THE WORKING-WOMEN OF MELBOURNE, AND IN
PARTICULAR THE CHAR-LADY
VERY few people of any social standing beyond a few college professors
and doctors actually live in Melbourne. But, still, it is thickly
inhabited, and has a curious sublife of its own, quite distinct from that
of the people who flock to it during business hours; returning again to
their suburbs between five and six, only to reappear later, like flashing
meteors, on their way to the theatre and supper at The Vienna or Paris
Café. The professors congregate for the most part round the University,
and the doctors up at the east end of Collins Street, where one would
imagine there must be at least one doctor to every five people in the
town. But beyond these there are the upper parts of shops, where the
tradesmen who cannot yet afford a villa in suburbia live; and dingy,
narrow streets, with little huddled homes where the workpeople dwell, and
out of which issue on Sundays and high days the most resplendently
attired young women that you could possibly imagine; while, besides
these, there are huge blocks of buildings known as “Chambers,” the
inhabitants of which are less easy to place—and what a hotch-potch they
do present in all faith, kept ever a-simmer by a flame of gossip.
Rooms in these places are all prices, all sizes, all degrees of comfort
or dinginess. Melbourne Mansions head the list; but these are really
flats, beautifully appointed and proportionally dear. The drop from them
is sudden indeed, chiefly marked by the washing accommodation. In
Melbourne Mansions each suite, even if it consists of but two rooms, has
its own bathroom attached. But the next step down in price gives two
bathrooms, with hot water laid on, between the inhabitants of each floor,
one floor for men, the next for women, and so on. Thus, if you live on
the landing where the men’s bathroom is, and you happen to be a woman,
you must walk the length of a long passage, and upstairs in your
dressing-gown before you can reach your morning tub. It is all very well
if you are early, before anyone else is about, but if you are late, you
meet all the men coming out of their rooms on their way to work. Another
drawback being that you more than occasionally forget to take your
latchkey with you, and do not realize your fatal error till you return
from your ablutions, when you alternately cower against your lintel and
make wild dashes to the lift: entreating the lift-man to send the
caretaker with his duplicate key, so that you may gain the shelter of
your own apartment.
There is a rule that no one shall wash clothes in these baths, but
everybody does; and when I used to hear the tap running furiously, and
someone singing loudly behind the locked door, it needed no particular
penetration to guess that it was all done with the idea of muffling the
sound of scrubbing and rinsing. Considering the incomes of the people
who lived in these chambers, and the exorbitant prices charged by
laundresses; also the fact that many of the tenants have only one room,
and have to carry both clean and dirty water up and down stairs, this
washing habit cannot be wondered at; and only when people, quite beyond
the pale, wash their saucepans and frying-pans in the same manner do any
but the most inveterate grumblers register a serious complaint. Though I
must say a great deal of sound and fury always rages round the bathrooms;
one great scandal I remember being started by a lady whose husband had
seen another lady going to the bath in her _robe de nuit_ alone.
These particular chambers, or rather the entrance passages and stairs,
are kept beautifully clean by a small army of men and char-ladies; as for
the rooms—well, they vary; though it seems that the smarter the ladies
are who come out of them the less savoury is any glance or whiff that one
catches through the open door. But these are mostly comparative idlers:
those people who never do have time for anything. No praise that I can
give would be too high for the _bona-fide_ working or business girls, who
form a large percentage of the inhabitants of these places, the way they
toil to keep themselves and their belongings dainty and fresh, and their
unbounded goodness to any fellow in distress; their cheeriness and
gallant efforts to keep up appearances, being beyond words.
