CHAPTER TWO: Domestic Violence in Feminism and Policy: 1900 to 1970 Climbing Walls and Beating on Doors: but Where Had the Knowledge Gone?

CHAPTER TWO: Domestic violence in feminism and policy: 1900 to 1970 Climbing Walls and Beating on Doors: but where had the knowledge gone?

Late nineteenth century Australian feminists unambiguously placed domestic violence as a feminist issue, and one which informed the initiatives they pursued through policy activism. Differences in their practical and representational context, including the nature and possibilities of public policy as they knew it, shaped key differences in analysis, emphasis and strategy between their responses to domestic violence and those of feminists a century later. But this does not explain why those later feminists began their response to domestic violence with a conviction that they were not just reframing but actually discovering the feminist significance of partner violence.

I begin this chapter by establishing the impact of that experience of discovery, and the circumstances which shaped it. This is an opportunity to study the moment, and then the subsequent stages, of the experience of recognition which becomes the ‘creation’ of an issue. I then return to the exploration of the representational history of domestic violence in Australian feminism and policy, focusing on the period between the winning of women’s suffrage and the early 1970s. This is the period which both sets the immediate context for the new feminist engagement, and holds the clues to the disjuncture between feminist knowledge at the beginning of the century and the initial apparent ignorance of the new generation of feminists about the significance of male violence to women with whom they share intimate relationships.

As in the previous chapter, this exploration continues to address the main themes of the thesis. In addition to the continuing investigation of the ‘discovery’ context and its contribution to analysis of the implications of contextual constructions for policy, this chapter traces the analytical emphases and policy strategies of feminists in the intervening period, and looks for the place within them of domestic violence. It also continues analysis of the representational implications of relevant policy instruments, and, through them, of the circumstances of and resources available to women

suffering partner violence. Finally, it considers the validity of ‘policy activism’ as a model for feminist policy related activism in this period.

With the exception of the opening section, much of the source material for this study is again taken from secondary historical accounts. Judith Allen’s work on women and crimes of violence in NSW continues to be a valuable source, as are the broad ranging histories of Australian women and feminism provided by Anne Summers (1975a; 1994a), Patricia Grimshaw et al (1994) and Marilyn Lake (1998, 1999), and the analyses of Australian social policy in this period of Deborah Brennan (1998a), Lois Bryson (1988, 1992, 1995), Bettina Cass (1985; 1988; 1995), Brian Dickey (1980), T. H. Kewley (1973, 1980), Jill Roe (1976, 1988), Sheila Shaver (1988; 1990; 1995) and others. As in the previous chapter, I reposition this material so as to identify the constructions of domestic violence implied by relevant policy instruments and by feminist analyses and directions. A significant aspect of that re-positioning is the establishment of links between accounts of the development of social and justice system policy and of feminism in Australia in this period, with particular attention to the placing of domestic violence.

It is particularly remarkable that, with the exception of Allen’s work, historical analysis of Australian feminism in this period has barely addressed the framings of domestic violence developed by feminism and policy after 1970. As will be observed below, Anne Summers has explained this absence from her pioneering tour-de-force history of Australian women, Damned Whores and God’s Police (1975), in terms of the concurrent ‘discovery’ (Summers 1994a: 1; 1999: 315-6). In a more recent example, Marilyn Lake, in her history of Australian feminism, neither identifies nor discusses the apparent absence of domestic violence among feminist concerns prior to 1970 (Lake 1999). Nor does she explore these issues in her ‘A history of feminism in Australia’ in The Australian Feminist Companion, while the section on ‘Violence’ in that volume does not explore the historical dimensions of either the feminist or the policy response to domestic violence, apart from policy directed education campaigns (Caine 1998; Lake 1998; Mason 1998). Meanwhile, Pat Grimshaw and her colleagues in their re-positioning of women in Australian history, Creating a Nation. 1788-1990 (1994), mention domestic violence only twice: the first mention is made in the context of late nineteenth century divorce reform and the second with regard to the funding of

women’s refuges by the Whitlam government (Grimshaw et al 1994: 172-3, 304). As in Chapter One, and once again in order to explore the context for the feminist policy process which is the central focus of the thesis, the discussion which follows initiates a neglected aspect of Australian feminist history.

Following the examination of the circumstances of the feminist recognition of domestic violence in the early 1970s, the chapter investigates the construction of domestic violence by the Australian justice system and social policy between 1900 and 1970 and its implications for women suffering such violence, followed by the framing and directions of Australian feminism in the same period. In a final section, the contextual circumstances of the new phase of Australian feminism from the end of the 1960s, and of the recognition of domestic violence it involved, are considered.

THE ‘DISCOVERY’: CLIMBING WALLS AND BEATING ON DOORS

Feminist scholars in Australia and North America have argued that the re-invigorated women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s was necessary for the feminist recognition of domestic violence, because the analysis it provided enabled women suffering violence to politicise what was happening to them, and so to speak out (Hopkins and McGregor 1991: 8; Walker 1999: 17; Schechter 1982: 33). Hopkins and McGregor also explain the delay in Australian feminist response to domestic violence at this time by claiming that the earliest feminist demands ‘[did] not focus on the behaviour of men, but rather on the activities of the state. … [T]he demands of the early women’s liberationists were aimed very much at public life (Hopkins and McGregor 1991: 5).

