Danielle Thornton | 'We have no redress unless we strike': Class, Gender and Activism in the Melbourne Tailoresses' Strike, 1882–83 | Labour History, 96

'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.

'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

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.

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.

Although small, apparently spontaneous strikes had long been a cyclical feature of life in Melbourne's clothing factories, until the 1882 strike women were assumed incapable of initiating industrial action. When news of the strike spread, the possibility that the women were acting independently was thus barely entertained. Suspicion instead fell on the Victorian Trades Hall Council (THC). Godfrey Barthold, the manager of the Victorian Clothing Co. was adamant that 'the trouble' had started 'when the outside excitement came on [and] they could not resist it'; although he believed some of them were 'ashamed of it afterwards'. In his view they had been 'very ill-advised' by the 'Trades Hall people', who had persuaded them to strike.³ Even sympathisers took the women's passivity for granted. Hoping that the strike would lead to greater regulation of the clothing industry, the Protectionist Age newspaper declared that the 'helpless girls' should place themselves, in the words of one male trade union delegate, 'entirely in the hands' of the THC: 'men in similar circumstances can hold indignation meetings and publicly make their grievances known; women cannot. They can only depend on friends to champion their cause.'⁴ The paper cast itself as chief among these champions, going so as far to claim that 'their dependence rests entirely on the press to whom they appeal to ventilate their grievances'.⁵ So pervasive was the myth of female vulnerability that even one of the leaders of the strike, Ellen Cresswell, felt the need to cast her fellow unionists as 'helpless females' who had been rescued by the 'noble men' of the THC, when she thanked them at the Second Inter-colonial Trades Congress the following year.⁶

Until recently, this assumption was reflected in historians' accounts of the strike. For most of the twentieth century it rated little more than a mention in histories of the Australian labour movement, usually as a catalyst for broader political developments or to note the 'novelty' of their sex.⁷ It was not until Raymond Brooks' 1983 article that the events of the strike were recounted in detail, although he was more concerned with the role of Trades Hall than the actions of the women.⁸ Braden Ellem also briefly covered the strike in his 1889 history of clothing trades unionism in Australia, but like Brooks, was principally concerned with situating the strike in a broader context, and as a consequence judged it a failure for failing to stem the flow of work out of the factories.⁹ Raelene Frances was the first to reflect in depth on its gendered dimensions. Most significantly, she recognised how the strike was part of a continuing challenge to traditional notions of femininity. The emergence of the Tailoresses Union, writes Frances, 'reflected (and possibly contributed to) a changing definition of femininity in the 1880s and 1890s'. While the majority of factory workers 'still aspired to the helpless, docile and retiring stereotype', she wondered if clothing factories 'attracted and fostered a more outspoken and independent type of woman'.¹⁰

This article builds on the work done by Brooks and Frances. By shifting the enquiry from the activities of the THC executive to the activists on the factory floor, I reveal – as far as sources allow – a dimension of the strike hitherto absent from both accounts. I am less concerned than Frances and Ellem with how the strike affected the operation of the Victorian clothing industry. I am also less ambivalent than Ellem about the outcome of the strike. While it may be true that in the long term 'there were no winners', the strike showed what women were capable of, and remained a beacon for future generations of unionists. My re-examination of primary sources also indicates an alternative to Brooks' chronology, suggesting a subtle, but significant, difference of interpretation, proving not only that the strike was initiated by the women at Beath, Schiess and Co. themselves, but that it was conducted and coordinated without outside assistance for far longer than previously thought.

The Colonial Factory Girl

Colonial ideas about women factory workers were strongly influenced by the writings of British commentators. Although women had worked in factories since the beginnings of industrialisation, it was not until the later nineteenth century, when the presence of so many women in factory work began to jar with the Victorian ideology of separate spheres, that the factory girl was seen to pose a social problem.¹¹ As the idea that women's proper place was in the home gained currency, so women's work in the factory came to be seen as morally degrading and dangerous, pitting enterprising industrialists against moral and social reformers.¹² In practice, this contradiction reinforced the disparity between men's and women's wages, whereby women earned on average less than half of male earnings. The fiction that women who worked did so only briefly to support themselves before marriage or for pocket money, permitted employers to pay them a fraction of the cost of living. Lower wages were also supposed to offer an incentive for single women to marry early, while the supposed inevitability of marriage in turn vindicated the uniform classification of women's work as 'unskilled'.¹³ In this way the cultural taboo on women's work outside the home neatly fitted with the profit motive; at once encouraging the hyper-exploitation of female labour, while allowing employers to be seen as providing every disincentive for women to pursue a more suitable career.

By the 1870s the population of Melbourne had risen sufficiently to sustain a local manufacturing industry. The colonial labour market mirrored the gendered inequalities of British industry. Prior to the manufacturing boom employment opportunities for women had been limited, with domestic service among the few respectable careers available to young working-class women; it was after all, excellent preparation for married life. No consideration was given to the needs of married women should their husbands be unable to provide, although widows might take in piecework without jeopardising their respectability. In providing women with an opportunity to work outside their own home – or the homes of the wealthy – factory work offered women greater social and economic independence than had hitherto been possible.

As the number of women in manufacturing grew, it became clear that many working-class women were expressing an active preference for factory work before a domestic career. At the time of the 1871 census, 14,178 women were counted as employed in the 'Industrial Class'; by 1881 this figure had risen to 23,713.¹⁴ 'Persons engaged in working and dealing with textiles, fabric and dress etc.' accounted for the majority of this increase, with the number of clothing operatives rising from 12,186 to 20,977 in ten years, reflecting the gradual 'feminisation' of the clothing industry.¹⁵ Meanwhile, the number of girls and women employed as domestic servants remained static at around 20,000 over the same period.¹⁶ Beverley Kingston has traced the reasons for the exodus from domestic service in pursuit of the 'freedom of the factory'.¹⁷ While commentators were incredulous that virtuous women should prefer factory work to a situation as a servant in a good home, the promise of regular leisure time, greater personal freedom and daily social interaction with peers, compensated for the relative insecurity, relentless monotony and poverty wages.

The 'servant problem', as the difficulty of engaging qualified domestic staff was called in wealthy circles, was a constant theme of middle-class writings from the 1870s onwards.¹⁸ Prior to the end of assisted immigration in 1871, most maids had been Irish émigré women who, due to sectarian prejudice, were excluded from better jobs. Graeme Davison suggests that it was the drying up of this pool, combined with the creation of more factory jobs, which led to a shortage of experienced domestic servants.¹⁹ The expansion of Melbourne's suburbs also increased demand, and as the wages needed to keep a reliable servant rose, employers complained that most servants were ignorant, incompetent, and increasingly, impertinent.²⁰

Blame, however, also fell on factory girls. During the agitation for the first Factory Act, the resolutely Free-Trader Argus newspaper protested that if women were really sick of 'half starving at a trade', they should do 'as the mothers and grandmothers of nine tenths of them and become domestic servants'.²¹ Not only would the free board relieve them of the need to keep themselves, but in keeping them off the streets, it offered 'far better chances of a happy settlement in life'. Such platitudes were, as Shurlee Swain has shown, curiously at odds with the belief that domestic servants were more inclined than other occupations to become unwed mothers.²²

The Factory Girls of Melbourne - Leaving Work

Source: Illustrated Australian News for Home Readers, 20 May 1873.
Courtesy State Library of Victoria

Contemporary portraits of Melbourne's factory girls emphasised their contravention of respectable femininity as they appeared in public, unchaperoned and gaudily dressed in cheap imitations of the latest styles. Watching the promenaders in the fashionable 'Block' precinct of Collins Street, the journalist Edward Oxford, alias John Freeman, marvelled at how difficult it was to tell the daughters and wives of the colonial elite from the common 'work-girls' – until that is, they opened their mouths.²³ Factory girls possessed a 'boldness of manner', were 'chatty and a trifle slangy' and inclined to be 'rather outré in the matter of head gear'.²⁴ Writing during the 1870s, Marcus Clarke archly described 'handsomely dressed' 'sewing girls and milliner's apprentices' who 'haunt the pavements' of Bourke Street late at night, 'either for amusement or for the purpose of making assignations'.²⁵ Indeed factory girls were widely considered to be clandestine prostitutes. 'From general observation', reckoned Sergeant Bell of the Richmond police station, 'I have no hesitation in saying that a considerable number of girls employed in factories become street-walkers and eventually low prostitutes'.²⁶ Several of the expert witnesses called to testify before the 1884 Royal Commission made similar claims.

