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Female Collectivism and Traditional Women in Post -Suffrage New South Wales

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Female Collectivism and Traditional Women in Post -Suffrage New South Wales "DOING THEIR BIT": FEMALE COLLECTIVISM AND TRADITIONAL WOMEN IN POST -SUFFRAGE NEW SOUTH WALES HILARY M. CAREY, History Department, The University of Newcastle Abstract This paper is based on a study of the biennial reports of the National Council of Women of New South Wales from 1914-1942 and the returns of the more than 140 organisations which were affiliated with the NCW at some point during this time. Organisations referred to include housewives' associations, the Country Women's Association, patriotic organisations such as the Victoria League and church-based groups such as the Young Women's Christian Association, the Women's Christian Temperance Union, and the Catholic Women's League. It is argued that many of these traditional women's organisations shared a coherent ideology which can be described as "female collectivism". Female collectivism is characterised by conservative emphasis on non-party, non-sectarian, voluntary activity by women to support the welfare of their own communities. They asserted gender solidarity against what they perceived to be the destabilising forces of masculine, Labor party politics and sectarian conflict. In the 1920s and 1930s this was a successful ideology which achieved many tangible welfare benefits for women. We believe that women have a very definite contribution to make to the common cause of the community, and it is only by "doing their bit" that we can achieve the ideals which we have in view. (Editorial, HM 1933, 1) Throughout the 1890s Australian women fought a series of well organised campaigns for the state and federal suffrage. In June 1902 the Commonwealth vote was secured and a couple of months later, in August, white women in NSW achieved the right to vote for their State Parliament as well. It was a euphoric moment for the young democracy and a triumph for first­ wave feminism. But what did the active, middle class, organising women of New South Wales do after the suffrage was achieved? This question has been asked and answered, usually with some disappointment, many times (Oldfield, 1992, 217-30). Many women simply retired from active political work. In New South Wales, Rose Scott announced the disbandment of her Womanhood Suffrage League and its replacement with a non-political organisation which would educate women in the franchise and "deal with the problems of all women".(SMH, 9 October 1902). In general it has been argued that the political campaign for the suffrage led to an historic peak in female consciousness and political activism in the late nineteenth century which rapidly dissipated after World War I so that women did not rise again as a significant and unified political force until the 1970s. This article draws attention to the many women who were active in community-based service and church organisations in the post-suffrage years. In the turbulent times of the new century, as depression followed war and then war again, women remained active in their own cause, but focussed their energy on the organisations which belonged to the women's sphere. The first section reviews the historiography relating to conservative women with a view to establishing the extent to which this literature provides a model which may be extended to explain the appeal of community organisations for traditional women in Australia in the period from about 1900 to 1942. The second part examines the ideology of traditional women in a journal of interdisciplinary gender studies vol 1 no 2 (1996): 101-116. 101 range C!f organisations affiliated with the National Council of Women of New South Wales, including service groups such as the Country Women's Association and Housewives' Associations, church groups such as the Women's Christian Temperance Union, the Young Women's Christian Association and the Catholic Women's Association, and patriotic organisations such as the Victoria League. In this period, traditional women developed an ideology appropriate to their own needs and the opportunities of the time which may be described as "female collectivism" or women "doing their bit", as the Housewife Magazine described it in 1933. Under the umbrella of the National Council of Women, and their own extensive national and international organisational structures, traditional women confidently pursued a wide range of political, social and welfare goals for the benefit of women and children and, as they argued, the nation. Despite the large number of women who belonged to one or other of them throughout most of the present century, the organisations which are the subject of this paper have had relatively little attention given to them. In the 1970s second-wave feminists concluded that traditional women's organisations and all they stood for were part of the problem against which they had to contend. Anne Summers argued that feminism was not the same as what she called, "female consciousness". Women who formed Housewives' Associations and other community groups to protect what they saw as their