The circumstances in which the feminists of this period made their identification of domestic violence bear out the significance of this phase of the women’s movement as the context for that recognition and reframing. But the story I am about to relate demonstrates that the way in which it happened, and the directions of influence involved, were the exact reverse of those claimed in the opinions referred to above. To begin with, the claim of Hopkins and McGregor that the emphasis of the new phase of Australian feminism was on public life rather than male behaviour is not borne out by the ‘personal is political’ emphases or the consciousness-raising

methodology of the early women’s liberation movement (Dowse 1984: 140-1; Summers 1994a: 514-5; 1999: 270-5). Further, the first encounters between the new feminists and women suffering violence make it clear that the decisive effect of the feminist context was not its analysis, but rather that it provided those women with a new strategic location for their enduring survival efforts. The other crucial significance of the new phase of the women’s movement was that having provided a forum, in Sydney this happened to be the 1973 Women’s Commission, which the violence sufferers could put to strategic use, the listening feminists had been prepared by their encounter with feminism to be able to respond to what those women had to say.

The first public encounter of this kind was the Women’s Commission organised by Sydney Women’s Liberation groups and WEL in the Teachers’ Federation Auditorium in Sussex Street on 17 and 18 March 1973, in connection with International Women’s Day (IWD) (Mejane 10, March 1973:5; 2/1, July 1973:4-5; Refactory Girl 6 June 1974:5; Wills 1983:323; Summers 1999: 324). Joyce Stevens, one of the participants, has described what happened as ‘a watershed for the Sydney movement (Stevens 1985: 41). The drama of this precise moment of ‘discovery’ is foreshadowed in the themes advertised for the 1973 Commission: rape is mentioned under the heading ‘Women as Sex Objects’, and the theme ‘Women and Marriage’ is included, along with ‘Women as Mothers’, ‘Women as Workers’ and ‘Other Forms of Discrimination’, but partner violence is not mentioned (Mejane 10, March 1973:5). What happened instead is described by Stevens: ‘It was an exercise in mass consciousness-raising about areas of women’s lives which had hitherto been ignored and closeted. One hundred and thirty-eight women, many of whom had been unable to reveal physical and sexual assaults to their closest friends or family, rose to talk, some making their debut in public speaking as well. Women sat taut, breathlessly silent as speakers struggled to overcome grief and pain’ (Stevens 1985: 41). It is clear that the context of a well-publicised women’s movement and the venue provided by the Women’s Commission gave the women suffering violence permission and an opportunity to speak of their suffering. But the planned gathering did not invite or expect them to speak, or open the way with a ready framed analysis. The women’s movement context, one shaped by a commitment to listening to other women’s experiences, provided an audience ready to hear and respond. But the women who

spoke were continuing the age-old tradition of primary activism for survival which took beaten women into magistrates’ courts and the State Children’s Board at the end of the nineteenth century and which would produce surprise interventions in a sequence of government sponsored consultation venues, including several which I will refer to later in the thesis.

Nor was the feminist response to the encounter of March 1973 an immediate leap into construction of an analysis of domestic violence, although it did prompt a decision that the theme of the next Women’s Commission, in March 1974, would be Women against the Violent Society (Wills 1983: 324). To begin with, a variety of other experiences also helped to prepare the way, as a multitude of feminists each experienced their individual moments of recognition/discovery. In some cases, this was a matter of linking lonely memories from childhood or the hard end of a partnership with stories heard from others, in the context of their new encounters with feminism. For others, in circumstances repeated remarkably often, the framing experiences were the result of the movement of alert young women out of the seclusion of their suburban childhood homes, where the sounds of violence were muffled by isolation and shame, and into student digs in working class streets, where assaulted women had long lived by the tradition of running screaming into the night, to beat on the doors or climb over the fences of their neighbours. Anne Summers has recorded two such incidents experienced while living in inner-city Sydney. On the first occasion, in 1971, a young woman had beaten, screaming in terror, on her front door, pursued by a man who proceeded to smash down the door (Summers 1999: 318). The second incident was in 1972, when the fleeing woman clambered over an eight foot fence with her baby in her arms to escape her husband, who was pursuing her with a knife (Summers 1999:318-9). I heard other, similar stories, in the interviews conducted for the thesis.

Nevertheless, and although she was already active as a feminist, Summers makes it clear that these experiences were not enough to stir an activist response. She records that well into 1973: ‘Even though I had been working for two years on [Damned Whores and God’s Police] it had not occurred to me to investigate violence against women in Australia’ (Summers 1999:316). The trigger for the next stage of response came for Summers, as it did for many other feminists in this country and others, from

a similar course of events unfolding in London. There, in the London suburb of Chiswick, in the Borough of Hownslow, a group of women came together in 1971 to protest about food prices, then secured a Borough house to open a centre where they could go on meeting. They called it Women’s Aid. Within weeks, desperate women recognising a strategic resource started to arrive and tell their stories of poverty, insecurity and violence (Pizzey 1974: 9-25; Dobash and Dobash 1980: 1-3; 223). By 1974 the Chiswick group had opened five houses; similar centres had been opened all over England by feminists who had organised as the National Women’s Aid Federation; and a House of Commons Select Committee on Violence in Marriage had commenced hearings (Pizzey 1974: 130-5; Dobash and Dobash 1980: 1-3, 223-5; 1992: 25-34). Much of this was stimulated by the book, Scream Quietly or the Neighbours will Hear (1974), written by Erin Pizzey, a journalist member of the initial Chiswick group, about what had happened there (Pizzey 1974).

An important reason for the amazing international effect of Scream Quietly was that it not only identified a problem, but offered a strategy. The Chiswick women had, initially unintentionally, created the model for the women’s refuge. That was the key in Sydney, as it was in local settings across Australia, the UK, the USA and Canada. Summers learned of Chiswick in an article by Pizzey in the UK feminist journal Spare Rib, which she read in September 1973. She records that later the same night she decided to work for a women’s refuge in Sydney (Summers 1999: 316).

