more experienced in the field than me (my area is Aboriginal history) had perhaps decided it was a project better left alone. How does one write a history of women's employment and professionalism in Australia focusing on its relationship to place in 20 000 words or less and in three months? In retrospect I like to think about this as a metaphor for women's work experiences more generally.
The history of women's employment and professionalism is a huge topic: one that has kept many scholars occupied for some time. There is an amazingly large body of material, much of it written over the last thirty or so years. Within that literature there are many key debates: for example: how does one define women's work? Have feminist labour historians simply assimilated women's experiences into definitions and categories better suited to men rather than fundamentally changed how we think about and interpret the history of women's employment? What is the relationship between women's paid labour and their unpaid labour? Does a focus on women's employment ' which tends to mean for wages ' only contribute to eliding the real significance of women's labour?
Paradoxically, while there is a vast amount of scholarship, there are considerable gaps in the scholarship: there are many chapters in the history of women's employment inadequately recorded. What does one do with the obvious gaps? Why are women in the urban economy better represented than women in the rural economy? Why has so little been written on Aboriginal women's labour?
The second issue was that it is an extremely fragmented history: not easily rendered as a single narrative. A history of women's employment is certainly not a simple one about progress. It occurs in fits and starts ' and when women are highly visible as paid workers the situation is sometimes more aberrant than indicative. And while advances might be made in the world of paid work for some women, the situation becomes worse for others. Class, ethnicity and geography cut across the experience of women as a group. How does one capture this in 20 000 words or less?
The Australian Heritage Commission adds two more degrees of difficulty to the task. It wants histories that lend themselves to representation through place and that they be nationally significant. Place and nation raise particular issues for women's histories generally and employment history specifically. The places where women worked are not necessarily those that lend themselves to preservation; and those that do might emphasise the work of well-to-do women over the vast majority of women's workers. Feminist labour historians often refer to the hidden nature of women's labour ' not just in terms of being unacknowledged by economists and labour historians but also in terms of where and how it is performed. How for instance might we represent a history of 'outworking' through the built environment? What about a history of Aboriginal girls and women working as domestic servants on pastoral properties or in white people's homes?
I do not want to say much about national significance because I am not sure how to address it. How does one assess national significance? In Australian history, it has often been ascribed to processes such as building infrastructure like national railway systems; or developing a democratic system of government; or gaining federation. As Quartly et al note in Creating a Nation: the story about how the nation was made has often been a story about men not women. To look for women in these processes can sometimes lead to them being rendered bit players in the bigger scheme of things. The line, I took, in justifying the examples chosen was simply to assert: women's labour is nationally significant ' and all the more so because it is not necessarily considered to be.
With these things in mind I decided ' in consultation with my colleagues and various experts in the field ' to take a fairly broad approach to the task. I had looked around at other models ' which included focusing solely on place types, such as the house; or occupations, such as nursing; or time periods, such as the second world war. However, I thought it might be more productive to provide a general theme-based framework through which one might consider aspects of women's employment and professionalism across time and place, in the hope that it might provide a starting point for more specific studies in the future. It was at this point that the AHC decided to re-name the project: A contextual history of women's employment and professionalism in Australia became Women's employment and professionalism: Histories, Themes and Places. At first I was a little put out: thought I failed in the task. But then realised that this was exactly right. There was no one history to tell. The pluralisation is significant (and appropriate I thought).
In conceptualising the project, I was particularly interested in the processes that contributed to women entering paid employment in the public realm as well as the processes that excluded them from it ' or at least from certain positions or occupations. In other words, rather than simply tell a history about women doing paid work, I wanted to draw at least some attention to the structures that influenced their access to and experiences within the 'world of work'. [Heritage often seems to be pursuit of women in unusual places.] Jill Matthews argues that we can understand women's movement into paid work in the public realm (which she dates as a late nineteenth-century development) in terms of the expansion of the capitalist economy. Labour, once performed at home for the informal cash economy, was gradually incorporated into the formal market place. What I found productive about Matthews' thesis for this project was that it keeps the nature of the relationship between home and work in focus. It shows, on the one hand, how women's work performed at home for cash was gradually incorporated into the formal market place. And, on the other, that when women's labour became thus incorporated women nonetheless remained responsible for domestic duties. Moreover, it provided an analysis for why the history of women's employment has been characterised by struggle ' where the capitalist economy sees women as workers not as working women.
