Anthony House
History 101-01
Prof. Eklund
25 April 2001

Women and National Identity in Canada and Australia

The western world is at the brink of a third wave of feminism. Though women continue to be underrepresented in positions of power and underpaid regardless of social status, the struggle for women’s rights has enjoyed significant success during the past century. Because of historical inequalities, though, today’s women continue to suffer as second class citizens. One of the greatest challenges to feminism today is the reclamation of history as a story of all people. Certainly, thousands of years of misogyny cannot be erased from our collective memory. At the same time, remembering history without mentioning the contributions of half the population is an equally absurd proposition. Acknowledging the factors that have kept women out of positions deemed worthy of specific remembrance is a start. At the same time, continuing to advocate women’s involvement in all aspects of societal life will help ensure that the history we make today includes both men and women. The move to expand national identity to encompass both sexes is of particular importance. The coherence of any present day nation requires some common past. It is acceptance of that common past that binds a nation together, and those with no stake in the common past of a nation often have difficulty integrating fully into the national community. Today, few nations include women as fully as men in their identities, yet women account for more than half of the world’s population. Women are not only under-represented in the events which shaped their nations, but they are also particularly absent from those popular remembrances of history which are definitional to national consciousness. A comparison of the historiography of women in Canada and Australia suggests that androcentric approaches to history are common to western culture generally. Differences in the historiography of women in the two nations reflect different courses of development rather than disparate views on the role of women in society.

Of course, almost every nation is susceptible to criticism for its historic disregard of women. In discussing the development of a national identity, however, Australia and Canada offer themselves as particularly apt subjects of study. British interest in the land that is now Canada did not exist distinctly until 1783, after the American Revolution. Great Britain established its colony at the site of modern Sydney in 1788. The two colonial outposts developed contemporaneously under the auspices of the second British Empire. Both expanded to usurp the continents that had once seemed filled with incalculable wilderness. Eventually, the autonomous colonies in both North America and Australia chose to federate. Altogether, this means that Australians and Canadians alike must look to the past two centuries to define themselves as a people. The relatively modern scope of both nations’ development facilitates a holistic view of the issue at hand.

New South Wales was a great social experiment on the part of the British. While the continent of Australia was never wholly penal, the convict experience is central to the origins of the modern nation. While the past quarter century have brought attention to the experience of convict women, it is the men of penal Australia who, for most of Australia’s history, dominated discussions of the nation’s convict past. This is not altogether surprising, considering the role women were expected to play in the new colony. They were tools to Britain’s imperial ends: "it was largely because of their ability to produce children and thus build the population of the new settlement that the women had been sent" (Bolton 7). Early Australia had little need for female labor. Those women who were transported most often found their way into domestic service. Ironically enough, most women in penal Australia "were in a far better situation than those of the free and unconvicted female servants in Britain, being guaranteed accommodation, food and clothing (Hawthorne 17). Their job security, however, did not accompany acceptance by free society. Oftentimes the women were seen as "degrading influences in the families where they worked" (Dixson 144). This mistrust reflected the prevailing notion the convict women were "with scarcely an exception, drunken and abandoned prostitutes" (Molesworth Committee qtd. in Dixson 136). While hardly true, the idea was widespread and has tainted the general view of the convict women through today. Not surprisingly, people are generally reluctant to build their national identity around prostitutes. Demonized as they were, "there was little expectation that these convict women would work as family women for the benefit, support, and advancement of the family" (Hawthorne 17). In the 1920s, feminists harshly criticized the origins of European Australia, calling settlement "an alibi for the gratification of men’s lusts, a source not of civilisation, but of contamination" (Blom 165). Women faced more overt oppression, as well. "Female convicts were the objects of…officially sanctioned and highly visible brutalitiy" (Bolton 18). The women found themselves at the mercy of those administering the colony. The male convicts victimized them, as well. In some cases "there was no protection against the weather, let alone against unwelcome advances from the men" (Bolton 19). In such an hostile environment, the appeal of marriage is implicit, and many married despite the expections of their contemporaries. "Convict women needed to find a long-term ‘protector’ even among men who held them in contempt" because they otherwise faced universal vulnerability (Bolton 24). Marrying, however, meant trading independence for security. The women found themselves forced to acquiesce to the patriarchal social structure. The heads of household (men) became the proprietors of history. While the male convicts are remembered as having built the ‘newly discovered’ Australia, the women who lived with them remain at the periphery of historical consciousness.

