Yet another successful woman garage proprietor – Mrs V. Holland, of Bowen Bridge, Q. She started with a trifling roadside petrol station, which in three years she has expanded to such an extent that a big modern building is now in course of erection to house her business.1

Mrs Holland was one of several thousand women in Queensland in the interwar period who operated her own business. She is representative of a group of Australian women whose role in the economy as employers and self-employed workers rarely attracts sustained attention from historians. Yet taking Mrs Holland and her peers seriously, enables us to gain a deeper understanding of the intersections of class and gender, extends our appreciation of the gendered nature of the economy, and highlights some of the opportunities as well as the restrictions which shaped the working lives of a group of women whose relationship to the economy diverged from majority experience. It also prompts consideration of why, with a few important exceptions, neither labour nor feminist historians have evinced much interest in female proprietors in Australia. After offering a brief explanation for this lacuna, this paper explores four aspects of the experiences of white women in interwar Queensland who were employers or self-employed workers: the types of businesses they operated, how and why they acquired those businesses, the income they generated, and the relations between female employers and their staff. All four aspects demonstrate the central influence of gender in a society in which gender was a primary axis of power, but they also suggest a degree of flexibility in the gendered patterns of economic activity and female proprietors’ ability to benefit from that flexibility.

Female proprietors in labour and feminist historiography

While some studies of particular occupations recognise female proprietors as well as employees, Australian historiography on businesswomen tends to be notable for its omissions rather than its inclusions.2 These omissions are particularly glaring for the twentieth century.3 Although there is an expanding body of work that analyses white women who employed domestic servants, especially Aboriginal servants, other female employers and self-employed workers are rarely considered.4 With the notable exception of Jill Julius Matthews’ examination some two decades ago of white women who earned money in the informal economy, there has been little substantial appraisal of self-employed women or female employers as members of distinct groups with particular relationships to the economy.5 Instead, such women appear as fleeting and/or as interesting and exceptional individuals, in histories of businesses and in biographical dictionaries.6

This lack of attention derives from problems relating to available sources and from the research preferences of Australian labour and feminist historians. Many of the commercial operations operated by women were small-scale, were frequently run from home, and have not generated extant records. Matthews writes that ‘the women would rarely declare themselves as workers for any census or survey purposes; they paid no tax’.7 The extent and variety of information on white female employees in such sources as government, trade union and Industrial Court records do not exist for female employers.

Additionally, female employers have tended to fall through the gaps of labour and feminist historiography. Notwithstanding occasional calls for detailed examination of employers as well as employees, labour historians, understandably, have usually been more interested in workers than in bosses.

Feminist historians have tended, again understandably, to concentrate on women’s lack of power in the past. Certainly, feminist authors have emphasised concepts of difference and diversity in their explorations of women’s histories, and analyses of the relations between Aboriginal domestic servants and their white female employers have demonstrated the power that some white women could exercise. White women who employed workers in commercial ventures or who achieved a measure of independence through self-employment, however, remain neglected topics.

Women like Mrs Holland were a minority in interwar Queensland and, indeed, Australia. The nature of surviving documentary sources makes it difficult to develop a definitive interpretation about them and some of the conclusions in this paper are tentative. Given variations in economic trends in different Australian states in this era, including the relative importance of primary industry versus the manufacturing sector and differences in unemployment levels, the findings of this paper, with its case study of Queensland, may not be easily transferred to other states. Yet the existence of Mrs Holland and her peers serves not only as a reminder of the diversity of women’s experiences in the economy but also emphasises women’s differential access to power and the interpenetration of gender and class identities and relations.

