D b.t+- a ø AWAKENING WOMEN: WOMEN, HIGHER EDUCATION AND FAMILY FORMATION IN SOUTH AUSTI{ALIA c 1880 -L920. by Alison Mackinnon B. A. Dip.Ed (Melb.) tt¿. Ed. (Adel.) Thesis submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of PhilosoPhY' I (\,r\si:o,\.q 4 3Õ jÎt¡ Department of Education University of Adelaide November,1989 Table of Contents Summary Declaration Acknowledgements Tables chapter 1 The Probiem and the Theoretical Context. 1 Chapter 2 The Keystone of the Arch" 46 Chapter 3 Who were the Women Graduates? 88 Chapter4 A DemograPhic Vanguard? 125 Chapter 5 Independent Women...""""" 159 Chapter 6 Awakening Women ""205 Conclusion 251 Awakening women: womerç Higher Education and Family Formation in South Australia c 1880 -1920 It is now over one hundred years since the first women gained admission to higher education in most countries of the industrialized west. Over that period many writers have both celebrated the achievement of a hard fought battle and deplored the slowness of universities to respond to women's needs. Recently feminist historians have begun to re-examine that experience and to place it in the context of broader social change, seeing within that debate an opportunity to contribute to wider historical questions' This study seeks to reassess the meaning of higher education for women in the context of the demographic transition. Using a basic structuring framework of feminist history, it examines the outcome of the experience of higher education for a group of the earliest graduates of the University of Adelaide. Women's admission to the University of Adetaide is described and it is argued that the ready acceptance of women from the earliest days was due to the particular nature of South Australian society, one characterized by a vigorous middle class and a dissenting religious tradition. The major focus of the study is the effect of that education on women's demographic behaviour and of their attachment to the workplace. Where possible, the women's life histories were reconstituted and the resultant data subjected to statistical analysis in order to illuminate patterns of marriage and childbearing in the group. Much demographic work focuses on fertility decisions made by couples, giving little emphasis to the role of women in demographic change. This study challenges that emphasis and attempts to restore women's agency in fertility decision making. It is argued that women involved in the process of higher education were exposed to circumstances which potentially led to a change in consciousness, a and change which is reflected in the decisions they made about marriage childbirth. The study also poses the question of consciousness as a factor in social change. It is argued that for women, access to the language and argument of university curricula provided them with a means of attaining independence and of challenging women's traditional association with the realm of nature. Many graduates lived independently of men and found satisfying lives in women - centred communities. They were able to significantly affect their material circumstances, both within marriage and outside it. In the period studied university education provides an exiunple of the significant liberatory potential of education for a specific group.The gender order was profoundly shaken, provoking a response which eventually subverted many of the earlier gains. Declaration I certify that this thesis does not include any material previously submitted for a degree or diploma in any university. Moreover, to the best of my knowledge it does not contain any material previously written or published by another Person unless duly acknowledged' I consent to the thesis being made available for photocopying and loan if accepted for the award of the degree. November 1989 Acknowledgements Many people have contributed to the successful completion of this thesis and I regret that I will not be able to thank them all in the space permitted. I am particularly grateful to my supervisor, Ian Davey, for his assistance over the years and for his friendship,which has stood the test of two lengthy periods of thesis supervision. I am also grateful to Ann Riddle, a meticulous and painstaking researcher, for her assistance with data collection. Ann taught me a great deal about the intricacies of the Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages. Susan Woodburn, IJniversity of Adelaide archivist, has assisted me in the pursuit of university records. Two friends and colleagues, Carol Bacchi and Pavla Miller, have been particularly helpful in discussing the ideas which inform this study and I have benefitted a great deal from my association with them. A wider circle of feminists in Adelaide has provided stimulating discussion groups. Toby Mackinnon has been a patient instructor in the art of word- processing and Malcolm Mackinnon has provided constant support and encouragement. Above all, I wish to acknowledge the early graduates of the University of Adelaide: those whose letters and diaries have provided much material for this work and those who were prepared to be interviewed and to share their reminiscences with a wider readership. Parts of this study have previously been published in The New Women: Adelnide's Eøily Women Graduøtes, Wakefield Press, 1986. Tables Chapter 3 Tablel. Occupational Categories of Fathers 96 Table 2. Class Background of Students 97 Table 3. Previous School Attended 1,09 Table 4. Previous School Attended - 2 Cohorts 117 Chapter 4 Table L. Degrees Taken by Women Graduates up to 1922 129 Table 2. Average Issue of Wives by Education and Religion 131 Table 3. Percentage of Females never Married ( S. A.) 134 Table 4. Median Age at Marriage of Females (S.4.) 