The exploration of the vast Australian bush aggravated the already tenuous place of the family in Australian life. "National mythologies and histories have defined the Australian nation in terms of the burgeoning of a distinctive national type, the Bushman" (Blom 159). While the homestead on the frontier was integral to long-term settlement, the adventurous bushman proved to be a more intriguing image of expanding colonial Australia. Certainly, the formation of the bushman archetype was facilitated by vast demographic disparities. In outlying districts, the ratio of women to men could be as low as 1:15 (Hawthorne 16). Familial settlement of the outback was not easy, especially early on. According to an aphorism, the Australian frontier was "all right for men and dogs, but it’s hell on women and horses" (qtd. in Dixson 179). In addition to natural and climactic obstacles to settlement, family’s faced their daunting distance from civilization. "For women who settled the bush…there was in all probability no prior awareness of the possible hardships of the Australian environment, of the ‘differences’ from Britain" (Hawthorne 19). Regardless, women and families eventually made their way across the continent. Their experiences, though acknowledged, do not hold the enduring cultural significance of the mythic bushman.

The discovery of gold at Bathurst in 1851, pushed women further out of historic focus. The gold fields that sprang up across the continent were no place for women or families. The gold rushes "served to etch some early lines deeper" (Dixson 71). Large numbers of men in the developed east abandoned their families in search of instant wealth. One witness commented: "I find there is a great amount of destitution among females in consequence of their husbands leaving them and going to the diggings" (Clayton qtd. in Dixson 105). The impoverished condition of women—though occurring contemporaneously with the gold rushes—hardly lent itself to inclusion in the enduring national legend. The gold rushes in themselves mad history. So did the activities of the miners. Neither avenue offered women a place in the story. While "the gold rush to Australia…turned the tide of migration" away from Canada and toward the Pacific colonies," the majority of the new arrivals were single men (Riendeau 96). The immigrants’ tendencies toward political agitation may have spurred the federation of Australia with events , but the geographic location of such formative events as the Eureka rebellion meant that many expressions of nationalist agitation were devoid of women.

The first British involvement in "Canada" came seventy-five years before the first fleet of convicts arrived at Botany Bay. The French, however had already laid out the infrastructure necessary to colonization, and the French settlement was characterized by a semi-feudal arrangement of family farms. "The fundamental goal of [France] in sponsoring female immigration and rewarding early marriage was to promote population growth" (Prentice 47). When New France was ceded to the British after Queen Anne’s War, "single men predominated among the first arrivals" (Prentice 65). Canada, though, can almost be called an afterthought of the British Empire. Before the American Revolution, few meaningful distinctions existed between the lower thirteen colonies and Quebec, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland. The Atlantic and St. Lawrence colonies—the original British footholds in what is now Canada—boasted few of the natural advantages of the lower thirteen colonies. Their relatively low populations, then, are not surprising. Being more populous and profitable than their northern neighbors, the colonies along the Atlantic seaboard were, for all practical purposes, more valuable to the British. The also enjoyed the distinction (with the exception of New York) of having originated as English settlements, while the northern colonies had begun as New France. In 1763, with the Treaty of Paris, Britain took control of the French Catholic colony of Quebec. The annexation of Quebec added significantly to British North America’s available arable land. A cultural and legal divide prevented the new colony’s immediate exploitation by the British, though, and the northern British colonies remained less important than those along the Atlantic seaboard. For nearly a century, for example, Britain administered Newfoundland under a disinterested naval regime, reflecting "limited British commitment to the development of Newfoundland as a colony" (Riendeau 66). With the American Revolution, however, Britain "lost its most stable and populous colonies, which had formed the pillars of the old mercantile system." (Riendeau 80). The areas remaining under royal control could not compensate for the loss of the thirteen colonies. The revolution not only brought increased attention to the colonies that would later become Canada, it also augmented their populations. Loyalists fleeing the newly formed United States "became the founders two provinces, Ontario and New Brunswick" (Riendeau 81). British North America, then, was wrestled from France in a series of wars. Its Anglo-American population was augmented by another war. Women are conspicuously absent from all these wars. While certainly affected, their stories are hardly remembered academically, let alone by the Canadian population at large.