Non-Aboriginal women and their businesses

The Commonwealth Censuses are major sources of information on non-Aboriginal women’s roles as employers and self-employed workers but they leave some questions unanswered. In 1921 the Statistician commented that ‘the subject of occupation opens a wide field for investigation, and presents more complexities than any other subject that comes within the scope of a Census’.8 In that year, respondents selected from the categories of employer, working on own account (not employing others), assistant (not receiving wages), wage-earner, out-of-work and not applicable; the last category included dependents of breadwinners, persons of private means who were not in business and pensioners. The 1933 Census adopted some different terminology but otherwise retained and refined the categories from 1921, distinguishing between full-time and part-time wage earners and adding a section for apprenticed wage earners. Neither the 1921 nor the 1933 Census recognised out-workers or sub-contractors as distinct categories, nor did they include questions about individuals’ previous grades of occupation, complicating any attempt to track the movement of individuals across occupational categories, although it is probable that the Great Depression prompted some unemployed wage-earners to reinvent themselves as self-employed operators.

Women constituted almost half of the adult population of interwar Queensland but, according to the 1921 and 1933 Censuses of the Commonwealth of Australia, only about 10 per cent of employers and self-employed persons. Even allowing for the under-estimation in the Censuses of the numbers of female proprietors, women were far less likely than men to own commercial ventures. Of the nearly 55,000 women recorded as employees, employers and self-employed workers in the Queensland economy in 1921, just over one in ten belonged to the latter two categories. Not surprisingly, far more men and women were employees than employers or self-employed workers, although within particular occupational classifications, notably music teaching and agricultural pursuits, the number of female business owners exceeded the number of female employees.9

The Commonwealth Censuses underestimate the number of women who operated commercial enterprises. Not all women engaged in small-scale self-employment were counted as self-employed, especially those women who defined themselves primarily as mothers and wives, and the Censuses largely overlooked the informal economy in which both men and women participated.10 There were also businesses which women effectively operated but which were nominally owned by their husbands or other male relatives. Jessie Rosina Grant managed Mandalee Farm in northern Queensland in the mid-1920s, prior to and after her husband’s death, before her son assumed control of the farm.11 Instances of women operating their male relatives’ commercial ventures may have been particularly likely to occur in the post-World War I period, owing to the inability of some physically and psychologically damaged veterans to resume control of their businesses.

The businesses which white women commonly operated included those based on such traditionally ‘female’ skills as dressmaking, millinery and cooking. Typical of these commercial ventures were fashion boutiques, beauty salons, cafes and small stores, including grocery shops. Women owned and managed boarding houses, private hospitals, nursing homes and hotels. They also worked as self-employed private teachers of music, drama and dance. Some female authors, artists and performers, and some craftswomen were self-employed.12 White women often ran businesses that required skills which they could acquire through their roles as wives, mothers, daughters and/or employees. This association occurred because women were likely to establish businesses in which they could exercise skills which they already possessed. It also reflected broader societal assumptions about the types of work and sectors of the economy appropriate for women, regardless of whether they participated in those sectors as employees, self-employed workers or employers. As a result, such businesses had domestic associations and tended to exist in sectors of the economy in which white women also participated as employees. This may have encouraged acceptance of white women as proprietors of businesses while simultaneously reinforcing assumptions about the areas of the economy in which they belonged.

Dressmaking, one of the businesses most commonly owned by women, conforms to the characteristics outlined above. Women owned almost one-third of the new factories that were registered in Brisbane in 1931. The majority of these female-owned factories were small-scale (in Queensland a factory contained two or more individuals) and fell into the categories of dressmaking, hemstitching, millinery and clothing, areas in which women could acquire the necessary skills for these pursuits through their role in the home, schooling, apprenticeships and employment.13 Women were numerically dominant in certain types of businesses, including dressmaking. In 1933, 1168 women owned dressmaking establishments in Queensland compared with just 11 men and, despite men’s dominance in other areas of the clothing trade, women constituted nearly 55 per cent of employers and self-employed workers in the 1933 Census category of ‘manufacture of articles of dress’.14 Advertisements for fashion clothing shops and beauty salons suggest that there was also a preponderance of women in these areas.15 The majority of proprietors of boarding and lodging houses were female, with women constituting 87 per cent of that Census category in 1933.16