The first thing Summers did, together with her friend Jennifer Dakers, was to visit the two existing Sydney shelters for homeless women, run by the Salvation Army and the Society of St Vincent de Paul. Those services worked like the late nineteenth century night-shelters and the contemporary night-shelters for men, by providing overnight accommodation, but leaving the women and children to walk the streets all day, searching for legal or financial assistance. Summers’ and Dakers’ response to this, in November 1973, was to place notices in the Sydney Women’s Liberation and Women’s Election Lobby (WEL) Newsletters, and to put one up in Women’s House, then in Alberta Street, calling a meeting to discuss a different kind of service for ‘women and children who have nowhere to sleep’. They decided to call the proposed centre a ‘refuge’, to differentiate it from the traditional ‘shelters’ they had inspected (WEL NSW Newsletter15, Nov 1973: 21; Summers 1999: 320).

But still, here at the beginning of the first women’s refuge founded in Australia, the primary issue was not yet violence. The leading issue identified by Summers and Dakers in their meeting advertisements was women’s homelessness, with escape from assault appearing as one in a list of reasons that it might occur (WEL NSW Newsletter 15, Nov 1973:21). Summers and Dakers proposed ‘starting a night-shelter’ for women and children, along the lines of ‘the numerous night-shelters which exist for men’, to assist women ‘in various distress situations – women who have just arrived in Sydney and cannot afford hotel or hostel accommodation, women who need to escape from a difficult domestic situation (like, their husband is beating them), women who, for any reason find themselves without shelter for the night’ (WEL NSW Newsletter 15, Nov 1973:21). Only four other women came to that meeting. In retrospect, Summers acknowledged once again: ‘Violence was not yet something that the women’s movement had focused on’ (Summers 1999: 320).

Like many Australian, and international, feminists at the time, some of women drawn to the project had had their first politicizing experiences, including an instructive encounter with their second class status as women, in other activist campaigns. The movement against the Vietnam War was such an experience for many (Wills 1983:313; Curthoys, A. 1988b: 79-80). Anne Summers had also taken part in the Sydney Green Bans campaign, particularly the action to save from developers the cheap and beautiful workers’ housing in Victoria Street, Woolloomooloo (Summers 1999:305-8). Just as the women’s refuge action started, a fortuitous ABC television program revealed that the Church of England, which was virtually a slum landlord in inner Sydney, was letting expanses of housing property in Glebe and Edgecliff stand empty in the hope of purchase by a Commonwealth government urban renewal program. When the refuge committee’s approach to the Church for an empty house failed, Summers remembered the tactics of civil disobedience and squatting she had learned in Victoria Street (Summers 1999:323). A walk around Glebe and a quick nick over a fence located ideal premises at 73 Westmoreland Street. The empty house bore the name plate: ‘Elsie’. But establishing a working refuge needed more women (Summers 1999, 322-3; Timeframe, 13 February 1997).

That was achieved on 9 and 10 March 1974, at the Women’s Commission on Women against the Violent Society inspired by the speak-outs at the previous IWD Commission. After another group of courageous violence survivors told their stories, Anne Summers seized the moment and offered the shocked listeners the chance to act on what they had heard (Summers 1999:324). The following Saturday, sixty nervous and excited women occupied the house called ‘Elsie’. In the euphoria of the moment, some of them also broke into the house next door and claimed it, too (Summers 1999: 324; Timeframe 13 February 1997). The term ‘domestic violence’ had not yet been used, the key issue was still homelessness, and the women did not know what would happen next.

Before the next stage of the story is explored and followed into the policy context, this chapter now returns to investigation of the representational history which lay behind the gradual process of recognition and framing which has been introduced.

THE CONSTRUCTION OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE WITHIN POLICY DEVELOPMENTS: 1900-1970

Developments in both the justice system and social policy in Australia between 1900 and 1970 constructed domestic violence in ways which made it progressively less socially visible than it had been in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The representational implications involved differed, although complementing each other, in the two policy contexts, and those differences are indicated by the accessibility of relevant information in the records of the two policy areas. As at the end of the nineteenth century, court records provide rich information about the responses of the justice system to women suffering partner violence. They also continue to demonstrate both that women were assaulted, and sometimes killed, by their husbands/partners throughout the twentieth century, and that women continued to turn to the courts as a strategic resource, for protection, justice and as means of negotiation with their violent partners (Allen 1982: 2-8; 1986: 119-27; 1987: 208-9; 1990: 108- 27, 133-41, 238-42; BCSR 1975). But it is difficult, in this pivotal period in the shaping of the Australian welfare state, to find direct attention to women who suffered domestic violence in either the primary records or relevant secondary accounts of Australian social policy. This is even the case, as will be demonstrated, for the

policies most relevant to those women, that is those which provided income support for sole mothers. This difficulty is itself an indication of the apparent ‘disappearance’ of domestic violence in this period.

Developments in the policy of the justice system

Judith Allen’s examination of the justice system in NSW in this period establishes two major changes with significant implications for the framing and visibility of domestic violence. The first was an even stronger move than that identified in the late nineteenth century away from addressing wife assault through the criminal law and towards a preference for civil procedures. Allen demonstrates this through case law examples, and finds evidence of presumption that divorce law reforms and the ‘constructive desertion’ provisions meant that the needs of assaulted wives were adequately and more appropriately met by these means than through the law (Allen 1986:119, 124-125; Allen 1982: 14-15, 20; 1986: 123-127; 1987:208-9, 215-6). The second significant change identified by Allen was increased reference to the discourse of psychological analysis both in the criminal defence of violence men, and, more generally, in the broad construction of human behaviour, including marital and family based violence (Allen 1990: 234; 1982:11). .