Paralleling the mythic bushman of the Australian frontier is Canada’s fur trapper. Little of the land in the northern colonies was valuable for agriculture, and the vast forests seemed to offer an endless supply of beaver pelts. Fur was central to the Canadian economy from the beginnings of the seventeenth until the end of the nineteenth centuries. At its height, the Canadian fur empire extended from Hudson’s Bay to Oregon. Not surprisingly, the fur trappers were almost universally male. The Hudson’s Bay Company "was interested only in maintaining its fur-trading monopoly, and thus it made no effort to settle" the vast lands it controlled (Riendeau 67). The fur trade was one of the driving forces behind the westward growth of Canada. The Northwest Company—a fierce rival of the Hudson’s Bay Company and it’s monopoly over Rupert’s land—"completed the transcontinental expansion of the fur trade and foreshadowed the developmental course of the future Canadian nation" (Riendeau 99). The fur trapper’s spent a large portion of their lives in the Canadian frontier, and "it is a singular fact in the social development of the Canadian West that for well over a century there were no white women" (Strong-Boag 72). The frequency of marriages to native women should not, therefore, be surprising. The unions were often mutually beneficial: "marriage alliances were an important means of ensuring good will and cementing trade relations with new bands or tribes" (Strong-Boag 72). Despite their centrality to the development of the Canadian west, however, native women face both sexist and racist barriers to gaining inclusion in the story of national identity. Ironically, the absence of white women helped sustain the fur industry. The introduction of white settlers into the Canadian frontier—with the foundation of the Selkirk Colony in 1811—"hastened the decline of an indigenous fur trade society" (Strong-Boag 76). Within sixty years, the fur trade had faded almost completely from the Canadian economy. It left its mark, however, in the form of an enduring national icon, the fur trader: independent, male, and white.

In 1901, Australia became a single nation. At the time, its laws concerning the rights of women were progressive. As usual, men dominated the process of federation. And they spoke of federalization in masculine terms: "in nineteenth century Australian colonial discourse, national independence from Britain was conceptualized as a coming to ‘manhood’" (Blom 159). Federation in Australia was "preceded by a well-developed sense of community" (Albinski 8). In contrast, "Canadians as a people have never been as culturally egotistical or as self-conscious" as Australians (Ablinski 31). Nor were Canadians as willing to accept a common cultural heritage at the time Canada confederated, three decades before Australia. On the eve of the twentieth century, though, the women of Canada enjoyed significantly fewer rights than their Australian sisters. At the turn of the century, the economies of Australia and Canada were quite different. The Australian economy, in short, had not achieved levels of industrialization commensurate with other western nations. Industrialization in Australia was characterized by the "jealous guarding of jobs and wage scales by male workers" (Albinski 106). The Australian economy at the turn of the century, though was still a mixture of pastoralism and mining. In both industries, men of the landholding upper-class profited from the exploitation of workers and aboriginal Australians. Women were hardly even considered in terms of the Australian economy. In Canada, Fur trappers gave way to railroad magnates as masters of the Canadian wilderness in the last half of the nineteenth century. The Canadian Pacific Railroad gave rise to a sort of ‘technological nationalism’ which "continues to play a dominant role in Canada’s national identity" (Otter 11). The ascendance of the Canadian railroads also catalyzed the growth of other industries, including engine foundries, locomotive shops, rolling mills, iron works, flour mills, saw mills, shoe factories, textile shops, breweries, and wagon manufacturers (Riendeau 127). The railroad boom, however, provided no immediate advances in the status of Canadian women. In the opening years of the twentieth century, Australian women enjoyed more rights than the women of Canada. The First World Ward would change much of that.

Though countless other events of national importance preceeded it, it was the campaign at Gallipoli which captured (and continues to capture) the Australian imagination. Perhaps more than any other memory, the endurance of the ANZAC legend best embodies Australian popular history’s disregard for women. Australian involvement in the First World War offered women neither social advancement nor a place in the story of the war experience. Joan Beaumont suggests that feminist historians are not altogether inculpable for the disregard of women in the history of World War I. She argues that, while traditional war historians disregard women generally, modern feminist viewpoints tend to reject war as among the worse manifestations of the patriarchy. The limited involvement of women in the First World War therefore risks total dismissal by both factions. Certainly, the Australian women who did devote "themselves to roles such as voluntary war work have been marginalised in the historiography of the First World War" (Beaumont 273). Australia is particularly vulnerable to this problem. Unlike women in Great Britain and the United States, the women of Australia "were barred from any paramilitary activities or from employment in the defense forces" (275-6). The labor market was equally unreceptive to female inclusion during the war: "The percentage of women at work in Australia actually declined between 1911 and 1921, from 28.5 percent to 26.7 percent" (275). Even in the socialist left of the period, women were trapped in traditional roles, such as "fundraising, arranging picnics and bazaars, and preparing programmes and decorations for demonstrations" (276). When the war was over, as the ANZAC legend began to take form, there was no place in it for women. "The contemporary sense that the only ‘real’ war work was at the battlefront was reflected in the memorials constructed in the aftermath of the war" (Beaumont 281). Though later memorials acknowledged the supportive role played by the women who remained behind, the ANZAC myth never integrated their aspect of the war experience into its story. "By the First World War Australian women had been given the franchise. But women’s role in the economy had emerged only gradually, and Australia’s less industrialized economy did not produce as much reliance on a female labor force as happened in Canada" (Albinski 106).

