Rose Summerfield’s Gospel of Discontent : a Narrative of Radical Identity in Late Nineteenth Century Australia

Rose Summerfield (1864–1922), feminist, labour activist and radical, spread ‘the gospel of discontent’ amongst the Sydney working class in the 1890s. Discontent was a defining metaphor of fin de siecle radicalism, a condition of restless proselytising expressed in a range of experimental political, religious and cultural organisations and movements. Rose Summerfield fitfully embraced secularism, women’s suffrage, temperance, labour mobilisation and radical politics. In key texts and performances such as the 1892 Master and Man lecture Summerfield dramatically personalised the sufferings and fears of the working class. Summerfield’s radical texts and performances represented an expression of narrative identity, identifying her subjective sense of self and alienation with the injustice inflected upon women and the working class. Summerfield’s strident racism reflected a need for self definition and social integration, a vilification of the other designed to secure the self in a racially homogeneous and economically stable society. Yet race reflected the turbulent and destabilised nature of Rose Summerfield’s gospel of discontent.

On Sunday 17 July 1892 Rose Summerfield was asked to deliver an address for the Australian Socialist League (ASL). She chose Master and Man as the theme and title of her address at the League’s Sydney meeting rooms. She described the relative position of master — the employer, and man — the labourer, under colonial capitalism, ‘their status in the community at present, and what their status ought to be if we had our rights yielded to us’.[1] In other speeches at the time Rose, a 28 year old woman who had only recently emerged in Sydney as a labour activist and radical, described herself as spreading ‘the gospel of discontent’, a title she used interchangeably with Master and Man for her lesson on radical agitation.[2] Through these metaphors of class division and resistance Rose released an urgent and troubled narrative of alienation and idealism, compelled by the misery she saw every day on city’s streets, as the colony of New South Wales slid into an economic depression that persisted throughout the decade — conditions that stimulated and retarded her radical project.

In Master and Man Sydney became a ‘symbolic environment’, allowing Summerfield to express in public discourse something of how she actually was, or at least how she saw herself and her fellow workers.[3] In her metaphorical display of working-class suffering under the rule of the master we may discern the possibilities and the limits of her radicalism, and the extraordinary task of self-fulfilment that she attempted — and urged her fellow workers to share. This article seeks to clarify the nature of Rose’s radicalism as expressed in Master and Man, and follows her efforts to infiltrate her politicised identity into the turbulent public sphere of 1890s Sydney. Frustration with the compromises of Australian labourism led Rose to William Lane’s New Australia co-operative settlement in Paraguay in 1899. Race provided a significant lesson for her gospel of discontent and New Australia promised racial exclusion. Rose found that Paraguay did not ease her discontent, nor expel the troubling other from either her imagination or physical presence.

Labour historians have drawn attention to the role of women in the labour movement of the 1890s. Burgmann and Damousi highlighted the challenges women posed to the state — and organised labour — as radical agitators.[4] Moore and Shields have observed that the work of Burgmann, Scates and Damousi constitute valuable ‘collective biographies’ of socialists and radicals.[5] Yet there are few sustained biographical studies of women radicals and feminists of the period. Mathews’ rather self-conscious biography of Louisa Lawson neither investigates the issues raised in her feminist journal, The Dawn, nor seriously places Lawson in the context of her peers.[6] The work that has been carried out on the Biographical Register of the Australian Labour Movement reminds historians of the network of women radicals and labourites in late-nineteenth century Sydney — Creo Stanley, May Hickman, Kate Dwyer, Annie Golding, Mary Gilmore, Rose Summerfield.[7] A biographical focus draws attention to neglected experience — a valid criterion in itself — and may clarify the relationship between the individual and broader social, economic and cultural forces.

Analysing the gender politics of late nineteenth century radicalism, Scates has challenged Lake’s argument that ‘socialism was a man’s movement’, demonstrating that socialist groups such as the ASL were not exclusively part of ‘a man’s movement … women alongside men claimed their place in the public domain’.[8] Scates nominates Rose Summerfield as an example of this inclusive politics;[9] yet her experience in radical politics and the labour movement of the 1890s can also be read as the struggles of a marginalised identity in male-dominated structures — at once able to achieve some measure of respect, and an acknowledged role — as a writer for the Sydney Worker, and as an organiser of women workers — while never being able to move beyond the confines of these roles, or, as in the case of her organising work, fulfilling its potential.

Influenced by Joan Scott’s work on gender and identity, Lake argues that ‘the meaning of class identity is … constructed in terms of sexual difference’, and that in socialist discourse ‘the meanings of gender and class are established in and through each other’.[10] Lake and Scott stress the dynamic interconnection of these categories in the construction of identity, a dynamic which is capable of elaboration.[11] This article interrogates the interplay of gender, race and class in Rose Summerfield’s experience. Boris and Janssens identify the need to integrate the study of these categories and thereby ‘complicate’ and enrich our understanding of working-class experience, echoing similar appeals by McClintock, Hall and recent contributors to a symposium on this theme in International Labor and Working Class History.[12] For Rose Summerfield the categories of gender, race and class were promiscuously mingled in experience and imagination. Economic dislocation — an awareness of being denied, as a working-class woman, a full and meaningful participation in society due to an undervalued economic and social status — intensified resentment at her marginalisation by gender or class, and left her vulnerable to an exaggerated fear of displacement by non-Europeans — a fear that played on anxiety about communal and personal identity.

Dening’s ethnography tightens the analytical focus on the exchange between individual and society. The narratives expressed by agitators such as Rose Summerfield included elements of myth and ritual designed to stimulate shared values amongst her peers and create a galvanising legend of struggle and salvation.[13] The relationship between narrative and identity is significant. Somers and Gibson argue that life itself is ‘storied’; narrative is ‘an ontological condition of social life … people construct identities (however multiple and changing) by locating themselves or being located within a repertoire of emplotted stories’. Individuals make sense of their lives and circumstances by sharing stories, and ‘… it is unlikely we can interpret social action if we fail to also emphasise ontology, social being, and identity’.[14]

Figure 1
Rose Summerfield – a portrait photo taken in the 1890s
Source: Gavin Souter, A Peculiar People, University of Sydney Press, 1968

The Precocious Freethinker

The only way of biographically approaching Rose Summerfield, and interrogating the connection between her identity and social action, is through a close reading of her surviving texts. The alternative sources of Rose’s biography are slim, particularly so for her early life. It is simply known that she was born Rose Stone at Middleton Creek, near Ballarat in the gold mining districts of central Victoria, on 18 April 1864.[15] As with many working-class radicals in the late-nineteenth century, Rose’s embrace of political dissidence seemed to start with a rejection of traditional religion; she emerged, according to her own account, as a supporter of freethought in the mid-1880s.

