An ‘Army of Superfluous Women’: Australian Single Women and the First World War
Elicia Victoria Taylor
BA (Honours I)
A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy in History
University of Newcastle
School of Humanities and Social Science
November 2019
This research was supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarship.
STATEMENT OF ORIGINALITY
I hereby certify that the work embodied in the thesis is my own work, conducted under normal supervision. The thesis contains no material which has been accepted, or is being examined, for the award of any other degree or diploma in any university or other tertiary institution and, to the best of my knowledge and belief, contains no material previously published or written by another person, except where due reference has been made. I give consent to the final version of my thesis being made available worldwide when deposited in the University’s Digital Repository, subject to the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968 and any approved embargo.
Some material from Chapter 2 was included in an article published during my candidature. This article was titled “’Unspeakably happy and content’: Single women’s surprising First World War Service” in the History Magazine of the Royal Australian Historical Society, No. 136 (June 2018).
Elicia Taylor
i ABSTRACT
When the First World War was declared, Olive King sensed an opportunity for adventure. After purchasing and converting an Alda truck into an ambulance, King entered into war service as an ambulance driver with the Scottish Women’s Hospitals and, later, the Serbian Army. While King’s wartime episode might be regarded as an aberration, other independent-minded Australian women acknowledged the war’s potential to liberate them from sheltered lives of domesticity. Australian single women became prominent figures in overseas humanitarian ventures, managed communications and logistics networks, and excelled as medical specialists in challenging environments. Home front upheavals also affected single women in diverse ways as they actively offered their time and skills to essential services, publicly appealed for opposition to war and conscription, sustained the nation’s education institutions, and influenced public policy regarding home front morality. Yet only snippets of these women’s experiences have received scholarly attention within Australia’s broader First
World War history.
This thesis tells the story of the First World War through the lens of Australian women who were unmarried, separated or widowed prior to the war, and variously regarded as ‘superfluous’, ‘surplus’ or simply ‘problematic’ within Australian public discourse. Shining a light on the experiences of women less constrained by their marital or maternal status offers a more nuanced account of women’s experiences in war while adding to emerging literature acknowledging Australian women’s self-perceptions of their value and legitimate citizenship during the early twentieth century. Adopting a hybrid micro-biographical method, this study draws upon archival records, correspondence, memoirs, diaries and newspapers to argue that Australian single women experienced war in unique ways as direct and active participants – transcending gendered expectations of their capabilities while also confronting resistant societal attitudes towards their prominent and self-assured wartime activism.
ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
In completing this thesis, I have been blessed by the enthusiasm, support and expertise of my two supervisors, Professor Victoria Haskins and Dr Kate Ariotti. Victoria’s encouragement during my Honours project inspired my continuation into postgraduate studies, a decision that has been life-changing. As my principal supervisor, Victoria provided generous and expert guidance in sources, structure and argument. She has also been an incredible mentor, and an example of consummate professionalism throughout my postgraduate studies. I am particularly grateful for her empathetic support in dealing with the challenges of academia, parenthood, and life in general. Co-supervisor
Kate Ariotti’s expertise in Australian war history has been incredibly valuable, and I have found her enthusiasm contagious. I have particularly appreciated Kate’s encouraging feedback, and her ‘eagle-eyed’ attention to detail over the past three and half years.
Over the course of my postgraduate studies, I have also appreciated the financial support I received through an Australian Research Council Research Training
Program scholarship, the University of Newcastle Vice Chancellor Award, and the
National Council of Women (NCW) Australian History Award. Being able to focus on my studies without added financial pressure has been an enormous privilege. I deeply value the generosity provided by these organisations and the faith they have placed in my abilities.
I have also benefited from advice and assistance from scholars and specialists at the University of Newcastle and beyond. Associate Professor Josephine May, Dr Wendy
Michaels and Dr Alana Piper were most generous and helpful in suggesting possible research avenues. A variety of archivists and librarians at the Australian War Memorial, the National Library of Australia, the National Archives of Australia, the State Libraries of New South Wales and Victoria, and the University of Melbourne aided my research, and I deeply value their assistance. Kerry Neale and Emma Campbell at the Australian
War Memorial were especially generous with their time and advice. Bryce Abraham and
Padraic Gibson kindly helped me to overcome the first hurdle of my PhD – confirmation
– and I thank them both.
iii To the extraordinary group of women in MC148 – Dr Amy Lovat, Dr Di
Rayson, Dr Naomi Fraser, Dr Annika Herb, Honae Cuffe, Kerry Plunkett, Ash McIntyre,
Ella Rusak, Caroline Schneider and Heather Lyle – thank you. I have had the privilege of joining this supportive and generous group of fellow postgraduates at different stages of their academic journey. Their friendship and support have been vital in helping me get to the finish line, and a highlight of my PhD experience. I have made lifelong friends through this process. Joining me from day one, Honae Cuffe’s wisdom and self- discipline have been truly inspiring. I have learned so much from this remarkable young woman for whom a bright future awaits. The assistance provided by the School of
Humanities and Social Science, and the collegiality of the postgrad cohort at the
University of Newcastle, have been invaluable. A special mention must go to Pearl
Nunn for her sympathetic ear and optimism, and Miriam Burgess whose perpetual can- do attitude is such a joy.
Finally, to my long-suffering family. Thank you for your patience and support while I undertook this long research journey. To my husband, Dean, I deeply value your love and support, and the secure home life you have helped foster while I have been rather distracted. My sons, Joshua and Oliver, thank you for understanding my need for time, space and quiet, and for helping me to maintain a sense of perspective during my studies. I sincerely hope I have not turned you both against university studies!
This thesis is dedicated to my parents. My father, David McLean – a true teacher and a man of integrity – always expressed faith in my abilities, championed my efforts, and demonstrated such pride in the achievements of his children and grandchildren. My mother, Judi McLean, continues to inspire me with her generous heart, her zest for life, and more recently, her courageous approach to widowhood.
iv CONTENTS
ABSTRACT ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iii
LIST OF IMAGES vi
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS viii
INTRODUCTION: Horribly Independent 1
1. Working out Her Destiny 29 Single Women Prior to War 2. A Streak of Vagabond 50 Freedom, Adventure and Service 3. Looking After Their Boys 80 Women’s Humanitarian Enterprises 4. Alleviating Distress 110 Women Leaders in Communication Networks 5. Channeling Women’s Faculties 140 Medicine, Leadership and Activism 6. A Brigade of Lady Helpers 169 Women’s Home Front Patriotism 7. Separate From All that Makes for War 201 Women’s Anti-war Activism 8. Modelling Professional Spinsterhood 231 Women Teachers During War 9. The New Social Work 262 Policing Home Front Morality
CONCLUSION: Women Have Found Themselves 293
BIBLIOGRAPHY 300
v LIST OF IMAGES
Image 1: Olive May (Kelso) King, c. 1915 60 Australian War Memorial (P01352-002)
Image 2: Studio Portrait Olive May (Kelso) King, c. 1916 64 Australian War Memorial (P01352.001)
Image 3: WWI: English Munitions Recruiting Campaign, 1914-1918 66 Australian War Memorial (H13179)
Image 4: Member of the Women’s Land Army, 1915-1918 70 Imperial War Museum (Q54607)
Image 5: Miss Louise Mack disguised as a Flemish Maid Servant 73 Sun (Sydney), 18 July, 1915
Image 6: Miss Rose Venn-Brown 90 Sunday Times, 29 April, 1917
Image 7: Miss Verania (Rania) MacPhillamy, Rafa, 1919 98 Australian War Memorial (B00865)
Image 8: Group portrait of Miss Verania MacPhillamy, Rafa, 1919 101 Australian War Memorial (B00913)
Image 9: Miss L. E. Armstrong 104 Country Life Stock and Station Journal, 21 March, 1924
Image 10: Studio Portrait of Vera Deakin, Australian Red Cross, 1918 123 Australian War Memorial (P02119.001)
Image 11: Portrait of Miss Mary Elizabeth Chomley, 1914-1918 128 Australian War Memorial (H01366)
