CHAPTER VIII.

WOMAN.

In one respect, Victoria stands at once sadly behind and strangely in advance of other democratic countries. Women, or at least some women, vote at the Lower House elections; but, on the other hand, the legal position of the sex is almost as inferior to that of man as it is in England or the East.

At an election held some few years ago, female ratepayers voted everywhere throughout Victoria. Upon examination, it was found that a new registration act had directed the rate-books to be used as a basis for the preparation of the electoral lists, and that women householders had been legally put on the register, although the intention of the legislature was not expressed, and the question of female voting had not been raised during the debates. Another instance, this, of the singular way in which in truly British countries reforms are brought about by accident, and, when once become facts, are allowed to stand. There is no more sign of general adhesion in Australia than in England to the doctrine which asserts that women, as well as men, being interested in good government, should have a voice in the selection of that government to which they are forced to submit themselves.

As far as concerns their social position, women are as badly off in Australia as in England. Our theory of marriage--which has been tersely explained thus: “the husband and wife are one, and _the husband is that one_”--rules as absolutely at the antipodes as it does in Yorkshire. I was daily forced to remember the men of Kansas and Missouri, and the widely different view they take of these matters to that of the Australians. As they used to tell me, they are impatient of seeing their women ranked with “lunatics and idiots” in the catalogue of incapacities. They are incapable of seeing that women are much better represented by their male friends than were the Southern blacks by their owners or overseers. They believe that the process of election would not be more purified by female emancipation than would the character of the Parliaments elected.

The Kansas people often say that if you were told that there existed in some ideal country two great sections of a race, the members of the one often gross, often vicious, often given to loud talking, to swearing, to drinking, spitting, chewing, not infrequently corrupt; those of the other branch, mild, kind, quiet, pure, devout, with none of the habitual vices of the first-named sect,--if you were told that one of these branches was alone to elect rulers and to govern, you would at once say, “Tell us where this happy country is that basks in the rule of such a godlike people.” “Stop a minute,” says your informant, “it is the creatures I described first--the _men_--who rule; the others are only women, poor silly fools--imperfect men, I assure you; nothing more.”

It is somewhat the fashion to say that the so-called “extravagancies” of the Kansas folk and other American Western men arise from the extraordinary position given to their women by the disproportion of the sexes. Now in all the Australian colonies the men vastly outnumber the women, yet the disproportion has none of those results which have been attributed to it by some writers on America. In New South Wales, the sexes are as 250,000 to 200,000, in Victoria 370,000 to 280,000, in New Zealand 130,000 to 80,000, in Queensland 60,000 to 40,000, in Tasmania 50,000 to 40,000, in West Australia 14,000 to 8000, 90,000 to 80,000 in South Australia. In all our Southern colonies together, there are a million of men to only three-quarters of a million of women; yet with all this disproportion, which far exceeds that in Western America, not only have the women failed to acquire any great share of power, political or social, but they are content to occupy a position not relatively superior to that held by them at home.

The “Sewing Clubs” of the war-time are at the bottom of a good deal of the “woman movement” in America. At the time of greatest need, the ladies of the Northern States formed themselves into associations for the supply of lint, of linen, and of comforts to the army: the women of a district would meet together daily in some large room, and sew, and chat while they were sewing.

The British section of the Teutonic race seems naturally inclined, through the operation of its old interest-begotten prejudices, to rank women where Plato placed them in the “Timæus,” along with horses and draught cattle, or to think of them much as he did when he said that all the brutes derived their origin from man by a series of successive degradations, of which the first was from man to woman. There is, however, one strong reason why the English should, in America, have laid aside their prejudices upon this point, retaining them in Australia, where the conditions are not the same. Among farming peoples, whose women do not work regularly in the field, the woman to whom falls the household and superior work is better off than she is among town-dwelling peoples. The Americans are mainly a farming, the Australians and British mainly a town-dwelling, people. The absence in all sections of our race of regular woman labor in the field seems to be a remnant of the high estimation in which women were held by our former ancestry. In Britain we have, until the last few years, been steadily retrograding upon this point.

It is a serious question how far the natural prejudice of the English mind against the labor of what we call “inferior races” will be found to extend to half the superior race itself. How will English laborers receive the inevitable competition of women in many of their fields? Woman is at present starved, if she works at all, and does not rest content in dependence upon some man, by the terrible lowness of wages in every employment open to her, and this low rate of wages is itself the direct result of the fewness of the occupations which society allows her. Where a man can see a thousand crafts in which he may engage, a woman will perhaps be permitted to find ten. A hundred times as many women as there is room for invade each of this small number of employments. In the Australian labor-field the prospects of women are no better than they are in Europe, and during my residence in Melbourne the Council of the Associated Trades passed a resolution to the effect that nothing could justify the employment of women in any kind of productive labor.