Rose was active in the Australasian Secular Association (ASA) in Melbourne by 1886, coming under the influence of its pugnacious leader Joseph Symes. An acolyte of Charles Bradlaugh, the founder of the National Secular Society in Britain, Symes had arrived in Melbourne in 1884, agitating for the publication of Sunday newspapers and Sunday opening of art galleries and public libraries, and fighting off Victorian government prosecutions over his strident campaigns.[16] Symes’ ‘combative righteous radicalism’, may have provided an early role model for Rose, although she was amongst a younger generation of secularists who gravitated towards socialism.[17] Symes, an adherent of the Darwinian code of individualism favoured by the early secularists, ‘dogmatically’ opposed the spread of socialism in the ASA.[18]

Rose recalled that by identifying as a secularist she achieved notoriety on a visit to Ballarat in 1886 as ‘the Freethought lecturess from Melbourne’. Passing alone a group of women — her peers — she heard them disparagingly assessing her as they stared ‘very hard’. She claimed to take heart from the encounter, although she also looked forward to the time when ‘a Freethinker [would be] regarded as an honourable person’, who had ‘love for their fellows ever moving in their lives’.[19] In her early twenties Rose was made acutely conscious that her fledgling radicalism isolated her at the margin of community and in defiance of established belief systems.

Despite her relative youth, she took to public speaking with ease: in Ballarat in January 1886 ‘the fair lecturess’ held a Secular Society audience ‘rapt’ on the subject of ‘Social and Religious Reforms’. The Ballarat ASA struggled in the face of the local ‘orthodox party’ led by a leading local Bishop, which was ‘very strong, and naturally very bitter’ at the challenge provided by the freethinkers.[20] The morale of the Ballarat secularists was apparently so improved by the ‘talented young lady’, in ‘first rate trim [of] voice and power’ that they invited her back to speak on ‘The Heredity of Alcohol: Should Drunkards Marry?’.[21] Temperance would provide an enduring theme of her radicalism, and revealed a rather severe streak: Rose had previously delivered ‘The Heredity of Alcohol’ in Melbourne in December 1885, advocating ‘the seclusion of dipsomaniacs so as to prevent them from propagating their species, and endowing posterity with their own terrible effects’.[22] The precepts of Social Darwinism, a feature of secularist ideology, might be employed to regulate alcoholics, who would apparently always breed alcoholics. In Melbourne Rose worked as an ASA Sunday School teacher in the Hall of Science, leading children away from religion and towards rationality and scepticism.[23]

In 1886 the 21-year-old Rose married fellow freethinker Henry Lewis Summerfield, a 55-year-old ‘gentleman’ and clothing manufacturer — ‘the freethought outfitters’. The firm regularly advertised in the Liberator, the ASA journal. Rose may have met Henry at the Sunday School, which also provided a Sunday social gathering for freethinking adults. Henry is recorded reciting a poem at a March 1886 meeting.[24] The Liberator records that the Summerfields were married on 23 March 1886 under the rites of the Free Church of England.[25] ASA apostasy clung to the ritual forms of the belief it denounced: children encouraged to Sunday School, and adults drawn in married union before the ‘altar’ of the Free Church — an institution that represented a break with religion while replicating the rites of the religious blessing of marriage, and honouring marriage’s social normalisation. By 1887 the Summerfields had settled at ‘Ivanhoe’ one of the ‘Summerfield Terraces’ at 14–20 Porter Street, Waverley in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. A son, Henry, was born soon after; but the family was to enjoy only a few years together, as Henry senior died in 1890.[26]

During the 1890s Rose’s secularism flourished into an impassioned mix of socialism, temperance and womens’ rights. In April 1892 she began writing for the Hummer (soon to become the Sydney Worker) under the name ‘Rose Hummer’.[27] Six feet tall with a strong face and intense gaze, Rose also developed as ‘a rattling lecturer and organiser — full of fire and energy’.[28] In July 1892 she brought this talent for theatrical fire and energy to Leigh House, the ASL’s headquarters in southern Castlereagh Street.

Master and Man

By the 1890s the southern end of Castlereagh Street was the heart of a densely populated, working-class ‘labour precinct’ — a centre of radical agitation and debate.[29] Regularly on Sunday evenings radicals, trade union officials and workers gathered at Leigh House, at 233 Castlereagh Street, to listen to the League’s speakers, searching for solutions to the hardship and injustice that daily confronted them. In June 1892 the young and ambitious Labor identity William Holman had issued ‘A Plea for Liberty’; in the same month William Spence, the President of the Amalgamated Shearers Union, outlined ‘The Ethics of the New Unionism’.[30]

These addresses reflected conventional rhetorical flourish, and abstract notions of justice borrowed from traditional religious and political discourse. Master and Man also reflected these influences, but there was something intensely instinctive about Rose’s narrative. On 17 July, Rose figuratively led her audience out of Leigh House and onto the street — to the places where her audience lived and worked, and where their hopes and fears were played out.

Australia was, she said, gripped by an economic depression that had left working-class men walking about the city streets ‘helpless and homeless, ragged and breadless’.[31] Rose had seen these men with her own eyes, as everyone listening in the room had seen them. She had recently passed down George street at seven o’clock one evening, ‘and saw a big procession of men wending their way to get a free meal’. They were
orderly, well-behaved fellows … My heart ached at the sight; my tears flowed to see this want, this degradation, men sunk down to this beastly level, having to eat what they couldn’t earn, what they could not work for, and yet have to be thankful for it.[32]

Rose summoned an image of the suffering and defeated procession to stir her audience to action, invoking the narrative device of ‘the slum description’ employed by British and Australian radical writers, including her contemporary, William Lane.[33] Rose demanded that her audience consider their own acquiescence before the power of the capitalist master. ‘You have become accustomed to your position’, she accused:
you have worked while you could get it, bore it the best you could when no employment offered, were contented with less food, less covering for yourselves and families; you dreaded the sight of an agitator — a man who would show you how to better your position, or tell you what your position really was — a social slave.
The capitalists may dominate the system but, she insisted, ‘ye cannot blame them, you know. You let them do it’. Your ‘masters’ are ‘your self-constituted owners’, who have reaped the rewards of your harvest.[34]

She described the toils of mine workers, breast deep in water, ‘searching for beautiful yellow gold’; she lamented children denied their childhood, working from 12 or 13 in dusty factories, and shop girls, standing for long hours with ‘painful female complaints’.[35] Her stories of injustice were often about people she had known, or witnessed herself. Rose had a skill for personalising injustice and emphasising its familiarity for her audience. She conjured an image of a greedy station owner and her daughter, ‘grasping, grinding creatures’ who might have stepped out of the pages of a Dickens novel or an unpleasant fairy tale:
I knew a lady once, the owner of three fine, well-stocked stations and a very big Bank account, who would gather the eggs from the nests, pack them away beyond the reach of the servants, deny a single egg to a male or female servant, and when she has had ten or twelve dozen gathered, gone stale and rotten, get her cook to throw them out. I have seen her daughter churn butter, put it away and keep it until it was rancid, then give it to the kitchen folk.
‘It is these people you have occasion to dread’, Summerfield reminded her audience.[36]

