A Decade of Darkness—Or Into the Light? The Struggles and Successes of 1950s Women

The 1950s have been painted traditionally as a decade when women went home and stayed there, playing ‘housewife and mother’, the role traditionalists impose upon women whatever the reality of women’s lives. Women have always worked, whether inside or outside the home, for money or not. The 1950s saw women determined to hold onto jobs that were handed back to men returning from war. Some women succeeded. Many did not but this did not mean that as one they succumbed to the housewife-at-home syndrome. A false vision of the 1950s infuses history and even female historians have been captured by the traditionalist view projected by scholarly texts and film, the media and documentary asserting that this was a decade of women’s silence. Far from it. The decade began with the Basic Wage Inquiry 1949–1950 and Muriel Heagney as an expert witness for the unions. The Australian Federation of Business and Professional Women (AFBPW) and National Council of Women (NCW) intervened, their women advocates making submissions founded in cost of living and economic analysis, contending that the Basic Wage should include women and women’s full and equal entitlement. Throughout the decade, women lobbied the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), state and federal governments, ministers—state and federal, the prime minister and state premiers. They spoke from public platforms and organised huge rallies. Interviewed for print media and radio, their voices were neither silent nor silenced. They pressed for equal pay, family allowances, and the rate for the job. Together, women’s organisations and the ACTU ran Equal Pay Week with conferences, speeches and meetings around the country. True, by decade’s end equal pay remained elusive—but it was not a consequence of any false narrative that women ‘did nothing’. 1950s women’s activism and strength provided a solid and sustained platform from which 1960s women were able to spring into action. Building on the decades of women’s activism before them, 1950s women provided the foundation and impetus for their daughters and granddaughters, and for the beginnings of the last quarter of the twentieth century’s Women’s Movement and Women’s Liberation Movement demanding women’s voices be heard.