This paper is part of my larger study on women’s trade union organising in interwar Sydney, which focuses on the lives and industrial strategies of women who were union organisers, or were otherwise activists in the labour movement. That study investigates their union involvement, organising strategies and connections with other activists between 1917 and 1942, and particularly in the 1920s. These were industrially active labour women who organised collectively, creating and harnessing occupational, ideological and social networks as a strategic foundation to their professional activism. These networks linked a range of organisations and community groups, drawing on the resources of the labour movement and the women’s movement to strengthen women’s agency in unions and workplaces, and in the wider public sphere. They were embedded in the parochial or workplace sphere and were facilitated by the locations, precincts, and specific buildings occupied by the labour movement in the inner city of Sydney.2 The following analysis explains the spatial influences on the class identities and activist orientations of these interwar women organisers and labour women. I argue that it is essential to examine spatial influences on class and labour, drawing on theoretical frameworks on space and place, and on class to assist this analysis.3 In this context, spatial references both allude to, and facilitate, the strategies and dialogue of women’s activism. Space provides the context for communication, contact, familiarity and relationships that assert community and facilitate networks.

As Giddens notes, ‘locale’, as well as ‘time’, creates the setting for social interaction.4 Points of intersection created by space prompt networks in workplaces and amongst workers as residents in towns and suburbs. In this way, space underpins the formation of networks of nominally disconnected people. For the labour movement, space and the built environment not only facilitate these networks, they encourage community. The built environment is a persistent reminder of spaces culturally owned by workers, embedded in local community, and financially controlled by capital.5 Symbolically and tangibly it embodies class conflict and identity. Class and labour identity are fundamental to interpreting women’s industrial networks, and critical to interpreting the shared motivations and connections of these women. Incorporating spatial influences into class and gender analysis shows how the embeddedness of the networks in the parochial sphere and labour space preserved their class integrity, even in the context of social and strategic collaboration with non-labour women.

Organisers and the relational and spatial bases of class identity

John Shields has described the workplace as ‘an important site for the formation of social identity’.6 I argue that formation of this identity is not restricted to interaction among workers in a workplace, but includes interaction with those who helped shape the workplace – the trade union organisers – who have a special relationship to workers’ identity. The workplace is a ‘workspace’ that underpins identity and relationships. Even though they did not inhabit their members’ workspaces, organisers were frequent visitors to these sites. As industrial advisers, negotiators and advocates, they influenced labour dynamics and worker self-awareness in the places of work. The presence and influence of women’s organisers was therefore crucial for women workers. This was so because women were often the disadvantaged inhabitants of workplaces: their industrial interests were a low priority for many unions, almost always running second best to the interests of men.7

Connections between union members and their organisers, and between organisers and labour activists, were also supported by their shared community identities. These were identities based on their relational connections and awareness as part of a class or community, and on their primary class or community loyalties. Identification with the labour movement and with the working class influenced relationships, and the way connections were made, between organisers from different unions.8 Analysis of working-class community needs to take account of these relational dynamics as well as spatial influences on the maintenance and nurturing of labour and working-class identity. Spatial factors to be taken into account include physical factors such as residential proximity, neighbourhood street grids, industrial sites and locations and social factors including the significance of workplaces for supporting and defining labour relationships between workers, and between workers and their representative organisations, the trade unions.9 For Sydney’s workers, that built environment included the streets which unions nominated to delineate organisers’ industrial workplace responsibilities, including the immediate precinct around the Trades Hall. Hence, the phenomenon of trade union consciousness and identity deriving from sites of union activity is directly related to the place occupied for the labour community, both physically and symbolically, by Trades Hall.

Ira Katznelson’s observations on class formation provide two important explanations for the nature of labour women’s activist collaborations and identity.10 Firstly, their world ‘experience’ was that at times they were more disadvantaged by their gender than by their class affiliation, although each created tensions to which they learned to respond. Secondly, and specific to this paper, their experience of labour’s relationship to capital was affected by the nature of Sydney’s economy and built environment. Interwar Sydney provided particular spaces in which women could operate, and could thus negotiate and confirm networks. This combination of places and networks influenced the ways they related to each other and to men in the labour movement. It affected their industrial strategies and enabled their activism to carry into the public sphere.