unique contribution to society were not feminists because they showed an active acceptance of female roles (Summers, 1994, 72). The feminist project involved the dismantling of patriarchy, the assertion of women's rights of citizenship and participation in the public sphere and the rejection of the institutions of marriage, the family and femininity. Conservative women were depicted as at worst hostile and at best irrelevant to this project. Commentators such as Webley made heavy weather of explaining the attraction of right-wing women groups such as the Women Who Want to be Women to their Australian adherents (Webley, 1982; Carey, 1987, 178-79). Even today, historians continue to regard traditional women's organisations with little interest or sympathy. In their recent feminist rewriting of Australian history, Lake, McGrath and Quartly relegate traditional women's organisations to the sidelines with the assertion: "Women were to be encouraged into associations in order to reinforce their place in the home" (Lake et al., 1994, 202-3). More sympathetic accounts, such as Willis's study ofthe Anglican Mothers' Union, can also be rather condescending (Willis, 1980). Other historians have seen traditional organisations, more perniciously, as agents supporting the conservative, masculine hegemony. Simms, who uses the term "conservative feminism" to label the ideology of some women's service organisations describes the Red Cross as a "Liberal Party front" (Simms, 1983, 14). With rather more justification, Teather maintains that the Country Women's Association has always been the de facto women's auxiliary of the Country (later the National) Party, but has argued more contentiously that the CWA functioned as a counter-revolutionary organisation supporting the activities of rural para-military fronts in the 1920s and 30s (Teather, 1994). Whilst conservative women's ideology has been a problematic issue for more recent feminists, it forms part of a familiar terrain for historians of the late nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries. It can be argued that traditional women's organisations, such as the CWA and the Housewives' Association, should be seen as the historical heirs of nineteenth century "relational" feminism, as this is defined by Karen Offen (Offen, 1988a, 1988b). On the other hand Offen's definition of relational feminism has been dismissed by critics such as Cott as nothing more than a defence of the status quo for women (Cott, 1989; Offen, 1989). Examining the very considerable program of welfare reforms advocated by traditional women's groups, this judgement seems unreasonable. In the US, historians such as Wendy Sarvasy have gone so far as to argue that in the post-suffrage era of the 1920s women did not abandon 102 jigs vol 1 no 2 (1996) Table 1: Organisations affiliated to the original1888 National Council of Women of the United States 1. National Women's Christian Temperance Union 2. National Free Baptist Women's Missionary Society 3. Illinois Industrial School for Girls 4. Universal Peace Union 5. National American Woman Suffrage Association 6. International Kindergarten Union 7. National Association of Women feminism but used pragmatic arguments based on female difference to build a feminist welfare state (Sarvasy, 1992). These US feminists attempted to synthesise a program of reform for women which recognised the discrimination they suffered but then proceeded to use gender difference as the basis for emancipation and reform. Grappling with similar issues, Audrey Oldfield uses the term 'domestic feminism' to refer to the policies devised by welfare advocates active in Australia in the same period (Oldfield, 1992, 217-19). These same ideals and political strategies can be discerned among Australian women and the community organisations which they developed in the post-suffrage period. In this paper this program has been called "female collectivism", rather than "feminism" to avoid indulging in too much semantic quibbling. Whatever we choose to call it, it was a significant and influential body of ideas shared by a large number of women in the post-suffrage era. The second part of this article draws on the journals and other records of a range of traditional women's organisations affiliated with the National Council of Women of New South Wales to establish the extent to which these organisations shared a cohesive ideology. The biennial reports of the NCW held in the Mitchell Library are, unfortunately, far from complete and some reports do not include the usual list of affiliated members. The Appendix to this article (Table 3) contains a tabulation of the members of the NCW based on the extant reports for 1914 to 1942 with some additional details from the 1897, 1966 and 1976 reports included for comparative purposes. The published records of the 141 organisations which were affiliated with the NCW over this period constitute a very large resource which few historians have examined in any detail. This article is based on an examination of the brief biennial returns to the NCW as well as the annual reports and publications of a much smaller selection of associations which are held by Mitchell Library.
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