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'We have no redress unless we strike':
Class, Gender and Activism in the Melbourne Tailoresses' Strike, 1882–83
Danielle Thornton*
By examining on the role played by rank-and-file activists and their leaders, this article seeks to balance the institutional focus of existing accounts of the 1883–3 Melbourne Tailoresses' Strike. Placing the strike in the broader context of the emergence of a woman-centred trade unionism, it argues that while the strike ultimately failed in its goal of improving the tailoresses' wages, it marked a major turning-point in public perceptions of female factory workers. Whereas the popular stereotype of the 'factory girl' was of a feckless adolescent who jeopardised her morals for a 'pernicious freedom', the striking tailoresses presented themselves as redoubtable activists, responsible for the support of young families, younger siblings and aging parents. In claiming the status of breadwinners in their own right, they challenged their exclusion from the 'brotherhood' of organised labour and won the support of the Victorian public.
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| 'I find the girls very difficult to deal with', J.R. Blencowe told Commissioner Smith one June day in 1883. His competence under scrutiny, the manager of Beath, Schiess and Co. was keen to put his side of the story to Smith, who had arrived unannounced to investigate conditions at the factory. For Blencowe had good reason to be nervous: The Commissioner was in fact Major William Collard Smith, the Protectionist member of parliament. and veteran anti-sweating campaigner, who had long had employers like Blencowe in his sights. Six months before, a strike had broken out at Beath, Schiess and Co. Flinders Street factory, spreading to the suburbs and crippling Melbourne's tailoring industry.1 Ever since, his employees had become brazenly insolent: 'they have no consideration except for themselves, and do not understand the two sides of anything'.2 |
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The events of the summer of 1882–83 mark a major turning point in the history of women's industrial activism. While not the first time women had gone on strike, it was the first time within the British Empire that a strike composed wholly of 'unskilled' workwomen had attracted such publicity – a full six years before the London 'matchgirls' strike'. As such it was the first strike of its kind to be broadcast across a city and a continent to a largely literate populace, putting the first chinks in the myth of female helplessness and heralding the advent of a host of social processes that would transform colonial society. With the growth of manufacturing in Victoria during the second half of the nineteenth century, the female factory worker emerged as a recognisable social type, and to some, a distinct social problem. The first part of this article explores the contemporary representation of the 'factory girl' – as she was called, regardless of her age or seniority. The second part examines the activity of the real historical actors responsible for the 1882 strike, and argues that their stand contested this representation, creating a new discourse that asserted their right to dignity and fair remuneration in line with their responsibilities as breadwinners. |
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There are, of course, multiple practical difficulties implicit in reconstructing the political activity of subaltern subjects; their everyday experiences of oppression and resistance, how they understood these, and how they viewed themselves and the society in which they lived. The handful of interviews with participants recorded during the subsequent Royal Commission, are therefore an especially invaluable source. I have also been able to use union records. Elsewhere, I have relied on Melbourne's two principle daily newspapers, the liberal and pro-Protectionist Age and the more conservative Free-Trader Argus. Although I have necessarily mined both for facts, I have attempted to read them ethnographically, as mediated texts which can reveal both what historical actors did, and what observers understood their actions to mean. |
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