The women who spoke to the Royal Commission contested the stereotype of female factory workers as young, single women with no domestic responsibilities. Echoing male unionists' demand for a living wage, they asserted their status as breadwinners for their families. This should not have come as a surprise to the Commissioners, for the 1881 census had counted some 40,000 women as wage-earners among Victoria's 410,263 females.²⁷ The invisibility of older women in public discussions of 'factory girls' reinforced the belief that women workers had lesser needs. Ellen Cresswell was one such woman, a widow who had returned to the tailoring trade to support her three children after the death of her husband 22 years before. During that time she had experienced deprivation and suffering first hand as a consequence of low wages. When her children had lived at home, they had sat up with her every night, finishing the minimum of pieces needed to keep them. Her youngest child had recently died aged 15, and Ellen was convinced that her death had been hastened by hard work and malnutrition.²⁸ At the time of the strike she had one daughter still living with her, employed as an apprentice at a rival company.

Ellen was therefore understandably prickly when asked whether she had found that factory work had 'an immoral effect on young girls'. When pressed she assented that 'if a girl is a good girl she can always be a good girl' and encounter 'no evil': 'I have been in [the clothing industry] thirteen years and my own daughter is in it', she told the Commissioner, 'and I thank God that neither of our morals have been tainted'.²⁹ But nothing could disabuse Commissioner Smith of his belief that sexual danger was inherent in factory work. Excessive freedom and low wages not only swelled the 'ranks of rowdyism', but caused the 'ruin and downfall of the weaker sex, a fact demonstrated to the most sceptical by a stroll through the streets of this city after dark'.³⁰ Equally dangerous was the 'crowding' of men, women and girls into the same workroom. Such 'promiscuous groupings' he believed, lead to 'conversation and the interchange of ideas that must serve to contaminate the minds of the young of both sexes'.³¹

However Ellen Cresswell refused to passively accept her lot in life. Contrary to the prevailing representation of female factory workers by liberals and unionists as the powerless victims of sweaters' greed, she had a record of industrial militancy that stretched back long before the 1882 strike. Four years before, she had led a strike at another firm during a pay dispute. They had held out for three days before their boss backed down, but Ellen had been dismissed on returning to work. 'Because I was the speaker', she explained to the Commission; '[but] I never worked for 71/2d and I never will'.³² On the day the strike began, Blencowe had offered her 7d a piece.

It was no easier for younger, single women. Despite the popular belief that unmarried girls and women had only themselves to keep, and therefore needed but a fraction of the wage paid to men for equal work, most contributed to the family unit. Asked by the Commissioner about the 'young girls' who had forsaken domestic service for the factory, Ellen Cresswell presented a very different reality to the stereotype of the frivolous, luxury-loving factory girl. She doubted whether any of them could survive on their wages if they lived in lodgings of their own. Of those who lived at home, only a few 'just get what they earn for clothes'. Most helped out their parents; there were, she said, 'many women working in the factories to support their aged parents and children, who worked fourteen hours a day'.³³ This picture is backed up by the testimonies given to the Age during the strike: one young woman told the reporter that she could not expect her parents to keep her and paid them 10 shillings of her 15 shillings a week board. Another complained angrily that she could not possibly support a sick mother and two little sisters on 16 shillings.³⁴ When Ellen was asked why such girls did not go into service and relieve their patents of the cost of their keep, she replied, 'they like to be at home with their parents, and their parents like to have them'.³⁵ No matter how difficult it became to make ends meet, she could not bear to send her surviving daughter away to live with strangers.

The Strike Begins

On Tuesday 5 December 1882, having just been informed that their piece rates were to be reduced even further, 300 or so women employed at Messrs. Beath, Schiess and Co. put down their work and walked out into Flinders Lane.³⁶ The announcement was probably not a great shock. Ellen Cresswell reckoned from her 20 years of experience in the clothing trade, that employers were always striving to lower prices. It was a 'daily complaint' among clothing workers.³⁷

Before the proposed reduction, a trouser hand such as she could make 25 shillings a week, but only if she took home extra pairs at night. On the new rates, she would have struggled to make 20 shillings. Another employee at Beath and Schiess told the Age a similar story: before she had been able to earn no more than 24 shillings a week, working 14 hours a day. The proposed reduction would bring her 'down to eighteen shillings or one pound at the most', and this for 'working from half-past eight in the morning to half past five in the afternoon with half an hour's interval for lunch and three to four hours work in the evenings at home'.³⁸ Another woman, employed as a coat hand, anonymously told the Age how six weeks before, the firm had tried to reduce the price for a coat from four shillings and eight pence to 4 shillings and tuppence. In this instance the workers had 'refused to accept it', and they had only taken threepence off instead. 'We submitted to this', she admitted, 'but [when] they said that they would take off another threepence, then we struck'.³⁹ In this unequal war of attrition, collective dissent in the form of a strike, or at least the threat of one, was their only weapon of defence. When challenged by the Commissioners, Ellen was adamant that workers in their position had 'no means of redress unless we strike'.⁴⁰

Employers also resented the market pressure to lower prices in order to compete with other firms. By the 1880s, Victoria was the undisputed centre of manufacturing in the colonies. As Frances has shown, the trend towards mechanisation and the consequent redefinition of much tailoring work as 'unskilled', meant that women gradually replaced male tailors.⁴¹ Over time, the demand for progressively lower production costs, combined with the virtual absence of organisation among women in the clothing industry, saw wages caught in an endless downwards spiral.⁴² Lower prices also meant lower profits. Although they were to regret it afterwards, Beath, Schiess and Co. initially supported the strikers' decision to form an official union, in the hope that organisation would enforce a fixed scale of prices on all companies, halting this race to the bottom. His employers, Blencowe claimed during the strike, did 'not care if the prices were increased by one hundred per cent, if all the other firms joined in the movement'.⁴³

According to W.E. Murphy, the secretary of the THC, the initial strike at Beath, Schiess and Co. had been entirely spontaneous. The women had taken action 'voluntarily', that is to say not at the behest of Trades Hall, a contention backed up by the testimony of the women themselves. Writing in 1888, Murphy also claimed that a deputation of women had presented themselves at Trades Hall to inform him of the strike and request assistance on Wednesday 10 December.⁴⁴ However, the day after the strike began was Wednesday 6 December, and the following week was 13 December, so at least in this respect, his recollection was inaccurate. At any rate the Trades Hall minute books do not mention any meeting with the strikers' deputation happening before 13 December, the day after the story broke in the Age. It appears therefore that the women did not approach the THC immediately, but only after the dispute had already been publicised by the Age. In light of this fact, it seems that the women had already held out on their own resources for a whole week before Trades Hall – or the Age– became involved. On 12 December, one week in, the Age reported that apart from 20 women who had returned to work, 300 had voted to remain on strike. The remaining women were reportedly 'anxious', but steadfast.⁴⁵ It is unclear whether the Age responded to a request for publicity from the strikers, or on hearing of the strike had independently decided to publicise their plight in its campaign for the industry regulation. In any case the strikers' readiness to exploit the press to gain public support suggests a degree of political nous. Though formally disenfranchised – Victorian women would not win the vote for another 25 years – the strikers 'maintained they had a right' to broadcast their side of the story 'in a democratic colony like Victoria'.⁴⁶