Through dread or provocation Summerfield was determined to rouse workers from their sullen apathy. She invoked the politically radical poetry of Shelley’s ‘The Mask of Anarchy’ as an exemplary model that might work as well for her audience as it had for her:
Asses, swine have litter spread, And with fitting food are fed, All things have a home but one, Thou, oh, Englishman, hast none! This is slavery! Savage men Or wild beasts within a den Would endure not as ye do, But such ills they never knew.[37]’The Mask of Anarchy’ was provoked by Shelley’s outrage at the 1819 Peterloo Massacre of protesting workers in Manchester. The poem contained ninety-one scathing stanzas, attacking the reign of anarchic tyranny the English political elite maintained over the working class — a reactionary rule symbolised by Lord Castlereagh, barely masked in the poem as ‘Murder’.[38] Shelley’s biographer claims ‘The Mask of Anarchy’ as ‘the greatest poem of political protest ever written in English’.[39] Shelley’s poetry was certainly influential amongst late nineteenth century radicals in Britain and Australia.[40]

It is likely that Rose identified in a personal way with Hope, the heroine of ‘The Mask of Anarchy’. In solitary and patient defiance Hope destroys Anarchy, a personification of tyranny who had, with apparent omnipotence, trampled an ‘adoring’ multitude, declaring ‘I AM GOD AND KING AND LAW’.[41] In the final section a female voice, almost certainly Hope’s, rails against the workers’ meekness, and at a great rally offers them a vision — repeated in almost identical terms by Rose in Master and Man— of ‘neat and happy homes’, plentiful food, peace and freedom to creatively flourish as individuals, if only they will rise against their oppressors.[42] As Rose again quoted Shelley, this time from the equally ‘savage’ ‘Lines Written During the Castlereagh Administration’:
Then Trample and dance thy oppressor, For thy victim is no redressor [sic]; Thou art sole lord and possessor Of her corpses, her clods, and abortions — they pave The path to the grave.[43]Shelley’s poetry provided codes of both meaning and dramatic language for her text and a model of public and radical identity for her performance. In Master and Man Rose described Shelley as ‘our beautiful poet, our exquisite thinker, our noble humane worker’.[44] Rose assimilated Shelley’s almost biblical and portentous rhetoric of suffering, struggle and freedom as she confronted her audience with responsibility for their own fate: ‘How can ye bear, men and women, to be so patient under the toils…and bear it all without resistance?’ As Hope had famously challenged English workers to ‘Rise like lions after slumber/Ye are many — they are few’, Rose saw herself as a galvanising agent of protest and freedom. ‘I will not preach calmness to you’, she declared: ‘No ! no! Agitate! agitate! I hope I’ll die with that word on my lips’.[45]

Race

Having established the terms of division between master and man and the insidious connivance of workers in their own fate, Rose turned to a theme entirely absent from ‘The Mask of Anarchy’— the dilemma of race, drawn from her perceptions of colonial experience. She ominously warned that ‘their traitorous rulers’ intended to leave them in ‘want and misery’ while allowing ‘the slaves of other nations to do your work’. To dramatise the dangers of foreign slaves proliferating in their midst Rose once again led her audience down Sydney’s streets. Go down Pitt Street, she instructed. ‘Take a walk round Goulburn Street’, or lower George Street near the Belmore Markets, only a short walk from Leigh House. She led them through the narrow paths of the markets:
Ugh! The smell, the dirt, the unwholesomeness! If you are a woman you hear loud laughter, expressions of ‘welly nice’, ‘welly good’, from the lips of Chinese gamblers, and lewd eyes are fastened upon you by these creatures who are allowed to live huddled together like beasts instead of human beings.
Walking through the Belmore markets her audience would find ‘the refuse, and outcasts of other nations’, whom Australians were expected to compete with in the struggle for jobs. They would find the Chinese — ‘almond eyed slaves’ — and Syrian and Indian hawkers, Italian beggars in the lane ways. ‘Can you do it?’, she demanded of her audience. ‘Work early and late every day in the week like them for a small wage, huddled up together ten in a room’; were you willing to live like ‘the waste of Italy’s fair shores’? [46]

Understanding the power of theatre, Summerfield stood before her audience and confronted them with the psychological anarchy to which capitalism subjected the working class. An insecurity that manifested as a fear of loss of employment and culture through this foreign invasion, intensified, in Summerfield’s drama, through a fear of sexual predation, striking a direct emotional chord amongst the women in the audience and the men expected to protect them from such a dehumanising ordeal. Rae Frances refers to the fear of miscegenation between Asian men and white women that gripped the late colonial imagination.[47] Rose took her audience through the market, to share her experience of having lewd eyes fastened upon her, of being inspected and assessed as a living commodity as she went about her business; ‘if you are a woman’, she explained, this is what you see and this is how you are made to feel.

Reflecting on the ritual practices of the indigenous people of the Marquesas, Greg Dening observed: ‘in their models of the Other they betray their metaphors of themselves’.[48] Labour historians have argued that in the late-nineteenth century fear of unemployment and reduced wages animated the racial fears expressed by Australian radicals and labour movement figures.[49] The myth of ‘traitorous rulers’ Rose Summerfield propagated was not simply a cautionary tale of lost jobs or pay cuts; the rulers colluded in a betrayal of race, community and personal identity. Invoking race, Summerfield stimulated a fear of the loss of the self — reduced to the status of almond-eyed slaves, white workers would no longer be themselves. Summerfield could not conceive of herself, or be herself, in the world of the other, these foreigners she had seen, and passed closely in the street and in the markets, and almost felt their touch: it is the implication of empathy with the Other that Summerfield could not accept, an alienation she assumed was shared by her audience. Assigning prejudicial meanings to the body of the Other — the smell, filth, leering faces of these aliens huddled like beasts — provided Summerfield’s audience with a powerfully visceral production of their shared and fearful loathing.[50]

A focus on the individual clarifies the anxiety about the stability of the self, and its place in the community as a legitimate identity, that is central to racist discourse and which stood at the heart of Rose’s narrative and her struggles against injustice. Rose ambiguously reassured her audience that they were not like the slavish Chinese or the poor Kanaka: white Australians possessed racial and gender qualities that set them apart. ‘You have more manhood, more courage than the poor unfortunate black who is torn from his island home and kindred, and forced into a miserable subjection…you are a step beyond slavery, most of you’, she added, maintaining the dramatic tension by reminding her audience that they stood poised on a knife edge between their status as white workers and that of the foreign slave: ‘Your work of redemption is in its infancy’.[51]

Scates argues that in the 1890s, ‘Australia’s radical societies were deeply implicated in the project of colonial racism’.[52] Burgmann has argued that while labour movement racism was ‘blind and unthinking’, socialists of the period ‘knew very well that racial attitudes weakened working-class resistance to exploitation’.[53] Scates concludes that labourites and radicals alike succumbed to an imperialist discourse of race.54 Why did so many leading radicals of the period, whom Scates represents as otherwise defiant, self-acting and creative, succumb so readily to an imposed racial discourse, even if they knew better? Racism provided an intensely creative element of Rose Summerfield’s radicalism. Rose drew a potent lesson from the symbolic environment that she shared with her fellow workers and radicals and constructed a fable that could galvanise them into action — a spur to their freedom at the expense of significant others barely present in numbers, but sufficient for the purposes of totemic vilification. It is unlikely that Rose’s tale of racially treacherous rulers was incited by anything more than the wild rumours of ruling class intention that circulated in the labour press, in rallies and lectures and in the pubs; the Belmore markets simply reflected the racially diverse nature of port city life — a diversity that remained highly marginal in a predominantly anglo-celtic society.

