The Poverty of Patriarchy Theory

The Family Wage

Hartmann argues: “the development of family wages secured the material base for male domination in two ways. First, men have the better jobs in the labour market and earn higher wages than women.” This “en­courages women to choose wifery as a career. Second, then, women do housework, childcare, and perform other services at home which benefit men directly. Women’s home responsibilities in turn reinforce their in­ferior labour market position.”³⁶ The argument that the establishment of a family wage institutionalised women as housewives and mothers earning low wages if they went to work is widely accepted. Lindsey German and Tony Cliff accept that the working class supported the idea of a family wage in Britain.³⁷ In August 1989, I wrote: “the family wage helped estab­lish the connection between sex stereotypes and the workplace.” And the “gender divisions … in the Australian workforce … were codified and legitimised by the Harvester Judgement of 1907.”³⁸ I am now much more sceptical about this argument.

Most feminist historians hold up the Harvester Judgement of 1907 as decisive in institutionalising the family wage and low wages for women in Australia. They argue it was a turning point in establishing the gender division in the work force and the idea that women don’t need to work, because they should have a breadwinner. Justice H.B. Higgins, as Presi­dent of the Commonwealth Arbitration Court, heard a test case involving H.V. McKay, proprietor of the Sunshine Harvester works in Victoria. Hig­gins awarded what he called a “living wage” based on what a male worker with a wife and “about three children” needed to live on. He awarded 7s a day plus 3s for skill. Women’s wages were set at 54% of the male rate.

Edna Ryan and Anne Conlon argue that:

the Harvester judgement was to have extraordinary impact on working women. When in later hearings the court further defined ‘the average employee living in a civilised community’, the definition included those responsible for keeping families but women were not presumed to be amongst them. The imposing edifice of a ‘family wage’ was to bar the progress of women’s pay rates for over half a century.³⁹

It may have been used as the rationale for lower wages for women, but it certainly did not instigate the concept. Nor did it initiate the gender divisions in the workplace. To prove that this judgement was decisive in establishing women’s position in the home and at work, it would have to be shown that it established lower pay for women than before and drove women out of the workforce. Neither is the case.

It is well known that convict women in the early years of settlement were always regarded as cheap labour. And as Connell and Irving point out, “a sex-segregated labour market was established” by 1810. In that year, of about 190 jobs advertised in the Sydney Gazette, only seven were for women. Of those, six were for positions as household servants. Most of the women immigrants brought to Australia by the efforts of Caroline Chisholm in the 1840s were employed as housekeepers and maids.⁴⁰ By and large, women’s wages were lower than men’s from the earliest development of industry. In the 1860s, in the Victorian Woollen Mills, men earned 35s a week while women received 10s and girls 4s.⁴¹ In 1896, the Clothing Trades Wages Board in Melbourne fixed women’s wages at 44% of men’s – 3s 4d against 7s 6d for men.⁴² New South Wales didn’t even introduce a minimum wage until 1907. Its aim was “to prevent employment of young girls in millinery and dressmaking for nothing for periods of six months to two years”!⁴³

The facts do not indicate that Higgins’ judgement was decisive in relation to the numbers of women working, or in establishing a gender division in the workforce. Table 1⁴⁴ shows that the ratio of women to men employed in factories in NSW and Victoria continued to rise, il­lustrating the fact that more women were able to find work other than as domestic servants. And Table 2⁴⁵ shows that the percentage increases of women in the workforce rose at a faster rate than men from 1907-8 to 1909-10.

Table 1:

Ratio of females to males employed in factories, NSW & Vic, 1886-1916

	NSW	Vic
1886	1:7	1:5
1891	1:6	1:5
1903	1:4	1:3
1916	1:3	1:2

Table 2:

Percentage increases in the Work Force, Commonwealth, 1905-10

	Females	Males
1905-6	7.82	6.08
1906-7	11.05	8.15
1907-8	4.66	3.06
1908-9	4.84	2.98
1909-10	8.67	7.24

Any agitation for a family wage has to be seen in the context of the ruling class’s push to establish the family. Again and again, the ruling class has had to campaign around these ideas, partly because workers have not taken them up with the enthusiasm they wanted, but also because capitalism itself continually undermines the family. The slump of the 1890s disrupted family life, with men travelling around the country look­ing for work, or simply deserting their families in despair. By the early 1900s, birth rates had fallen to the lowest in the world. So it is not acciden­tal that the ruling class looked for ways to strengthen the family and the ideas associated with it. It is in this light that we have to view the Har­vester judgement and the general climate at the time which has led many feminists to identify this as the turning point for the position of women in Australia.

The feminist argument that decisions such as the Harvester judge­ment are the decisions of patriarchy, an alliance between male workers and male bosses, does not stand up any better. Leave aside that it made no appreciable difference to the material conditions of women, it certainly cannot be shown to have brought any great boon to male workers. The amount of 7s a week was not a living wage for a family of five. Higgins said he wanted to award “merely enough to keep body and soul together.” In fact, he left out any consideration of lighting, clothing, boots, furniture, utensils, rates, life insurance, unemployment, union dues, books and newspapers, tram and train fares, school requisites, leisure of any kind, in­toxicating liquors, tobacco, sickness, religion or expenditure for contin­gencies.⁴⁶ A confusion in the hearing resulted in the allowance for skill of 3s, one shilling less than members of the Amalgamated Society of En­gineers got for the same work.