137 Table 5. Completed Family Size of Graduates 1,4T. Table 6. Average Issue of Married Women During DemograPhic Transition 742 Table 7. Occupations of Husbands .150 Chapter 1 The Problem and the Theoretical Context. 'Why write a book about women at Oxford?" wrote Vera Brittain in 'tg6}," so few people are interested in them, and their numbers are so few". Their story, she claimed, was "a tale that had been told." Nevertheless Brittain did go on to write Tfte Women at Oxford justifying her work with the argument that the pursuit and attainment of intellectual enlightenment could not be judged by numerical tests.l For Brittain it represented the quintessence of the whole movement for women's emancipation, the contest for the equal citizenship of the mind. I¡r one sense the story of women at the University of Adelaide is also a tale that is told. Women freely enter all faculties, are represented on academic staff, even at professorial level, although they are still very much a minority. A women holds the most esteemed position, that of Chancellor and another is Pro Vice-Chancellor. Women have certainly arrived in a manner which would have delighted the nineteenth century supporters of higher education for women and horrified its opponents. Yet the movement for women's higher education encomPassed so much more than an account of the struggle for women's admission can explain. Coming as it did, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the demand for women's higher education can be seen as an aspect of much broad.er social change. Economic and industrial developments had irrevocably changed the lives of middle class women. The growth of commerce and of urbanization had stripped many women of their traditional tasks and of their economic contribution to the family. Furthermore in South Australia, as in most of the Western world, a decline in fertility had begun which would further lighten the load of many middle class woman. These changes had already led to a significant questioning of women's place in the world, a questioning that challenged women's legal inequality and political powerlessness. The'woman question' had come to occupy a prominent part in the popular press and the popular imagination. 1 Vera Brittain The Women at Oxforil Geo Harrop &Co 1960 1 The demand for higher education was then part of a much wider set of demands. Middte class women were seeking to redefine their place in a changing world The essence of those demands involved a widening, at all levels, of choice. To what extent has that choice been widened, one hundred years after the first halting steps were taken to admit women to university? While the earliest accounts of women in universities tended to unashamedly celebrate women's achievement of that goal, later studies have been more critical. It has been argued by several historians who have examined women's admission to higher education at the turn of the century that, at least in the short term, it changed very little for women'l In the first place, as Vera Brittain pointed out, it affected a minute proportion of the population. Secondly, the group whose lives were touched. by higher education were middle class women and usually members of the prosperous middle class, those whose lives were seen to be irrelevant to, or lacking in influence on, the lives of others, particularly working class women. If such an influence occurred, that influence has often been deemed to be pernicious. For example, those involved in the new 'science' of mothercraft advocated new standards of child care sometimes impossible for working dass women to meet. A third dimension of the critique of the 'celebratory' aPProach to higher education for women has focused on the illusory nature of so called ad.vances for women. An initiat gain such as an increase in the number of women finding professional careers has been offset by a concomitant reinforcement of patriarchal values such as woman's primary identification with the home. While all these critiques have some validity, they present the researcher in higher education with certain dilemmas, not the least of which relates to political practice.Why then do feminists in industrialized countries pursue with great tenacity such goals as the inclusion of greater numbers of women in tertiary education, the demand for more places for women in graduate programmes? Why do articulate women leaders in 1 See for instance La Pierre P J .