Rose’s instincts of empathy and complicity with her familiar, white audience seemed well-founded. The Evening News reported that ‘the lecturess was frequently interrupted by bursts of applause’.[55] At the end of her address, she was met with ‘a perfect ovation’.[56] Her performance was not passively received; her audience had vicariously shared in its production and responded to her warnings and demands for action. Like many radical presentations in the 1890s — protests, lectures, declarations —Master and Man was quite literally a performance, and was indeed an address: an appeal not only for the reception of ideas and argument from an audience, but also seeking a response. And in order to stir that response Master and Man took the form of a kind of dramatic play, in which Rose Summerfield performed a role that summoned up the lurid symbols of persecution and fear — ‘the grasping, grinding creatures’ of capitalism, and the refuse of foreign shores. There was artificiality in these vilifications, an exaggeration that might incite a passionate performance and response but were unsustainable in the day to day struggles of work and political activism.

Rose was conscious of the need to direct the awakened class consciousness of her audience into social change. In a striking simile she likened workers to a horse straining at the reins, ‘that keeps your neck so cramped, the strain that makes your eyes bloodshot and dilated, the cruel curb that makes your poor mouths foam’. And although ‘you must strain, and plunge and rear until the cord is snapped’, it was no use wildly revelling in a new-found freedom. Workers had to be alert to another halter being cast around their necks. ‘The world is full of quacks who seek to ease your pain’. They had to develop ‘common sense’ solutions.[57] Rose urged workers to unite under the trade union banner, but its reforms provided only one solution. They must embrace the spirit of the New Unionism, and peacefully take control of the means of production, although she expressed her impatience with ‘moral suasion’, words that reminded her of ‘thin slices of bread with very little butter’.[58]

Master and Man reveals her impatience with both the passivity of workers and something of an elitist disciplinarian, frustrated by the sluggish, compromised progress of democratic political organisation and a concern that the horse might bolt, gullible and unfocused, into the constraint of another halter. Summerfield concluded her lecture with an exhortation for workers to embrace socialism — ‘the leveller of tyranny and despotism, the destroyer of monopoly, the destruction of usury’. Together they must wipe away ‘the fearful inequalities that exist between master and man’. To intensify this point Rose finished her address with another dramatic plea in verse:
Let the man merge into master, and the slave into the man;
Let the harlot Competition fashion out some other plan,
For our manhood will not need her; they will have loosed the galling chains

That long held them in their bondage and for centuries in pains.
Intellect has forced a freedom, and the nations now arise,
Where before was want and groaning, floods of song ascend the skies.
Men are equal, men and women, none the tyrant, none the slave.
Man and master, friend and friendly, usury fast in its grave.[59]This untitled appeal revealed the rhetorical source of her theme; Rose appears to have been its author. Rose consistently resorted to poetry throughout her life to express her most heartfelt emotions. Rose’s concluding verse resembles William Morris’s ‘No Master’,[60] suggesting a connection that Rose felt between herself and the English, romantic radical tradition typified by Shelley and self-consciously renewed by Morris in his 1885 Chants for Socialists, written for the agitational needs of the socialist movement.[61] Similarly, the vague conception of socialism outlined in Master and Man seems to owe much to this tradition, rather than the tenets of ‘scientific’ socialism.

Gender

The concluding verse also revealed the subliminated gender tensions that had persisted throughout her lecture. ‘Men are equal’, she observed, and then added as a kind of necessary clarification, ‘men and women’. This ambiguity about gender equality is consistent with the view she expressed earlier in the lecture that
Men and women must co-operate, must band together. The weaker sex must become stronger. They have to labor, and if they want to reap the benefit of their toil, to keep from degrading their sex and becoming food for the spoilers, they must make common cause with the men in their endeavours to right the evils now existing.[62]There is little doubt that when Summerfield employed the term ‘Master and Man’, she intended man as a generic reference for both male and female workers. She also acknowledged in the address that within the framework of colonial capitalism men, either as masters or workers, were in a stronger position than women, even as an ASL audience: several of her remarks suggest that she addressed an overwhelmingly male audience whom she both soothed and unsettled. ‘You have more manhood’ than Chinese or Kanakas, she assured them, but only by a step. Summerfield reminded her audience of their status as breadwinners: ‘if you want your wife and children well fed, well dressed, let them be so by all your means’ — urging them to ‘be a man’ and resist the master, and placing on their shoulders a responsibility to provide for their families.[63] As Lake argues, such arguments insidiously reinforced male working class gender identity — and the inequalities between men and women.[64] At times Summerfield simultaneously consoled and unnerved her male listeners by reference to their gender function as protectors of ‘the weaker sex’: their masters ‘… dare not ravish your women and girls’, infiltrating the threat of this violation into the minds of husbands, fathers and brothers.[65]

Summerfield’s criticism of ‘the weaker sex’ reflects the ambiguities of her own marginalised gender and economic position in society — partly an expression of the impatience that she felt with the working-class response to its condition, and a frustration at women’s vulnerability to the exploitation of masters and men. Press response to her address reflected the tenuous nature of her intervention in public discourse. Rose’s proselytising was reported in the labour press, and the ASL in collaboration with the Hummer office printed Master and Man in pamphlet form; copies were offered for sale through the Worker (which superseded the Hummer in September 1892).[66] Of several mainstream Sydney newspapers, only the Evening News carried a report of her address.