There are telephone-girls, typewriting-girls, shop-girls, tea-room girls,
University students, art students, dressmakers, and milliners. For the
most part they live in one room, that presents on the whole a very
cheerful appearance, with disguised packing-cases masquerading as
cupboards—in which all the toilet paraphernalia is poked away—pegs with a
curtain over them for a wardrobe, a basket and deck-chair or so, and a
trestle-bed, which during the day does duty for a couch. These rooms are
often no bigger than a medium-sized bathroom, but the girls entertain
there; their men friends come to supper, and they make coffee over the
little gas-ring, or primus, and cut anchovy sandwiches, and have a very
cheerful time—washing up the cups in the bathroom at dead of night when
it is all over. There is much gaiety and good-comradeship, and a little
too much noise, perhaps. But if you are young, and have been tapping a
typewriter all the day and answering your snappy employer in respectful
monosyllables only, it is good, no doubt, to feel you are still a woman;
and there _are_ men in the world who like to talk to you, and _would_
like to make love to you; cannot bear your soiling your hands over the
kerosene stove; and are really disturbed because you look tired. After a
long day’s grind to have a hot bath, which makes you feel as good as
anyone; and brush your hair till it shines, Melbourne girls are veritable
artists in hairdressing, marvellous when one thinks of the size of the
looking-glasses; then to put on your best Jap silk blouse—at one and
four-three a yard—made by yourself, aye, and washed and ironed again and
again by yourself, and arrange your threepenny bunch of flowers in the
vases, and turn the cushions to the clean side. Then “play at ladies,”
waiting for your guests to arrive, life is really very pleasant, and the
next day’s work seems far away; besides, anything may happen before that,
for the life even of the most ordinary girl is full of infinite
possibilities. Though if the expected visitors do not turn up, and send
a wire or a note at the last moment, it is little short of killing; while
the sight of the anchovy sandwiches—all curled up—which you try to eat
for breakfast, in the cold dawn of the next day, because you simply
cannot afford to waste them, seems the last straw.
These girls work incredibly hard, and live the straightest, simplest of
lives, every day of which is a series of petty privations and
self-denial, in spite of small pleasures. That some gayer damsels do
have rooms in these buildings merely for the sake of the liberty it
allows them, and use it, too, to its full extent, has, on the whole,
given them rather a bad name. But this is grossly unjust to the greater
number of the residents, who live there for the very good reason that
they would rather have the tiniest room of their own, and “leave off work
to carry bricks,” than herd with a lot of others in a boarding-house, at
the mercy of a landlady. They rise very early—one kind-hearted
music-teacher used to bring me a cup of tea in bed nearly every morning
at six—and though I always turned out myself at half-past, I was never by
any means first. The girls get their own breakfast—and along every
corridor one hears the whirr of primus stoves; and smells, and breathes
in, an atmosphere of kerosene, sausages and bacon; coffee is generally
kept for evening parties, tea being both cheaper and more easily made.
For the most part business girls have their lunch out, or take it with
them—generally the all-ubiquitous scones and tea; but when they come back
from work they get their own evening meal, and then the roaring of the
primus starts afresh.
At midday on Saturday they flock home and start to turn out their rooms,
and wash, and dust, and sweep, while whole stories may be read in the
little odds and ends of furniture which take an airing in the passage
while the cleaning goes on. Then, as often as not, they do their week’s
washing, no inconsiderable task in the hot weather, when print dresses
and blouses are worn. Still, they get through their work quickly
enough—for the Melbourne girls are fine workers, sharp and decisive in
all they do—hang their clothes on lines across their room, then dress and
go out for the rest of the afternoon, with some friend, often ending with
an evening at the theatre; for, though they work hard enough, goodness
knows, yet they enjoy life on the whole. There are sweethearts, or
“boys,” as they are always called, in plenty; and cottons and muslins are
cheap; and the beach, with all the gaiety of bands and sideshows and
bathing, to be reached for the small sum of threepence.
Then on Sunday mornings there is profound peace hanging over the building
till well over nine o’clock, when the primus smell begins to be replaced
by a distinct odour of ironing proceeding from every girl’s room for
about an hour before she starts off—with flying white veil, crisp muslin
skirts and blouse, long white washing gloves and beflowered hat—for a day
by the sea or in the country with her “boy,” and another girl and her
“boy”—the usual quartette. No wonder that these girls are more
fearless-looking, healthier, brighter, and less neurotic than their
fellows at home; for, apart from the greater facilities for fresh air and
cheap, healthy amusements which they enjoy, they are better paid, a
typist with a machine of her own getting half a crown a thousand words;
while, if she is any good, she can always demand £2 a week in an office,
with extra pay for overtime. The same thing holds good in every branch
of women’s work, the domestic servants demanding, and getting, higher and
higher wages every year.