Once news of the tailoresses' stand spread, it attracted an unprecedented breadth of support from unexpected sections of colonial society. The advocacy of a major daily newspaper was instrumental in bringing the weight of middle-class opinion behind factory reform. But the most generous subscribers to the strike fund were other workers, and organised male labour in particular. Even before the THC had taken charge of the campaign, the Age relayed many gestures of solidarity from rank-and-file unionists. As early as 13 December, the strike had become 'the chief topic of conversation among the working classes' and it was reported that 'several of the trades' had already announced their commitment to assisting their 'sisters in the field of labour'.⁴⁷ Among these were ironworkers at Langland's Foundry in Flinders Street. They had met during their dinner hour and voted unanimously to support the strike, forming a committee to offer concrete assistance. Having no experience of relating to women as militants, male workers' solidarity was expressed as paternalism, or at least a gendered fraternalism. 'Those who enjoy the benefits of the eight hour system', wrote 'Employe' to the Age, 'must not forget their less fortunate sisters'.⁴⁸ Over the course of the strike, donations to the strike fund from male workers amounted to hundreds of pounds. Some of these were from individuals, but most were informal collections taken up from workshops or sites. The subscriptions listed in the Age illustrate the diversity of trades represented, including tailors, tanners, engineers, bricklayers, plasterers and many others.⁴⁹ The seemingly universal support for the strikers from male unionists was considered noteworthy even at the time. The Age marvelled that 'great bodies of working men' were at last 'aiding women to work upon fair terms', a 'not unimportant' development given the 'suspicion' typically accorded women in the trades.⁵⁰

Even paternalism was preferable to outright hostility. For much of the 1860s and 70s the Tailors' Society had upheld a rule banning tailors from working in any shop that employed women, and even into the 1880s, several leading members continued to their voice their opposition to female labour.⁵¹ However, their intransigence could not withstand the march of mechanisation, and with it the feminisation of the clothing industry. At the time of the strike, only cutting and the sewing of made-to-order clothing, was performed by skilled tailors.⁵² Ready-to-wear, or 'slop', tailoring was done by 'unskilled' women at a third or less of the cost.⁵³ Anne Summers claimed that the tailors' support was probably motivated more by a desire to protect their own livelihoods than empathy with the women's plight.⁵⁴ Self-interest undoubtedly played a part, but the significance of the tailors' realisation that their only hope lay in reaching out to female clothing operatives, rather excluding them on principle, cannot be underestimated.

Yet even at the height of the strike, when it seemed proved beyond doubt that women were not only willing, but also capable of organising to defend prices, the tailors' support was controversial.⁵⁵ Among the dissenters was Harry Fowler, secretary of the Tailors Society from 1872 until his resignation in 1904. His colleague Harry Carter, the union's unofficial historian, described him as 'a firm character but of the conservative type'. Unmoved by the struggles of the 1880s, Fowler absented himself from the drive to organise women.⁵⁶ Fortunately other officials did not share his views. Duncan McIvor, the Society's delegate to the THC, who Carter declared a 'most advanced thinker', played an active role in the formation of a women's union, as did John Wing, the Society President. Whatever their personal views on women working in their trade, they recognised the need to organise them to secure their own wages, even though they encountered hostility from comrades for their efforts well into the 1890s.⁵⁷

Although Timothy Coghlan later reckoned that the first tailoresses' union had been 'fostered and managed entirely' by the Tailors' Society, seeking to protect themselves against competition, the initial impetus to organise Melbourne's female clothing operatives almost certainly came from the women themselves.⁵⁸ The first body, the 'Needlewomen's Cooperative Association' had been formed a decade earlier.⁵⁹ Then in 1874 a 'Mutual Protection Society' was formed. Although she later became associated with the 1882 strike,⁶⁰ Helen Robertson's contribution to women's unionism began eight years earlier in 1874, when Helen, then in her late twenties, together with a small group of activists, took it upon themselves to organise their fellow workers at the height of the campaign for factory regulation.⁶¹ Born in Scotland, Helen's family immigrated to the Australian colonies when she was three, and she had lived and worked ever since, even when married, in Melbourne's inner city clothing factories. When she was interviewed by the Clothing Trades Gazette in 1922, Helen told how she and 'three or four' others, among them Lucy Moody and Mary Wise, sick of being 'treated like animals' by their employers, had resolved to start a union.⁶² Yet this decision may not have been wholly unprompted. Their campaign began at the peak of the agitation for factory legislation in which organised labour played an active part, and it seems likely that the sudden public focus on factory conditions spurred Helen and her co-conspirators to action.

Helen remembered how she, Lucy Moody and Mary Wise had acted covertly, on one occasion plastering the factories with 'dodgers' – handbills – under the cover of night.⁶³ Another time, she and her band of committed activists led a rally to Parliament House, presumably in support of the Factory Act, wondering all the while how long it would be before they were found out and sacked. Eventually, another worker betrayed them. 'Opposition came from all quarters', she remembered, and she had been labelled 'an agitator' and boycotted by employers. Undeterred, her gang of 'staunch fighters' had 'stuck all along', stoically 'battling the might of the employers' until a Factory Act was at last passed. 'That', Helen recalled, 'was really the starting point of our improvement'.⁶⁴

Although her name does not appear in connection with the 1882 strike, Helen Robertson remained active in the labour movement. After her efforts to establish a union in 1874, it may be that she was eventually forced out of the tailoring industry, for during the 1880s and 1890s, her name appears in connection with several labour projects including the Eight Hour Day Committee. During the 1900s she was remained active in what was by then the Clothing Trades Union, and in her sixties was the first woman to be elected to the executive of the THC.⁶⁵ Interviewed at the age of 74, she said that her 'only wish' was that she could be '40 years younger, so that I could get properly into the fight for a long time to come'. When she died in 1937, the Labor press mourned the passing of 'one of Labor's Grand Women'.⁶⁶

As for the union she helped form, it appears that by the early 1880s it had become defunct, its effectiveness undermined by the contempt with which employers flouted the letter of the Factory Act.⁶⁷ As a consequence, women working in Melbourne's clothing in 1882 were still being 'treated like animals', and sometimes worse. Among the breaches of the Act uncovered by the subsequent Royal Commission were countless instances of women working crammed into rooms with no natural light or ventilation, often staying until late in the evening. Most shocking to the commissioners was the inadequacy of toilet facilities; many factories had no separate lavatory for women, who had to use a bucket, or go into the nearest hotel to relieve themselves. This was the state of affairs against which Ellen Cresswell and her co-workers revolted.