Class Mobilisation 1892–99

From mid-1892 Rose emerged as the leading labour movement organiser of women workers in New South Wales. Rose established a ‘women’s division’ on behalf of the nascent General Labourers Union, with the encouragement of its President, W.G. Spence, under the title the Australian Women Workers Union.[67] Rose also conducted a labour exchange for women workers, the Australian Workers’ Labour Bureau in the Carrington Hall, not far from Leigh House in Castlereagh Street.[68] Although the Dibbs Protectionist administration had recently opened a Government Labour Bureau, it focused almost entirely — and to little useful effect — on the needs of unemployed men.[69] Summerfield travelled to Bourke in the far west of New South Wales, spreading ‘the gospel of discontent’, unionising laundry workers and establishing branches of the Australian Women Workers Union and the Australian Socialist League.[70]

These ambitious projects proved difficult to sustain. Despite the backing of Spence, the campaign to enrol women workers lapsed after 1892. Summerfield could not overcome the chronic unemployment that persisted throughout the 1890s. Organising women workers in the 1890s also suffered from a lack of effective co-operation from already struggling unions, and the difficulty of maintaining support from women both financially hard-pressed and intimidated by employer harassment.[71] Summerfield acknowledged that unionising the Bourke laundresses resulted in them losing their jobs: the employer refused to tolerate unionists amongst his staff. The General Labourers Union (GLU) office in Bourke stepped in to save what might have been a disastrous advertisement for organising local women, offering to establish a co-operative laundry and employing the sacked workers. Summerfield claimed that the women would be more ‘happy and independent’ working in the co-op laundry.[72]

Frustration with the failings of her own gender, the insidious impact of the depression and the predatory structures of colonial economy and society formed the themes of Summerfield’s March 1893 report of her failed GLU organising. Few ‘girls’ enrolled in the Carrington Street bureau could afford to contribute financially; the ‘socials’ had to be abandoned as too expensive, and attracted ‘the wrong class of men’. Significantly, an apparently ‘right’ class of men were conspicuously absent from both the socials, owing to a lack of support from the Sydney Labour Council affiliates, ‘as the trade unionists through them may have patronised us’. Despite the fact that ‘hundreds’ of girls could obtain no work, the bureau girls refused work offered by employers ‘at the lowest possible wages’. Employers thought the bureau might provide a source of cheap labour, an impression unfortunately cultivated by ‘prominent women’ such as Mrs Julian Ashton, wife of the influential artist and trustee of the New South Wales Art Gallery. Other ladies promised to help, Rose observed, ‘but did not fulfil’. They thought the New Unionism dangerous, ‘and whilst I was right enough personally, my efforts in women’s work was not to be aided or noticed in any way’. Being right enough personally perhaps meant that genteel Sydney society would not treat her with open disdain, as the Ballarat women had once isolated the precocious freethinker; nonetheless Rose felt the alienation of neither being aided nor noticed.[73]

Rose also ruefully observed that ‘women’s cheap labour in many instances forces men out of employment, and causes incalculable mischief in the community’. Women ‘who take work home’ at cheap rates reduced factory and workshop wages. As in Master and Man, Rose’s GLU report displayed a tendency to blame the victim for the crime. The failure of women to organise and combine also led them to deal with Chinese and Indian hawkers.
It is the women who in their ignorance patronise these aliens that makes the men’s battles still harder to fight. The true Australian when combined would assist wonderfully in wiping out the colored curse.
It was these rather negative factors that made ‘the woman question … indisputable … [in] the cause of humanity and progress’.[74]

From 1893 Rose turned her energies to the Womanhood Suffrage League of NSW (WSL). She served as a member of the League’s governing council in 1893–94.[75] At League public meetings Rose urged working-class women to their ‘duty to ask for the vote’. She appealed to the women readers of the Worker, urging them to active citizenship while adapting her argument along conventional gender lines. Women would ‘purify the Parliament’ by voting for the ‘sober, moral man’, and exert an influence for ‘gentleness and kindliness’ on polling day. And ‘yet you seem to be asleep’, Rose lamented, while men made laws ‘about little children, divorce, marriage … which really affect you as much as they affect men’. Just as men could not manage the home and children without their wives,
neither can they manage the country … and it is as much our duty to help them in this work as any other and to sympathise actively with all the efforts which men are making to improve the laws and the people. Yes, and inspire to them to even greater exertions and more noble efforts.
That women might represent either themselves or men in Parliament was a proposition absent from her appeal. [76]

The WSL renewed Rose’s tense relationship with prominent women, particularly League president Rose Scott. Summerfield had encountered the formidable Scott in August 1892, after ‘Rose Hummer’ had criticised a WSL official who had suggested that women should, like men, be willing to ‘carry the hod’ — engage in menial physical work. Summerfield did not believe such labour represented any kind of meaningful or desirable equality. She argued that ‘we want to raise women, to lessen their toil … we do not wish to spread pauperism, to make men dependent on women’. Women should be able to find work ‘without usurping men’s places’.[77] Rose Scott retorted that the WSL did not endorse such views, but had rather promoted debate on women’s work; she urged Rose Hummer to ‘come among us’ and join that debate, and the League’s struggle for the right to vote.[78] The apparently confident Rose Hummer seemed a little intimidated by this appeal. ‘When time allows I shall be most happy to attend the meetings of the League. I am a beginner, and hope to learn; then to disseminate.'[79]

Rose joined the ranks of the WSL in late 1893, and by January 1894 had established its Waverley branch. Under her presidency the branch made a reputation for devoting ‘many evenings to lectures and debates with much success’.[80] Her participation in the League’s senior ranks proved more fleeting. Either by choice or circumstance she served only a year on the WSL executive. Many of the women who participated in the League, and who formed the National Council of Women in 1895 were from middle class backgrounds, in whose company Rose may have felt ill at ease.[81] Nonetheless her commitment to the cause persisted. In 1897 she participated in a debate on women’s suffrage with Rose Scott, rebutting the ‘old fashioned’ argument that ‘women’s sphere is home’. Summerfield’s reply reflected the stresses that low pay and poor working conditions imposed on women in late colonial society. ‘[H]undreds of working women and young girls would only be too glad to have homes and home spheres if the chance was given to them.'[82]

As her participation in the WSL’s senior ranks lapsed Rose took up a prominent role in the temperance cause. In 1896 she was an honorary official of the Independent Order of Good Templars (IOGT) Sydney metropolitan executive and the IOGT’s ‘Heart of Oak’ Lodge in Waverley.[83] The IOGT’s campaign for ‘prohibition without compensation’ — banning alcohol sales without compensating the colony’s breweries and public houses for their losses — reached a high point in New South Wales in the mid-1890s. In 1896 the IOGT had 39 lodges and over 6,000 members, with 1,489 in the Sydney district, agitating for a popular referendum on prohibition.[84]