In Melbourne it is no good trying to get a servant by merely stating your
requirements at a registry-office, and asking that a likely girl should
be sent out to see you. On the contrary, it is the mistresses who line
the waiting-rooms at the offices. They come early and stay late, often
bringing books with them, and only slipping out for a hurried meal when
they are quite certain that every possible domestic is comfortably
enjoying her dinner at home, or in some restaurant. If it is very hot or
wet, no maids turn up at all, though the ladies still flock to town by
each early tram and train; a wistful-eyed and weary host, so evidently
bent on that all-absorbing quest that one gets after a time to recognize
them at first glance as servant-hunters. When a smiling and
self-satisfied young woman is brought into the room by the harassed
person who runs the office, and introduced to some eager mistress, all
the other ladies glare at the possibly successful candidate for the
girl’s favour, and meanwhile smile at her in the most beckoning and
easy-going way; though even when she has thrown the glove, so to speak,
they all know that she will not have the faintest compunction in breaking
her agreement. These are a few of the questions a mistress may have put
to her:—Does she keep a piano for the maids? If not, are they allowed to
practise in the drawing-room? Are there any children?—an unforgivable
sin in the eyes of a Melbourne domestic; as one hopeless lady said to me,
after many days of weary waiting:—“They expect us to put out the work and
kill our children.” Is she allowed every evening out, and half a day a
week, and a whole day a month, and every Sunday? And is she expected to
wear a cap?
For the most part even the best of them refuse to call you “ma’am.” It
is, “Hey, you there,” if they wish to attract your attention, and “All
right” in response to any order. A little less in the rough, and they
repeat your name every moment, till you are sick of the very sound of it.
One woman I know, who remonstrated with her maid on the constant
reiteration of “Mrs. —” was met with the response that if she was Mrs. —
she ought not to mind being called so, and if she was not, she ought to
be ashamed of herself!
But I have strayed far from the subject of the chambers and their
inhabitants, of which, indeed, a whole book might be written. One sees
the cheery, independent-looking girls walking, with that characteristic
swing of the hips, along the passages, or hurrying to their work through
the sunny streets; but this is all the brightest side of the picture, to
which there is, as in all pictures true to life, a reverse side. Even
here there are not always billets to go round; a girl may lose her
situation, and not get another at once, and then the primus roars less
frequently, and there is no odour of bacon or sausages mingled with the
kerosene. The door is kept jealously closed. Sometimes the men from the
shops which let out furniture on the hire system come and fetch it away.
The inhabitant of the room tells you jauntily that she is moving, and
that it is not worth while carting furniture about; but she stays on,
with lips that every day grow whiter and more persistently smiling, while
you meet her in the street during business hours, trying to look very
busy and full of affairs.
Some girls will talk of their position; they are “out of a billet”; they
are “awfully hard up,” and one need not fear greatly for those who can do
this. We have all been in the same box, and are only too ready to give
her a meal here and a meal there; to lend her a lounge-chair by way of a
bed, till something turns up, and help out her scanty wardrobe, if she
wants to appear particularly smart and prosperous when interviewing some
possible employer. But it is those who do not and will not complain who
are the difficult ones to deal with. One such girl, I remember, was
found by the caretaker—when the busy people about her at last began to
realize that they had not seen her go in and out of her room for some
time—lying on the floor behind the locked door, as nearly dead as any
woman could be, from sheer want—starvation, to put it bluntly—though
there was not a single woman in the building who would not have helped
her, if only the real state of things had ever been guessed at; for the
uncharitableness of the Australian woman is, for the most part, verbal;
they will abuse you like a pickpocket, but, while they will not leave you
a shred of character, they will literally strip themselves in other ways
that you may be clothed.