Image 12: Mrs Annie Wheeler, c. 1920 133 Capricornia Coast Historical Society
Image 13: Dr Phoebe Chapple, MM, c. 1917 155 Australian War Memorial (P10871.005)
Image 14: Dr Agnes Elizabeth Lloyd Bennett, c. 1916-1917 157 Alexander Turnbull Library (PAColl-6972-12-25-1)
vi Image 15: Vera Scantlebury Brown and her brother, c. July 1918 162 Melbourne University Archives (2013.0058.00001)
Image 16: Willunga Cheer-up Society 173 Victor Harbour Times, 30 March, 2015
Image 17: Stockton Dinkum Girls 195 Newcastle Sun, 13 December, 1919
Image 18: Portrait of Vida Goldstein 210 National Library of Australia (PIC/6937 LOC Drawer PIC/6937)
Image 19: Miss Cecilia John 218 The Herald, 26 November, 1923
Image 20: Kinglake Central School Students and Teacher, c. 1916 238 Museums Victoria Collections (MM 137375)
Image 21: “Amazonian Drill Instructors in the Making” 246 Daily Telegraph, 11 January, 1915
Image 22: Miss Ella Gormley, BA 248 Daily Telegraph, 26 July, 1916
Image 23: Miss Winifred West, 1945 258 National Archives of Australia (11738355)
Image 24: Lillian Armfield, one of the First Policewomen in NSW 281 Daily Telegraph, 14 July, 2015
Image 25: Kate Boadicea Cocks, c. 1936 283 State Library of South Australia (B10886)
vii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
AAMS Australian Army Medical Service AANS Australian Army Nursing Service
AFL Australian Freedom League AIF Australian Imperial Force
ARC Australian Red Cross AWSC Australian Women’s Service Corps
BMA British Medical Association BRF Belgian Relief Fund
LSB Loyal Service Bureau MBE Member of the Order of the British Empire MM Military Medal NCW National Council of Women NUWW National Union of Working Women
OBE Officer of the Order of the British Empire POW Prisoner of War QMAAC Queen Mary’s Army Auxiliary Corps SWH Scottish Women’s Hospitals
USCU University Students Christian Union VAD Voluntary Aid Detachment VC Victoria Cross VD Venereal Disease VWA Voluntary Workers Association WAAC Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps
WCTU Women’s Christian Temperance Union WLA Women’s Land Army WPA Women’s Peace Army
WPS Women’s Police Service WPV Women Police Volunteers
WSPU Women’s Social and Political Union
viii YMCA Young Men’s Christian Association YWCA Young Women’s Christian Association
ix INTRODUCTION
Horribly Independent
I often wonder if you’ll find me very changed. I think I’ve got pretty selfish in the war, and I know I’ve got more horribly independent than ever.1
Olive King’s rueful lament to her father spoke of the complicated internal struggles she was experiencing in 1916, in the middle of the Great War, as an ambulance driver in the Serbian Army. In this simple self-deprecatory remark, she readily acknowledged the war’s capacity to change her outlook and behaviour, and not necessarily for the better. Yet King’s reference to the war’s impact on her independence is somewhat ironic given that her fiercely independent nature was evident well prior to the war and had prompted her service in such an unusual wartime setting. A further complication was her financial dependence upon her wealthy father. While King’s admission to
‘horrible’ independence might have been unintentional, the ambiguity of the term, and indeed her own situation, perfectly reflects the uncertain societal position occupied by many single women during the Great War. It is precisely single women’s ambiguous societal position that this thesis seeks to understand. That is, in what ways did
Australian single women exercise their independence during the First World War, and to what extent did their wartime experiences enhance their personal, professional and societal standing?
As an ambulance driver and chauffeur in the Serbian Army, King’s experience reflected the most unusual or, at least, the most traditionally ‘masculine’ occupation for
Australian women during the First World War. She is hardly a household name in
Australia nor are other women who pursued less traditional modes of service during
1 Olive King to George Kelso King, August 18, 1916, in One Woman at War: Letters of Olive King 1915-1920, ed. Hazel King (Collingwood: Melbourne University Press, 1986), 38.
-1- the war: women such as Louise Mack, who similarly sought adventure as a war correspondent in Belgium; and Mary Brennan, who pursued work in British munitions factories before joining the British Land Army. Many other Australian women performed vital work in overseas humanitarian, communications and logistics networks, while thousands of women served in the medical arena as doctors, nurses and Red Cross voluntary aids. Indeed, Australian women were active across many sites of the First World War, including Britain, France, Belgium, Egypt, Greece, India and Malta. Their contributions in such diverse settings and activities is surprising.
Australian authorities preferred that women remain at home and attend to traditionally feminine activities such as child-rearing, fundraising and producing comforts for soldiers. Yet even on the home front, significant numbers of women pursued less conventional activities associated with the war effort. Patriotic and anti- war activist groups attracted women from different sides of the political spectrum, and women teachers assumed heightened responsibilities when their male colleagues departed in large numbers for the war. The First World War also heralded the introduction of women police officers to address societal concerns regarding the increasing presence of young women within the public domain.
A significant proportion of women who participated in unconventional wartime activities or unusual settings were single women. This point may seem unremarkable at first glance, given that the most likely contenders for overseas war service or demanding home front activities were women free from marital or maternal responsibilities. While men’s participation in the war was not officially constrained by marital or parental responsibilities, they too considered their marital status and responsibilities as family providers when weighing up their decisions to enlist – a point evidenced by the fact that over 80 percent of enlistees were unmarried.2 Nevertheless, gender governed the ways in which Australian citizens engaged in wartime activities, and marital status was critical in defining which women could serve in the war as well as the types of duties they performed.
2 Bart Ziino, “Eligible men: men, families and masculine duty in Great War Australia,” History Australia 14, No. 2 (2017): 216.
-2- The presence of Australian single women within challenging environments and unusual wartime activities complicates our understanding of this cohort’s societal status in the early twentieth century. Assessing women’s independence in considering their opportunities for war service also invites reflection upon a variety of social, political and economic conditions that coalesced in the early twentieth century.
Significant numbers of women may have been free from marriage and motherhood, yet they too had limits placed on their level of independence in both economic and reputational terms. These constraints not only affected their ability to travel overseas for war service, but also shaped women’s opportunities to participate in patriotic and anti-war activities at home. Women who overcame these limitations represented a significant challenge to the status quo in gendered expectations, and their experiences warrant further critical analysis.
The war’s impact on women’s future opportunities for marriage and motherhood was acknowledged both during and after the war. Public concern was especially evident in Britain where the number of ‘excess’ women of marriageable age
– often referred to, rather brutally, as ‘surplus’ or ‘superfluous’ women – almost doubled, from 613,000 in 1911 to 1,174,000 in 1921.3 Britain’s plight in this regard received considerable attention within the Australian press where proposals to accept
Britain’s ‘surplus women’ were discussed in the light of growing numbers of ‘surplus women’ also in Australia.4 However, problematising single women was not new. Well before the war, Britain’s ‘excess’ of unmarried women was represented as a crisis that directly contrasted with a reverse imbalance of men to women in Australia.5 At the
3 Katherine Holden, “Imaginary Widows: Spinsters, Marriage, and the ‘Lost Generation’ in Britain after the Great War,” Journal of Family History 30, No. 4 (2005): 397-398.
4 “In Woman’s Sphere: Surplus Women-Workers,” Barrier Miner, November 1, 1919, 7; “Surplus Women: Problem of Getting them to the Dominions,” Telegraph, December 2, 1919, 11; “Surplus Women: Melbourne Writer’s Opinions,” Darling Downs Gazette, August 16, 1919, 4; An Old- fashioned Woman, “Women Surplus and Minus,” Age, August 9, 1919, 21.
5 “Superfluous Woman: No Chance to Marry,” Telegraph, December 4, 1909, 2; “Britain’s Surplus Women,” Examiner, December 27, 1913, 2; “Women Immigrants,” Daily Telegraph, July 20, 1907, 19; “Surplus Women,” Register, March 19, 1914, 6. By contrast, Catherine Dollard explains that in pre- World War I Germany, concerns surrounding a surfeit of unmarried women was not based on a demographic reality, but was, rather, a cultural assumption. See Catherine L. Dollard, The Surplus Woman: Unmarried in Imperial Germany, 1871-1918 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), 88.
