Agitate, Educate, Organise, Legislate

Protestant Women's Social Action in Post-Suffrage Australia

Ellen Warne

• Publisher: MUP Academic Digital
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780522869903
• eBook ISBN:
  9780522869910
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Australian & Oceanian History
• Index: History

After successfully agitating for the vote for women from the 1890s, Protestant women's organisations in Australia began to educate women at a grassroots level on effective ways of applying political pressure on a wide range of topics and social concerns. Positioning their organisations as non-party-political and separate from more overtly feminist groups, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU); the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) and the Mothers' Union attracted women who were keen to work for change, and who were seeking to 'save' the individual as well as the greater society. These three organisations sought to agitate on a wide range of issues related to girls and women, connecting with public anxieties and highlighting particular vulnerabilities of girls and young women who lived alone in the city and had the potential to be exploited in the workforce. By the 1920s and 1930s these women's groups noted with concern the easier access to divorce and birth control in the Soviet Union and the growing influence of both Communism and 'Hitlerism' in galvanising young people. Agitate, Educate, Organise, Legislate explores the colourful debates and anxieties that were prevalent from the 1890s to the 1930s and the responses of the key women's organisations whose leadership and campaigns acknowledged that—outside of parliament and party politics—women's connection to political matters could be both innovative and socially influential.

CHAPTER 1

Suffrage: ‘A Long-Range Weapon’

Alone we can do little. Separated we are the units of weakness; but aggregated we become batteries of power. Agitate, educate, organise, these are the deathless watchwords of success.¹

Suffrage, Political Rights and the Protestant Christian Woman

Only in 1906, after white women in South Australia, Western Australia, New South Wales, Queensland and Tasmania had been granted the vote, did Sara Nolan, state president of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) in New South Wales declare: ‘The WCTU had outlived the age of ridicule.’ It was noted in the report of the annual convention that Nolan ‘and others had figured in the pages of the Bulletin but they did not mind it—it advertised the work.’² Despite the occasional satirical cartoon in the Bulletin, the WCTU had been successful in entering the established temperance arena, revitalising it and changing its scope to include the fight for women’s suffrage on the grounds that Christian women offered a sound moral judgement that was lacking in the politics of men.³

Members of the WCTU believed that the effects of alcohol and tobacco on children’s moral and physical development were largely unknown among parents, and they worked hard to educate the public about the risks of drinking and smoking. At the same time, WCTU activities provided a model for women’s activism and incursion into political space that would be replicated even after women obtained the vote, allowing members to conceive of change on an impressive international scale. Their initial intention was to ‘unitedly appeal to the men of the world, convened in all its great Legislative Assemblies, and represented by its potentates, to put away this “gigantic crime of crimes”’.⁴ Their agitation, educational campaigns and demands for legislative change soon meant that Protestant women in Australia oversaw long-running political campaigns on a range of social problems, sometimes placing pressure on members of parliament and other times seeking to change social perceptions more broadly.

In the 1880s, when the WCTU was established in the Australian colonies, the economy was booming, but emerging problems associated with rapid migration and urban expansion disturbed people across the political spectrum.⁵ On one side of politics, labour organisations, trade unions and Christian socialists were concerned by the unequal distribution of wealth and a growing division between rich and poor. On the other side, many conservative Protestant Christians deplored the drunkenness and other anti-social behaviours that they saw as evidence of Australian society’s degeneration, and hoped that the renewal of society would soon be more universally recognised as an important item for the agendas of colonial governments.

Branches of the WCTU were established in Australia during visits by temperance advocates from Britain and the United States of America who were familiar with the structure and functions of women’s temperance organisations and who galvanised Australian women to form their own branches. In New South Wales, visiting American Temperance lecturer Eli Johnson promoted WCTU ideas in Sydney during his tour in 1882, and helped to establish the first branches there. The first ‘round-the-world’ WCTU missionary, Mary Leavitt, who visited Adelaide and Melbourne in 1886, helped to establish branches in Adelaide that year, and less successful branches in Melbourne under the auspices of the YWCA. A more vigorous and independent WCTU was established in Melbourne a year later, under the leadership of Marie Kirk, newly arrived in Australia from Britain, where she had already been involved in the British Women’s Total Abstinence Union. Fired by the belief that the elimination of alcohol from Australia would lead to a corresponding reduction of substantial social problems, members of the WCTU joined an established temperance scene fighting for temperance legislation, educating children and attempting to convert alcoholics to total abstinence.

The broad platform of the international WCTU was to agitate, educate, demonstrate and legislate, encouraging members to spread their efforts beyond traditional temperance work to include campaigns on an impressive number of issues. Members of the WCTU would, in time, seek equal pay for equal work; the appointment of female factory inspectors and healthy working environments for women; the promotion of women’s civic roles and the specific appointments of female police matrons and memberships on school boards; and a raft of legislation to protect women and children in the family. They demanded protection for girls under eighteen from sexual abuse, and for married women in the case of negligence, abandonment or violence. Frances Willard, the World WCTU president, argued that as almost all social problems were in some way connected to alcohol, women in the WCTU should also take on issues that might less directly threaten the community. Under the auspices of the ‘Do Everything’ campaign of 1893, WCTU members also responded to threats of an organised system of sexual slavery known as ‘white slavery’; the cocktail menace; drink driving; and unregulated motion pictures. In combination, these campaigns sought to frame the ways in which women in Australia lived and worked in circumstances that rendered them vulnerable. In doing so, and by using international debates, discussion and strategies the WCTU connected very personal stories to political causes.