In the end, the decision was overturned a year later. But Higgins was still awarding 7s many years later, in spite of 27% inflation. No wonder Buckley and Wheelwright point out dryly that “trade unionists at the time (unlike historians later) showed little interest in the Harvester judgement.”⁴⁷ If male workers were involved in some alliance with capi­tal, they certainly got very little monetary reward for their part in it.

The idea that the capitalists were in some kind of alliance with working class men to get women into the home is ludicrous when we look at the conditions men worked under. In the depression of the 1890s, thousands were sacked, wages plummeted and most trade unions were either completely destroyed or reduced to a miserable rump. In 1905 there were 2500 to 3000 wharf labourers and coal lumpers in Sydney. At least 1500 of them could not earn enough to live on. And at this time male shop assistants, some of the few workers who consistently worked a full week, could not afford to marry unless their wife worked.⁴⁸ Such “rewards” were hardly calculated to keep men on side for the dubious (and mostly unrealised) benefit of having a wife to wait on them. Furthermore, given that the bosses were in such a strong position, there is no reason why they needed an alliance with male workers. They got what they wanted anyway. A more reasonable explanation is that these conditions convinced men that the family wage would raise their living standards.

The concept of a family wage was then of some ideological impor­tance. It strengthened the already prevalent conception about women’s role in the home, and how “decent” people should live. But a true family wage was never a reality for more than a small minority of workers. An important fact which shows that workers’ families couldn’t live on one wage was the huge number of married women who continued to work. In the half century from 1841 to 1891, the number of women in Britain’s tex­tile mills grew by 221%. In Australia, the picture was much the same. Working class women have always worked in large numbers. In 1891, 40% of women aged 18-25 worked. And they continued to work in sizable numbers in the twentieth century, even before the massive growth in their numbers following the Second World War.

Men did take up sexist ideas about women’s role – this is hardly surprising given the ruling class campaign was backed up even by the feminists of the time. But it is not the case that men argued for the family wage or protective legislation and the like on the basis that they wanted women to be their unpaid chattels in the home. The situation is more com­plex than that. The arguments from trade unionists in favour of a family wage are overwhelmingly dominated by reference to the needs of women, like this one quoted by Hartmann:

It is needless for us to say, that all attempts to improve the morals and physical conditions of female factory workers will be abortive, unless their hours are materially reduced. Indeed we may go so far as to say, that married females would be much better occupied in performing the domestic duties of the household, than following the never-tiring mo­tion of machinery. We therefore hope the day is not too distant, when the husband will be able to provide for his wife and family, without sending the former to endure the drudgery of a cotton mill.⁴⁹

We might not agree that the solution was for women to be confined to the home. But the man quoted does not talk of women making life easier for men. He says quite clearly that the family wage is seen as a way of alleviating the horrible conditions endured by women in the workplace. Anne Summers also distorts the truth about male workers’ attitudes to women workers.

Where equal pay was sought or opposed in the Arbitration Court … most unions supported the principle – because they saw it as protecting men’s jobs. It is less certain however whether most unionists saw it this way. For the male worker on low wages any decision for equal pay would be likely to have direct consequences in his own home; his wife and daughters might find jobs they would otherwise have rejected attractive for economic reasons, his own status as bread-winner would be eroded and the one area of his life where he had any power would be cut from under him.⁵⁰

This is an outrageous assertion with no facts to back it up. The only basis can be her own prejudice. She does not document any examples of male workers opposing pay rises for women, or arguing that they should service them in the home. The feminist interpretation misses the com­plexity of the relationship of ideas and material circumstances. Workers are products of this society, and the ideas of the ruling class dominate their thinking. But they are not empty vessels which simply take up every phrase and idea of the ruling class just as it is intended. Workers found their material circumstances unbearable. One response when trying to find a way out was to take up ideas propagated by the bosses and use them in their own way and to their own advantage. So the demand for women to be able to live in the family is at the same time repeating bourgeois ideas and an attempt to raise living standards.

Male workers, whether for exclusion of women, for a family wage, or for unionisation of women, were mostly worried about the use of women as cheap labour to undercut conditions and pay generally. Ray Markey, who has done a detailed study of the Australian working class in the latter half of last century, notes that “broadly, the labour movement’s response to female entry into the workforce was twofold: one of humanitarian concern and workers’ solidarity, and one of fear.”⁵¹ 1891-2, the New South Wales Trades and Labour Council maintained a strong campaign against sweating, particularly of women, and assisted in the for­mation of unions of unskilled workers, of which a sizable minority were women. In this case, male trade unionists were involved in organising women as workers – not driving them out of the workplace.