-3- same time, the historical sex imbalance in Australia had specific connotations for the position of unmarried women; they attracted criticism for their perverse rejection of the protection and security offered by marriage, or were considered flawed because of their failure to achieve marriage and motherhood.6
Aside from the negative perceptions specifically associated with unmarried women, early twentieth century attitudes influenced the limited wartime roles officially available to all Australian women. Historian Jan Bassett identified a distinct polarisation of men’s and women’s roles during the war, explaining that such roles rarely transcended the traditional gender stereotypes that applied to men’s and women’s activities during the early twentieth century.7 As in some European nations, an overriding consideration within the Australian context was the essentialist notion of a woman’s maternal role, particularly firmly held ideas that her most important civic responsibility was to produce a healthy fighting force for the nation.8 The prescription of legitimate motherhood necessarily privileged marriage, leaving unmarried women
(including unmarried mothers) excluded from this dominant ideal of patriotic womanhood. At the same time, the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) rejected women’s usefulness anywhere near the war front, and prevented women, other than nurses
(who were only grudgingly accepted in any case), from joining the official war effort.9
Despite these obstacles, and while many single women enthusiastically undertook accepted feminine pursuits such as knitting and fundraising, significant numbers of
6 Elizabeth Sloan Chesser, “’Old Maids’ - To-day and To-morrow,” Observer, March 13, 1909, 7; Kate Holmes, “’Spinsters Indispensable’: Feminists, Single Women and the Critique of Marriage, 1890-1920,” Australian Historical Studies 29, (1998): 75; Beverley Kingston, The Oxford History of Australia: Volume 3 1860-1900 Glad, Confident Morning (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1988), 115.
7 Jan Bassett, “’Ready to Serve’: Australian Women and the Great War,” Journal of the Australian War Memorial 2 (1983): 16.
8 Carmel Shute, “Heroines and Heroes: Sexual Mythology in Australia 1914-1918,” in Gender and War: Australians at War in the Twentieth Century, eds Joy Damousi and Marilyn Lake, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 23-24. Published first in Hecate in 1975.
9 AIF Despatches, cited in “Women War Workers,” Jensen Papers, Accession No. MP 598/30, Department of Supply, Item 15, National Archives of Australia, Victoria as cited by Rae Frances, “Women’s Mobilisation for War (Australia),” 1914-1918 Online: International Encyclopedia of the First World War, 4, accessed July 31, 2016, https://encyclopedia.1914-1918- online.net/article/womens_mobilisation_for_war_australia.
-4- other single women sought opportunities to engage more actively.10 These women used the unique conditions of war to exert their independence in new and challenging ways. Their wartime efforts and experiences, and societal reactions to their participation, form the subject of this thesis.
Single Women in War and Gender Historiography
By distinguishing the subjects for this study based on their marital status, this thesis interrupts a tendency to homogenise Australian women’s experiences of the First
World War. Explicitly focusing on the experiences of single women also generates important insights regarding the complex societal position assumed by Australian single women in the early twentieth century. To examine the intersections of war and gender in this way requires entering into a controversial field that has often been criticised for its tendency to mythologise and generalise the extent of war’s impact in the early twentieth century.11 In Australia, Marilyn Lake and Joy Damousi explain that the mythical role played by the First World War in the so-called ‘birth’ of Australian nationhood has meant that the ‘baptism of fire’ experienced by Australian men at
Gallipoli, and an emphasis on war and masculinity, have long dominated Australian war history.12 Carmel Shute’s influential article published in Hecate in 1975 offered an important counterpoint to the masculine focus of Australian First World War history while tracing a parallel mythologising of women’s functions in terms of their moral, maternal and sacrificial roles.13
10 Frances, “Women’s Mobilisation,” 4.
11 In her influential chapter, Gail Braybon refers to works such as Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory and Eric Leed’s No Man’s Land as examples of texts that have perpetuated the idea of the ‘lost generation’ of men, and which ignores the diversity of men’s experiences in the Great War. Similarly, Braybon refers to Arthur Marwick’s The Deluge, and Susan Kingsley Kent’s Making Peace: the Reconstruction of Gender in Interwar Britain as works that perpetuate idea that the First World War was beneficial to women’s progress. See Gail Braybon, “Winners or Losers: Women’s Symbolic Role in the War Story,” in Evidence, History and the Great War: Historians and the Impact of 1914-18, ed. Gail Braybon (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005), 86-90.
12 Marilyn Lake and Joy Damousi, “Introduction: Warfare, History and Gender,” Gender and War: Australians at War in the Twentieth Century, 1-2.
13 Shute, “Heroines and Heroes,” 23-42.
-5- The predominant focus of this thesis on women’s ‘patriotic’ activities is also somewhat controversial and requires explanation. The dictionary definition of patriotism as “the feeling of loving your country more than any others and being proud of it” belies the complicated variants of patriotism existing in early twentieth century Australia.14
Controversies surrounding the notion of patriotism have also made some Australian historians reluctant to examine women’s contributions during the First World War. Joan
Beaumont entered this realm in 2000 when she called for more nuanced examinations of women’s patriotic wartime contributions, and challenged feminist historians to overcome their ambivalence towards the mostly middle-class, imperialistic, militaristic sensibilities of so-called ‘patriotic’ women.15 While acknowledging that ‘patriotic’ women also opposed the war and/or conscription, Beaumont provided a helpful way to consider women’s wartime contributions. Her qualified use of the term ‘patriotic women’ as shorthand for the “broad spectrum of women who, whatever their earlier political persuasions and associations with international peace movements, found themselves in
1914 to 1918 unable to adopt any position other than that of being pro-war” has been similarly employed within this thesis.16
Historians willing to examine Australian women’s patriotic endeavours during the First World War have underscored the official limitations placed on their capacity to contribute directly to the war effort, especially compared to the mobilisation of European women. Jan Bassett particularly highlighted the rejection and ridicule levelled at women attempting to participate in more visible and ‘masculine’ forms of patriotism.17 As Bruce Scates points out, Australian newspapers’ fascination
14 “Patriotism,” Cambridge Dictionary, accessed September 30, 2018, https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/patriotism. Within the Australian political landscape, progressive or socialist groups have traditionally rejected nationalist patriotism in favour of internationalist solidarity in terms of class, race and gender. Conversely, a particular brand of patriotism, operating in the early twentieth century, saw many Australians recognising their connections to the British Empire as being more important than their distinct national identity. See Joan Beaumont, “Australian Citizenship and the Two World Wars,” Australian Journal of Politics and History 53 (2007), 272.
15 Joan Beaumont, “Whatever Happened to Patriotic Women, 1914-1918?” Australian Historical Studies 31, No. 115 (2000): 282.
16 Beaumont, “Patriotic Women,” 277.
17 Bassett, ‘’’Ready to Serve’,” 8-16.
-6- with the movement of British women into traditional men’s employment must have both inspired and frustrated Australian women who were similarly eager to step beyond the private sphere during the war.18 For the most part, historians have accepted the efficacy of social and political attitudes that emphasised women’s civic responsibilities as mothers. The pervasive acceptance of women’s maternal role during this time is highlighted by Katie Holmes and Sarah Pinto, who have shown how even feminist groups who were critical of marriage acknowledged the validity of ‘maternal citizenship’ during this era.19
Historians have also referred to the evolution of maternal citizenship into
‘maternal sacrifice’ as the war continued. Joy Damousi suggests that the ‘sacrificial mother’ achieved an honoured status in Australia, not only as an extension of her own soldier son’s heroism and sacrifice, but in her own right for supporting her son’s enlistment.20 While accepting that this view of Australian women’s purpose as mothers during the war was indeed dominant, the preoccupation with ‘maternal citizenship’ and ‘maternal sacrifice’ has resulted in women’s wartime contributions being rather submerged within discussions surrounding motherhood and war. Thus, historians have been less interested in articulating the experiences of unmarried, childless women during the war for whom the valorisation of maternal citizenship and the expectation of maternal sacrifice raised very different considerations.
Aside from women’s prescribed role as mothers, wartime nursing has also attracted considerable attention, to the extent that Eleanor Hancock has criticised the tendency for historians to exaggerate the significance of nursing within Australian First
18 Bruce Scates, “The Unknown Sock Knitter: Voluntary Work, Emotional Labour, Bereavement and the Great War,” Labour History 81 (2001): 43-44.
19 Katie Holmes and Sarah Pinto, “Gender and Sexuality,” in The Cambridge History of Australia Volume 2, eds Alison Bashford and Stuart Macintyre (Port Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 310.
20 Joy Damousi, The Labour of Loss: Mourning, Memory and Wartime Bereavement in Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 26, 28, 30. Susan Grayzel also explains that gender-specific roles were defined as mother and soldier, offering a way to encourage all women to perform their essential wartime function. See Grayzel, Women’s Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and France During the First World War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 2.
