Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

Unbridling the tongues of women
mon in domestic service. The relative percentages suggest that women moved from
one to the other slowly: in 1891, 6.1 percent of South Australia’s female population
was still employed in domestic service, while those working in factories amounted to
only 1.5 percent. 26 Even among those aged between fifteen and twenty this seems to
have been so: the percentage employed in domestic service fell from 24 in 1891 to
18 in 1911 while the percentage employed in industry rose only from 13 to 14. 27 Yet
the trends suggest a different story: the number of women employed in domestic service
in South Australia halved between 1881 and 1911, whereas the number of those
employed in factories and workshops trebled between 1876 and 1911. 28 Clothing
production was not the only field in which such changes were taking place. Women
were finding paid employment in bookbinding, printing, paper-bag making and
laundries as well. But the clothing industry, as the second major single employer of
women, showed more clearly than any other how working-class women were moving
into a sphere of paid employment which was, like that of their brothers, physically
removed from anyone’s hearth and home.
The figures disguise a further and closely-related development which suggests
that the number of women involved in the clothing industry was greater than was
generally recognised. Clothing workshops could not always fill their orders and
make the profits that their owners wished for simply by taking on cheap female
labour. One solution, a well-established tradition in England, was outwork and its
inevitable accompaniment, sweated labour. The practice of outwork in the clothing
industry increased in Adelaide during the 1880s and 1890s. 29 Apart from the desperate
physical suffering of the sweated outworkers, sweating meant that at least one
facet of domestic production in working-class households was being locked into a
cash economy. This, too, eroded the distance between the public sphere of men and
money, and the domestic sphere of women, children and labour performed unpaid,
for love.
The third kind of change in the gender order of South Australian society occurred
in the middle-class households in which women were having fewer children
and were losing their former occupations as jam-makers, bottlers, picklers and unpaid
makers of dresses and suits. These women sought a wider sphere for their energies
in the charitable penumbra which their activities extended from their domestic
worlds into the public sphere. Some joined the Boarding-Out Society, with Catherine
Spence and Emily Clark. Some went hospital visiting, or visited the sick and
poor in their homes; women of the North Adelaide Baptist Church did this regu-
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