Working class sites for labour and community needed to be near public transport services, so that workers could reach their places of employment, their sites for collective action and planning, and their social or community gathering places. This was ensured by the sophisticated and comprehensive transport system established in Sydney by the mid 1920s. The main Central Railway Station had been built in 1906, and tram and bus routes on near by George Street linked to ferries and later to rail at Circular Quay 11 Extension of the railway into the suburbs began in 1916.12 Location near the central axis of this system enhanced Trades Hall’s status as the central formal and informal meeting place for the labour movement. Labor, labour and communist women met there. Mary Lamm recalled regular meetings of the Militant Women’s Group, suggesting that the building continued to be important for CPA women even after the ‘class against class’ split saw the Communist Party oppose the ALP and the Labor Council in 1929.13 Lucy Taksa explores the notion of working class ‘hubs’ of community, applying this particularly to Sydney’s ‘Domain’, until recent years a hub for working class and radical speakers and audiences. The term derives from Simmel’s discussion of hubs of activity, or clusters of locations, which reinforce identity.14 Just as the Domain was a ‘hub’ of working class activity, Trades Hall was a ‘hub’ for the union movement.15 Most Sydney organisers worked out of the building, with the site facilitating a network of female organisers and left women. They shared valuable debriefings on issues ranging through equal pay to sexual harassment, and lobbied the New South Wales Labor Council for more practical recognition. In October 1925, for example, The Printer (journal of the New South Wales Branch of the Printing Industry Employees’ Union of Australia, PIEUA or PIEU) noted that the Trades Hall Executive was to be asked to set a room aside as a rest room for Trades Hall Girl employees.16 With its net of hallways, corridors, linked rooms, and large rooms and small meeting rooms the building encouraged otherwise logistically difficult communications. In this way Trades Hall clearly was an industrial and political hub for the labour movement. So was its surrounding site: workers talked as often of ‘dropping down to Goulburn Street’ (that is, the locality) as of visiting ‘the Trades Hall’. 17

Apart from the administrative convenience of being centrally located with the bulk of labour movement organisations, many unions had operational reasons for retaining rooms in or near Trades Hall. Proximity to workplaces and to transport was strategically important for each organiser’s portfolio of workplace responsibility. Location near the Goulburn street retail and department stores facilitated familiarity with members’ workplaces for Shop Distributive and Allied Trades Union (SDA) organiser Carmel Nyhan. Trade union records for the PIEUA (NSW Branch) and for the Hospitality, Catering and Restaurant Employees’ Union (HCREU) show organisers’ responsibilities distributed on an axis of the streets around Goulburn Street, further enhancing the Trades Hall community. The NSW Branch minutes of the HCREU illustrate the importance of location for industrial portfolios. In Sydney, responsibilities were distributed by type of business and then by city street. For example, the Subcommittee allocating work to organisers agreed on 22 April 1925 that street divisions should define city areas of responsibility, and then divided suburban responsibilities along the main transport divisions of railway lines and the Harbour.18 This allowed liaison with workplaces and members, crucial to monitoring of conditions and tactically useful during industrial action for swift mobilisation. Efficient worksite access meant good organising.

Women’s labour and working class identity

Taksa has drawn attention to the need to recognise women’s multiple identities. In doing this she acknowledges Liz Bondi’s insistence that Marx’s thesis of divided identity has little applicability for women, because it neglects the significance of the private sphere on women’s identity formation.19 As Taksa puts it, the concept of multiple identity ‘highlights the numerous and potentially competing subjective realities that women often experience as result of their indeterminate position vis a vis both public and private spheres’. As she adds, we need to be aware of how such multiple identities shifts in response to changing needs.20 Labour movement women’s complex networks saw them moving within and between their union communities, their networks of labour and non-labour women, and their social collective.21 In other words, multiple affiliations and identities came together to meet the demands of their industrial work. The spaces hosting and connecting the communities were critical to this process. Labour organising is highly reliant on the spatial links between labour – for example labour precincts – and working class precincts. The notion of hubs of community reinforcing identity is useful as a way of understanding communities in Sydney’s inner working class suburbs, from Newtown through Ultimo and Balmain – places where workers and their families could live, congregate and easily communicate.22

Aspects of the role of labour precincts can be seen through Jack Kavanagh’s diary. Kavanagh was a Boer War veteran and Canadian Communist who arrived in Sydney at the end of World War I and became a leading figure in the CPA.23 He became a close friend and early mentor to the young Edna Ryan.24 His diary for 1931 and 1932 identifies meeting sites for the unemployed and communists during the Depression, sites including Newtown Town Hall, Sydney Town Hall, Trades Hall, the Domain, and the Eveleigh Railway Workshops in Alexandria.25 During 1931 and 1932 he edited and published The Challenger, the news-sheet of the Unemployed Workers’ Union (UWM), and addressed numerous meetings for the CPA and the UWM in Sydney’s inner suburbs. The significance of Eveleigh as a site supporting working-class identity is endorsed by former Eveleigh worker and communist Hal Alexander and by Taksa, who notes that meetings at Eveleigh were targeted to ‘support collective action, and also to promote class-consciousness.26 Some of the evidence for the labour ‘hubs’ identified for this thesis is also embedded in the trade union reports. The concept is crucial to interpreting women’s separated and linked communities.