But girls such as I have been writing of do not comprise the whole
inhabitants of these chambers. There are married couples, for the
greater part, living as much on the edge of things as the girls. I
remember one quite cheerful matron confessing to me that she and her
husband at that moment had only twopence between them. He was an
engineer, of sorts, and when he was out of a billet she used to take in
dressmaking by the day, and get a small part at one of the theatres in
the chorus, or as part of a crowd; or—being possessed of an extremely
fine figure—pose for a photograph or sketch of some newly imported model
gown for one of the larger drapery firms, or as an example of the newest
styles of hairdressing for a ladies’ paper. Then there are more
prosperous couples, sometimes with children—or more likely with one
child—and various men who “batch” in places such as these, getting their
meals out at some handy tea-room or restaurant.
Cheaper than these rooms are others, to be found for the most part in the
narrow back-streets—buildings with long, echoing, uncarpeted passages,
kept very moderately clean by occasional charwomen, with no hot-water
supply whatever, and for the most part no bathroom. They are badly
lighted, shivery places even on the hottest days, and though some of the
rooms are bright and cheery enough, the doors, with the dirty, cracked,
chipped paint, bear an ominous look, as though the wolf were for ever
pawing at them. They are failures as buildings. Mostly they have not
been designed for residential purposes at all, but as huge blocks of
offices, in those days of swollen pride “before the boom.”—In England
things have happened before the Conquest and after, but even B.C. and
A.D. are letters which here have no significance—except to the
geologist—and it is as “before the boom” or “after the boom” that all
affairs of any importance are said to have occurred, unless the date is
further particularized as “the year So-and-so won the Cup.” Among many
other mementoes of the great bubble these buildings stand confessed
failures: as unadapted for the purposes they are put to as are the many
human failures, who drift into them, aimlessly as a stray leaf is drifted
through an open door by some passing breeze.
From places such as these people are always moving, whether from an
inborn restlessness or a desire to escape their creditors, I cannot say;
but one day you see them toiling up and down stairs with the oddest, and
most intimate, household and personal belongings clasped in their arms.
There is an eddying whirl of dust and straw outside some room door, while
from within it comes a persistent sound of hammering. Then only a week
or two later you run across the very same people staggering downstairs
under the same burdens, or dropping soft bundles over the banisters to
the hall below; and pass a widely open door, which shows you an empty
room, with fresh stains on the walls, and a fresh irruption of tin-tack
holes everywhere; while a perspiring “char-lady” tussles valiantly with
the dirt-begrimed floor, for these “flitters” take little or no pride in
their surroundings.
The army of “char-ladies” in Melbourne is a large one. It is a “legion
that never was ’listed”; it has no commander and no regulations; it is
managed by no Acts of Parliament; is included in the affairs of no Board;
has no fixed minimum wage; in fact, has no protection of any sort, beyond
what lies in the tongue of each individual member; though that is,
indeed, most often a two-edged sword. But, for all that, these women
have one weakness, and that is their strength. If they were not strong
enough to work their husbands would be supporting them. If they had not
willingly and bravely put their shoulders to the wheel at the time of
some crisis, scarcity of employment, or illness, their husbands would
never have found out how much more capable they were than they
themselves; for, with very few exceptions, the women that one sees
scrubbing miles of passages and mountains of stairs, in warehouses and
offices and chambers, long before it is light on a winter’s morning, are
married women.
There was one charwoman attached to a big block of buildings I once lived
in, a little upright, dark, bright-eyed incarnation of energy—very
different from most of the bent and wearied regiment—to whom I often gave
a cup of tea and some work to do in my rooms just for the sake of hearing
her opinions. Remarking to her one day that I supposed a great many
daily workers, such as herself, had husbands, as many as half—the rest
being widows, with the exception of a very small percentage of
spinsters—she replied that well over two-thirds of them were either
deserted wives or supporting their husbands in idleness. Her own husband
had been a hard-working fellow and very good to her and her two children,
till one time when he was out of work she had turned-to and gone out
charing. From that time onward she had never had a penny from him, for
herself or the children. For a time he had lived at home in idleness on
her earnings; then—what an irony of fate!—got a good job and gone to live
with another woman, who spent every penny of his wages on dress and
luxuries, not even doling out to him sufficient for his weekly allowance
of tobacco, as even the most niggardly wife would have done. But for the
most part these defaulting husbands have “gone West”; and when a husband
does that—leaving his wife behind to follow him later on, when he has got
a job—she might as well ring down the curtain and realize at once that
her married life, anyhow, as far as he is concerned, is at an end.
