‘Explorations in Industry’

Abstract

Domestic and industrial employment for women became an increasingly visible issue in Australian newspapers and journals in the years immediately following Federation: when women gained the vote both nationally and at state level, with Victoria the last state to fall in line in 1908. This chapter examines some of the anxieties that attended this issue, to do with protecting women’s well-being in employment in terms of salary and working conditions, cultivating appropriate social worlds through which women could safely circulate, and building their character-formation into the future of the nation. A key debate here is to do with what labour contributed to women’s independence. Does employment for women take them away from the family, or help them — ultimately — to return and contribute to it? How does women’s labour help young women especially to transition from girlhood to adult life? And, more interestingly for us, what is the interplay during this time between women’s employment experiences and the romantic and matrimonial possibilities that were consequently available to them? Two kinds of distinctions are typically drawn. The first is between employment as a matter of women’s training for the future, and employment as something much more rudimentary, a form of servitude or enslavement that can seem anachronistic or regressive in the framework of a modern, post-Federated nation.¹