Alarums and Excursions: Women Versus Men Versus Women

Links between women throughout Australia, forged through political campaigns and union activism, ensured that strategies employed in one state or territory could be drafted into action in another. When men in one state or organisation structured arguments against equal pay for women, women there or elsewhere were ready with wit and wisdom to respond. Women constructed economic reasons for equal pay, and demolished men’s reasoning with short shrift. Debate raged in the NSW Teachers Federation at meetings, conferences, and school staffrooms. It reared its head in resolutions, motions and letters published in Education, the Federation newsletter. Men in opposition had varying ways of saying so. In one memorable debate reported in Education a (male) member said he ‘favoured the principle but not the motion’, whilst another professed sympathy for equal pay but asserted it would cause women to lose their posts. Some said women were ‘too frail’ of disposition or could not ‘stand the pace’ set by men (the reason men were paid more, it was asserted) or fulfil effectively the higher duties carried out by men—albeit these were denied to women, anyway, they being set to teaching in the ’lower’ classes (and deputed to educate the children who were labelled ‘difficult’). At conferences or in planning wage and salary cases to go before the Public Service Board (PSB), some men claimed equal pay to be a distraction from claims for higher pay—which meant a focus on men’s wages to the ignorance of women’s. All this impacted on public service claims, including teachers’ salaries, and provided an excuse for government’s failure to address equal pay rights for women teachers and other public sector workers such as librarians.