On 14 December, nine days into the strike, the THC, including representatives from 26 trade unions, met with Blencowe. Without any record of the interaction between the strikers' deputation and the THC bureaucracy, it is difficult to establish whether their involvement was perceived at the time as interference or welcome assistance. It is also unclear what role, if any, the women played at this meeting. Murphy later recalled that it had been difficult to get any of the 'fair operatives' to speak openly on account of their manager being in the same room.⁶⁸ Appealing to the 'sympathy of every right thinking man', Benjamin Douglas, the chairman and President of the THC, urged all assembled to take action, or else the 'threatened evil' of sweating would lower all their wages. Motions were passed unanimously that the THC support the strike and, in conjunction with a sub-committee of five women, assist the formation of a tailoresses' union.⁶⁹ At the same meeting, Blencowe announced that his employers had that morning decided to reinstate the old piece rates, but would assist the women to form a union on the condition that it forced their competitors to pay the same prices. In the interim, he invited 'the girls' to return to work at the old rates.

Based on the correspondence between the THC and Beath, Schiess and Co., Raymond Brooks suggested that the strike might not have been spontaneous at all, but engineered by both parties to put an end to falling prices.⁷⁰ This is certainly one possible explanation for both Trades Hall's sudden generosity towards women workers, and Blencowe's extreme cooperativeness. However, the dating of the letters between Murphy and Blencowe, while they prove collusion over how best to solve the crisis in their mutual interests, make it unlikely that the walk-out from the Flinders Street factory was anything other than a direct response to the proposed cut in prices.⁷¹

But neither Blencowe nor the THC was prepared for what happened next. The next morning Julian Thomas, the Age correspondent, arrived at the Flinders' Street picket to find that the strikers were no longer satisfied with a return to the old rates: 'a great number of the women, having now shown a determination to get better terms', he reported, 'still refuse to go back' for anything less than a 3d increase.⁷² Despite the firm's denials to the contrary, Thomas also claimed to have been 'authentically informed' – presumably by one of the women – that another 100 women had gone on strike at Beath, Schiess' second largest factory in Collingwood.⁷³ As news of this second strike spread, another strike promptly broke out at factory number three.⁷⁴

On Friday evening, between 500 and 600 tailoring operatives, many of them employees at rival firms, crowded into one of the large meeting rooms at Trades Hall to discuss the formation of a union. Another 500 people, apparently working-class sympathisers attracted by the 'unusual occurrence of a strike of females', gathered excitedly outside.⁷⁵ After speeches from Douglas and Murphy, Ellen Cresswell, who was evidently recognised as one of the leaders of the strike by both the women and the THC, moved that they 'form themselves into a union for their mutual protection and improvement'. The motion was seconded by a Miss Cass, and 'carried unanimously'. The Tailoresses Union was thus formed 'amid great applause'. A proposal that the strikers appoint a committee to work alongside Trades Hall, was then moved by Miss Drew, and seconded by Miss Cass. Women were then appointed to represent each branch of the trade on the committee: Miss Mansfield was elected to represent the vest hands; Miss Nixon, the machinists; Ellen Cresswell, the trouser hands; Miss McMahon, the buttonhole hands; Miss Froud, the coat hands; Mrs Bryant; the knickerbocker hands and Miss Johnstone, the coat machinists. Administration of the new Union, however, remained in the steady hands of the THC executive, with Douglas as president, Murphy as secretary and James Hall as treasurer.⁷⁶

Nevertheless, responsibility for the success of the Union lay with the women. 'It now rested entirely with themselves', Douglas sternly reminded them, 'to secure, not only for the present, but for all time to come, and not for themselves alone, but for all their fellow craftswomen, the boon they stood in need of'.⁷⁷ Murphy agreed, assuring the strikers that they had the full support of organised labour but only if they 'showed a desire to help themselves'.⁷⁸ The following Monday 18 December, the Age declared the 'roll of the Victorian Tailoresses Union has been called into existence', and reported that it already had over 200 financial members. In the coming months, its membership would top 2,000.⁷⁹ The membership roll survives, an unremarkable ledger book with a crumbling spine. Inside, in neat columns, the pages are filled with names in faded ink, in many different hands, some of them now illegible. Other than the marital status, little else can be deduced about the strikers from this list. Some names are familiar; those of Ellen Cresswell, Lucy Moody – a veteran of the 1870s agitation – and those of the elected Strike Committee. Other surnames appear more than once, suggesting the number of sisters and daughters who followed their relatives into the trade.

After several days of protracted negotiation with the Union, Beath, Schiess and Co. finally agreed to abide by the Union's proposed log of prices, and on 21 December the women returned to work. The first stage of the strike was over, but the firm's acceptance of the log was conditional on the union holding competing manufacturers to the same prices. This proved to be a serious obstacle. In January, the largest 13 firms targeted by the Union formed themselves into the Victorian Wholesale Clothing Manufacturer's Association (VWCMA), through which they aimed to use the power of combination to their own ends.

To win, the Union would have to unite the city's tailoresses in a campaign on a scale never before attempted by workwomen. On 11 February the Union held a public meeting at the Melbourne Town Hall, inviting sympathisers to throw their support behind the 'female operatives efforts to obtain a obtain a reasonable rate of wages'.⁸⁰ Before a packed auditorium, it was resolved that the women employed at the intransigent firms should strike immediately and not return until the union log was unanimously agreed to. Over the next week the numbers of women officially on strike rose steadily, reaching a peak of over 700, and thereafter declining as, after 21 February, one by one the firms caved in.⁸¹ The details of the negotiations between Murphy, on behalf of the union, and the VWCMA have been described by Raymond Brooks and do not need to be repeated here.⁸²

By now the strike had now become the centre of a much wider campaign to expose the prevalence of sweating in Melbourne's booming manufacturing industry. The 'poor sweated seamstress' had became a powerful emblem of the divide between the pomp and prosperity enjoyed by colonial elites, and the seamy urban underbelly of sweaters' dens that produced their finery.⁸³ Contemporary events helped engender an impression of social crisis. The second phase of the strike coincided with a spate of industrial unrest in unrelated industries, among them Melbourne's bakers. Melbourne Punch reflected on the 'curious times' in which 'girls' now emulated 'The ways of Dan and Mike/ And all engaged to sew-and-sew/ Have gone upon the strike'.⁸⁴ The next fortnight they published 'The Trouser Famine', a humorous cartoon depicting the bearded and moustachioed businessmen of Collins Street in blazers and top-hats wearing skirts, with the caption: 'What it must come to if the Tailoresses continue much longer on strike'.⁸⁵ As well as demonstrating the impact of the strike, the absurdity of the image evoked a world in which the gender order had been turned topsy-turvy. The situation, Punch implied, was inherently ridiculous. Unsurprisingly, the strikers' working-class supporters did not appreciate the joke. During a solidarity meeting at Fitzroy Town Hall, a Punch reporter was refused entry. In the following edition the editor apologised for making light of the strikers' plight, but added teasingly that they simply had desired to warn of the horrific consequences if a resolution was not quickly reached.⁸⁶

The Trouser Famine: What it must come to if the Tailoresses continue much longer on strike

Source: Melbourne Punch, 1 March 1883
Courtesy Special Collections, Ballieu Library, University of Melbourne

If the editors of Punch were in earnest, expressions of sympathy were not forthcoming from all sections of respectable Melbourne society. The Argus was swamped with correspondence blaming the strikers for their poverty on account of their having chosen factory work over the security of service. According to one letter, they had done so simply to 'indulge in personal, and in most cases injurious, gratification', namely 'walking about the streets' and 'visiting dancing saloons'. 'Respectable women' did not 'want to be out several nights in the week'.⁸⁷ Not only did service remove girls from temptation, but it prepared them for housewifery: 'A Christian Minister' predicted that their 'mistaken love of liberty' would have 'dire consequences' for the working-class home. Blaming 'indulgent and sadly mistaken mothers' for allowing their daughters to neglect the domestic arts, he sketched a dismal picture of a workman's cottage in disarray, with no dinner set out and a husband left to fend for himself.⁸⁸ The Argus agreed heartily that their suffering was 'voluntarily incurred', simply to gratify 'a silly vanity' and 'secure a pernicious measure of freedom'.⁸⁹ Most troublingly, the claim that these women 'look[ed] upon the factory life as being less servile' implied aspirations above their station.⁹⁰ Such representations were irrevocably gendered – in spurning domesticity factory girls rejected the only permissible vocation for a working-class woman – but they were equally classed, denying factory workers' capacity to make rational choices for themselves, and keeping them in their place.