In the heart of each individual wife hope lingers for a little while:
“her Bill,” or “her Jim,” is not like the others, and at first letters
and an occasional remittance may come pretty regularly. But in the ears
of those who merely look on at the game the words “going West” ring like
a knell, and God only knows what history of struggling hope, of poverty,
of disillusion, and toil might be gathered round that one little phrase.
As I write these women seem to visualize before my eyes; the work-bowed
figures, the roughened hands, the tired faces, with their bright, eager
eyes, all victims of the golden lure of the West, where the Victorian
husbands seem to cast their conscience as easily as a snake casts its
skin.
Luckily for the Melbourne “char-lady”—I once heard a child severely
rebuked by its middle-class mother for speaking of a washer-_woman_, and
the female side of the Melbourne prison, referred to as “the place where
the lady convicts are kept”—she is far better paid than her English
sister, the minimum daily wage being four shillings, with dinner and
sundry cups of tea, while she receives at least half a crown a week for
attending to an ordinary small office or room, lighting the fire during
the winter months, and sweeping and dusting it daily. It is wonderful
how much of this sort of work a really smart woman can get through, and
the one of whom I have spoken seldom did less than twenty rooms regularly
each day—the offices the very first thing in the morning, or the last
thing at night, and the living-rooms of the bachelors and more prosperous
business girls between nine and twelve. After this she would race home,
see to her own house, cook her children’s dinner and return about six to
get a certain proportion of the offices ready for the next morning; doing
her own washing, as she told me, on Sundays—a practice not greatly to be
condemned, seeing how near a place cleanliness occupies to godliness.
Her four children were always very models of neatness and cleanliness—as
was their mother—indeed, the appearance of all working-women in
Melbourne, of whatever class, strikes me as very far superior to what I
remember it in England.
One summer when I lived out of town and went to work every morning by the
eight o’clock train, I used to marvel at the way the girls going to
business in shops and offices managed to turn themselves out at such an
early hour; and the amount of real work that it must have occasioned them
to wash and get up their fresh stiffly starched print or linen
dresses—which certainly could not be worn for more than two days—their
dainty white cuffs and collars and other etceteras of the toilet. One
particularly trim girl, I remember, confessed to me that she only
possessed one set of muslin cuffs and collar, and washed and starched
them regularly every evening when she got home, ironing them out before
she left each morning. On the whole these girls are a far fresher,
healthier set than those who live right in the town, as much, I suspect,
from the better food they have when they are living with their people as
from the better air. Indeed, without any exaggeration, it is worth while
going to Flinders Street Station, or Princes Bridge, any day between
eight and nine, for the mere delight of seeing the dozens of fresh,
happy-looking girls that the early trains disgorge; then to watch them
branch off in every direction—up Flinders Street, and down Flinders
Street, and along Swanston Street—to their places of business. It is as
if the puffing suburban trains were each a veritable part of the heart of
the town, pumping bright new blood through every artery, in the shape of
the grey and dust-grimed street. The human freight brought in by the
later trains is more exotic, and on the whole less robust; though whether
the work, in which the girls who arrive between nine and ten are
employed, is more sedentary, or the girls themselves come of a more
refined and delicate stock, I cannot say; but certainly the employees in
the large, well-lighted, and airy shops, factories, and public buildings,
though they may have a lower social status, work under more healthy
conditions than those in the smaller offices.
It used to amuse me to notice the books these girls read on their way to
and from town. At one time I kept a list during several months, and
found that, apart from the little penny English papers, like _Home Notes_
and _Home Chat_, Mrs. Henry Wood topped the list; then came, oddly enough
for people who could not know his world, Dickens; and, still more odd,
Thackeray.
