by Bill Holloway

As the year winds to an end, Bill, in his final post as an editor with this site, winds up this series (full list below) on Australia’s Independent Woman – a myth to rival the Lone Hand/Brave Anzac, the man at home with his mates in the bush who has long been the ‘typical’ Australian favoured by politicians.

It is my contention that the ‘1950s’ – an era of idyllic one provider, one housewife, 2.1 children households propagated by American film and television on behalf of conservatives everywhere – stands between us and a proper understanding of our history. Womens Lib, the Civil Rights and Vietnam anti-war movements in the 1960s and ’70s were necessary rebellions against our parent’s conservatism, but we thought society had always been ‘like that’.

I now believe that the ’50s represented peak-conservatism (until Nov 2024 anyway), and that the Women’s Lib-inspired exploration and rethinking of our history which has been ongoing since the seventies, and of which this series is a small part, demonstrates that women’s writing about and activism for equality of opportunity pre-1950s, and indeed pre-1900s, was much greater than we had been led to believe; that many exceptional women lived independent lives despite men; and that education systems dominated at all upper levels by men up until recently, effectively suppressed whole areas of women’s history.

In Australian literature this resulted in the most popular authors in the nineteenth century, all women, being out of print for up to 100 years, and to the extent that Australian universities even recognised that Australian literature was a thing, in Australian women other than perhaps Henry Handel Richardson – whose most famous work is of course a saga about a man – being completely ignored.

My introduction to this area of study, around 1990, was my then local library, Nunawading (Melbourne) setting up a special section for nineteenth century Australian women who had, finally, been republished by Pandora and Penguin under programmes instigated by Dale Spender. Later, of course I would read Spender’s Writing a New World: Two Centuries of Australian Women Writers (1988) in which she set out just how many women wrote during the first 200 years of white settlement, and how many of them were ‘lost’ by not being included in male-dominated canons:

Unless and until women’s different view of the world is included in the literary canon, unless and until there is the representation of power from those who are on the receiving end, it is not possible to speak of a balanced, inclusive, fully human heritage. Spender, 1988.

I found Spender’s ‘new’ old writers – Catherine Helen Spence, Tasma, Rosa Praed, Catherine Martin, Ada Cambridge – a revelation, as good as their English counterparts and with Australian settings and subjects to boot. Spence in particular, wrote just a few years after the Brontes, wrote as well as Charlotte and Anne, and shared their concern for middle class women being able to support themselves without men (Emily and Wuthering Heights are something else again).

Tasma left her first husband and later pilloried him in her fiction; Praed left her husband to live with a woman, and her dashing heroines were forever moving to ‘better’ husbands and otherwise disposing of unwanted men;  Martin argued seriously for women’s independence, though I don’t think she could see a way around marriage; leaving just Cambridge to represent the status quo (but read her anyway).

This period, the 1890s, with these women dominating sales of Australian fiction, also saw the rise of the Sydney Bulletin, at the forefront of pro-Australian sentiment at a time when we were still a straggle of separate colonies; racist; misogynist; anti-Melbourne and anti-women ‘romance’ writers; encouraging amateur, aspiring and professional authors, to contribute ballads and stories valorising the white man at home in the Bush; and from which arose/solidified the myths of ‘mateship’ and the ‘Lone Hand’.

Meanwhile women were determined that Federation would bring with it women’s suffrage. Spence, Rose Scott, Louisa Lawson, Vida Goldstein and many, many others provided the leadership, forums, and newspapers for discussion and action.

Which brings us to Miles Franklin and My Brilliant Career, bursting on to the scene in 1901. I have never been able to determine which of her predecessors Franklin read, but many of them would have been readily available to her in newspaper serials, and she (much) later wrote glowingly of Spence. Franklin’s Sybylla argues loudly for freedom from the degradation of marriage and endless childbearing. Rose Scott, single, well off, bringing up her late sister’s son, invited Franklin to stay with her in Sydney and there she met suffragists, writers, everyone Scott mixed with and who her came to her famous soirees. 

Franklin, in her life and in her fiction, both flirted outrageously and recoiled from the idea of sex with men. In Chicago, before the War, she was invited to join a threesome with her friends Floyd and Margery Currey Dell:

I remember Floyd and Margery wrestling with me. I was invited to weekends where husbands were exchanged and virgins were ‘taught to live’. I never accepted … They tried to proselytize me through Margery, who was then accepting the doctrine of promiscuity as a part of freedom for women (Franklin, Diaries).

It says something for her self-awareness (or self-deprecation) that as late as 1946, My Career Goes Bung, and 1954, Cockatoos, she had the heroine representing herself  back in 1902 (respectively Sybylla and Ignez) fear that they might be pregnant after being kissed.

Franklin all through her life was an independent woman, through her heroines in her writing, and in her life and work. If the independent woman was in the air with the New Woman movement of the 1890s, it was carried forward in Franklin’s writing; in Henry Handel Richardson’s novel of her schooldays The Getting of Wisdom (1910) with its implications of a lesbian relationship (about which Richardson was later more explicit); in Barbara Baynton’s anti-Lone Hand stories, especially Squeaker’s Mate; and after WWI in the lives of Daisy Bates and Ernestine Hill; and by novels like Ride on Stranger (1943) by Kylie Tennant and Come in Spinner (1951) by Dymphna Cusack and Florence James.

Eve Langley, in The Pea Pickers (1842) and White Topee (1954), brought together the ideas of both ‘legends’ – the Lone Hand and the Independent Woman – as no-one else had or has. Steve and Blue, Langley and her sister, dress in men’s clothes to fit in and for the practicality; do their best to live the life of itinerant workers in the Bush which they love; while all along proclaiming their femininity – “I wanted poetry, and love of the earth, I wanted morning, noon and night spent purely with the one I loved. But don’t talk to me of sex I said. I fear it” –  and, despite other claims, their heterosexuality.

In the 1960s, what is an Independent Woman was changed forever by ‘the pill’, which allowed women to enter marriage without the fear of endless pregnancies. Yet, sixty years later, change, especially in power relations between men and women, still seems slow. And if third wave feminism has redefined ‘independence’ to mean unrestricted sex, and it sometimes seems it has, then also the archetypal Independent Woman from before the sexual revolution still seems relevant in her ability to inspire women not to accept second place in relationships or in work.

Earlier posts in this series:
The Independent Woman in Australian Literature
Bev Roberts ed., Miss D and Miss N: An Extraordinary Partnership (review)
Elizabeth Macarthur
Eleanor Dark, Timeless Land trilogy (review)
Caroline Chisholm, Married and Independent
Caroline Chisholm, Radical
Catherine Helen Spence, Woman’s Place in the Commonwealth
Catherine Helen Spence: An Autobiography (review)
Clare Wright, You daughters of freedom (review)
Janette M Bomford, That Dangerous and Persuasive Woman: Vida Goldstein (review)
Australian Suffragists
The New Woman in Australia
AWW Generation 1, 1788-1890 (list)
The Bulletin Years, 1890-1920
Miles Franklin, writer and activist
AWW Generation 2, 1890-1920 (list)
Ventured North by Train and Truck
Daisy Bates
Ernestine Hill
Doris Pilkington, Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence (review)
Third Generation, 1920s – 1950s
Dorothy Hewett, Bobbin Up (review)
Mena Calthorpe,The Dyehouse (review)
Eve Langley
Third Generation, 1920s – 1950s (list)