-7- World War history.21 Such an exaggeration might be explained by the fact that nursing in the Australian Army Nursing Service (AANS) was the only official avenue of war service available to Australian women.22 It was also, significantly, an occupation for unmarried or widowed women only (married women were prevented from serving with the AANS).23 Historians of wartime nursing have provided important insights into single women’s experiences within the military arena. Jan Bassett’s work on the
AANS highlighted the rigid requirements for nurses to remain single to prevent distractions from their nursing duties, which would threaten the reputation of the entire nursing service.24 Katie Holmes and Kirsty Harris have also critically examined the experiences of Australian Army nurses in World War I in their respective works considering the impact of nurses’ sexuality and the professional benefits gained through their exposure to the military environment.25 Holmes’ work provides a particularly useful analysis of the strategies employed by nurses to diffuse potentially awkward sexualised relationships, and their acknowledgment of soldiers’ dependence on their maternal care.26 Nurses have functioned as the definitive representations of
Australian single women’s overseas service during the First World War, and owing to the significant body of work already dedicated to this cohort, this thesis only briefly touches on their experiences.27
21 Eleanor Hancock, “’They also served’: Exaggerating Women’s Role in Australia’s Wars,” in Anzac’s Dirty Dozen: 12 Myths of Australian Military History, ed. Craig Stockings (Sydney: New South, 2012), 103-107.
22 Katie Holmes, “Day Mothers and Night Sisters: World War I Nurses and Sexuality” in Gender and War, 45.
23 Jan Bassett, Guns and Brooches: Australian Army Nursing from the Boer War to the Gulf War (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1992), 39-40.
24 Bassett, Guns and Brooches, 1-2.
25 Holmes, “Day Mothers and Night Sisters,” 43-59; Kirsty Harris, More than Bombs and Bandages: Australian Army Nurses at Work in World War I (Newport: Big Sky Publishing, 2011), 216-218. 26 Holmes, “Day Mothers and Night Sisters,” 48.
27 To gain a sense of the variety of works dedicated to First World War nurses, see examples such as Janet Butler, Kitty’s War (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2013); Victoria K. Haskins, “Australian Nurses and the 1918 Deolali Inquiry: Transcolonial, Racial and Gendered Anxieties in a British Indian War Hospital,” in Australians and the First World War: Local-Global Connections and Contexts, eds Kate Ariotti and James E. Bennett (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 67-83; Christa Hämmerle, “’Mentally broken, physically a wreck…’: Violence in War Accounts of Nurses in Austro-Hungarian Service,” in Gender and the First World War, eds Christa Hämmerle, Oswald
-8- The service of women in the Red Cross has been the subject of sustained research by Melanie Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer draws attention to the inextricable links between the humanitarianism of the Australian Branch of the British Red Cross and the militarism of the Anzac legend.28 She maintains that the Red Cross could not have achieved its tight association with the military administration without women’s contributions, and cites the integral work carried out by the Australian Red Cross founder, Lady Helen Munro Ferguson, and the organisation’s thousands of unpaid members and volunteers.29 Oppenheimer also emphasises the important role played by young women in voluntary aid detachments, who became the public face of the
Australian Red Cross, as they dutifully carried out their quasi-nursing duties in hospitals and convalescent homes, and later served abroad.30 Aside from a brief reference to concerns regarding their duties as soldier escorts, Oppenheimer does not address the marital status of these women in any substantial way.31 However, her focus on the important contributions of individuals within larger movements identifies the importance of women’s self-perceptions in promoting their usefulness. Her work paves the way for further considerations of the single women who assumed prominent roles managing crucial functions within non-military organisations during the war.
Überegger, Birgitta Bader Zaar (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 89-107; Yvonne McEwen, In the Company of Nurses: The History of the British Army Nursing Service in the Great War (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2014).
28 Melanie Oppenheimer, “Shaping the Legend: The Role of the Australian Red Cross and Anzac,” Labour History 106 (2014): 123-142; Melanie Oppenheimer, Red Cross VAs. A History of the VAD Movement in New South Wales (Walcha: Ohio Publications, 1999); Melanie Oppenheimer, All Work, No Pay: Australian Civilian Volunteers in War (Walcha: Ohio Productions, 2002).
29 Oppenheimer, “Shaping the Legend,” 130. The significance of women’s contributions to nation forming was similarly articulated by Vicken Babkenian in his examination of the Armenian relief movement and women’s humanitarianism during the First World War. See Vicken Babkenian, “Australian Women and the Armenian Relief Movement,” Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 101 (2015): 111-133.
30 Oppenheimer, “Shaping the Legend,” 130-131; Towards the end of 1915, 14 VADs were asked to take the place of male orderlies aboard the Australian hospital ship, Kanowna, and in June 1916 the Women’s Joint VAD Committee in London requested that Australian VADs be sent abroad for war service. See Selena Williams, “’Taking the Long Journey’: Australian women who served with allied countries and paramilitary organisations in World War I,” PhD Thesis, Australian National University, 2016, 40-41.
31 Oppenheimer, Red Cross VAs, 24.
-9- A small but highly visible number of Australian women sought to take an active public role during the war as political activists, either opposing the war altogether (on a variety of grounds) or, while supporting Australia’s involvement in the war, opposing conscription. A variety of international historians have highlighted the connections between feminism and peace activism during the war, and Australian historians such as
Michael McKernan and Raymond Evans have particularly focused on the class aspects of women’s pro-war or anti-war activism.32 Joy Damousi’s work on socialist women’s anti- war mobilisation emphasises the gendered aspects of wartime activism as these women emerged from their conventionally ascribed private/domestic sphere and entered the traditionally male-dominated public arena.33 In explaining how pacifism challenged notions of manliness, and highlighting how pro-war men and women sometimes attacked women protestors, Damousi reflects upon the war’s unsettling impacts on gender constructs.34 However, the fact that many, indeed most, of the prominent individuals within the Australian anti-war movement or anti-conscription movement were single women, has not been analysed in these historical studies.
Considering the impact of the First World War on single women does require entering into a debate that has long occupied war and gender historians. From the mid-
1980s, renowned feminist historians questioned historians’ tendency to accept the First
32 Ingrid Sharp, “Blaming the Women: Women’s ‘Responsibility’ for the First World War,” in The Women’s Movement in Wartime, eds Alison S. Fell and Ingrid Sharp (Online: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), 67-87; June Purvis, “The Pankhursts and the Great War,” in The Women’s Movement in Wartime, 141-157; Kimberly Jensen, “Esther Pohl Lovejoy, M.D., the First World War, and a Feminist Critique of Wartime Violence” in The Women’s Movement in Wartime, 175-193; Erika Kuhlman, “The ‘Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom’ and Reconciliation after the Great War,” in The Women’s Movement in Wartime, 227-243; Michael McKernan, The Australian People and the Great War (Sydney: Nelson, 1980); Raymond Evans, Loyalty and Disloyalty: Social Conflict on the Queensland Homefront, 1914-1918 (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1987).
33 Joy Damousi, “Marching to Different Drums: Women’s Mobilisation 1914-1939,” in Gender Relations in Australia: Domination and Negotiation, eds Kay Saunders and Raymond Evans (Marrickville: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Group, 1992), 353-364; Joy Damousi, “Socialist Women and Gendered Space: Anti-conscription and Anti-war Campaigns 1914-1918,” in Gender and War, 254-273.
34 Damousi, “Socialist Women and Gendered Space,” 269.
-10- World War as a turning point for women’s progress.35 In their influential chapter, “The
Double Helix”, Margaret and Patrice Higgonet argued that while women’s contributions to the war effort may have improved their social status during the war, both women’s efforts and status remained constantly subordinate to those of men.36
Historians such as Joan Scott and Gail Braybon have also criticised the so-called
‘watershed thesis’, in which women’s gains have been positioned in direct opposition to men’s losses during wartime.37 Within the British context, the so-called ‘gains’ instigated by war have been identified as women’s inclusion in war work and their eventual acquisition of the vote.38 While acknowledging the beneficial insights concerning women’s wartime participation, Scott and Braybon have challenged historians to engage in more rigorous and subtle analysis that accentuates the complexity and variability of women’s lives during the war.39
Historians such as Susan Grayzel, James McMillan, Peter Gatrell and
Simonetta Ortaggi accepted this challenge.40 Their works variously complicate our understanding of women’s sexuality and morality, take a longer-term view of the tensions leading to and following the war, and move the focus to settings in which the impacts of the First World War were overshadowed by later events such as the
Bolshevik Revolution. These works address the impacts of war upon women who were geographically close to the war front without having achieved political equality to men. By contrast, Australian women’s wartime experiences were fundamentally
35 Joan W. Scott, “Rewriting History,” in Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars, eds Margaret Randolph Higonnet, Jane Jenson, Sonya Michel, Margaret Collins Weitz (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 19-30; Braybon, “Winners or Losers,” 89-90.
36 Margaret R. Higonnet and Patrice L. R. Higgonet, “The Double Helix,” in Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars, 34-35.