Temperance appealed to the self-discipline that Rose felt the working class had to embrace in order to achieve liberation. ‘Drink, vice, crime, were all traceable to the one cause — poverty’, she observed in 1892; poverty could only be eliminated by changing the social system.[85] Under capitalism, alcohol was an insidious instrument of suppression, worsening the very conditions that held workers in servitude.
The hollow chest, awkward gait, stooped shoulders, hysterical conduct, intense hankering after excitement, tendency and desire for strong drink, and many things that space will not permit me to mention just now are the outcome of the present deplorable condition of our working people.[86]The IOGT specifically appealed to the working class.[87] Its membership included a number of significant labour movement identities — the IOGT’s Grand Templar was former Labor parliamentarian G.D. Clark. The IOGT declared in July 1896 that it strove to ‘lift humanity to a higher level’ by suppressing one specific ‘labour-crushing’ evil. There was no ‘class distinction’ in the IOGT, which promoted an idea of equality in its ranks ‘very repugnant to certain sections of the community, and probably largely accounts for the comparatively few of the classes joining’. The IOGT believed that the ‘lower orders’ initiated and carried through almost all the world’s great reforms. ‘Liquor law reform is not likely to prove an exception.'[88]

As Metropolitan District Assistant Secretary Rose was a relatively senior IOGT official. She lectured on ‘Woman’s Place in the Temperance Movement’ in January 1896, inspiring several pledges.[89] She was also the treasurer of the Waverley, ‘Hearts of Oak’ Lodge. Rose’s participation in the Waverley lodge is only sparsely reported, but it was a form of public and community participation, like the Waverley branch of the WSL, that may have been as meaningful for Rose as more prominent lectures or executive meetings; the communal nature of local branch activism may have mitigated the sense of alienation that her radicalism seemed at times to trigger. Rose read an ‘excellent paper’ at a lodge meeting in March 1896.[90] In the 1890s IOGT lodge meetings merged the serious and the social, and each lodge conducted a regular series of entertainments — the ‘Queens Birth Night’, ‘Question Box and Comic Cuttings’, ‘Pound Night’, ‘Brothers Surprise Sisters’ and ‘Brothers Sewing Contest’. Various lodges visited each other on social occasions, encouraging a wide participation of members in the life of the order.[91]

Rose’s participation in the IOGT — at least as an office bearer — does not appear to have endured beyond 1896, perhaps reflecting the fact that the temperance movement generally failed to persuade workers to embrace its cause. The promising tide of success evident in early 1896 soon subsided. By 1897 the IOGT’s Grand Electoral Superintendent had to concede that the campaign for a referendum on prohibition had failed. IOGT membership in New South Wales fell from 6,605 to 5,222 by the end of 1896.[92]

During 1892–93 and again in 1897–99 Rose was the principal women’s correspondent for the Sydney Worker. In her articles Rose repeated familiar themes — the need for women to embrace industrial organisation and the cause of suffrage. In 1898 Rose urged women to agitate for a ‘no’ vote in the NSW referendum on the Constitution bill, designed to give effect to the federation of the Australian colonies. ‘We have not votes, but we have intelligence’, she asserted. The labour movement feared the undemocratic nature of the proposed Senate would stymie progressive legislation, as Rose argued: ‘the worst possible class rule will oppress us in the name of … states rights’. The bill was rejected in the June poll.[93] She continued to expound her views on race and fear of miscegenation in melodramatic and personalised stories. Warning young women not be ‘ruined’ by naïve praise of the ‘nice manners and civility of John Chinaman’, Rose recounted in September 1898 a recent visit she had made to a country hotel which employed a Chinese cook. She claimed that owing to her aversion to the cook, she went into the kitchen to make cocoa and saw him spit in the flour he was mixing into dough. The invention of this almost certainly fantastic story was apparently necessitated by the torment of white working class — and perhaps personal — alienation: ‘as a race surely we are demoralised enough without mixing with an inferior one’.[94]

Rose regularly expressed her hopes and fears in verse. In December 1898 the Worker published the wistful ‘This Fleeting Show’:
This life could be a paradise
If men were pure, and kind, and wise,
And laws were few and just.
Tho’ wants are great, there’s great supplies;
The world would get a big surprise
If we’d each other trust.[95]As Rose had been contributing to the Worker in the late 1890s her disillusionment with Australian workers and Labor politics had been intensifying. She resigned from the ASL in 1897, and bitterly lamented workmen ‘gulled’ — ironically by the ‘mighty bribe’ of suffrage.[96] She had long been interested in William Lane’s New Australia co-operative settlement in Paraguay, established in 1893.[97] On 22 September 1897 Rose had married shearers’ cook and Jindabyne mine manager Jack Cadogan. In April 1899 they set out together for New Australia, farewelled by ‘every section of the reform movement’ in Sydney, including Spence, Labor MP George Black, Worker editor Hector Lamond and feminist May Hickman.[98]

Rose had already imagined the symbolic environment of New Australia, although she had never seen it. In Master and Man Rose had described how she longed for ‘a community, an industrial hive’, created by ‘our great socialist reformers’, where ‘freedom, social equality, individual independence for man and woman is willingly acknowledged the law of the land’.[99] New Australia, as it had been conceived by Lane, promised socialism, equal rights for women, temperance and racial exclusion; Paraguay only intensified Rose’s alienation.[100] Lane’s experiment had foundered in division and just as the Cadogans arrived in Paraguay in 1899, Lane departed, never to return.

In November 1901 Rose wrote to the Sydney Worker, bitterly warning its readers not to believe all they heard about Paraguay.
It is a fine country, but, owing to the ignorance, indolence, and superstition of the natives, it is a poor place to live in, and anyone may do better in any part of Australia. One regrets that such good workers in the reform cause should be buried among strangers and retrogrades.[101]In 1908 the Cadogans, who by now had four children, left New Australia for life as shopkeepers in nearby Yataity. Scates has observed the failure of the Paraguayan pioneers to realise a truly feminist society.[102] In Yataity Rose was left virtually single-handed to run the shop and the family, compensating for the discouraged and heavily drinking Jack.[103] By 1915 she pined for ‘the scent of wattle’, as she wrote plaintively in a poem, ‘Australia’;[104] a longing cruelly denied in 1920, when the Cadogans lost their savings in a bank failure only months before finalising arrangements to return to Australia.[105]

Rose Cadogan died of cancer in Villa Rica, Paraguay on 14 April 1922, four days before her fifty-eighth birthday. She had been ‘with the forward movement fully forty years’. Rose was survived by her husband and four sons — Eric, Bronte, Leon and Hugh. Harry Summerfield predeceased her as a result of a crocodile attack in the Northern Territory.[106] Despite her despair of the Paraguayans, Rose worked amongst them for many years, treating malaria and hookworm with herbal cures.[107] Leon inherited her mother’s passion for social justice, expressed in anthropological research and campaigns for the rights of indigenous Paraguayans.[108] Rose Cadogan is buried in the Las Ovejas cemetery at New Australia.[109]

Conclusion

What did it mean to be a pioneer of emancipation, a ‘first-wave’ feminist in 1890s Sydney?[110] The fragmented nature of Rose Summerfield’s activism during the years 1892–99 indicated the difficulties of maintaining consistent political agitation or civic participation in the context of the brutally lingering depression of the 1890s, the hostility of employers and the state to labour mobilisation, and the resistance confronting an idealistic working-class woman. These factors undermined the reasonably prominent activists’ role that Rose had been developing in the period 1892–93. The frustrations that Rose experienced also highlighted her relative marginality — she was never accorded a decisive or clear leadership role; only in speeches such as Master and Man and the articles and poetry published in the Hummer/Worker did she find space to create and project a sustained ‘voice’. Her radicalism often carried the weight of the traditional values it pulled against, and race complicated her radicalism in ways she could not have anticipated.