This broad thematic approach cast a wide net over place types. It made it possible to not only focus on workplaces but equally important sites associated with the history of women's employment and professionalism. In addition to the home and to public workplaces it covered other sites such as women's hostels, and child-care centres, and professional meeting rooms, and women's colleges. These place types feature strongly in the listings for Canberra. For example, Ian Potter House, Gorman House (which Nancy is going to talk about), and Hotel Ainslie were all at one stage used as staff quarters for female public servants.
Furthermore, the emphasis on women's struggle to improve their lot in paid employment meant that we could consider other place types such as union meeting rooms, or sites of protest, or court rooms where key wage cases were heard, or sites associated with the lives of prominent activists such as Muriel Heagney, Jessie Street, Maybanke Anderson and Louisa Lawson. Maybanke Anderson is especially interesting because she was actively involved in the women's suffrage movement, a prominent member of the Womanhood Suffrage League of NSW. The League was not only concerned with getting votes for women, but was equally concerned with issues such as divorce, child support and equal pay. Key women involved, like Anderson, were not only advocating on behalf of others but also for themselves. Women's rights as workers were vital to women prominent in the organisation because they all worked (for different reasons) to support themselves and their children. Anderson rented a room in the Societe Generale Building in Sydney (which is still standing) where she produced a journal called The Women's Voice. She was also active in the Kindergarten Union, which was established in Sydney in 1895. Before working to establish the Kindergarten Union, Maybanke Anderson operated a private kindergarten known as the Maybanke Kindergarten. With the establishment of the Kindergarten Union, free centres were opened throughout inner Sydney some of which are still extant. The Union was a driving force behind providing traning for women teachers and a forerunner to the Sydney Kindergarten Teachers College.
Bessie Rischbieth played a similar role in Western Australia. She was both a prominent feminist activist and played a pivotal role in the establishment of the Kindergarten Union. Her house ' because it is quite grand ' is on the Western Australian Heritage Register, but its significance clearly goes beyond its architectural merit. It had for a time had been used as a training centre for kindergarten teachers.
Interestingly, though, women's forms of protest posed issues generic to the fit between heritage with its emphasis on material fabric and women's histories (which might leave fewer material traces behind). Women have not always organised themselves in the same way as men ' have not always been politically organised in the same terms, or used public forms of protest well-known in Australian labour history. Many studies show that women used less obvious forms of protest: sometimes simply leaving undesirable work situations. For instance, Melanie Raymond, in a detailed study of female workers' responses to work conditions in the Guest Biscuit Factory in Melbourne in the late nineteenth century, noted the high rtae of turnover of female staff. She suggested that this could be interpreted as 'a comment on the pay and conditions within the factory, where they simply voted with their feet and left'. Raymond's observation ' only applicable obviously when women's labour was in high demand ' reveals the ways in which an emphasis on readily recognisable (and some might argue 'masculinist') forms of public protest, such as organised strikes, can obscure the types of activism, or even resistance, used by women workers.
This matter of women's forms of protest ' including their organisation into unions, or how male dominated unions addressed women's issues ' flows onto the more broad question about this most significant thread in women's labour history might be represented in heritage terms. For instance, if unions were not the most significant structure for women's activism on work-related issues, then is preserving union buildings the best approach? Or how can already preserved union buildings be used to also tell a history about women's activism? In the end, perhaps we ought to think about how to we read histories of absence (as well as presence) into buildings. For instance, what does the women's room in the Trades and Labour Council tell us about women's participation in unions and the limitations of this type of political organisation around work-related matters?
So to finish: How might these themes be reflected in and through Canberra? How can we read into its built form, or how can we use its buildings to tell, histories about women's participation in, exclusion from, access to, and protest about, the world of paid employment and professionalism ' a history that is representative of diverse experiences?