The Fortunes of the Flappers—The 1920s Generation Confronts the ‘30s

Women did not overlook the Treaty of Versailles exhortation for equal pay. In debates at the Teachers Federation building on the corner of Sussex and Bathurst Streets in Sydney, women teachers peppered their speeches with it and any other official statements they could employ to their advantage. Nurses were prominent through the 1920s, too, through the boom and bust of the economy leading into the 1930s Great Depression. With the right to vote firmly fixed for non-Indigenous Australian women, Indigenous Australian women were not silent. Pay rights were important for them, too, employed (when they were) in the cattle industry and ill-paid domestic work. From before the fin de siècle and into the twentieth century, women targeted, fought for and gained rights to take up public office and to enter the professions. Together with this gain in theory, if not in practice, growing traditional fields of women’s paid employment were targeted by equal pay campaigners, too. Where there were advances, however, women’s gains were undermined by growing levels of unemployment. Although striking both women and men, the severe downward turn in the economy and the lack of jobs was seen as hitting men and depriving them of their head-of-household status. Depressed wages that went with the fall in industry output and a lack of job vacancies were seen as promoting women into men’s jobs for the lower wages. Are Women Taking Men’s Jobs was Muriel Heagney’s riposte. Hence the decade that had begun with optimism ended with equal pay remaining imperative for women but thrust down the economic ladder by the male-defined exigencies of the times. Boom or bust, women’s jobs, wages, and cost of living failed to urge industrial commissions to implement industrial fairness by introducing wage justice for women.