37 Braybon, “Winners or Losers, 89-90.
38 Braybon, “Winners or Losers,” 89.
39 Braybon, “Winners or Losers,” 106.
40 Scott, “Rewriting History,” 25; Susan Grayzel, “Liberating Women? Examining Gender, Morality and Sexuality in First World War Britain and France,” in Evidence, History and the Great War, 113- 134; James McMillan, “The Great War and Gender Relations. The Case of French Women and the First World War Revisited,” in Evidence, History and the Great War, 135-153; Peter Gatrell, “The Epic and the Domestic: Women and War in Russia, 1914-1917,” in Evidence, History and the Great War, 198-215; Simonetta Ortaggi, “Italian Women During the Great War,” in Evidence, History and the Great War, 216-238.
-11- affected by their geographical distance from the conflict and their legitimate sense of citizenship, having already gained the right to vote in state and federal elections between 1894 and 1908.41 Not only were Australian women not mobilised into men’s work during the war, as they were in Britain and Europe, but Australian women’s attainment of suffrage well before the outbreak of war suggests an even greater challenge to the ‘war as watershed’ thesis. Nevertheless, as this study demonstrates, single women readily acknowledged the First World War as a significant point in their lives in which their sense of independence allowed for greater wartime participation.
Within this context, the war changed their self-perceptions, and consequently, their future lives. In examining the distinct experiences of Australian single women, this study therefore provides an original and nuanced contribution to the ‘war as watershed’ debate by assessing the impact of contingent wartime conditions upon a specific cohort of Australian women.
A further contentious aspect of women’s war history relates to the debate between historians who argue that specifically focusing on ‘women’s history’ (rather than ‘gender history’) is a simplistic and compensatory exercise, and historians who promote the broader value of women’s history.42 Joan Sangster argues persuasively that by its very nature, women’s history is relational: “it necessarily makes comparisons between women and men, relates women to men, and shows how women’s lives were created by, within and sometimes in opposition to the world of men.”43 Historians such as Catherine Dollard, Martha Vicinus and Mary Louise
Roberts have further narrowed the focus by examining the experiences of unmarried women in Germany, Britain and France to highlight the novel ways in which
41 Clare Wright, “A Splendid Object Lesson: A Transnational Perspective on the Birth of the Australian Nation,” Journal of Women’s History 26, No. 4 (2014): 12; Australian white women’s suffrage gains occurred over an extended period from 1894 when South Australian women won the right to vote and the right to be elected to and sit in the state parliament, to 1908 when Victoria was the last Australian state to grant women the right to vote in state elections. See Kirsten Lees, Votes for Women: The Australian Story (St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1995), 182-186.
42 Joan Sangster outlines various arguments against the discrete field of ‘women’s history’ in her article in which she advocates against dismissing ‘women’s history’ in favour of ‘gender history’. See Joan Sangster, “Beyond Dichotomies: Re-Assessing Gender History and Women’s History in Canada,” Left History, 3, No. 1 (1995): 109-121.
43 Sangster, “Beyond Dichotomies,” 118.
-12- unmarried women challenged established gender norms.44 Not only have such works illuminated the direct ways in which unmarried women agitated for social and political reforms, they also consider the societal anxiety arising from this cohort’s
‘unattached’ and ‘unprotected’ status.45 Dollard and Roberts, in particular, offer valuable insights into the ways in which the First World War generated lived experiences and societal perceptions that disrupted gender norms.46 As these historians demonstrate, within the wartime context, societal attitudes associated with the unmarried woman or the ‘spinster’ assume a special significance.
While a number of feminist historians have been interested in societal attitudes that regarded unmarried women as problematic or ‘surplus’ women during the early twentieth century, their works have not substantially analysed the impact of war on their position as unmarried women, except for its obvious role in eliminating potential husbands.47 Dollard’s work makes a rare but important contribution to this neglected aspect of war and gender history by examining the intersections of gender, class and patriotism and the changing status of single women in Germany over the course of the war.48 Within the German context, the dominant gendered expectation of motherhood was deployed to find a utility for single, childless women as an alternative expression of maternal sacrifice. As these women were mobilised into caring for injured soldiers, and replacing men in factories, fields and the professions, their service to the “beloved fatherland” was glorified as a “blessing.”49 Dollard concluded that the
44 Catherine Dollard, The Surplus Woman: Unmarried in Imperial Germany, 1871-1918 (New York: Berghahn Books E-Book, 2009); Martha Vicinus, Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women 1850-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); Mary Louise Roberts, Civilisation without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917-1927 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
45 Dollard, Surplus Woman, 5.
46 Dollard, Surplus Woman, 205; Roberts, Civilisation without Sexes, 3.
47 Sheila Jeffreys, The Spinster and Her Enemies. Feminism and Sexuality 1880-1930 (London: Pandora Press, 1985); Virginia Nicholson, Singled Out: How Two Million Women Survived Without Men after the First World War (London: Viking, 2007); Laura L Doan, ed. Old Maids to Radical Spinsters. Unmarried Women in the Twentieth-Century Novel (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991).
48 Catherine Dollard, “Marital Status and the Rhetoric of the Women’s Movement in World War I Germany,” Women in German Yearbook 22 (2006): 211-235.
49 Anna Pappritz, “Nationaler Frauendienst,” Kriegsjahrbuch des BDF, 33 as quoted in Dollard, “Marital Status,” 223.
-13- Great War provided the conditions for this cohort to be “recast (both in rhetoric and action) as social stabilizers rather than threats to the prevailing order, as essential rather than superfluous, as citizens rather than burdens”.50 This conclusion offers an important foundation from which to consider the value placed on Australian single women’s wartime efforts.
Perhaps the most pertinent study of single women’s agency is Alison
Mackinnon’s work on professional single women during the early to mid-twentieth century.51 Mackinnon situates her examination of Australian professional women within a broader transnational context. While exploring the impact of some of the new sciences upon conceptions of gender and societal attitudes directed towards single women, Mackinnon provides valuable insights into the importance placed on female support groups, the ‘mutual interdependencies’ of women who prioritised their career over marriage and family life. Mackinnon’s work also directly addresses the impact of the First World War on highly educated women, acknowledging their contemporary recognition of its liberating character.52 This acknowledgement of war’s ‘liberating character’ on educated women invites further analysis with respect to broader groups of Australian single women, and consideration of the idea that they too may have developed ‘mutual interdependencies’ during wartime.
Australian historians have also focused on the colonial era to explore how single women from less privileged classes pursued personal and financial independence. Katrina Alford’s monograph on the economic history of colonial
Australian women provides a useful starting point in understanding how women‘s employment emerged within the Australian context, and in highlighting the influence of class status on women’s opportunities.53 Clare Wright has acknowledged that marital conflict could be the catalyst for women’s escape from dependence, as well as their desperate acceptance of casual labour or prostitution to survive in a male-
50 Dollard, Surplus Woman, 205.
51 Alison Mackinnon, Love and Freedom. Professional Women and the Reshaping of Personal Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
52 Mackinnon, Love and Freedom, 195.
53 Katrina Alford, Production or Reproduction? An Economic History of Women in Australia, 1788-1850 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1984).
-14- dominated world – a point also observed by Alford and Christina Twomey.54 The timeframe examined within this thesis provides an opportunity to understand the nature of women’s personal and financial independence into the twentieth century and through the tumultuous period of Australia’s first major test of nationhood.
One of the more visible arenas for single women’s employment stretching across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was education. Kay Whitehead acknowledges that the tendency to align the image of the ‘spinster’ with that of the female teacher has significantly influenced long-held anxieties regarding the troubling figure of the ‘new woman’.55 The ‘new woman’ was a social and literary figure that had emerged within European, American and Australian culture from the late 1890s. She was defined by her assertive quest for independence, higher education and employment in the professions, and her prioritisation of intellectual or artistic endeavours over domestic concerns such as marriage.56 While Whitehead acknowledges the societal discourse that regarded women teachers as a noticeable (and threatening) group of professional, single women, her work does not specifically address the impacts of the First World War on either their professional or personal lives. Rosalie Triolo’s examination of Victorian schools during the First World War provides occasional glimpses of the war’s impact on women teachers, without highlighting their single status – indicating the need for a more focused study of this most visible cohort of Australian single women.57
Another arena in which single women became increasingly visible during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was manufacturing. Raelene Frances’ and
Bruce Scates’ examinations of Australian women’s involvement in industrial employment provide valuable insights into changing gender relations as women
54 Alford, Production or Reproduction? 176-177; Clare Wright, The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2013), 271; Christina Twomey, Deserted and Destitute. Motherhood, Wife Desertion and Colonial Welfare (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing Pty Ltd).