Whatever their sins in the eyes of the Argus, the striking tailoresses were not idle. Although their activities during both phases of the strike were not recorded in the same detail as the formal negotiations, they can be reconstructed. All on strike were required to sign a strike attendance book for each day they claimed strike pay, in return for performing routine strike duties.⁹¹ In December, Duncan McIvor had suggested that the strikers from Beath, Schiess and Co. go out to other factories to talk to the women there 'with a view to all the factories in the city and the suburbs striking at once'.⁹² The second phase of the strike necessitated an even higher level of co-operation and communication between unionists at the 13 factories involved. The women were also responsible for organising and maintaining regular pickets outside factories, a task Murphy later recalled the women had done exceedingly well.⁹³ The effectiveness of these pickets is confirmed by H. Farrar, Secretary of the VWCMA, who complained to the Argus that women had used 'violent language and threats' to intimidate workers attempting to return to work.⁹⁴ The alleged ferocity of the tailoresses was also mentioned by another Argus correspondent, who speculated on the grisly fate of anyone who dared to advise the 'hundred young women outside the Trades Hall' that they forsake the factory for domestic service.⁹⁵ Whether or not they were as obnoxious as Farrar claimed, the experience of going on strike forced the women to reappraise the value gentility on a picket line. But if their spirited defence was distasteful to the Argus, Murphy's lavish praise suggests that it was considered heroic by other unionists. This did not mean that they saw themselves as any less respectable. When the union was invited to march in the annual Eight Hours procession, the executive declined, saying that they 'felt too diffident', and during the ensuing Royal Commission several witnesses requested that the interviews not take place in a hotel, since it was no place for a lady.⁹⁶

However, not all women played a militant role during the strike. At a union meeting on 27 February, Murphy bemoaned the 'scant attendance' and claimed that Trades Hall had been 'badly treated by the girls, after all they had done to obtain the victory for them'. He remarked that the same women who did no union work were 'not slow to turn up for their pay on Saturday'.⁹⁷ Ellen Cresswell shared his disappointment. She was 'ashamed of the tailoresses when [she] saw the way they treated the committee of the Trades Hall who had laboured so hard in that great struggle'.⁹⁸ The difficulties associated with mobilising and sustaining an active membership would remain a perennial problem.

Aftermath

By the first week of March, the strike was drawing to an end, with most of the firms targeted agreeing to honour the union log.⁹⁹ Only a handful of employers still refused, but they had not counted on the determination of the Union.¹⁰⁰ At a public meeting on 8 March at the Fitzroy Town Hall, it was resolved that the Union approach the warehousemen to boycott the intransigent firms.¹⁰¹ The solidarity of the warehousemen secured, a collection was taken up for the 400 remaining strikers.¹⁰² However, a month later the stalemate had still not broken and the Union was compelled to consider the firms' proposed reductions. A meeting on 15 April voted against any concession, but two weeks later a committee was empowered to meet with employers representatives and the women returned to work.¹⁰³ At a meeting on 17 May, almost six months after the walk-out at Beath, Schiess and Co., the members voted to accept the amended log.¹⁰⁴

Despite this setback, the strike was judged a victory. As news of their success spread, women employed in the clothing trades of Ballarat, Sydney and as far away as Dunedin and Christchurch, set about forming unions of their own.¹⁰⁵ Yet the union's success paradoxically led to employers increasingly sending work out to home-workers at a fraction of the cost. This practice became rife in the years following the strike, as manufacturers found new ways of circumventing the new piece rates.¹⁰⁶ As early as August 1883, the Royal Commission called to investigate the operation of the 1874 Act discovered that some employers were already ignoring the log. Ellen Cresswell believed there were 'very few employers paying it at the present time', and that some had only adhered to it for a week. She said the workers were still little more than 'white slaves'.¹⁰⁷ 'Miss B', a coat maker at Barthold Co., described how after only three weeks, the bosses had pressured union members to work below log prices. When they refused, the manager had sent the work to outside 'sweaters', leaving the factory hands with nothing to do unless they capitulated. She reckoned that the majority of women were now 'worse off', although she refused to admit that the strike had been a 'bad thing', defending it on the grounds that it had at least temporarily halted the lowering of prices.¹⁰⁸ 'Mrs I', on the other hand, a widow who worked as a trouser hand at Bartlett Co., said that since the strike, her wages had gone up, although she emphasised that this had less to do with her employer's generosity than the new-found assertiveness of her fellow workers.¹⁰⁹

Although they held the employers ultimately to blame, factory workers reserved a great deal of bitterness for the outworkers. Ellen described how she had encountered 'a good many of them ... carrying it out on the quiet' who 'take it far below our prices and then laugh at us'.¹¹⁰ 'Miss E' remarked disparagingly that 'some take it for anything'.¹¹¹ Yet rather than attempt to organise the home-workers to prevent further competition, the Union adopted an utterly sectarian attitude. This in Frances' view was 'a major cause' of the Union's slow degeneration.¹¹² None of the participants of the 1882 strike, nor their supporters, appear to have seen a contradiction between their attitude toward outworkers and their struggle against the narrow sex-prejudice of the Tailors Society. Even John Wing, who had fought so hard within his own union to organise women in the tailoring trade, claimed that outworkers were no better than the bosses and 'if they joined the union it would [only] bring prices down'.¹¹³

Yet despite this setback, the strike developed a layer of committed activists who remained involved in union work; representing the union at official events, sitting on the executive and associated committees, and generally becoming absorbed at various levels into the Trades Hall bureaucracy.¹¹⁴ In 1884 women's presence in the labour movement was acknowledged with the commissioning of a special Female Operatives Hall adjacent to the Lygon Street building.¹¹⁵ A year after the strike, Ellen Cresswell was once again sacked because of her 'zeal on behalf of the union'. However, she refused to take the purse of coins collected by the Union, saying that she 'was well paid if they remained true to their principles'.¹¹⁶ Soon afterwards she was appointed as a delegate at the 1884 Intercolonial Trades Congress, where she and Jane Graham publicly addressed the congress to rapturous applause. What they thought of the official Congress poem, that began 'In your federated freedom/ In your manliness allied', can only be guessed at.¹¹⁷ W.G. Spence presented them with a photograph of the delegates. It survives, showing Ellen and Jane, black-bonneted and smartly dressed, glaring sternly at the camera, amid a sea of balding, moustachioed men. It is an indication of how paternalistic attitudes towards female unionists persisted well into the next century, that when Joe Harris included this photograph in The Bitter Fight in 1970, he likened these formidable activists to 'two little petunias in a hairy onion patch'.¹¹⁸ Ellen represented the Union a second time in Sydney the following year, this time accompanied by Mrs J. Aribin, where she gave a rousing speech declaring that all workers who 'earn their living by the sweat of their brow', 'had a right to sell their labour at as high a price as they could get for it'.¹¹⁹ However, by the time of the Fourth Congress in Adelaide, the Union had contracted too severely for any delegates to be sent.