The Great War treated Canadian women substantially better than their Australian sisters. The war provided Canadian women their first opportunity to any form of political autonomy. Equally important, however, was Canada’s willingness to involve women in the war effort. The result has been a more complete popular memory of the experience of war. Ironically, it has also been a memory less central to modern national identity. "While there were attempts to persuade men to shift from less vital to more essential activities, and to draw on the potential supply of women for war industry, these rested for the most part on persuasion rather than compulsion" (McInnis 491). Between 1911 and 1921—while the percentage of Australian women in paid employment declined—Canadian women grew from 9.1 to 18.5 percent of the total workforce (Strong-Boag 256). Some of the jobs were in heavy industry: "by 1917 over 35 000 women in Ontario and Quebec were producing shells for the alies," and "in Montreal alone, over 2300 women were employed by the railways" (Prentice 139). The war provided opportunities for female work beyond heavy industry, though. There was a 168.6 percent increase in female clerical workers during the decade of the war (Strong-Boag 257). Financial institutions also began to hire women. In 1916, "the Bank of Nova Scotia officially directed its branch managers to replace enlisted male clerks with women" (260). In banking, especially, women proved unwilling to relinquish their posts after the end of the war, so that women became "a permanent labour source by the end of the 1920s" (261). After the war, "Canadian women continued to involve themselves in serious and often skilled work" (Albinski 105). This is substantially different from the Australian experience. The Great War also catalyzed the advancement of women’s rights in Canada. In 1917, a Wartime Election Act "enfranchised women who were next of kin to soldiers serving overseas" (McInnis 414). Voting rights developed from there. "The grant of suffrage was a partial recognition for the considerable role played by women in the nation’s male-scarce mobilization economy" (Albinski 105). By 1920, almost all Canadian women had earned the franchise, though Quebec held out until 1940 (Prentice 207, ff). With the notable exception of Quebec, World War I raised Canada’s women to the same political level as the women of Australia. Because of the industrial nature of Canada’s contemporary economy, women also became more central to the economy than in Australia. The result is a more equitable national memory of the war.

Ideally, women would be represented "in the cultural, artistic, literary, and historical discourses that [have] defined the nation and in the political institutions that [have] governed it" (Blom 160). For various reasons, however, the national identities of neither Australia nor Canada represent the history of the women who call each country home. In Australia, early invisibility at the national level was balanced with the relatively rapid development of political rights for women. Both, however, have been overshadowed by the exclusively male remembrance of the First World War, which took its shape from the slow-to-develop industrial economy. In Canada, on the other hand, a family-based process of settlement retarded the development of women’s rights. Canada’s relatively advanced industrial economy, however, was more receptive to women during the Great War, and suffrage followed soon thereafter. Unfortunately, World War I never dominated Canada’s sense of national identity. The advances of its women during the era are still therefore neglected in the collective memory of the nation. Miriam Dixson has asked "whether the caste-like situation of convict women has contributed to shaping [Australia’s] sociosexual patterns" (143). While the answer to her question is not clear, it seems likely that the situation of female convicts and the historiographical neglect of women may be rooted in the same cultural tendencies. The challenge to third wave feminism is to overcome those tendencies and remind the western world that its history includes both men and women.

Works Consulted

Albinski, Henry. Canadian and Australian Politics in Comparative Perspective. New York: Oxford U P, 1973.

Beaumont, Joan. "Whatever Happened to Patriotic Women, 1914-1918?" Australian Historical Studies. Vol. 115, October 2000. pp. 273-286.

Blom, Ida et. al., eds. Gendered Nations: Nationalisms and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Berg, 2000.

Bolton, Geoffrey, ed. The Oxford History of Australia. vol. 2. Melbourne: Oxford U P, 1986.

Boutilier, Beverly and Alison Prentice, eds. Creating Historical Memory: English-Canadian Women and the Work of History. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 1997.

Dixson, Miriam. The Real Matilda: Woman and Identity in Australia, 1788 to the Present. 4^th ed. Sydney: U of New South Wales P, 1999.

Eagle, John. The Canadian Pacific Railway and the Development of Western Canada, 1896-1914. Kingston: McGill-Queen’s U P, 1989.

Hawthorne, Susan and Renate Klein, eds. Australia for Women: Travel and Culture. New York: The Feminist P at the City U of New York, 1994.

McInnis, Edgar. Canada: A Political and Social History. New York: Rinehart and Co., 1947.

Otter, A.A. Den. The Philosophy of Railways: The Transcontinental Railway Idea in British North America. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1997.

Prentice, et al. Canadian Women: A History. Toronto: Harcourt Brace, 1988.

Riendeau, Roger. A Brief History of Canada. New York: Facts on File, 2000.

Strong-Boag, Veronica and Anita Clair Fellman, eds. Rethinking Canada: The Promise of Women’s History. 3^rd ed. Toronto: Oxford U P, 1997.