December 10 marks the centenary of women's suffrage in Tasmania and will be celebrated at the state Parliament House with a commemorative photograph and get-together by a bunch of MPs. Local film-maker Karen Buczynski, together with anti-discrimination commissioner and feminist Jocelyn Scutt, recently produced and screened a short documentary to mark the anniversary.
The typical portrayal of first-wave feminists is of women who were "fearsomely respectable, crushingly earnest, socially puritanical, politically limited, and sexually repressed", according to Susan Magarey, in her 2001 book Passions of the First Wave Feminists.
Magarey debunks all this as myth. She traces back to 1902 the assertion that Australian women didn't have to struggle to win suffrage, but were granted it by men who were committed to liberal democratic ideals — or to advance their own class or party's power.
While much of the campaign for women's suffrage in Tasmania took place within the bounds of establishment forms — petitions, lobbying, delegations to parliament — the winning of women's right to vote was a victory, if partial, won through struggle.
At the outset, the cards were stacked against women wanting the vote. The very idea of women being admitted to the public world of politics was considered obscene, unnatural, disgraceful, even to many women.
In the world view prevailing at the time, men belonged in the public sphere, and women in the private, domestic sphere. Still, women debated, formed organisations and agitated for the vote.
In Tasmania, the campaign for women's suffrage was spearheaded by Jessie Spinks Rooke and the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). In fact, the Tasmanian lower house had been ready to enfranchise women for years before it happened. The conservative, propertied Legislative Council (upper house) had rejected the bills that replaced the word "man" with the word "person" in 1895, 1896, and 1898.
However, in 1902 the franchise for voting for the federal parliament had been extended to include white women, and "to avoid electoral anomalies" the Tasmanian upper house caved in.
In a similar way, the other states that hadn't enfranchised white women subsequently did so.
The involvement of the WCTU may be another of the reasons that first-wave feminists in Australia are thought of as stuffy and politically limited. But while for the WCTU, women's enfranchisement was a means to raise moral standards by legislating for "temperance", there were many involved in the struggle who were not part of the WCTU and were neither Christians nor wowsers.
The Woman Movement was much more diverse that the WCTU. In their journals, pamphlets, speeches and organising, the first-wave feminists articulated a vision of a world where men and women were equal. While generally not opposed to marriage (although some equated marriage with prostitution), they opposed what they called "enforced maternity" (which Magarey explains meant marital rape). They opposed sexual double standards and decried the impact on women of venereal disease. Some advocated contraception and legal access to abortion to control family size; others, "temperance". (This should be understood in the context of an era when fertility control methods were not as safe or reliable as they later became.)
The 1880s and 1890s was a period of expanding access of women to industrial employment as a consequence of a combination of the depression and the introduction of new technology. This meant that for the first time large numbers of women could make a living for themselves without recourse to marriage.
The Woman Movement took up demands for equal pay, and campaigned against the subsequent exclusion of women from a range of trades. Rather than a labour of love, they called domestic work labour. Some advocated wages for housework, others called for the industrialisation of housework.
The 1907 "Harvester" judgement, acclaimed for recognising the right of working men and their families to live in modest comfort, enshrined in law unequal pay for women, and legally disappeared independent women from the work force, again into the private domain of childbirth and domestic labour. Women had won the right to vote, but then lost much of the economic basis that might have made it possible to exercise real liberty.
It wasn't until the 1960s that feminism once again became a mass phenomenon in the second wave. Some of the demands, and many of the methods of the movement were new; but a surprising number of the issues were the same — unfinished business left from the first wave.
And today, it is the same. John Howard and his ilk dismantle public childcare, grant reverse-means-tested payments to encourage women to stay at home to have babies and undermine single mothers' access to a living income. We, too, will need to draw on a vision of respect and equality that goes beyond paper citizenship, to again take up the struggle for women's liberation.
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BY KAMALA EMANUEL
From Green Left Weekly, December 10, 2003.
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