The commercial ventures of dressmaking establishments, dress shops and beauty salons were characterised by a confluence of female proprietors with a mainly female clientele. The provision of services for women constituted a significant proportion of the businesses owned by women. This confluence parallels the presence of female employees of department stores in ‘female’ departments. Gail Reekie’s analysis of the necessity for those stores ‘to maintain sexual propriety by employing women assistants to sell women’s goods to women’ may be applied to enterprises in which the female owner had direct contact with the commodity and the consumer.17 There was a pattern, although somewhat imperfect, of gendered distinctions in the production, sale and consumption of certain goods.

Although white women who were self-employed or employers tend to have been clustered in particular types of commercial operations, they owned businesses in the primary, secondary and tertiary sectors of the Queensland economy in the interwar period. A minority of women were present in industries which traditionally had been, and during the interwar period remained, mostly male-controlled. In 1933, for example, the 3073 women who owned grazing properties, farms, market gardens and apiaries in Queensland represented nearly 6 per cent of business owners in the state’s agricultural, pastoral and dairying industries.18 Amongst the small number of women who entered the medical and legal professions, some ran their own practices alone or in partnership. By 1933, 15 female doctors were in private practice. The solicitor and barrister Katherine McGregor was senior partner in a Brisbane law firm during the 1930s. A female pharmacist, Betty Colwell, was a partner in and subsequently became the manager of a Brisbane firm of chemists.

White women also worked as garage proprietors and motor repairers, stock and station agents, and butchers. One woman was a road-building contractor in Innisfail; another was the proprietor of the Gulf News. Individual women established themselves respectively as a furrier, a self-employed bullock driver, a saddler, a professional angler and a mail carrier contractor. In 1933 an Australian Woman’s Mirror reporter visited the north Queensland gold fields and found 62 women working as self-employed gold miners and prospectors, either independently or in conjunction with their husbands.19 The presence of women as gold prospectors offers one example of the wide range of economic activities undertaken by white women in rural Queensland. In part, the breadth of those activities reflected the existence of commercial operations peculiar to those regions, such as pastoral properties. It also indicates some flexibility in the occupations deemed appropriate for white women in rural areas. When a woman entered a male-dominated industry, however, she did not necessarily pose a major challenge to traditional gender roles, particularly if she entered that industry to replace a male relative. Julie Matthaei argues that in the United States such women ‘were not destroying the sexual division of labour, or even challenging it; as widows, daughters, or sisters, they were fulfilling their womanly obligation of replacing an absent or deceased male family member at the helm of the family business’.20

Acquiring a business: how and why

Inheritances and family connections enabled some white women to acquire control of commercial ventures while others began their own businesses with very little capital. Mrs Laura Duncan inherited Mooraberrie Cattle Station in far western Queensland from her husband in the early twentieth century. She managed the property with her three daughters until World War II, when her eldest daughter assumed responsibility for the station. Miss Eva Rosenstengel became governing director of the Toowoomba furniture firm, Rosenstengels Ltd., in the mid-1920s. She was appointed on the recommendation of her father who was the former director, and she had previously worked in the firm as his assistant. Miss Ellen Barry became perhaps the only female owner of a bullock driving business in Australia in the 1930s when, at the age of 18, she succeeded her father on his death. Having previously worked for her father, she possessed the skills necessary to continue the venture.21

Other women owned businesses in conjunction with their husbands. Mr and Mrs Pritchard were joint proprietors of the Ascot Riding and Driving School in Brisbane in the 1920s.22 Some women established profit-making activities within the context of their husband’s or father’s existing business, thereby avoiding the need for initial substantial capital. In 1936 the Australian Woman’s Mirror reported on an unnamed Queensland woman who had established a poultry raising business on her husband’s wheat farm, and subsequently persuaded him to buy 400 head of sheep for her.23 Such women could enjoy a degree of financial independence, although they probably remained subject to their male relatives’ acquiescence to their activities. Moreover, the women’s profits could be absorbed by their male relatives’ businesses. The unnamed Queensland woman began her commercial activities in order to augment her husband’s diminishing income during the Depression.