In the dressmaking trade, at which many of these girls are employed,
there is, as in all other recognized trades, a fixed minimum wage of half
a crown a week for beginners—with a fixed rate of increase—so that it is
impossible for an employer to use a girl without any payment under the
pretence of teaching her, and then dismiss her when the time comes for
her to receive an adequate wage. Indeed, the work-girl is most carefully
protected, and her hours regulated in accordance with her age. In the
tailoring trade the wages of female pressers and buttonhole makers
average 21s. a week. Dressmakers’ assistants, or ordinary hands, get
26s. a week; the woman in charge anything from £2 to £7; and ordinary
machinists, 21s.
As in all countries, the makers of underclothing, or white workers, are
the least well paid, averaging only 16s. a week, the people who wash the
clothes after they are made having far the best of it, as a fair
laundry-hand, or ironer, can easily command £1 a week. Women working in
the straw-hat factories are paid from 20s. to 30s. a week, and so are the
pressers in the dye-works; knitting machinists, from 20s. to 28s.;
printers’ feeders (female), £1 a week; box-makers, 22s. to 25s. Factory
wrappers and packers average from 15s. to 22s. a week; match-makers, 17s.
6d.; and warpers in the woollen factories, 25s.
Over four employees of either sex constitute a factory, the room in which
they work being then under factory laws and the supervision of the
factory inspector. On the other hand, the employment of but one Chinese
also constitutes a factory, and I cannot help thinking that this is
rather a mean little law; though in its own way far-seeing in the
interests of Australia, for, of course, no laundry proprietor who wishes
to engage, say, one or two hands to help herself and her family, is
likely to engage a Chinaman, however quick, clean, and hard-working, when
it means all the trouble of being registered as a factory, and the
constant irritation of official inspection and interference.
Among domestic workers cooks get from 17s. a week to 30s.; house-maids,
12s. to 15s., with everything found; thereby being much better off than
many typists—who have themselves to keep—and in an infinitely superior
position, from a pecuniary point of view, to the tea-room girls. These
are for the most part ladies, and therefore, I suppose, expected to
support themselves and keep up a good appearance on from 10s. to 16s. a
week; whereas the hotel waitress gets from 15s. to 20s. and her board and
lodging, besides tips, which no one ever thinks of offering to the
pretty, refined tea-room girl.
I remember one such girl saying to me bitterly that men, when they wanted
to show their appreciation of her services, sent her a box of sweets—or
lollies, as they are called out here. A subtle irony to one who was so
sick of the sight of anything in the shape of food, and would have been
so truly thankful for some of the ready-money that the more plebeian
waitresses pocketed gaily each day.
For girls wishing to enter the musical profession the premier University
College, Trinity, is open to men and women alike—the Trinity College
Hostel adjoining it affording accommodation for the resident
students—while the women doctors and dentists hold very high place in the
Melbourne world. There is one hospital—the Queen Victoria—where all the
visiting surgeons and physicians are women, and where operations of all
kinds are carried out. Though it is small, consisting of but two wards,
medical and surgical, the out-patients’ department catering, as it does,
for the needs of women and children only, is very large indeed. There
are absolutely no men at all about the place. It might be the dream of
the “Princess” come true, and rendered practicable, the very portress who
works the lift in which the patients are carried up to the wards being a
woman. I have been a patient in Melbourne hospitals more than
once—Providence seeming to have constructed me in a gimcrack and random
fashion. The last time does not bear thinking of, save for the
delightful kindness and courtesy of the sisters and nurses, for
Providence seemed also to have fatally muddled both the manners and the
intelligence of the house physician. But the one really happy memory I
have of hospital life all hangs round “the Queen Victoria.” It was
extraordinarily gay; I do not think I ever heard more laughter and more
droll remarks than in that surgical ward, where most of the patients were
either waiting for, or recovering from, some serious operation. I
remember particularly the storm of laughter and chaff that greeted me the
first time I was able to rise from my bed and stand upright They
christened me the “Canary”—not on account of my voice, but because of the
thinness of my nether limbs, which, as one wit remarked, reminded her of
number eleven on a cottage door—cannot you _see_ it, the two straight,
stark lines of white chalk on the rough boards?—while others, again,
declared that I was like nothing so much as two yards of pump-water.