The significance of both these changes for the framing of domestic violence within the justice system and in society at large was that they meant a strengthening move away from recognition of wife assault as a crime, with its implications of state responsibilities of protection and redress for the victim, and towards the construction of all forms of family based violence as matters of private and individual responsibility. In the case of the psychological framing, this also meant an implication that the problem was not a matter of the endemic ‘bad’ social behaviour addressed by the criminal law, but evidence of the ‘sad’ pathological aberrations of particular individuals and families. In these terms, the appropriate response was not justice or punishment, but an individual therapeutic approach. This was a reading, also, which permitted a shift from the identities and responsibilities of ‘perpetrator’ and ‘victim’ to emphasis on the mutual problems of the couple involved, and even to presumption that since wives bore primary responsibility for the moral well-being of the household, the woman in the case could be held to carry the major blame and shame

(Allen 1982:21-22; 1986:127-130; 1990:135-3,143,234; for discussion of similar framings in the USA see Pleck 1987: 145-82, 193; Gordon 1989: 280-5; and for the USA and UK, Dobash and Dobash 1980: 193-9; 1992: 218-21). These framings were not helpful for women struggling to survive violence; nor were they likely to assist the problem identification of domestic violence in the community at large.

The framing of the Australian Welfare State

Concurrently with these changes in justice system policy, significant developments were occurring in the policies most relevant to women’s chances of achieving viable and autonomous households. These were the policy initiatives eventually identified as contributing to an Australian welfare state. They proceeded by two routes: through the provision of income support as pensions and benefits for those unable to support themselves and by means of legislated wage fixing mechanisms. The income support measures began with provision of age pensions by the NSW government in 1900 and of age and invalid pensions by the Commonwealth government in 1908 (Dickey 1980: 110-123; Kewley 1973: 43-81; Roe 1988: 6). The wage regulation measures set up a network of arbitration and conciliation agencies and procedures, initiated by establishment of Wages Boards in Victoria in 1896 and arbitration systems in South Australia in the 1890s and NSW in 1901, followed in 1904 by the Commonwealth Court of Conciliation and Arbitration, with powers to deal with industrial disputes ‘extending beyond the limits of any one state’ (Roe 1976: 4; Ryan and Conlon 1975: 52-3, 86).

Although several of these measures were clearly of relevance to women and their life options, their value and accessibility for women were shaped by two dominant framings. The first of these was the continuing assumption that the most acceptable and effective means of economic support for women was dependence on men. The second was the parallel conviction that female breadwinners were so exceptional, and their existence so anomalous, that it was neither necessary nor appropriate to address their needs. These assumptions will be demonstrated first through the national wage regulation system, followed by investigation of social policy provisions.

The definition of the economic place of women by the national wage system began with the iconic Harvester Case in 1907, when Mr Justice H. B. Higgins ruled on the meaning of a ‘fair and reasonable’ wage in terms of ‘the normal needs of the average employee regarded as a human being living in a civilised community’ (Ryan and Conlon 1975: 90-1). Later judgements made it clear that this principle applied to a male employee, and that it was based on the living expenses of a man with a wife and three children (Ryan and Conlon 1975:91-2,100). Later judgements wrote the gender segregation of the work force into industrial law with appropriately differential wage levels (Ryan and Conlon 1975: 98-100). Then, when Judge Heydon, President of the NSW Board of Trade, made the first determination of a living (that is minimum) wage for women in 1918, he explained that although some women were obliged to be family breadwinners, such women were ‘exceptional’ and neither should nor could be taken into consideration. His grounds for this were that: ‘A girl learns that in all probability she will marry’, and so that ‘[her] work will only be an episode in her life’ (Ryan and Conlon 1975: 83). Equal pay principles made no impact on Australian wage regulation decisions until the Equal Pay decision under the new Whitlam ALP Commonwealth government in 1972 (Cass 1988: 62; Baldock 1988b: 34-45).

The anomalies veiled by these decisions included the large numbers of Australian working men with neither wife nor children and the significant number of wage earning women, estimated by Ryan and Conlon to have been ‘always about a third of the workforce’ (Ryan and Conlon 1975:65, 108; Cass 1988: 57). But possibly the most iniquitous anomaly was the invisibility of female breadwinners, who included women escaping from violent partners. Deborah Brennan reports an estimate ‘that at the turn of the [twentieth] century up to 20 percent of all women in New South Wales (married or unmarried) who had responsibility for young children may have lacked a male income earner either because of death or effective desertion’ (Brennan 1998a: 22, referring to Kelly 1988). Cass quotes a survey of Victorian manufacturing industries in 1928 in which almost thirty percent of women interviewed ‘were helping to keep, or were fully supporting family members’ (Cass 1988: 62). Ryan and Conlon report that the 1933 Census found that 19.3 percent of breadwinners, not including pensioners, were female (Ryan and Conlon 1975: 121). This amounts to one fifth of Australian breadwinners who were being treated as an ‘exceptional’ case, and so were not appropriately addressed by the wage system.

The anomalous position of the female breadwinner is equally evident in the income support policies proceeding alongside the ‘living wage’ system. They make it clear that two groups of women were even less visible, and even more anomalous, in the Australian welfare state than other female breadwinners. The least visible breadwinners were unmarried single mothers and women who chose, or were driven, to leave their official male meal tickets. With the interesting exception of the Maternity Allowance, introduced in 1912 as a panic response to a perceived population decline, women who became mothers outside marriage were excluded from all Commonwealth benefits (Lake 1999: 75-6; Kewley 1973: 103-9; Dickey 1980:126; Roe 1988: 7). Aboriginal and Asian mothers, whether married or single, were also excluded from receipt of the Maternity Allowance (Lake 1999: 75-6). Women who had left men, on the other hand, were placed in a territory of shadowy ambivalence, which indicates that the new social policy measures made no acknowledgement of the implications of domestic violence, and that these women also represented severe challenges to ruling expectations.