The businesses which white women acquired through family connections included large enterprises such as pastoral properties. By contrast, many of the businesses which women themselves began did not require extensive financial resources. White women’s roles in the home, the low wages they often received as employees, the temporary nature of many white female workers’ participation in the workforce, and a tendency for sons rather than daughters to take over family enterprises, militated against women acquiring substantial start-up capital. Most of the businesses owned by white women were small-scale. A majority of them did not have any employees, thereby avoiding the costs of a wages bill. Census records indicate that in 1921 only one in five female proprietors employed labour; in 1933, approximately one in three employed labour.24 Some women ran their businesses partly or fully from their homes, and avoided the expense of renting or buying commercial premises. During the 1930s Depression, for example, a Brisbane woman bought fat from cafes and restaurants, rendered it into soap in a shed in her backyard, and sold it to local stores.25

White women who were self-employed differed in their reasons for establishing or assuming control of a business. Although comparatively little information is available on why women chose to run commercial ventures, it is clear that some did so as a result of financial necessity. Others appear to have wanted the independence associated with managing their own business. Some women engaged in small-scale economic activity to supplement an existing source of income. A widow at Monto in the 1930s, who received state aid for her children, earned additional money through poker work, which is the art of burning images and designs onto wood or leather and renting rooms.26

Women often appear to have established or assumed control of businesses due to financial necessity caused by the death or incapacitation of the male breadwinner. Alice Pickard took control of and subsequently expanded her father’s service station in Brisbane after his death. She was able to support her mother, sister, brother and herself.27 As well as assuming the role of breadwinner, some women also fulfilled household duties. Mrs Rose Range, for example, continued to do the housework when she took over her husband’s fishing business in Cairns after he was seriously injured.28 The existence of adult men who were not active in the formal economy and who were partly or wholly dependent on the earning capacity of female relatives represents a departure from traditional gender roles. It also offers support to feminist critiques of those stratification theories which assume that a woman’s class position inevitably derives from that of her husband or father.29

Although female business owners included women who were single, married, widowed and divorced, the likelihood of white women entering the Queensland economy as owners of businesses rather than as employees was influenced by marital status. Of the single women actively involved in the Queensland economy in the 1920s and 1930s, almost 94 per cent were employees and only 6 per cent were employers or self-employed. By contrast, approximately one-half of the widows and between one-third and one-half of the married women who were actively involved in that economy owned businesses.30 The tendency for single women to be employees rather than business owners was partly a consequence of their age. Overall, single women were younger than married and widowed women; they were also more likely to be eligible for apprenticeships and were less likely to have accumulated funds to establish a business. Marital status itself, however, also contributed to the pattern of female participation in the economy.

Married women had fewer opportunities than their single counterparts to be employees because of the legal and social barriers that confronted them. The Queensland public service, for example, refused to employ married women. Especially strong opposition during the Depression to married women’s employment may explain an increase in the proportion of married women business owners from the 1920s to the 1930s. The high proportion of widows engaged in the economy as employers and self-employed workers rather than as employees probably reflects in part the significance of inheritance. An unknown number of widows would either have inherited existing businesses from their husbands or inherited sufficient funds to establish their own commercial operations.

The greater likelihood of married and widowed women operating their own businesses compared to single women also suggests that for the former, small-scale self-employment could offer advantages over being an employee. First, it enabled some married white women to earn an income while remaining essentially within the parameters of wife and mother. In addition, the autonomy derived from ownership of a business could enable a woman to manage more easily the responsibilities of breadwinner and mother than she could as a worker subject to an employer’s control. This would have been of relevance to married, widowed, divorced and deserted women who had children. Not all aspects of self-employment, however, held advantages over other types of employment. A small commercial venture did not necessarily provide financial resources equal to or greater than those which could accrue to some employees. Louise Polzin, a widow, ran a shop at Windera, west of Gympie, during the late 1930s. In 1939 she wrote to her son that ‘it needs all my wits to keep the things going and to keep a roof over our heads’.31