Kerri Allen found that analysing Hannah Whitall Smith’s ‘religiosity and spirituality’ helped her to understand how Smith’s ‘changing religious convictions were part of a quest for a coherent and authoritative sense of self’.[111] Race helped Rose Summerfield define a sense of identity by ‘marking the boundaries of difference’, categorising the other through racial vilification in order to construct a sense of self.[112] For Hannah Whitall Smith religion represented a personally stabilising, or disciplinary source, securing a sense of personal and spiritual comfort and self-control under the gaze of a watchful and benevolent God. For Rose Summerfield race proved destabilising and unsettling, inciting her gospel of discontent. There was no God present, only the perceived presence of a threatening other, an ally of those devils of discontent — capital and the state. Race intensified her disillusionment with Australia, although in Paraguay Rose found that she could not escape an insidious multi-racialism. Paraguay proved not unlike the Belmore Markets; in both spaces, Rose felt reduced to the status of an outsider, lost amongst strangers and retrogrades.

Endnotes

*�The author wishes to thank the anonymous referees of Labour History for their incisive comments and suggestions.

1.� Rose Summerfield, Master and Man, address for the Australian Socialist League, 17 July 1892 published as a pamphlet by the Hummer Wagga, 1892. Mitchell collection, State Library of New South Wales, p. 3.

2.� In September 1892 the Worker advertised that Rose would speak in the western NSW town of Bourke on ‘Master and Man or the Gospel of Discontent’. Worker (Sydney), 24 September 1892.

3.� ‘The only way to discover who people actually are is through their expressions, through their symbolic systems … ethnography takes an historian to the systematic and public expression of who people are — their rituals, their myths, their symbolic environments.’ Greg Dening, The Death of William Gooch, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1995, p. 157.

4.� Verity Burgmann, In Our Time: Socialism and the Rise of Labor, 1885–1905, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1985; Joy Damousi, Women Come Rally, Socialism, Communism and Gender in Australia 1890–1955, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1994.

5.� Andrew Moore and John Shields, ‘Activists in Aggregate: Collective Biography, Labour History, and the Biographical Register of the Australian Labour Movement, 1788–1975’, paper presented at the ‘Struggling for Recognition: the Individual in Labour History’ conference, University of Sydney, 21 November 2003, p. 5; Bruce Scates, A New Australia: Citizenship Radicalism and the First Republic, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1997.

6.� Brian Mathews, Louisa, McPhee Gribble, Melbourne, 1987.

7.� John Shields and Andrew Moore, ‘The Biographical Register of the Australian Labour Movement: a Progress Report’. The report includes an annex featuring entries on a number of ‘radical women.’ Working Lives Online Research Project, www.econ.usyd.edu.au/workinglives

8.� Marilyn Lake, ‘Socialism and Manhood: the Case of William Lane’, Labour History, no.50, May 1986, p. 54; Bruce Scates, A New Australia, p. 200.

9.� Bruce Scates, ‘Socialism, Feminism and the Case of William Lane: a Reply to Marilyn Lake’, Labour History, no.59 November 1990, pp. 56–7

10.� Marilyn Lake, ‘Socialism and Manhood: a Reply to Bruce Scates’, Labour History, no.60, May 1991 p. 116.

11.� See Joan Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, Columbia University Press, New York, 1988, pp. 5–6, and ch. 2, ‘Gender: a Useful Category of Historical Analysis’.

12.� Eileen Boris and Angelique Janssens, ‘Complicating Categories: an Introduction’, International Review of Social History, vol. 44, 1999, p. 4; Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather, Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, Routledge, NY, 1995, p. 5; Catherine Hall (ed.), Cultures of Empire: a Reader, Manchester University Press, UK, NY, 2000, ‘Introduction’; Sonya Rose, ‘Intersections of Gender and Labor in the United States and Western Europe’ International Labor and Working-Class History, no. 63, Spring 2003; see particularly in this symposium Eileen Boris, ‘From Gender to Racialized Gender: Laboring Bodies That Matter’.

13.� Dening, The Death of William Gooch, p. 157.

14.� Margaret R. Somers and Gloria D. Gibson, ‘Reclaiming the Epistemological ‘Other’: Narrative and the Social Constitution of Identity’, in Craig Calhoun (ed.), Social Theory and the Politics of Identity, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, 1998, pp. 38–40.

15.� Genealogical information provided to the author by the Australian Dictionary of Biography Supplement Project.

16.� F.B. Smith, ‘Joseph Symes and the Australasian Secular Association’, Labour History, no.5, November 1963, pp. 34–37.

17.� F.B. Smith, ‘Joseph Symes’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol. 6, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1976, p. 237.

18.� Smith, ‘Joseph Symes and the Australasian Secular Association’, pp. 39–41.

19.�Liberator, 14 March 1886.

20.�Ibid.

21.�Liberator, 17 and 31 January, 7 March 1886.

22.�Ibid., 13 December 1885.

23.�Ibid., 14 February 1886.

24.�Ibid., 28 March 1886; Smith, ‘Joseph Symes and the Australasian Secular Association’, p. 31

25.�Liberator, 11 April 1886.

26.�Ibid.; information provided re Henry Summerfield senior and junior provided by the Australian Dictionary of Biography Supplement Project. The author is also indebted to Anne Whitehead and the Cadogan family for information about Rose and the Waverley property.

27.�Worker [Sydney], 23 April 1892.

28.� Burgmann, In Our Time p. 78; I am indebted to Anne Whitehead for clarification of Rose Summerfield’s height.

29.� For the concept of the ‘labour precinct’ see Terry Irving and Lucy Taksa (eds.), Places, Protests and Memorabilia: the Labour Heritage Register of New South Wales, Industrial Relations Research Centre, University of New South Wales, Sydney, 2002 p. 5.

30.�Worker, 11 June 1892; W. G. Spence, The Ethics of the New Unionism, Worker pamphlet, Sydney, 1892. Mitchell collection, State Library of New South Wales.

31.�Master and Man, p. 3.

32.�Ibid.

33.� Lake, ‘Socialism and Manhood: the Case of William Lane’, p. 58; ‘John Miller’ (William Lane), The Workingman’s Paradise, Sydney University Press, Sydney 1980. First published in 1892, ch. IV describes ‘Saturday Night in Paddy’s Market.’

34.�Ibid., pp. 3–4, 5.

35.�Ibid., pp. 4, 10.