Sheila Shaver summed up the implications of the Australian welfare state for women as: ‘…when it comes to paying for the welfare state [as a taxpayer] the system treats women as individuals, but in respect of virtually every benefit conferred back on them, social policy measures treat them as somebody’s wife or somebody’s mother’ (Shaver 1988:151-2). When there was no man in the picture, the policy response was even more awkward. The first Commonwealth income support benefits specifically for women were the War Widows Pension, introduced in 1916 during the First World War, and the Widows Pension for civilian widows, initiated in 1942. The lower rate provided for civilian widows created what was later labelled as ‘a hierarchy’ of widows (Aitken-Swan 1962: 2). The differential was not addressed until the 1970s, when the difference in payment levels ended, but pensions for war widows remained free from means testing (Roe 1988:12).

The terms for the civilian Widows Pension make explicit the anomalous position of both women who became mothers outside of marriage and women who chose to leave men. The terms of access to the Widows Pension were so broad as to earn the comment, again from Jan Aitken-Swan, that ‘the term “widow” has lost its meaning

in Australia and requires to be defined’ (Aitken-Swan 1962: 7). Both de jure and de facto widows were covered, together with deserted or divorced de jure wives, wives whose husbands were in mental institutions, and, from1947, wives of men in prison. The pension was available to women in these categories who were under 50 years and had dependent children, and to qualifying women over 50; the latter (Widows B) provision, which continued until 1987 (Bryson 1988: 144), reflected the expectation that a woman supported by a man or the state until middle age could not be expected to start keeping herself (Kewley 1973: 213-23; Shaver 1989: 167). That left unmarried mothers and de facto wives who had been deserted or who had left their partners to fall through the legislative cracks, with the position of de jure wives who chose to leave unspecified. Later commentators refer to or imply a ‘constructive desertion’ interpretation, which presumably meant a special determination at the discretion of a departmental official (West 1991: 181; Jordan 1979: 63-4; Walshe 1994: 58). Such determinations must be seen in the context of a further provision of the Act, requiring that women receiving the pension should be ‘of good character and deserving of a pension’ (Kewley 1973: 215). These terms explain the exclusion of unmarried mothers from this benefit; they are also a reminder that, apart from the unassailable blamelessness of a woman whose husband was actually deceased, women without men continued to be a suspect category. As Ronald Sackville observed: ‘The policy of denying assistance to separated wives unable to prove desertion presumably rests on a belief that only the morally innocent warrant public assistance and that a wife who cannot prove desertion has only herself to blame for her poverty’ (Sackville 1972:10). The further condition that deserted, and presumably ‘constructively’ deserting, de jure wives had to wait for six months before they qualified for the pension in order to ensure that a ‘permanent’ separation had occurred, demonstrates that the pension requirements took no account of the urgent situation of a woman fleeing violence (Kewley 1973: 214). The six month wait also applied, somewhat pointlessly, to women whose husbands were in prison, presumably so as not to advantage them above deserted wives (Kewley 1973: 217; 1980:104).

Where did that leave deserted de facto wives, de jure ‘constructive’ deserters not deemed to meet the standard, unmarried mothers and all the women serving out their six month waiting periods? From 1926 in NSW and 1941 nationally all mothers had access to Child Endowment payments, although they were never intended to support a

mother and her family. These women also had access to state government benefits, which varied so severely that some were described as ‘scandalous’ (Sackville 1972: 21-2). In 1968, in a climate of concern about childhood poverty, the Holt Coalition Commonwealth government brought in the States Grants (Deserted Wives) Act to provide the states with subsidies ‘to provide more uniform levels of assistance to fatherless families not eligible for Commonwealth pensions (Sackville 1972:22; see also Kewley 1980:111-2; Dickey 1980: 198; Raymond 1987:13). In addition, some unmarried mothers had access to Commonwealth Special Benefits over the period in which they gave birth (Sackville 1972:19-20).

This piecemeal, and potentially demeaning, situation continued until the Whitlam ALP Commonwealth government enacted a supporting mother’s benefit in1973. Product of a brilliant and unquestionably policy activist campaign by unmarried mothers through the strategic instrumentality of the Council for the Single Mother and Her Child, this initiative provided for unmarried mothers and all varieties of separated women (including those who had left men) on the same terms as the Widows Pension (West 1991: 168-81; Cullen 1991: 89-101; Swain and Howe 1995: 202-3, 206). But the continuing provision that all these women, unless they had been widowed or divorced, must wait for six months before they qualified for the benefit is a forceful indication that the needs of women fleeing violent partners played no part in the design of this policy measure; as problem representations, violence survivors were still not on the agenda. The requirement of a six month waiting period was removed in 1980 (Roe 1988:13). But it is significant that a research paper produced by the Department of Social Security in that year, which included an historical account of Commonwealth income support provisions for sole parents, makes no mention of the situation of women who left a partner prior to introduction of the supporting mothers benefit, and no acknowledgement of the reasons women might have had for making such a decision; neither the concept nor the means of determination of ‘constructive desertion’ is included in this account (Hammond 1980). Indeed, the first specific mention, apart from the implications of ‘constructive desertion’, of the situation of women escaping violent partners that I was able to find in a Commonwealth government policy document, was published in 1987 as part of the Social Security Review initiated by the Hawke ALP government (Raymond 1987: 10). The implications are that during the years considered in this chapter, and beyond, domestic

violence and the women who suffered it had no clear place in either the provisions or the problem representations of Australian social policy.

THE PLACING OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE WITHIN AUSTRALIAN FEMINISM: 1900-1970

How, then, were Australian feminists seeing and responding to domestic violence in these years? What have the directions and strategies of feminist activism in these years to offer in reaching an understanding of why feminists in the early 1970s felt as if they were discovering domestic violence and its significance for women for the first time? The framing of dominant policy discourses provides part but not all of the answer.