55 Kay Whitehead, “The Spinster Teacher in Australia from the 1870s to the 1960s,” History of Education Review 36, No. 1 (2007): 7.
56 Charlotte Rich, Transcending the New Woman: Multiethnic Narratives in the Progressive Era (EBook: University of Missouri Press, 2009), 1.
57 Rosalie Triolo, Our Schools and the War (North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2012).
-15- increasingly engaged in work that had been traditionally regarded as men’s work.58 In her close examination of the politics of work in the state of Victoria, Frances refers to large numbers of young, single women employed within the clothing industry.59 While the First World War is not a significant focus of this work, Frances points out key wartime developments and their impacts on female factory workers. One such example was the new generation of radical women unionists such as Lesbia Keogh, whose activism helped extend the Clothing Trades Union’s oversight to women’s trades, as well as the equal representation of men and women on the union’s executive committee between 1915 and 1919.60 Frances also briefly explains how young female employees were encouraged to represent their employer in patriotic duties to encourage loyalty to the firm, and align employer and worker interests thus mitigating against union influence.61 This work forms a valuable foundation from which to consider class-based aspects of single women’s activism as well as the specific impacts such employment had on their experiences of war.
While historians have mostly undertaken examinations of single women within urban environments, Kathryn Hunter has explored the lives of Australian single women in rural settings during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Hunter particularly highlights the contrasting attitudes regarding farm work and a woman’s marital status whereby farm work was expected and normalised for single women but considered to be arduous and harmful to the health of married women.62
While this work includes glimpses of the war’s impacts such as the leisure activities, and greater sense of community that focused on the war effort, Hunter notes that single farming women typically showed greater concern for events such as the 1914-
58 Raelene Frances and Bruce Scates, Women at Work in Australia: From the Gold Rushes to World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
59 Raelene Frances, The Politics of Work: Gender and Labour in Victoria, 1880-1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 23.
60 Frances, The Politics of Work, 95.
61 Frances, The Politics of Work, 98-99.
62 Kathryn M Hunter, Father’s Right-Hand Man: Women on Australia’s Family Farms in the Age of Federation, 1880s-1920s (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing), 175.
-16- 1915 drought than the Great War.63 For single farming women, at least, the war may have had less noticeable impacts than for their urban sisters.
Aside from societal attitudes towards single women’s increasing visibility and participation, concerns surrounding their safety and morality constitute important considerations within the wartime context. Judith Smart’s examination of wartime fears surrounding sexual diseases identified the considerable blame assigned to young, single women thought to be carriers of venereal disease.64 Older women operating without male providers or protectors also attracted increased scrutiny, a situation acknowledged by Alana Piper in her work on women’s criminal activities.65 Piper draws particular attention to the rise in illegal fortune-telling activities during the war as women of varying levels of disadvantage acknowledged an opportunity to capitalise on widespread anxiety and pursue financial independence.66 She also discusses innovations in policing that saw the introduction of female police officers throughout the nation (except in Queensland) as a means of monitoring these immoral activities.67
The fact that childless and single women were preferred candidates for policing positions raises important issues regarding the ambiguity associated with single women during wartime.68 This dichotomised view of single women as either dangerous or useful warrants a more focused assessment, especially in terms of how it might enhance understandings of authorities’ admissions of dependence upon independent women.
As indicated by the foregoing survey of relevant literature, historical accounts of single women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries overwhelmingly emphasise the challenges and obstacles they encountered regarding their access to
63 Hunter, Father’s Right-Hand Man, 66,180.
64 Judith Smart, “Sex, the State and the ‘Scarlet Scourge’: Gender, Citizenship and Venereal Diseases Regulation in Australia during the Great War,” Women’s History Review 7 (1998): 19.
65 Alana Piper, “Women’s Work: The Professionalisation and Policing of Fortune-Telling in Australia,” Labour History 108 (2015): 37-52; Alana Piper, “’A Menace and an Evil.’ Fortune-telling in Australia, 1900-1918,” History Australia 11 (2014): 53-73.
66 Piper, “’A Menace and an Evil’,” 66-67.
67 Piper, “Women’s Work,” 50.
68 Piper, “Women’s Work,” 51.
-17- opportunities, and rigid societal attitudes governing their morality and behaviour.
Within the international and Australian contexts, historians have agreed that women who eschewed marriage and maternal responsibility were regarded as ‘surplus women’ and a societal problem. Historians have also noted that single women have, through choice or necessity, attempted to forge economically independent lives, and that this greater visibility within the public arena created new social anxieties and increased surveillance of women’s activities. The fact that historians have typically accepted Australian women’s First World War experiences as predominantly conforming to previous gendered expectations has resulted in a somewhat simplistic acceptance that women’s opportunities to explore less traditional lifestyles were similarly curtailed during the war. Such a conclusion ignores the experiences of women who pushed the boundaries of acceptable behaviour.
Aside from offering a more focused and intricate account of women’s wartime experiences, I seek to make an important contribution to our understanding of women’s place in Australian society in the early twentieth century. During this period, competing tensions had distinct impacts upon Australian women – especially single women. Clare Wright’s recent scholarship on the women’s suffrage movement shines a more optimistic light on Australian women’s lives during the early twentieth century, demonstrating a very different historical perspective arising from a closer consideration of women’s experiences and subjectivities.69 By similarly privileging women’s perspectives, this thesis illuminates the complex ways in which Australian single women negotiated the freedoms and constraints placed upon their levels of independence through the upheavals of the First World War.
Methodology
In this thesis I employ a hybrid micro-biographical method to consider the First World
War’s impact on single women’s lives. I have reconstructed wartime narratives to
69 Wright’s privileging of Australian women’s experiences within the suffrage movement presents an alternative conception of progressive attitudes influencing Australian institutions. See Clare Wright, You Daughters of Freedom: The Australians Who Won the Vote and Inspired the World (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2018).
-18- reflect upon the similarities and particularities of women’s involvement across various wartime settings. Disparate women’s accounts are drawn together to accentuate their wartime experiences, not as aberrations, but as elements of a larger shared story.
Adopting a biographical approach is not without limitations, however, and the method has an ambivalent reputation among scholars.70 From the late 1990s when
Stanley Fish denounced all biography as “minutiae without meaning”71, historians have reflected upon the unfair reputation of biography as “the Bastard Child of
Academe”72 while simultaneously calling for its resurgence.73 Historians critical of the method have variously emphasised the tendency for the author’s ideological agenda to influence their interpretation, failure to place the significance of the individual’s experience within the historical context, and the author’s temptation to engage in a commemorative rather than critical activity.74 While it is tempting to celebrate the personal qualities demonstrated by featured individuals within this thesis, understanding the societal conditions that influenced their opportunities or restrictions remains a key consideration.
The micro-biography method offers significant benefits in producing engaging historical accounts that privilege previously marginalised voices.75 As Kit Candlin and
Cassandra Pybus argue, this method enables the historian to examine the connections between the life stories of individuals and the broader socio-economic/political events of which they were a part.76 These historians promote the significance of individual life
70 Sabina Loriga, “The Role of the Individual in History: Biographical and Historical Writing in the Nineteenth and the Twentieth Century,” in Theoretical Discussions of Biography: Approaches from History, Microhistory and Life Writing, edited by Hans Renders and Binne de Hann (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 89; Daniel R. Meister, “The Biographical Turn and the Case for Historical Biography,” History Compass (2018): 1-2.
71 Stanley Fish, 1999, as quoted by Meister, “The Biographical Turn,” 1.
72 Steve Weinberg, 2008, as quoted by Meister, “The Biographical Turn,” 1.
73 Meister, “The Biographical Turn,” 2.
74 Hans Renders and Binne de Haan, “Introduction: The Challenges of Biography Studies,” in Theoretical Discussions of Biography: Approaches from History, Microhistory and Life Writing, 2.
75 Loriga, “The Role of the Individual in History,” 89.
76 Kit Candlin and Cassandra Pybus, Enterprising Women: Gender, Race and Power in the Revolutionary Atlantic (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015), 12-13.
-19- trajectories in analysing how personal agency interacts with competing historical forces, and highlight the important role of microhistory in countering the inherent homogenising tendency of macrohistory.77 According to Barbara Caine, the overlapping of biography and microhistory in recent times also provides new ways of addressing methodological limitations, particularly in relation to obscure subjects for whom sources are scarce. Rather than the extensive private and public papers informing traditional biographies of prominent individuals, adequate source material relating to a crucial episode or time-period can potentially illuminate a lesser-known individual’s life.78 The combined micro-biographical method, therefore, offers a useful way to view the lives of lesser-known women, for whom the war may have been their only or major documented experience. In this case, the microhistories of Australian single women contribute to the macrohistories of the First World War and gender relations in early twentieth century Australia.