Generating income and exercising power

The major source of information on the incomes of employers and self-employed workers in Queensland in the interwar period is the Census of the Commonwealth of Australia, 1933. Given the impact of the Depression, the Census statistics on income may not have been typical of the interwar years. The 1933 Census records a wide range of incomes among women who were employers or self-employed. It also reveals that a considerable number of female business owners had earned less than the Queensland female basic wage in the year prior to the Census.

The incomes of female employers and self-employed women in Queensland for the 12 months prior to the 1933 Census ranged from no income, including a net loss on their businesses, to earnings of £260 or more. Approximately one-third of female employers and two-thirds of women who described themselves as self-employed are recorded as receiving an income of less than £104; at that time the Queensland female basic wage was £101/8/-. According to the Census, approximately 4 per cent of female business owners had recorded no income for the previous year; a further 11 per cent of female employers and 33 per cent of self-employed women had earned less than £52. Some female employees earned higher incomes than some of the women and men who were employers or self-employed.32

As a group, female proprietors earned less money than their male counterparts, a gendered distinction which partly reflected variations in prosperity of the different ranges of business in which men and women were clustered. It may also relate to the fact that, in general, women probably had less access to initial capital than did men. Whereas over 40 per cent of male employers earned £260 or more, less than 30 per cent of female employers were included in this category. Compared with 25 per cent of self-employed men, 37 per cent of self-employed women had earned below £52. Nevertheless, as individuals, a considerable number of female business owners earned more money than their male counterparts. Whereas some female proprietors had earned over £260 in the past year, some male owners of businesses recorded no profit for that period.33

Some women generated sufficient income to employ staff. Unfortunately, there is little evidence on the relations between female business owners and their staff. Nonetheless, the very existence of examples of white women exercising direct power over men and women in interwar Queensland prompts questions about the ways in which gender and class identities and relations intersect with each other and the extent to which particular dimensions of female employers’ experiences are best understood within a class-based analysis, rather than stressing those employers’ gender.34

The confluence of female employers, self-employed workers, employees and consumers in particular business sectors suggests that female employers would usually have employed women. Annie Cusack, the proprietor of the Paris Café in Brisbane, employed five female staff including a cook, kitchen maid and waitresses. Other women, however, particularly those who owned grazing or farming properties, employed men. Mrs and Miss Barton, who ran about 4000 sheep on their 14,000 acre property near Charleville in the early 1930s, employed male workers during the shearing season. Some female pastoral property owners appear to have employed white male managers to oversee their businesses and it seems likely that some of these women would also have employed Aboriginal men. Female direction of male labour was not restricted to rural property owners. Phoebe Healy, who ran a messenger service in Brisbane from 1935, employed several messenger boys.35

Conclusion

Not surprisingly, gender emerges as a fundamental category for an exploration of white women as business owners in interwar Queensland. In a society in which gender was a primary axis of power, it was an important factor in the relative scarcity of white women in business and in explaining the types of ventures that women were most likely to establish. The segregation which characterised the formal economy was evident in the clustering of female employers and self-employed workers as well as employees in particular sectors. The incomes of female business owners as a group compared to those of male business owners indicate gendered differentiation in earnings, although analysis of the 1933 Census cautions against a simplistic acceptance of a direct correlation between gender, class and income.

While it is important to recognise that women were a minority among business owners in this era, it is equally important to acknowledge that several thousand women operated commercial ventures and to consider how they negotiated the gendered patterns of power within Queensland society. Many operated in sectors of the economy regarded as being appropriate for women. Some exercised the power that they derived from their class location. That location enabled white female employers in particular types of businesses to hire workers regardless of those workers’ gendered identities and despite the existence of a gendered hierarchy which placed white men above white women.