Rather than attempting a detailed account of Australian feminist activism between 1900 and 1970, the emphases of Australian feminism across these years will be examined by means of ‘soundings’ taken at three key points in its development. The locations for the ‘soundings’ have been chosen because they are both centrally significant in the development of Australian feminism, and directly relevant to the needs of women suffering domestic violence. The ‘soundings’ also make it possible to observe the ways in which the analyses and strategies of Australian feminists interacted with the profound changes concurrently taking place in women’s lives and opportunities, some of them through social policy. The location for the first ‘sounding’ is in the first decades, simultaneously, of the new century, the new Australian federation and of women’s right to vote; the second focuses on the struggle for maternal and child endowment during the 1920s and 1930s; and the third considers the response and contribution of Australian feminists to the international discourse of human rights and anti-discrimination in the period during and immediately after World War II. The circumstances identified in the 1970s as ‘domestic violence’ will not be found to be explicitly present in the feminist discourse of any of these locations.

In the period of the first ‘sounding’, domestic violence was as subtly located within the issues carried by suffrage feminists into the new century as it had been during the suffrage campaign. The code provided for male violence by the temperance

movement still applied; but feminists campaigning from a broader and more systemic approach continued to place primary emphasis on the degradation of women implied by the double standard of morality, and through the linked sexual compulsion and economic dependence of married women, rather than on male violence per se. This emphasis is, for example, evident in feminist responses to the increasing use of improved means to birth control. Many feminists still opposed birth control technology as an encouragement to unreasonable male sexual demands, and advocated ‘voluntary motherhood’ based on male continence as a protection against venereal disease and its eugenic implications (Lake 1999:90-1, 95-7).

Still operating from a framing of the state as a means of legislative intervention, rather than a provider of services and benefits, and still unable to conceive of the possibility of an autonomous household as an option for the majority of women, feminists in this period continued to campaign for legal changes either to improve the independence, particularly of married, women, or to restrict male sexual indulgence. They were more successful in achieving measures for the protection of women and children (for example Early Closing laws to restrict liquor outlets, the appointment of female prison matrons, police and factory inspectors, and establishment of separate courts for matters involving children than in restrictions to the sexual freedom or marital rights of men (Ryan and Conlon 1975: 34-44; Lake 1998: 139; 1999: 59, 62,148; Pixley 1998: 501-3. In NSW, attempts to raise the female age of consent to 18 years failed and an increase to 16 years was not achieved until 1910 (Summers 1994a: 423, note 49; Lake 1999: 57, 147); the wait to achieve equal custody rights for mothers, not until 1934 in NSW, and legislation to prevent men willing their estates away from wives and children, 1916 in NSW, was even longer (Lake 1999: 86; Atherton 1995: 181-5).

In the period of the next ‘sounding’, the interwar and Great Depression years of the 1920s and 1930s, feminists responded to the possibilities of an increasingly socially interventionist state. I have already pointed out Marian Sawer’s arguments about the resonance between feminist objectives and the social liberal philosophy shaping the building of a welfare state in the UK and Australia, with particular emphasis on the framing, as expressed by T. H. Green, of an ethical state providing citizens with the conditions of positive liberalism necessary for a viable life (Chapter One above;

Sawer 1993: 7-9, 19-21; 2003: 9-49). Feminists sought to shape those possibilities in terms of their own concept of ethical policy, particularly with regard to the moral and caring roles of women.

Two new elements are evident in feminist strategy in these years. First, in the changed policy context of the early welfare state, feminists worked for state income support for married women, in terms also of recognition for the dignity and contribution of their roles, through maternal and child endowment; secondly, and in the environment of the regulated ‘living’ wage, feminists also campaigned for equal pay for women in paid work (Lake 1999: 90-3, 98-103; Cass 1988: 62). These measures were opposed by men on both sides of politics, united in rejecting the threat to either the male wage or the traditional economic structure of the family. Maternal endowment was never achieved. Child endowment, established in NSW by the Lang Labor government in 1927 and the Commonwealth in 1941, was on both occasions introduced in a context of, and at the price of, wage restraint (Cass 1988: 71-6; Roe 1988: 9; Dickey 1980: 145-6).

Nevertheless, child endowment was unquestionably an achievement of feminist policy activism. Cass reports that Labor women were directly responsible for the inclusion of child endowment in NSW Labor party policy (Cass 1988: 72), and Cass and Lake both acknowledge the role of the United Association of Women in achievement of Commonwealth child endowment, and in particular their intervention to ensure that the payment was made directly to mothers (Cass 1988:79, Lake 1999:108; 149). Another dramatic demonstration of a united stand by feminists was made in 1923, when women of all political persuasions, with Victorian Labor women participating in defiance of a ruling from their party, rallied successfully in Melbourne against proposed cuts to the maternity allowance (Lake 1999:76-8). This ‘sounding’ period can be read as a stage in feminist exploration of the early development of the Australian welfare state, and of the advantages of increased workforce opportunities and decreased family sizes. Nevertheless, feminist analysis still operated primarily in terms of the inevitability of marriage for most women, and consequently targeted the protection of traditional roles, and a continuing broad strategy of improving women’s economic independence. It was still the case that the circumstances of women trying

to escape violent partners were not specifically signalled by feminist analysis or objectives, apart from the limited agenda of temperance feminists.