The reasons for this marked decline are complex. Obviously the challenge posed by the outworkers undermined perceptions of the union's effectiveness, and cannot have convinced many of the benefits of membership. Indeed, the Union experienced endemic difficulties holding an active membership capable of sustaining it as a viable organisation. For the first year at least, the Union thrived; in April 1884 the Age reported that it had 2,594 members, of which a thousand were financial, and that another 111 had been recently enrolled or re-enrolled.¹²⁰ Yet the Union seems to have deteriorated soon afterwards. Surviving letter books point to some of the problems associated with sustaining union activity among the rank-and-file membership. These letters offer an insight into the kind of duties that members were expected to perform: representing factories on the union committee, attending meetings, collecting dues and recruiting new members.¹²¹ Upwards of 20 women appear to have sat on the main committee, which met once a month on a Saturday afternoon so that the women would not miss work. Many of the same women were also entrusted with 'collector-ships', that given the low level of financial members, must have been an arduous task.

Several letters were written to members who had, for some reason, neglected their duties, most commonly a failure to collect or pass on dues. On 21 September 1885 Murphy wrote to Misses E. White, E. Thomas and M. Beggs requesting that they each 'kindly forward any contributions in their possession', or else return their collecting books forthwith'.¹²² Again on 27 November 1886, Murphy wrote a less affable letter to Miss M.A. Doherty, requesting that she hand over any monies immediately, after members at Banks and Co. complained that they had paid their dues to her when she had already resigned her collectorship. There may have been an honest explanation for the missing money, but this and other letters nonetheless suggest that the number of women resigning, either formally or informally, from their union activities, was unsustainably high. A typical case was that of one Miss Bibby. In May 1885 she agreed to act as the dues collector at Issacs' factory and was subsequently invited to serve as a representative on the union committee. In late July, Murphy wrote to her asking for a report on her progress recruiting new members, since he had heard nothing. In October, her name appears in a memo in relation to the return of her collection book, implying that she had resigned after only five months.¹²³

Without knowing the specific reasons for these lapses, it is difficult to draw any firm conclusions. Although male unionists might equally fall prey to recriminations from employers, a number of gendered factors undoubtedly affected the women's ability to carry out union work: the transitory nature of women's employment, the fear of sexual harassment from managers, and the ideological pressure on women not to involve themselves in political activity, were all perennial obstacles facing activists attempting to organise and cohere women workers.¹²⁴ Combined with its continuing inability to protect factory workers' prices and conditions from competition from outworkers, these may have added to the union's difficulty in retaining members. The decline of the union points to some of the reasons why activists desert organisations in which they have a personal stake, even when, as in the case of the Tailoresses Union, they have played a formative part in its creation. However, more work needs to be done to better understand the process of demobilisation to complement that done on mobilisation.

As the boom of the 1880s shuddered to an end, the Union confronted a fresh threat to its survival. Although the devastation wrought by the Depression on unionised labour was indiscriminate, women's greater vulnerability magnified its impact on the Tailoresses Union, which now rendered impotent by the Depression, was forced to disband.¹²⁵ In January 1893, Mr. Schiess wrote to John Wing, citing 'the continued and increasing depression in business' and saying that the firm, by now the only shop with a strong union presence, could no longer afford to the pay log prices, although he stressed that he was not opposed on principle to organisation.¹²⁶ On 1 July, the employees at the Beath, Schiess and Co. factory in Flinders Lane, where the walkout ten years before had sparked the historic strike, turned up to work to find a notice on the gates notifying them that union labour would no longer be employed.¹²⁷ According to the Herald, they were addressed by the then manager Mr. Barlow, who informed them that refusal to give up their union would result in instant dismissal, which 'in these days means the sure and certain knowledge of starvation'.¹²⁸ They did not concede defeat right away, but convened a meeting among themselves and demanded an interview with Mr. Beath, continuing to work in defiance of the ban. But the next morning, after the requested meeting, they voted to abandon the Union. 'Probably the girls will form a [new] society among themselves', conjectured the Herald, 'although as far as we can learn, the firm do not seem desirous that they should'.¹²⁹

The process of organising Victoria's working women would not be attempted again until the new century. For a movement that had once held such promise, the agonising decline of the Melbourne Tailoresses Union may seem like a dispiriting conclusion. Yet the story of the spectacular rise and demoralising fall of the Union also contained within it the seeds of future successes. Whatever its importance in the formal evolution of Trades Hall and the history of clothing trades unionism, I would argue that the strike's greatest historical significance rests in the clarion blow it delivered to the fiction of female passivity – the first of many. This, even more than its formal significance, may account for the persistence of the strike in the memory of the labour movement. So large did it loom, that subsequent chroniclers often merged the struggles of the 1870s with those of the summer of 1882–83. Forty years later, when then Clothing and Allied Trades Union (CATU) launched its newsletter, its editors paid tribute to 'pioneer' Helen Robertson, though it wrongly identified as the leader of the 1882 strike. When Jean Daley traced the evolution of the 'Trade Union Woman' in 1934, she too began with the tailoresses' strike.¹³⁰ The strike's place in the history of women's unionism was acknowledged by the Age in a feature article marking the strike's centenary in 1982.¹³¹ The same year a commemorative plaque was unveiled at the CATU headquarters on the site of the old Female Operatives Hall, where it remains to this day.

Yet perhaps the most salient legacy of the strike, was the space it opened up for working women to demand their rights as breadwinners in their own right. In claiming the status of breadwinner, the strikers appealed to the solidarity of male unionists and demanded inclusion in the 'brotherhood' of labour. It was thus not simply as women, but as the providers for dependent families, that the tailoresses won the support of the Victorian public and of organised labour. By demanding dignity at work, they commanded respect. However, this counter-discourse would enjoy very limited success as the racial imperatives of the colonial project reinforced the belief that women should be excluded from industrial labour. It would take another 90 years of struggle before women's role as breadwinners finally gained official recognition.

Danielle Thornton received her PhD from the University of Melbourne in 2008. She lectures in women's history at the Australian Catholic University in Melbourne and is currently working on a social history of fertility in twentieth century Australia at the Key Centre for Women's Health and Society.
<dlth@unimelb.edu.au>

Endnotes

^*� This article has been peer-reviewed for Labour History by two anonymous referees and I wish to thank them for their helpful comments

^1.� William Collard Smith et al, 'Royal Commission on Employees in Shops: Report on the Operation of the Victorian Factory Act, 1874', Victorian Parliamentary Papers (VPP), 1884, p. i.

^2.�Ibid., p. 15.

^3.�Ibid., p. 13.

^4.�Age, 16 December 1882, p.6; 13 December 1882.

^5.�Ibid., 13 December 1882.

^6.� 2^nd Intercolonial Trades Congress (ITC): Official Report of the Debates, Walker, May and Co. Printers, Melbourne, 1884 Merrifield Collection, Box 46, State Library of Victoria (SLV), p. 100.

^7.� See Robin Gollan, Radical and Working Class Politics: A Study of Eastern Audsralia 1850–1910, Halstead Press, Kingsgrove, 1960, p. 89. Geoffrey Serle, The Rush to Be Rich: A History of the Colony of Victoria, 1883–1889, Melbourne University Press, 1971, p. 101. Anne Summers, Damned Whores and God's Police, Penguin Books, Melbourne, 1975, p. 356; Anne Conlon and Edna Ryan, Gentle Invaders: Australian Women at Work, Penguin Books, Melbourne, 1975, p. 133.

