A Nineteenth-Century Legacy—Early Days, Equal Pay, and Radical Women

The turn of the century, the 1800s merging into the 1900s, saw women gaining power in public office and voting rights atop earlier advances in property rights and some recognition of child custody rights. Women entered the political field as candidates for elected office. Vida Goldstein campaigned with modern media—introducing the ‘magic lantern’ into her appearances on platforms in city venues and country halls. Women’s organisations, including the Women’s Progressive Association (WPG), National Council of Women (NCW), Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), International Alliance of Women (IAW) and Victorian Lady Teachers’ Association (VLTA)hdz. Suffrage was not the only goal, and not enough when gained. Economic independence remained central to women’s struggle, with married women’s property rights paralleling industrial rights and wage rights claims as vital. Nineteenth-century union and political campaigns swept women into the new century, organised around piecework or outwork, sweating, sexual harassment on the job (the term coined decades later, with 1970s women’s activism), dark, dank, and dismal factories and workplaces, deserting and alcoholic or gambling husbands. Office and shop work, secretarial skills, and teaching opened for women, while women fought for entry to the professions. Union activism remained high and intensified, with women’s wages figuring in state and federal industrial bodies and inquiries. Women appeared before state wages boards and tribunals, and on the federal stage in industrial commissions and inquiries, and made demands through women’s organisations and trade unions. The equal pay campaign from the end of the nineteenth century built—as with all women’s demands for rights—on the commitment of earlier proponents and the strength of earlier appeals. Pressed by women of the past, women looking toward present and future gains fought on every front—locally, nationally, internationally. Determined to have their voices heard, taking whatever routes became available or that they made work for them, women determined to have their voices count.