The third ‘soundings’ location, in the years immediately before, during and after WWII, was shaped by ongoing improvements in employment options (especially during the War), decreasing family sizes (which persisted after the War, since the baby boom was actually a marriage boom), and by the participation of Australian feminists in development of a discourse of human rights and anti-discrimination in the multi-lateral contexts of the League of Nations and United Nations. A watershed in the subtly changing directions of Australian feminist endeavour in this period can be found in the substantial Australian Women’s Charter Conferences in 1943 and 1946. Jessie Street was a leading player in these conferences, as she was in the Australian delegation which contributed to establishment of the United Nations, and in achievement of the UN Commission on the Status of Women (Street 1966: 265-85; Pritchard 1998: 496-7).Within the new international framing, the traditional feminist discourse of equity in difference was challenged by an agenda of equity through rights, furthered by measures to counter discrimination. The Charter Conference Reports in 1946-7 walked the line of this change by balancing recommendations for traditional measures, like the restoration of local option polls to control liquor licences, maternal endowment, and measures to counter venereal disease as a consequence of sexual promiscuity, with new ones, for example the decriminalisation of prostitution and the provision of child care for working mothers. But access to birth control was not included, despite its emergence in this period as an issue for several mainstream feminist organisations, and neither was domestic violence (Lake 1999: 190, 194-8; her quotation from Women’s Charter: 198)

THE LEAP TO WOMEN’S LIBERATION

To this point, this chapter has demonstrated that one of the reasons that Australian feminists in the early 1970s at first neglected, and then believed that they had made a pioneering ‘discovery’ of, domestic violence as a feminist issue, was that this form of violence did not have a place as a clearly identified social or political issue in either the feminist discourse and strategies, or the relevant legal or social policy initiatives,

of the immediately preceding years. No political or policy discourse, including that of their own political tradition, spoke to them about this widespread violence.

Such explanations place the 1970s feminists in terms of their social, political and policy contexts. Nevertheless, neither these contextual elements, nor the shock of the experience of discovery, completely explains why, after almost a century of careful feminist strategic and analytical development, the feminists of the late 1960s and early 1970s had, at first, so little sense of the subtly balanced ways in which their feminist predecessors had placed their issues and strategies, including domestic violence. Moreover, it was not just the recognition of domestic violence, but the whole experience of feminism itself which felt like and operated through a jolt of surprise and fresh discovery at this time (for example, Summers 1999: 256-87; Ryan 1999: 115-20; Stevens 1985: 27-41 and quoted in Penson 1999: 15-20; Curthoys, A. 1998a: 2-12). The re-definition which was the re-discovery of domestic violence was, in fact, part of a re-definition discovery of feminism itself. This leap, towards the feminist position initially embraced as Women’s Liberation, amounts to a historical disjuncture in a centuries old activist tradition.

Amongst the overlapping explanations which can be found for that separation is the notorious shaping of official record keeping and traditional historical research and exposition around public and predominantly male areas of activity; another is the possibility that the disjunctive leap was generational. But neither explanation is sufficient, since even politically active feminist historians (for example Anne Summers and Anne Curthoys in Australia and Sheila Rowbotham in England) did not immediately make these connections (for Rowbotham see Rowbotham 2000: 230-2), and long-term feminist activists joined Women’s Liberation, including in some cases its consciousness raising groups, or WEL and found themselves taken by surprise by new ways of seeing their lives and framing their feminism. Among such trans- generational feminists were Bessie Guthrie, who took part in founding Elsie; experienced Labor movement feminist Edna Ryan and left-wing and Australian Communist Party activist Joyce Stevens (Ryan, L. 1998: 483-4; Penson 1999: 15-20; personal recollections of conversations); long-term abortion rights campaigner Beryl Henderson (Ryan, J.: 1998: 433-4); union activist and eventual Labor Senator for WA, Pat Giles (Grahame1998: 426); and Victorian workers for equal pay and

industrial rights, Zelda D’Aprano and Mary Owen (Caine 1998: 406; Waterfield 1995: 8-17)

The further explanation I would propose here, both for the leap to feminist re- definition and as a last explanation for the lag and drama involved in the 1970s ‘discovery’ of domestic violence, is that the changes in women’s life circumstances unfolding throughout the twentieth century had reached, in the prosperous post-war years of the late 1950s and the 1960s, a point at which women were able to imagine their lives in profoundly new ways. I would argue, in fact, that the re-definition of feminism itself demonstrates the achievement of a re-conceptualisation by women of the possibilities and expectations framing our lives. This claim will be explored through reference to three locations of decisive change which have been observed as they unfolded in this and the previous chapter. These are: reproductive control, increasing employment opportunities for women, and the opening of policy influence to citizen participation, in the wake of the ethics which shaped the welfare state.

Feminist historians Judith Allen and Marilyn Lake both indicate the significance of women’s increasing access during the twentieth century to reproductive control, and to the related possibilities of smaller family sizes, a new rapport for women with their bodies and sexuality, and consequently higher expectations in the quality of their intimate relationships (Allen 1994: 23-4, 30, 92-3; Lake 1999: 6-9). Reproductive control took its incremental leap with arrival of the contraceptive pill during the 1960s. Lake has argued that the transformation in women’s attitude to their sexuality, from an obnoxious compulsion to a right to pleasure, was the single most significant dividing line between feminists in the late twentieth century and all who went before (Lake 1999: 7). It is certainly a profound distinction, and one which locates the force of abortion rights as an early campaign for Women’s Liberation feminism; it also explains the shock with which feminists eventually recognised the endemic presence of violence as an aspect of intimate relationships for many women.