36.�Ibid., pp. 6–7.

37.�Ibid., p. 3.

38.� The reproduction of the poem in Master and Man, repeated here, renders two stanzas as one (the second commencing with ‘This is slavery!’). For the full text of ‘The Mask of Anarchy’ see Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill (eds.), Percy Bysshe Shelley: the Major Works, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003, p. 400. For Castlereagh see Paul Foot, Red Shelley, Sidgwick and Jackson, London, 1980, pp. 2225, 175.

39.� Richard Holmes, Shelley: the Pursuit, Flamingo, London, 1995, p. 532.

40.� Paul Foot outlines Shelley’s appeal amongst British radicals, symbolised by the publication of Shelley’s Socialism by Edward Aveling and Eleanor Marx Aveling in 1888; Scates and Docker note Shelley’s appeal amongst their Australian counterparts. Foot, Red Shelley, pp. 227, 24147. Scates, A New Australia, pp. 9, 68; John Docker, ‘Politics and Poetics: Bernard O’Dowd’s Dawnward? And Nineteenth-Century Chartist Poetry’, Southerly, vol. 53, no. 2, June 1993, pp. 22–23.

41.� For the sources and nature of Shelley’s symbolic anarchy see Leader and O’Neill’s note re anarchy p. 706, and Holmes, p. 534.

42.�Master and Man, p. 10, Leader and O’Neill, p. 406; for Hope and the female voice in ‘The Mask of Anarchy’ see Foot, p. 177, and Holmes pp. 534–5.

43.�Master and Man, p. 8; Holmes, pp .476–77, Leader and O’Neill, p. 443.

44.�Master and Man, p. 3.

45.�Ibid., pp. 3, 9; Leader and O’Neill, p. 411.

46.�Master and Man, p. 6.

47.� Raelene Frances, ‘Sex Workers or Citizens? Prostitution and the Shaping of “Settler” Society in Australia’, International Review of Social History, No.44 1999 p. 111.

48.� Greg Dening, Islands and Beaches: discourse on a silent land, Marquesas 1774–1880, Melbourne University Press Melbourne 1980 p. 94.

49.� Greg Patmore, Australian Labour History, Longman Cheshire, Melbourne, 1991, pp. 184–88.

50.� Boris, ‘From Gender to Racialized Gender’, p. 11.

51.�Master and Man, p. 6.

52.� Scates, A New Australia, p. 162.

53.� Verity Burgmann, ‘Racism, Socialism and the Labour Movement, 1887–1917’, Labour History, no. 47, November 1984, p. 42.

54.� Scates, A New Australia, p. 25.

55.�Evening News, 20 July 1892.

56.�Master and Man, p. 11.

57.�Ibid., pp. 9, 10.

58.�Ibid., pp. 5,9.

59.�Ibid., p. 11.

60.� William Morris, ‘No Master’, reprinted in The Pilgrims of Hope and Chants for Socialists, Longmans, Green & Co., London, 1915, p. 67. I am grateful to H-Labor network correspondent John Marsh for this suggestion.

61.� E. P. Thompson, William Morris, Romantic to Revolutionary, Merlin Press, London, 1977, pp. 667–673.

62.�Master and Man, pp. 5–6.

63.�Ibid., p. 10

64.� Lake, ‘Socialism and Manhood: the case of William Lane’, p. 62.

65.�Ibid., p. 6.

66.�Worker, 3 September 1892, 8 October 1892; Australian Workman, 28 May 1892.

67.�Hummer, 30 July 1892.

68.�Australian Workman, 12 December 1892.

69.� Annual report of the NSW Government Labour Bureau for 1892, NSW Legislative Assembly Votes and Proceedings 1892–93, vol.VIII, p. 957.

70.�Australian Workman, 15 October 1892.

71.� Rose Summerfield, ‘Resume of my work in connection with the General Laborers’ Union, commencing 1 August 1892′ Shearers’ and General Laborers’, Record, 15 March 1893.

72.�Australian Workman, 15 October 1892.

73.� Summerfield, ‘Resume of my work…’

74.�Ibid.

75.� Annual Reports of the Womanhood Suffrage League of NSW, 1893, p. 12; 1894, p. 6; 1895, pp. 4, 6.

76.�Hummer, 23 April 1892; Australian Star, 9 November 1893.

77.�Hummer, 13 August 1892.

78.�Ibid., 27 August 1892.

79.�Ibid., 10 September 1892

80.�Worker, 27 January 1894; Woman’s Voice, 29 June 1895.

81.�Woman’s Voice, 29 June, 23 November 1895.

82.�Worker, 23 October 1897.

83.�Australian Temperance World and Good Templar Record, 1 April 1896; IOGT Metropolitan District Lodge No.2, Official Register and Directory with Combined Lodge Syllabus, May to July 1896, title page.

84.�Proceedings of the 24th Annual Session of the Grand Lodge of the NSW Independent Order of Good Templars, 19–22 April 1897, pp. 12, 19.

85.�Australian Workman, 28 May 1892.

86.�Hummer, 13 August 1892.

87.� J.D. Bollen, Protestantism and Social Reform in NSW, 1890–1910, Melbourne University Press, Clayton, Vic., 1972, pp. 50–52.

88.�Australian Temperance World, 1 July 1896.

89.�Ibid., 2 March 1896.

90.�Ibid., 1 April 1896.

91.� IOGT Metropolitan District Lodge No.2, Official Register, p. 12.

92.�Proceedings of the 24th Annual Session, pp. 8, 12.

93.�Worker, 28 April 1898.

94.�Ibid., 3 September 1898.

95.�Ibid., 24 December 1898.

96.�Ibid., 29 January 1898.

97.� Anne Whitehead, Paradise Mislaid, University of Queensland Press, St. Lucia, Qld, 1997, p. 474

98.�Worker, 1 April 1899.

99.�Master and Man, p. 3.

100.� Gavin Souter, A Peculiar People: the Australians in Paraguay, Sydney University Press, Sydney, 1981, pp. 23–5.

101.�Worker, 23 November 1901.

102.� Scates, A New Australia, pp. 190–193.

103.� Whitehead, Paradise Mislaid, p. 479.

104.� Souter, A Peculiar People, p. 231.

105.� Whitehead, Paradise Mislaid, p. 481.

106.�Common Cause, 28 July 1922.

107.� Souter, A Peculiar People, pp. 229–232; Whitehead, Paradise Mislaid, pp. 473–482.

108.� Whitehead, Paradise Mislaid, pp. 481–98.

109.� Burgmann, In Our Time, p. 33.

110.� Scates, A New Australia, p. 197.

111.� Kerri Allen, ‘Representation and Self-representation: Hannah Whitall Smith as family woman and religious guide’, Women’s History Review, vol. 7, no.2, 1998, p. 235.

112.� Dening, The Death of William Gooch, p. 16.