^8.� Raymond Brooks, 'The Melbourne tailoresses' strike 1882–1883: an assessment', Labour History, no. 44, May 1983, pp. 27–38.

^9.� Bradon Ellem, In Women's Hands: A History of Clothing Trades Unionism in Australia, University of New South Wales Press, Kensington, 1989, pp. 28–32.

^10.� Raelene Frances, The Politics of Work: Gender and Labour in Victoria, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993 35.

^11.� Deborah Valenze, The First Industrial Woman, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1995, p. 3.

^12.�Ibid., p. 86.

^13.� Sonya Rose, Limited Livelihoods: Gender and Class in Nineteenth Century England, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1992, pp. 22–3, 58, 77.

^14.� Henry Heylyn Hayter, Victorian Year Book, 1881, John Ferres, Melbourne, 1882, p. 504.

^15.�Ibid., p. 505–9.

^16.�Ibid., The contraction of industry during the 1890s depression temporarily halted this trend; between 1881 and 1891 the number of women in factories increased by only 4 949 while the number in domestic service rose from 20,515 to 42,431. Hayter, The Victorian Year Book 1891, John Ferres, Melbourne, 1892, p. 548.

^17.� Beverley Kingston, My Wife, My Daughter and Poor Mary-Ann, Thomas Nelson, Melbourne, 1975 pp. 45–6.

^18.� See B.W. Higman, Domestic Service in Australia Melbourne University Press, 2002, pp. 28–34.

^19.� Graeme Davison, The Rise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 1978, p. 202.

^20.� Paula Hamilton, 'Domestic dilemma: representations of servants and employers in the popular press', in Susan Magarey, Sue Rowley and Susan Sheridan (eds), Debutante Nation: Feminism Contests the 1890s, Allen and Unwin, St Leonards, 1993, p. 75.

^21.�Argus, 14 July 1874, p. 4.

^22.� Shurlee Swain, 'Maids and mothers: domestic servants and illegitimacy in 19-century Australia', The History of the Family: Domestic Servants in Comparative Perspective, vol. 10, no. 4, 2005, pp. 461–71.

^23.� John Freeman, Lights and Shadows of Melbourne, Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, London, 1888, p. 79.

^24.�Ibid., p. 47, 108.

^25.� Marcus Clarke, 'Sketches of Melbourne low life: night scenes in Melbourne,' in L.T. Hergenhan (ed.), A Colonial City: High and Low Life, Selected Journalism of Marcus Clarke, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1972, p. 102.

^26.� Quoted in Chris McConville, 'From "criminal class" to underworld', in Graeme Davison, David Dunstan and Chris McConville (eds), The Outcasts of Melbourne, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1985, p. 80.

^27.� Hayter, Victorian Year Book 1881, p. 504, 509.

^28.� Smith et al, 'Royal Commission on Employees in Shops,' p. 59.

^29.�Ibid.

^30.�Ibid., p. v.

^31.�Ibid., p. vi.

^32.�Ibid., p. 58.

^33.�Ibid., p. 59.

^34.�Age, 13 December 1882.

^35.� Smith et al, 'Royal Commission on Employees in Shops', p. 59.

^36.� Probably following Murphy's account in Norton, Brooks gives Wednesday 10 December as the starting date of the strike. However, 10 December was in fact a Sunday, and 13 December a Wednesday. In breaking the story on Tuesday 12 December, the Age reported that the strike had begun the week before: 'Last week it was proposed to make a further reduction, when those employed, who are principally women and girls, struck work.' When interviewed by Julian Thomas the following day, the tailoresses told him that they had already been out for a week, since the previous Tuesday. It therefore seems likely that the strike started on Tuesday 5 December. Brooks, 'The Melbourne tailoresses' strike', p. 29, W.E. Murphy, 'The tailoresses' strike,' in J. Norton (ed.), The History of Capital and Labour in All Lands and Ages: Their Past Condition, Present Relations, and Outlook for the Future ... Together with an Encyclopaedia of Australasian and Foreign Statistics, in Respect to Manufactures, Mining, Agriculture, Commerce, Oceanic Publishing, Sydney, 1888, pp. 169–171; Age, 12, 13 December 1882.

^37.� Smith et al, 'Royal Commission on Employees in Shops', p. 50. Raelene Frances makes a convincing case that 'Mrs' is in fact Ellen Cresswell in Frances, Politics at Work, p.32

^38.�Age, 13 December 1882.

^39.�Ibid.

^40.� Smith et al, 'Royal Commission on Employees in Shops', p. 58.

^41.� Frances, The Politics of Work, p. 26.

^42.�Ibid., p. 32.

^43.�Age, 15 December 1882.

^44.� Murphy, 'The tailoresses' strike', p. 169–70.

^45.�Age, 12 December 1882.

^46.�Ibid.

^47.�Ibid., 13 December 1882.

^48.�Ibid.

^49.�Ibid., 18 December 1882, p. 3.

^50.�Ibid., 15 December 1882.

^51.� Even in the early 1870s when the Tailors' Society was still nominally opposed to female labour, there is evidence of rank and file dissent. During the campaign by Major W.C. Smith to form a strikers society, the Argus reported a member of the Society handing out handbills advertising public meeting in support of the strikers. The paper archly concluded that the Society had 'resorted to artifice' and were now seeking to cause trouble between employers and the strikers; Argus, 18 July 1874, p. 9.

^52.� Ellem, In Women's Hands, pp. 27–8.

^53.� Frances, The Politics of Work, pp. 26–8.

^54.� Summers, Damned Whores and God's Police, p. 356.

^55.� For an account of the Tailors Society's stance on female labour see Ellem, In Women's Hands, pp. 21–28.

^56.� H. Carter, 'History of the clothing trade unions of Melbourne, 1866–1922,' E138/15, 14, Federated and Allied Clothing Trades Union Papers (CATUP), Noel Butlin Archives Centre (NBAC), Australian National University (ANU). Carter notes that Fowler did not 'interest himself very much in the organizing of the women workers'.

^57.� Susan Magarey picks up on this incident as evidence of the tailors' hostility to tailoresses and quotes from the 1890 minutes that the Outside Tailors were 'anxious to work with [the union] to suppress female labour'. I also noted this statement in the minutes, but it does not appear to have been taken up by the Society who was at that time actively attempting to revive the tailoresses' union. As I have attempted to illustrate, attitudes within the Society were not homogenous on this subject. Susan Magarey, Passions of the First Wave Feminists, University of New South Wales, Sydney, 2001, p. 135.

^58.� T.A. Coghlan, Labour and Industry in Australia: From 1788 to the Establishment of the Commonwealth in 1901, Vol. 3, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1918, p. 1472.

^59.�Age, 17 May, 6 July 1872, Argus, 3 August, 17 August, 7 September 1872.

^60.� For example, when the Age marked the centenary of the 1882 in 1982 it identified Helen Robertson as the leader of the tailoresses' campaign. The Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB) also identifies her as one of the key actors in the 1882 strike; however her name does not appear in contemporary reports. Since the ADB also mistakenly claims that Helen testified to the 1884 Royal Commission, it seems that the figures of Robertson and Ellen Cresswell have become conflated. Age, 15 December 1982. 'Helen Robertson', ADB Online, <http://www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/biogs/AS10414b.htm?hilite=Helen%3BRobertson>, accessed 20 March 2008.