Allen also indicates the significance of the increasing employment opportunities which accompanied steadily declining family sizes in opening a new range of choices to women (Allen 1986; 119-20). In the context of the late 1960s, I would situate this important change in a different way. Australian young women reaching maturity in

the second half of the 1960s enjoyed sufficient access to higher education (in many cases, including for working class women, through Commonwealth Scholarships to tertiary institutions) and to a variety of career prospects, that they were able not only to imagine but to expect to establish, if they so chose, their own viable, indeed comfortable, autonomous households. They also expected to be able to establish both careers and families. I would argue that this possibility, of the achievement and even the right to an autonomous household for women, whether or not they chose to have children, marks the key distinction between feminists at the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s and all who came before them. This was the distinction which made it feasible for feminists to imagine, for the first time in the period discussed in this thesis, the adoption of strategies not only to improve marriage, but conceivably also to end, or at least to reject, its institutional dominance in women’s lives. The point is not that either of the changes identified, or any of those built upon them, was complete at the end of the 1960s. The shock involved for young feminists in recognition that women suffering violence could not easily choose to leave the violent man makes this clear. The profound change which provided the context for, and the passion of, the leap to a re-defined feminism lay in the potential these developments offered of imagining beyond the options and realities which had shaped Australian women’s lives and feminism to this point. In this sense, these changes also opened the way for a response to domestic violence which was so radically new that it felt like a discovery.

The third conceptual location shaping the redefinition of feminism, and its response to domestic violence, was a new direction in the context of public policy. Throughout the twentieth century Australian feminists had been testing the possibilities of the changes in policy practice summed up by the term ‘welfare state’. During the 1960s the social liberal philosophy which had shaped welfare state policy began to be explored in a new way. Social liberalism had always emphasised the contribution of community participation to the shaping and delivery of policy (Sawer 1993: 20). In the period which produced the new expression of feminism, community participation was embraced so wholeheartedly by some policy participants that the new term ‘participative democracy’ was coined to define their practice. This was the political environment which permitted growth of the many so-called ‘new social movements’, including those for environmental protection, indigenous and gay rights and anti-

racism, among which the women’s movement took its place (Yeatman 1990: 49-50). The significant point here is that this was a political and a policy environment in which citizens were able to expect not only that governments would meet their needs, but that they had a right to tell governments what they needed, and to be heard. This was a political philosophy, for those who embraced it, which meshed with a feminism based in listening and learning from each other’s experiences; it also opened new possibilities for and shaped new expectations about policy activism. While this context is a significant part of the contextual changes which help to explain the leap to the new feminism and its many discoveries, it is also a crucial context for the leap into policy engagement which will be pursued in the next chapter.

CONCLUSIONS

I have sought in this chapter to explain not just the lag in feminist response to domestic violence in the early 1970s and the jolt of discovery which followed, but also why it was that the feminist knowledge and subtly strategic feminist location of partner violence in the late nineteenth century had apparently disappeared. After establishing the circumstances and the dramatic nature of the feminist encounter with domestic violence in the early 1970s, I looked for the answer in two contextual locations.

The first of these was the period intervening between the achievement of a women’s vote at the end of the nineteenth century and the new burgeoning of Australian feminism at the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s. With all its drama of great wars and depressions, these decades were found to be a context of steady but not fundamental change in women’s lives. Indeed, I have demonstrated that, despite the initiation of an Australian welfare state, the circumstances of domestic violence and the women who suffered it became less, not more, visible in the obvious policy locations in this period. The policy practice of the justice system moved away from the nineteenth century identification of wife assault as a crime and a social responsibility, ineffective as that had been, towards the framing of a pathological aberration and an individual responsibility. Meanwhile, the steadily building instruments of welfare state social policy persisted in the construction of women as the economic dependents of men, to the extent that the needs of women obliged to

separate from a violent partner played no acknowledged part in the framing of Australian social policy in this period, or, indeed, until well after the provision of the supporting mothers benefit in 1973.

Australian feminists through this period were found to have been persistently active and consistently sophisticated in their responses to the realities of women’s lives and opportunities. Their continuing placement of domestic violence as a less effective activist touchstone than compulsory marital sex in demonstrating the consequences of female economic dependence was equally shaped by their knowledge of their context. With access to a viable autonomous household still an extremely difficult prospect, this was still a context in which a feminism encouraging women to leave violent men was not a reasonable option. Domestic violence remained hidden in the codes and limited strategies of the temperance movement. Those who pursued a broader feminist agenda maintained their focus on improved opportunities for economic independence. Consequently, neither this feminist tradition, nor the representations framed by concurrent public policy, provided markers to assist the next generation of feminist in their identification of domestic violence.

The second contextual location in which I have sought an explanation for the apparent disjuncture in the Australian feminist tradition in the late 1960s and early 1970s was the period immediately before that new phase of feminism. I have concluded that the leap of discovery involved in both the recognition of domestic violence and the experience of feminism in which it occurred can be explained by the occurrence, at last, of a substantial change in women’s circumstances and opportunities in the late 1950s and 1960s. The outcome both of the real prospect of reproductive control provided by the contraceptive pill and of increased employment and educational opportunities for women, the measure of this change was that some women found it possible, for the first time in the period covered by the thesis, to imagine and to expect a self-determining life, in which the prospect of an autonomous household, whether or not they chose to have children, was a real option.

All of these conclusions contribute to the themes pursued in the thesis. They provide vivid demonstrations of the fundamental relevance of context, including the context of representation, in the shaping of both policy directed activism, in this case feminist

activism, and the directions of policy. This chapter, like the one which precedes it, makes it clear that such representational significance includes expectations about the nature of policy and the consequent possibilities of state responsibility it might embrace. The chapter also continues the demonstration begun in Chapter One of persistence and variety of the strategies through which Australian feminists have participated in interventions clearly located on the continuum of policy activism. This includes suggestions about the relationship between such strategies, within the limits of their operative context, and the policy outcomes which might result. Finally, the subtle placing of domestic violence amongst the activist and policy activist strategies of feminists prior to the early 1970s has added to understanding of the complexity of the relationship between a broad strategy for advancement of the status of women, and the part of the strategy addressing the situation of women suffering gender-based male violence.