The work of resident physician and matron were combined in the person of
one delightful woman, always immaculate in the whitest of white linen,
who used to lend me books—her own books, not the hospital
possessions—while the coming of the honoraries was always quite the event
of each day. There is a fantastic illusion to the effect that women take
no interest in their own sex. Anyone who could have seen how the coming
of the visiting doctors was watched for by these poor women, many of them
desperately ill, and have heard the conjectures made as to what they
would wear, and the way the patients disputed together over the charms
and “smartness” of their special honorary, might have lost all illusion
on that point, once and for ever; if anything ever can destroy such a
hidebound and century-old error. I think that convalescence was the most
pleasant I have ever known, lying on a long couch in the balcony, looking
out into sunlit courtyard with its huge fig-tree; the nurses in their
pale green uniform flitting across it from the office to their
dining-room; visitors coming and going; or the portress sweeping up
leaves and burning them in a bonfire, from which the pungent smoke
floated in a thin blue cloud up to the balcony. Then someone brought me
a present of a soft grey dressing-gown, trimmed with pale blue silk,
which I loved because I looked nice in it. I remember lending it one
visiting day to a pretty girl whose young man used to come and see her—a
matter of vast interest to us all; and she looked nicer still, because
her blue eyes just matched the blue silk. She died a few months later,
and I have always been sorry that I was not strong-minded enough to have
given it her “for keeps,” as the children say.
Between the hours of seven and eight, when the ward was all tidied up
ready for the night, the women’s husbands were allowed in to see their
wives. It was midsummer, I remember, for I had my Christmas dinner
there—and at that hour the long ward was filled with a tender twilight.
We women who had no one to come and see us used to turn over on our sides
and gaze out of the window at the leaves of the fig-tree, black against
the pink sky—at least, I did, because there were no beds that way, other
lonely patients, with a husband and wife on either side, having to lie on
their backs and stare out stolidly in front of them; still, one could not
help seeing the men tiptoeing in—some in their Sunday black, others
straight from work in their blue dungarees—and noticing how the faces of
some of the wives would flush and glow, as if a lamp had been lit behind
the transparent white mask. And how the man would hold one hand in his,
and fling his other arm over the pillow, above his woman’s head, and say
very little, while she talked eagerly, incessantly, in a little weak
whisper. We did not want to see all this. Not that they minded, as long
as one was not ill-bred enough to stare deliberately; but it gave us a
nasty lumpy feeling in our throats—_nous autres_ who had nobody to come
and see us during that twilight hour, which always seems so completely
made for intimacy.
There is, I suppose, no state of life that does not bring its own
pleasure and its own pain; and though perhaps, the ups of life are the
most comfortable, on the whole I would award the palm for interest to the
downs; and I for one never learnt more, from all of the world that I have
known, than I did from the eight weeks in that hospital ward, where the
very atmosphere seemed to breathe content and good feeling as palpably as
it did iodoform and carbolic.
Taking it all round, I should say that women in Australia, of the working
and middle classes, have a much better time of it than in England. In
some ways they do not expect so much. A girl marries a man who is
earning a decent wage because she loves him—even in the upper classes
there is very little question of settlements, nor does she expect to
start at exactly the same point as her parents have reached. I have
lived in countries where coolie labour of all sorts is ridiculously
cheap, and where a girl whose parents have, say, two hundred a year, need
not even trouble to put on her own stockings; is literally waited on hand
and foot, and knows nothing either of cooking or house-work, and, after
all, I have come to the conclusion that the servant difficulty in
Melbourne is by no manner of means an unmixed evil, and that certainly it
is a great factor in the making of good wives. In England the attitude
of men towards women is completely different from what it is in
Australia. At home they expect a tremendous lot of their women, but in
the smallest possible way. They must be purely domestic angels on the
hearth, and not over-interested in anything beyond it. If they have no
hearth on which to practise their virtues, then they are indeed unsexed.