^61.� This date is also verified by Carter who writes 'the stock tailoresses union was first formed in 1874. Mr Wing and Miss Mary Wise were prominent in its formation and others who were prominent in connection with this Union were Mrs. H Robertson and Mrs. Moodie [sic]'. Carter, 'History of the clothing trade unions', p.1; Jean Daley, 'The trade union woman,' in The Centenary Gift Book, Robertson and Mullens Ltd, Melbourne, 1934 p. 133. It is possible that by 1880 the original union had ceased to be viable, and so necessitated another being formed from scratch, but since there was no active union in 1882 this seems unlikely.

^62.� Helen Robertson, 'A pioneer interviewed', Clothing Trades Journal, 1922, p. 6.

^63.�Ibid.

^64.�Ibid., p. 7.

^65.�Woman's Sphere, January 1901, p. 44

^66.�Labor Call, 1 July 1937, p. 10. Helen's name does not appear in any of the press reports of the strike and she did not, as far as I know, hold any official position within the Tailoresses Union during the 1880s. Carter names her as one of the committee members present at the amalgamation into the Clothing Trades Union in 1899, as were Lucy Moody and Mary Wise. On 14 December 1900 she became the first woman to be elected as a delegate to the Trades Hall Council (THC). Australian Woman's Sphere, January 1900, p. 44.

^67.� Conlon and Ryan, Gentle Invaders, p. 32.

^68.� Murphy, 'The tailoresses' strike', p. 69.

^69.�Argus, 15 December 1882, p. 8.

^70.� Brooks, 'The Melbourne tailoresses' strike', p. 29.

^71.�Ibid., p. 29. Brooks' mistaken timeline leads him to conclude that the strike was manufactured by Beath, Schiess and Co. on the basis of a memo from the company to Trades Hall dated 5 December listing 30 other clothing firms. In fact 5 December was the day the strike broke out. It is possible (in the light of the company's strategy to stabilise prices) that once the strike had begun, the firm quickly opted to turn the strike to their advantage. Alternatively, Beath, Schiess and Co. might have knowingly precipitated the strike by cutting piece rates. Either way, Trades Hall does not appear to have acted until 13 December.

^72.�Age, 15 December 1882.

^73.�Ibid.

^74.�Ibid., 16 December 1882.

^75.�Ibid.

^76.� Murphy, 'The tailoresses' strike', 170. It was not, however, unusual for THC officials to form the executive of new unions of male unskilled and semi-skilled workers.

^77.�Age, 16 December 1882.

^78.�Ibid.

^79.�Ibid., 18 December 1882.

^80.�Ibid., 12 February 1883.

^81.� 'Strike Attendance Book', E138/4/1, CATUP, NBAC, ANU. As soon as the 22 February the Argus reported that the strike was nearly settled as a number of manufacturers had 'decided to accept the log as it was', Argus, 22 February 1883.

^82.� Brooks, 'The Melbourne tailoresses' strike', pp. 33–4.

^83.� See for example 'Sweating in Melbourne', Australian Herald, September 1889, 'The sweating system', Australian Herald, July 1890, August 1890.

^84.�Melbourne Punch, 13 January 1883, p. 22.

^85.�Ibid., 1 March 1883, p. 84.

^86.�Ibid., March 15 1883, p. 107.

^87.�Argus, 18 January 1883, p. 9.

^88.� Ibid, 4 January 1883, p. 9.

^89.� Ibid, 15 January 1883, p. 7.

^90.� Ibid, 4 January 1883, p. 9.

^91.� Several of these strike books survive and provide a record of the names and the numbers of women reporting for strike duty each day. 'Strike Attendance Book', E138/4/1, CATUP, NBAC, ANU. However the numbers according to these books do not accord with the estimates in the Age, leading Brooks to suggest that there may have been more than one strike book in use at a time. Brooks, 'The Melbourne tailoresses' strike', p. 35.

^92.�Age, 16 December 1882.

^93.� Murphy, 'The tailoresses' strike', p. 170.

^94.�Age, 17 February 1883, p. 13.

^95.�Argus, 18 January 1883, p. 9.

^96.� Smith et al, 'Royal Commission on Employees in Shops', p. 49.

^97.�Argus, February 27 1883.

^98.�Ibid.

^99.�Age, 27 February 1883, p. 5.

^100.�Age, 8 March 1883, 5. These firms were Mr Bowley, Sons and Daughters and Oakley and Co. and a third unnamed company.

^101.�Ibid.

^102.�Ibid.

^103.�Age, 16 April 1883, p. 3. 1 May 1883, p. 6.

^104.�Age, 18 May 1883, p. 3

^105.�Age, 15 January 1890.

^106.� Brooks, 'The Melbourne tailoresses' strike', p. 36. Conlon and Ryan, Gentle Invaders, p. 35.

^107.� Smith et al, 'Royal Commission on Employees in Shops', p. 58.

^108.�Ibid. p. 60.

^109.�Ibid., p. 62.

^110.�Ibid., p. 60.

^111.�Ibid., p. 62.

^112.� Frances, The Politics of Work, p. 37.

^113.� Quoted in ibid., p. 37.

^114.� Cathy Brigden traces the careers of Robertson and Cresswell in 'Missing women: an historical examination of female activism in the Melbourne Trades Hall, 1880–1920', paper presented at The Past is Before Us: the Ninth National Labour History Conference of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, University of Sydney, July 2005.

^115.� For a discussion of the gendered dimensions of space see Cathy Brigden, 'Creating labour's space: the case of Melbourne's Trades Hall', Labour History, no. 89 November 2005, pp. 125–40.

^116.�Age, 2 April 1884, p. 6.

^117.� 2^nd Inter-colonial Trades Congress, 1884. Official report of the debates, Walker, May and Co. Printers, Merrifield Collection, Box 46, SLV.

^118.� Joe Harris, The Bitter Fight, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1970, p. 51.

^119.� Summers claims that no women represented the union at Inter-colonial congresses after 1884. This is not quite true. However after 1885 the union's numbers declined significantly until an attempt in 1890 by the tailor's union to reform it. In 1891 Mrs. Sarah Muir represented the Melbourne union at the 7^th ITC in Ballarat, Merrifield Collection, Box 46, SLV; Clothing Union Minutes, 15/9/90, University of Melbourne Archives (UMA).

^120.�Age, 29 April 1884, p. 5.

^121.� 'Letterbook of the Victorian Tailoresses' Union 1885–86', N84/2, CATUP, NBAC, ANU.

^122.�Ibid.

^123.�Ibid.

^124.� While the union minute books for the 1880s have not survived, those from the early 1900s corroborate this view. In October 1909 Miss Heath resigned from the committee of what was by then the Clothing and Allied Trades Union as she was leaving the trade to marry. Accepting the resignation, Harry Carter said that he regretted losing 'such a good trade unionist' but 'wished the lady every success for the future'. It seems reasonable to suggest that her case was not unique. Clothing Union Minutes, 1890–1913, October 4 1909, Clothing and Allied Trades Union, UMA

^125.� Carter, 'History of the clothing trade unions', p. 1.

^126.� 'Letterbook of the Victorian Tailoresses' Union 1885–86', N84/2, CATUP, NBAC, ANU.

^127.� Carter, 'History of the clothing trade unions', p. 4.

^128.�Herald, 3 July 1893.

^129.�Ibid., 6 July 1893.

^130.� Daley, 'The trade union woman', p. 131.

^131.� 'The tailoresses and their strike', Age, 15 December 1882, p. 20.

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'We have no redress unless we strike':Class, Gender and Activism in the Melbourne Tailoresses' Strike, 1882–83