Marital status is applied in this thesis as a device to select and connect individuals and experiences, while also serving as a framework for analysis. The term
‘single’ requires some explanation as it incorporates a range of women examined in this study. As Katherine Holden has acknowledged in her work on singleness in
Britain, the very term ‘single’ is unstable and encompasses a range of legal meanings and popular understandings. Such variations include women who have ‘never married’ as well as those operating as ‘unattached women’, at least in an unofficial sense, including women who married but were subsequently deserted, divorced or widowed – all of whom operated outside the bounds of male authority.79 This thesis predominantly explores the activities and experiences of women who were not yet married during the war, and thus engages with societal perceptions of the ‘spinster’.
To a lesser extent, it also considers the experiences of women classed unofficially as
‘unattached’, such as those who had separated from their husbands and older women who were widows. Examining a range of unmarried and unattached women enables a
77 Candlin and Pybus, Enterprising Women, 13.
78 Barbara Caine, Biography and History (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 111-113.
79 Katherine Holden, The Shadow of Marriage: Singleness in Britain 1914-60 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 10.
-20- broader consideration of the extent to which ‘single’ women transcended expectations of their ambiguous social positioning during war.
The varying ages of the women examined within this thesis also requires some explanation. In the chapters examining women who served abroad, I have endeavoured to include both younger and more mature single women to demonstrate how their singleness and wide-ranging life experiences affected each wartime episode.
While the chapters concentrating on home front activities similarly feature women of varying age groups, contemporary terminology within source documents has the tendency to connect singleness with youth. This aspect is particularly noticeable in
Chapter Nine which examines home front morality. Wherever possible, I have provided the age of individuals featured within this chapter. However, in some cases references to the dangers posed by ‘young women’ might refer equally to adolescents or women in their late twenties as a consequence of the source documents (especially newspaper articles) from which information has been drawn.
Researching single women poses particular challenges owing to the limited and incomplete nature of records detailing their lives and activities. For certain prominent figures such as Vera Deakin, Agnes Bennett and Vera Scantlebury, archival collections and interview recordings contain rich details from which to analyse their wartime experiences. But the fact that some women participated in less formal wartime activities and remained unmarried for their entire lives means that neither organisational archives nor accounts from direct descendants are readily available. In some cases, female relatives were sufficiently interested to write memoirs based on their aunts’ explanations.80 Historian Hazel King understood the significance of her sister Olive’s wartime experience and published an edited collection of her wartime correspondence.
However, family accounts are notorious for slipping into hagiography, and require careful reading and consideration. Historians have also produced biographical works in close cooperation with women’s families and descendants.81 As with memoirs produced
80 Memoirs for Louise Mack and Mary Brennan were produced by their nieces.
81 Melanie Oppenheimer’s biography on Narrelle Hobbes is a good example of this type of biographical work. As Hobbes was a nursing sister, I do not cover her experiences in this thesis. See Melanie Oppenheimer, Oceans of Love: Narrelle - An Australian Nurse in World War I (Sydney: ABC Books, 2006).
-21- by relatives, these biographical works sometimes constitute our only possible access into these women’s lives. Superintendent of soldiers’ canteens Rania MacPhillamy, for instance, had been intensely modest about her wartime experiences in Egypt, requesting the destruction of some wartime correspondence upon her death.82 Her biographer,
Jennifer Horsfield, highlighted the care required in balancing the historical significance of
MacPhillamy’s life with her desire for privacy. MacPhillamy’s wartime experiences in desert canteens provide valuable insights into the challenges and opportunities associated with single women’s overseas war service. This thesis, therefore, relies upon relevant wartime details within this secondary source to enhance our understanding of women in similar situations to MacPhillamy during the war.
Aside from gaining personal insights through biographies and memoirs, I have undertaken archival research at the Australian War Memorial, the National
Library of Australia, the University of Melbourne Archives, the National Archives and various state libraries and archives. Correspondence files associated with the activities of women such as Mary Elizabeth Chomley, Rose Venn-Brown, Agnes Bennett, Vida
Goldstein and Margaret Thorp have proven particularly useful. In researching single women’s activities on the home front, the archival records and journal of the
Australian Women’s Service Corps (AWSC) were accessed through the State Library of
New South Wales. These sources offer a rare window into the activities of predominantly working-class women during the First World War. Similarly, school journals produced by numerous Australian schools provide insights into wartime discourse within school communities, especially among unmarried women teachers and their students. In addition to valuable archival sources, much analysis of ‘ordinary’ women’s lived experiences is possible by adopting cultural history approaches that consider public perceptions of events and societal conditions. In this thesis, insights gained from official and personal records are accompanied by analysis of contemporary newspaper articles to assess either the societal limitations placed on single women, or public reception to their efforts. As Adrian Bingham has observed in his examination of gender, modernity and the popular press in inter-war Britain, daily
82 Jennifer Horsfield, Rainbow: The Story of Rania MacPhillamy (Charnwood, ACT: Ginninderra Press, 2007), 7-10.
-22- newspapers were situated at the boundary of politics and popular culture.83 These sources therefore illuminate the political rhetoric associated with an idea such as
Feminism, and how such an idea resonated within the broader population.84 To gain specific insights into the political and popular attitudes towards Australian single women within this thesis, I have accessed the extensive collection of newspapers and women’s magazines available from the National Library of Australia.
Non-White Women’s Voices
A notable challenge within this study has been the difficulty in retrieving the wartime experiences of Indigenous and other non-white single women. This unavoidable absence of non-white women’s voices, especially Indigenous women’s voices, is disappointing. As Catriona Elder explains, the focus of feminist histories on the category of ‘woman’ has tended to universalise white women’s experiences, at times perpetuating racist, classist and ethnocentric assumptions.85 That western historical practice privileges certain groups in its selection of sources, organisation of information and preference for the written word, reinforces the absence of non-white voices and experiences in historical writing.86 Recovering Indigenous women’s experiences during the Great War poses particular methodological challenges owing to the scarcity of sources containing even a hint of their perspectives.
Yet Indigenous men did serve in the Great War, and Indigenous women experienced wartime and post-war conditions. Recent scholarship reveals that despite official requirements limiting enlistment to men of substantially European origin or descent, around 1,000 Indigenous men enlisted in the AIF between 1914 and 1918.87 As
83 Adrian Bingham, Gender, Modernity and the Popular Press in Inter-War Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 7.
84 Bingham, Gender, Modernity and the Popular Press in Inter-War Britain, 7-8.
85 Catriona Elder, “’It was hard for us to marry Aboriginal’: Some Meanings of Singleness for Aboriginal Women in Australia in the 1930s,” Lilith: A Feminist History Journal 8 (1993): 114-115.
86 Elder, “It was hard for us to marry Aboriginal,” 115.
87 John Maynard, “The First World War,” in Serving Our Country: Indigenous Soldiers, War, Defence and Citizenship, eds Joan Beaumont and Allison Cadzow (Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2018); 74,
-23- with non-Indigenous soldiers, Aboriginal soldiers participated in a range of wartime settings, and revealed diverse attitudes and responses to their experiences.88 On the
Australian home front, uncertain employment conditions arising from the war and drought reduced the capacity of many Indigenous men to support their families, and attracted the attention of government authorities. Over the course of the war, state and territory governments introduced coercive policies to control Indigenous people’s lives
– policies that have had enduring consequences for Indigenous families, including those of serving soldiers.89 Moreover, as John Maynard explains, Indigenous women and children faced the direct and long-term impacts of war when their battle-scarred loved ones returned home.90
While few historical works explicitly refer to Indigenous women’s First World
War experiences, there are some important exceptions, such as Michael McKernan’s description of Bessie Rawlings’ struggle to retrieve her son Reg’s uniform after his death on the Western Front. Despite expressing obvious pride in her “darling son who gave his life for King and Country”, Bessie suspected that she was not being treated equally to other mothers who were able to “[get] their sons [sic] kit sent home to them”.91 Her sense of patriotism must certainly have been conflicted under such circumstances. Similarly, Aboriginal activist Isabelle Flick recalled her father’s arrival home from war in 1919, and his hurt sense of pride when realising that his efforts did
76; Samuel Furphy, “Aboriginal Australians and the Home Front,” in Australians and the First World War: Local-Global Connections and Contexts, 145.