The women in Victoria naturally do not like to hear of the
stone-throwing, etc., practised by their own sex in the fight for
political equality at home, and, I believe, are truly sorry that there
seems no prospect of the brains of those in authority being reached in
any less forcible fashion; but, then, they literally _cannot_ comprehend
a woman’s side of the question being disregarded, simply because she is a
woman. They have never themselves resorted to violence, because there
was no necessity for it; the laws in Australia being the same for the
women as for the men, in divorce, in labour, and the ownership and care
of children. When one first lands in Melbourne one may, perhaps, form
the hasty opinion that the men are not as courteous to women as they are
in England—I am not speaking of the rich and travelled minority, who are
much the same all over the world, but of the ordinary middle or lower
classes. It is true that the men are not fond of parting with their
hats, and will stand and talk to a woman with both hands deep in their
hip-pockets. But, though they will not refrain from contradicting her
because she is a lady, they will yet give her their fullest attention;
and in business as well as pleasure weigh her opinion against theirs as
carefully as though she were of their own sex. While men at home
continue to treat girls and young women like pretty kittens, merely to be
petted and played with, they must not be surprised that they develop at
times into mature cats, using their claws, if only to show that they have
got them. In England there seems always—everywhere—to be running beneath
all social and political intercourse between men and women, and even
beneath much domestic life—for nothing can be more bitter than the
remarks some wives make on their husbands’ characters, pursuits, and
pleasures—a sub-current of fierce sex-antagonism that is very rarely
indeed felt out here where there is so much true equality between men and
women; they know here that it pays them, if nothing else, to stand
shoulder to shoulder, and to make of themselves and their family a
compact little commonwealth, protecting their interests against outside
interference only.
Certainly a very great number of women in Victoria do not use the vote
now they have it, but that is no argument against its possession. A
great many men—particularly in lonely, scattered districts, do not use
theirs, either. Though voting by post is permitted to anyone living more
than five miles away from the nearest polling-booth, or suffering from
any illness or infirmity which prevents them from voting personally, this
is not much help to people who are many more miles than five from a
post-office, and probably quite unaware, even, that any election is
taking place. As a matter of fact, the disparity between the number of
men and women who availed themselves of their privilege at the election
of 1906 is very small indeed—considering for how very short a time in the
world’s history women have been permitted or expected to use their
faculties outside their own homes; the number of male voters in Victoria
for the Senate being 335,886, and the votes recorded 209,168; while the
female voters enrolled numbered 336,168, and the votes recorded 171,933.
But even in Melbourne all women are not interested in the actual
possession of this much-coveted privilege, and I remember one labourer’s
wife saying to me: “I don’t want no vote, not I! Jim votes as I tell ’im
to; an’ if ’e didn’t, I’d let ’im know the reason why.”
She was a wise woman, that labourer’s wife, in more ways than one; an
excellent help-mate, keeping her home spotlessly clean, and feeding her
menkind—husband and grown-up son—thoroughly well—many a cup of tea and
fresh-baked, featherlike scone have I enjoyed at her kitchen-table—but
she insisted on her own rights and privileges, all the same. On Sundays
her husband and son “lay in,” as she called it, till midday, while she
gave them their breakfast in bed. But every Friday morning she “lay in,”
and they lit the fire, prepared her breakfast, and took it to her in bed,
cut their own lunches, and set off to work, leaving her to lie there
quietly and rest till she felt inclined to rise and get herself a midday
meal; usually a light one, in any case, for the Australian labouring
classes mostly have their dinner, with hot meat and vegetables and, of
course, tea,—when the men come back from their day’s work. But in every
way there is more give and take, and not only between the sexes. One
family I knew, consisting of four sisters who lived with their old mother
in the suburbs and went up to town every day for business. They did not
have to be at work till nine, and breakfasted a little after eight, the
one servant bringing them all round the inevitable cups of tea at seven.
On Sunday mornings, however, one of them always got the early tea, and
took the maid a cup in bed. I do not in the least suppose that she was
especially grateful—though doubtless she enjoyed it thoroughly—but
neither did the girls expect her to be so. They simply did it because it
seemed to them “fair.” And there you have the keynote of much which
prevents the hardest work in Australia from developing into drudgery, or
the poorest people from becoming downtrodden and hopeless; for, as far as
is humanly to be expected, it is a fair country, while the people that
are in it abide, at any rate, by this one great working ideal of
“fairness.”