The temperance movement, active in Australia since the 1830s, provided compelling reasons for agitation, publicising stories of weakness and redemption. It presented producers and purveyors of alcohol and opium as recognisable villains, and showed families living in misery when financial resources were wasted on drink, and parents were unable to retain employment and turned to crime or vice, or inflicted violence within the home. Members worked to convince inebriates, opium-eaters and women involved in sex work that redemption was possible. Protestant mothers were encouraged to exert individually a stabilising influence on their husbands and children. These methods contributed to a thriving temperance scene, but they relied on individuals making personal decisions to live in certain ways. The WCTU, however, emphasised legislating for change and educating the public to ensure there would be sufficient endorsement to make social change effective.

Mary Leavitt claimed on her Australian tour that traditional temperance organisations clearly neglected a mission to the home and family, and urged WCTU members to take up the cause of women and children suffering from the drinking habits of men. She wrote:

In Melbourne, with its many licensed hotels and breweries, I learned that there were many true, warm-hearted men and women who were working faithfully to stem the tide of dissipation and destruction which always accompanies the drink traffic. Philanthropic men and women gave largely to the support of charitable institutions, but little seemed to be done to reach the home and bring about a social reform respecting the use of intoxicating drinks.⁶

The WCTU, in its early years, saw female suffrage as a necessary part of achieving legislative change and argued for its necessity as a corporate means of ‘home protection’ for mothers and children. The organisation’s Protestant allies in Australia also committed themselves to eliminating the social and economic problems associated with the consumption of alcohol for both the individual and society, doing so in the name of social motherhood, but most did not extend their aims as far as achieving female suffrage. The Mothers’ Union in Britain, for example, included a modest maternal temperance clause in its early lists of rules and regulations for members, which stated: ‘You are strongly advised never to give your children beer, wine, or spirits, without the doctor’s orders, or to send young people to the public house’, though they did not make any recommendations regarding adults.⁷ In Australia, a separate Church of England Temperance Association encouraged temperance in the more evangelical Anglican parishes. Neither the Mothers’ Union nor the YWCA involved their organisations in suffrage campaigns.

Legislation as the ‘Fruitage’ of Democracy

Long before women got the vote in any colony of Australia, the WCTU took a leading role in educating the community on ways to avoid alcohol, agitated for legislative change and established women’s suffrage departments. Their temperance campaigns expanded to include opium, tobacco and patent medicines, which often contained high levels of alcohol or other drugs. The Victorian WCTU, in 1887, presented a deputation to the state premier demanding: ‘In connection with the present Licensing Bill it is requested that a provision be inserted forbidding the sale of liquor under any circumstances to children under the age of 16; and that grocers’ licenses be abolished.’⁸ Demanding that the teaching of temperance lessons in state schools be made compulsory, it pushed to inform and protect the younger generation. Noting that such a deputation from women might seem surprising, the report in the temperance press recorded: ‘The Minister … could not promise compliance with the radical requests of the deputation, but he gave a sympathetic reply, urging the ladies to work and wait, and to be content with gradual progress.’⁹

Jessie Ackerman, the second WCTU ‘round-the-world’ missionary, toured Australia in 1889, urging women to increase their influence by becoming more active in their reform agenda. She argued that social reform required more than the ‘moral suasion’ women were normally encouraged to exert, stating that it ‘could never break the force of habit of the drunkard nor anyone else’.¹⁰ She pointed to American women’s success with the whiskey crusade and in getting temperance education into schools, and urged WCTU members to tackle temperance concerns using new political methods to harness women’s political energy. Her counterparts in the United States were preparing a petition on which they expected to collect two million women’s names to be presented to all the governments of the world. Instead of simply influencing her own family, Sunday school or parish, each woman signatory could feel connected to women around the world, reaching for an outcome that would interpolate Christian goals into law, and would be democratic as ‘legislation is the fruitage of the sentiment of the people’.¹¹ Australian WCTU members reported that Leavitt would return to the United States with the signatures of women from all the countries she visited, including their own.

The WCTU saw legislative change as a significant goal that needed to be undertaken at a local level. While the World WCTU could inspire women to work for change, the legislation itself could only be achieved by persuading legislators, or by getting sympathetic candidates into parliament. Temperance women were encouraged to position themselves as both concerned mothers and public citizens. Leavitt and Ackerman told stories of women’s political involvement in ‘one of the American cities where prohibition was enacted’. Alluding, most probably, to the election of Susannah Slater in Argonia Kansas, where women had effectively used their campaign influence to expose the ‘doubtful character’ of a mayoral candidate, they decided it would be ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Suffrage
• 2 ‘The Girl Problem is the Problem of Australasia’
• 3 Christian Mothers and Sex Education Campaigns
• 4 Objectionable Features of the Cinema
• 5 The Wreckage of Alcohol
• 6 Political Challenges and the World Citizen
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index