88 Maynard, “The First World War,” 79; Further scholarship examining Indigenous soldiers’ experiences includes: Frank Bongiorno, “Anzac and the Politics of Inclusion,” in Nation, Memory and Great War Commemoration: Mobilizing the Past in Europe, Australia and New Zealand, eds Shanti Sumartojo and Ben Wellings (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2014), 81-97; Doreen Kartinyeri, Ngarrindjeri Anzacs (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2008); George Bray, Kenny Laughton and Pat Forster, Aboriginal Ex-Servicemen of Central Australia (Alice Springs: IAD Press, 1995); Philippa Scarlett, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Volunteers for the AIF: The Indigenous Response to World War One (Macquarie: ACT Indigenous Histories, 2012); Robert Hall, The Black Diggers (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1997); Jan “Kabarli” James, Forever Warriors (Northam, WA: J. James, 2010).
89 Furphy, “Aboriginal Australians on the Home Front,” 149. Furphy refers to the variations on Indigenous employment during the war, both temporally and spatially.
90 Maynard, “The First World War,” 91.
91 Bessie Rawlins as quoted by Michael McKernan, Victoria at War 1914-1918 (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2014), 151-152.
-24- not entitle him to soldier settlement land as had been offered to non-Indigenous soldiers.92 There are virtually no accounts of young unmarried Indigenous women’s experiences of the Great War. One of the few exceptions comes from Ella Simon who reflected in her autobiography: “The war had just ended. I can remember that very well. We could go to domestic jobs as ‘servants’ (that was the Board’s own term) and I had written applying for a job in Katoomba.”93
A few brief articles outlining government plans to train Northern Territory
Aboriginal women in Red Cross duties merely reflect the oppression under which
Indigenous women lived, rather than their own sense of patriotism or agency with respect to the war.94 While some examples of Indigenous women’s involvement in
Australia’s wartime activities are included in online exhibitions of the Australian War
Memorial and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies
(AIATSIS), these exhibitions predominantly feature Indigenous women’s contributions during the Second World War and subsequent conflicts – with the notable exception of
Marion Leane Smith, a woman of Darug heritage who became a Canadian resident before serving with the Imperial Military Nursing Service and (British) Italian
Expeditionary Force (between 1917 and 1919). Leane Smith’s experience is featured in the online AIATSIS exhibition “An Indigenous Nurse in World War I”.95
These small fragments of Indigenous women’s experiences warrant further attention. Indeed, this important aspect of Australian Indigenous wartime history requires its own definitive study. But as I have been unable to uncover the experiences of Indigenous single women during the First World War in any substantive way, the
92 Stuart Rintoul, The Wailing: A National Black Oral History (Port Melbourne: William Heinemann Australia, 1993), 59-61.
93 Ella Simon, Through My Eyes (Adelaide: Rigby Limited, 1978), 80.
94 “Aboriginal Soldiers and Lubras as Red Cross Nurses: Inspector Beckett’s Proposal,” Barrier Miner, March 6, 1915, 8; “A Regiment of Blacks,” Age, March 4, 1915, 6.
95 “Aboriginal Women,” Australian War Memorial, accessed July 9, 1919, https://www.awm.gov.au/advanced-search?query=Aboriginal+Women; “Women at War,” Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS), accessed July 9, 2019, https://aiatsis.gov.au/collections/collections-online/digitised-collections/indigenous-australians- war/women-war; “An Indigenous Nurse in World War I,” AIATSIS, accessed September 1, 2019, https://indigenoushistories.com/2013/10/30/an-indigenous-nurse-in-world-war-one-marion-leane- smith-smith/.
-25- inclusion of fragmentary accounts of state-imposed activities on single Indigenous women within this thesis would seem tokenistic at best. Instead, I hope that the absence of their voices might serve as a reminder to the reader of the deep exclusion of
Aboriginal women, and Aboriginal people generally, from the wider Australian society in this time period.
Structure
This thesis is thematically structured according to the activities and social movements in which single women participated during the war. Chapter One, as an introductory discussion, contextualises the social status of single women in the lead-up to the First
World War, and the social, economic and political forces that shaped their opportunities. Chapters Two to Five are dedicated to Australian single women’s experiences abroad, and then Chapters Six to Nine explore their experiences on the home front. In each of these chapters, micro-biographies of several key women provide a window into their specific and diverse individual experiences, and the broader impacts of their activities.
Chapter Two examines the experiences of three women from different socio- economic backgrounds who pursued overseas adventure. The occupations of ambulance driving, war reporting and munitions work are examined through the experiences of Olive King, Louise Mack and Mary Brennan. Within this chapter, the theme of personal autonomy dominates as the links between independence and privilege are considered, especially how these personal attributes both benefited and hindered women’s opportunities during and after the war.
Chapter Three focuses on women involved in overseas humanitarian enterprises by examining the work of Rose Venn-Brown, Lizzie Armstrong and Rania
MacPhillamy. These women’s duties initially complied with traditional notions of maternal nurturing as they cared for Australian soldiers in various locations far from home. However, their capacity for resilience and ingenuity had impacts far beyond cheering demoralised soldiers, and these women’s war experiences demonstrated considerable personal enterprise while initiating unexpected careers and life choices.
-26- Several Australian single women also assumed prominent positions in extensive communications and logistics networks during the war. Chapter Four examines the experiences of Vera Deakin, Mary Elizabeth Chomley and Annie
Wheeler. As key figures in both formally sanctioned and grassroots operations, these women discovered and displayed an aptitude for managing and excelling in administrative work that developed as a result of total war. They significantly challenged ideas regarding the usefulness of privileged women, and derived professional and social benefits through the relationships they fostered during wartime.
While women involved in First World War nursing operations have already received considerable scholarly attention, unmarried women also worked as doctors close to the war zone. Their experiences have yet to receive any substantial historical analysis of the distinctly gendered and cultural aspects of their service. Chapter Five, therefore, examines doctors Agnes Bennett, Phoebe Chapple and Vera Scantlebury.
This chapter particularly considers how these women’s own personal struggles and exposure to feminist activism influenced their attitudes towards leadership and their ongoing commitment to improving women’s lives.
Chapter Six turns to single women’s experiences on the home front. By examining organisations such as the Australian Women’s Service Corps, the Women’s
Loyal Service Bureau and various Dinkum Girls and Cheer-up societies, this chapter considers the explicit demonstrations of patriotism by organisations consisting predominantly of single women. Using unconventional methods, these women attracted complicated official and societal attitudes towards their patriotism but gained practical skills, a new sense of purpose and valuable connections with other like- minded women.
Not all women were supportive of the war effort, however, and Chapter
Seven examines women of the anti-war and anti-conscription movements. Pacifist women such as Vida Goldstein, Cecilia John and Margaret Thorp had emerged within feminist and religious movements, and had prioritised activism and public service over marriage. However, they encountered complicated public reactions to their stance
-27- upon the war, and their status as unmarried, childless women created significant challenges in gaining legitimacy for their pacifist and internationalist ideals.
Chapter Eight explores the wartime experiences of women teachers, overwhelmingly unmarried women. Education was considered vital during the early war period just as many male teachers were enlisting for war service. Women teachers, therefore, bore the brunt of difficult conditions and high expectations placed on their ability to serve the nation’s education functions and, by extension, the war effort.
Examining the wartime experiences of individual teachers such as Winifred West, Ella
Gormley and May Cox reveals how some women teachers benefited from increased publicity associated with their patriotic efforts while others served as examples of dignified ‘spinsterhood’ to their young female students.
The final chapter in this thesis examines home front morality, particularly the significant introduction of women police officers such as Lillian Armfield, Kate Cocks and Maude Rhodes during the First World War. This discussion illustrates the polarised public attitudes towards unmarried women as both those needing supervision and protection, and those regarded as respectable and useful figures in public welfare endeavours.
This thesis aims to enhance our understanding of single women’s wartime participation in practical terms while also considering how their wartime activities affected official and societal attitudes regarding single women’s value during such a crucial period in Australia’s history. Taking into account the varied and complex array of activities performed by single women, this thesis illuminates Australian women’s experiences of the First World War not only as grieving widows, stoic mothers or maternally inclined nurses, but also as active and productive agents. It challenges the perceived passivity of Australian women and the idea that they ‘received’ their wartime experience. By employing a framework of analysis that centres upon marital status and singleness, this thesis contributes fresh insights into the diverse ways in which Australian women negotiated the circumstances of independence and dependence by embracing the unique conditions of the Great War.
-28-