Access to the social capital embedded in relationships among members of the Sydney’s interwar working class was strong in the interwar years because the working class in the interwar years had not yet been dispersed into Sydney’s suburban sprawl. Working-class women in the 1920s and 1930s maintained their physical community.27 This cohesion assisted political and industrial mobilisation, or impetus to collaboration, with the suburbs themselves nurturing other hubs of activity for working-class women. Mobilisation was further facilitated by the connections resulting from involvement in paid work. Thus networks, as highly important channels for communication for working women, were one consequence of enhanced workplace relationships.28

Interviewed by Taksa, Edna Ryan described how the docks and maritime workers facilitated international working class networks.29 These important sites acted as communication channels, with incoming and outgoing workers on ships keeping local workers informed about international events and debates. According to Taksa such evidence shows how networks, linked to working class institutions, ‘reinforced working-class identity and culture both within and beyond national boundaries’.30 These links are explored in a separate context in her research on Sydney’s Eveleigh railway workshops. As an important and reliable local employer, the site reinforced the social and intellectual cohesion of the working class in surrounding suburbs.31

When Ryan discussed her work as a political activist in the 1920s, she spoke about childhood and adolescence in inner Sydney, and the way Pyrmont Bridge was the physical and symbolic link between domestic life and working life for the inner city working class. She experienced this link as part of her childhood because her mother and sisters reached their work in the City by walking across Pyrmont Bridge.32 The geography of the city was integral to Ryan’s remembered working-class childhood identity. Her testimony contributes to evidence that, for Sydney’s working class, identity formation in the pre-war and interwar years was particularly grounded in suburbs close to the harbour, which was where sites of industry and employment were concentrated. Harbour-side Paddington remained a working-class suburb at least into the 1950s and Balmain, Glebe, and Annandale, as waterfront locations for timberworks, boatyards and large industrial sites, were home to the working class for two decades after that.33 Inner city residents and workers maintained a strong sense of place, particularly of the places such as meeting halls and streets, which facilitated the habits of lifetime activism. This awareness infused the dialogue of both Edna Ryan and Labor-feminist Eileen Powell, the one evoking Pyrmont and Ultimo as her childhood suburbs and the other describing Labor activism in Petersham and Stanmore, and in Balmain. Both women also drew attention in interviews to the importance of Trades Hall for their young adulthood.

The issue of multiple working-class identities is informed by Katznelson’s observation that ‘spatial divisions between working-class and non-working-class residential areas (promoted) the increasing autonomy of working-class neighbourhoods and institutions and thus “the mutual insulation and repulsion of the masses”’.34 Spatial alienation persisted in interwar Sydney, reinforcing class identity. Solling and Reynolds note that moves to rid Sydney of its inner-city ‘slums’ began in the interwar years. They observe the impact of bureaucratic condemnation of homes on residents of the terrace house suburbs.35 Most of these residents were working-class and further outraged when the Labor Daily joined the criticisms, their responses again demonstrating working-class solidarity and community in the inner suburbs. In describing these working class homes as ‘slums’, the Labor Daily showed how the perspectives of political Labor and the working class could diverge.36 In attacking developers as the builders of slums and landlords as ongoing profiteers it explicitly deplored the quality of workers’ housing. However, by taking this approach the newspaper not only attacked the forces of capital but was also seen to attack the worker’s private sphere, the working-class home. Women’s domestic and private sphere roles meant that this assault on working class housing was as much a specific slur on women’s private space as a broader attack on working class neighbourhoods. Residents were sceptical about ‘concerns’ over the quality of workers’ housing, believing these concerns to be motivated as much by an obsession with civic dignity and appearances as by a genuine concern for the dignity of the worker.37 Their anger shows how attacks against their space could reinforce working-class identity by inciting collective resistance.

Publicly and privately, place was crucial in facilitating, and in hindering, women’s participation in formal and informal groups and their access to networks and mentoring. For both labour and non-labour women activists, mobilisation was enabled not only through personal and professional connections, but also by pragmatic considerations including proximity to other women and meeting places, the physical location of meeting places, and regular social or quasi-social reinforcement. Trade union files show that this applied for industrial as well as political activists. Because family or private sphere demands limited women’s opportunity to be involved in public life, accessible locations providing opportunities to meet with other activist women took on both material and symbolic importance as meeting spaces.38 Scheduling of meetings to fit with women’s commitments was important, but so was the positioning of the meeting place, including accessibility by transport from home and/or workplace.39 Arrangements needed to accommodate children and irregular attendances, and groups needed to promise support, mentoring, education or simply friendship to participants. Two very different city sites meeting these criteria were the Cavalier Cafe in King Street, and the Trades Hall. Others were located in suburbs like Newtown and Balmain. Newtown figures prominently in Jack Kavanagh’s records as a hub for socialist and communist social and political gatherings attended by women as well as by men. For Eileen Powell, Balmain was home to ALP activity.40 Each of these sites could be reached by public transport, facilitating the participation of women both in paid and in unpaid work. King Street, Sussex Street and Newtown were near the major railway and tramway system and to city workplaces. Balmain was accessible by tramway and ferry systems.41 For labour women who collaborated with organised feminism, Rose Scott’s home in Sydney’s eastern suburbs was accessible through the city’s tramway system.42

Workplace proximity to meeting places was critical to effective interaction between members and union officials. Many of the women and girls who belonged to the PIEUA worked close to the Trades Hall, so that their workplaces were close to organisers who needed to carry out industrial inspections and workplace visits.43 As we have seen, the HCREU exploited Sydney’s street grid to apportion organisers’ portfolio responsibilities. Women as industrial activists could therefore attend meetings and could interact with other organisers and members, either in Trades Hall or in workplace visits. Much earlier, Bertha McNamara’s bookshop had similarly channelled information to the working class and provided labour education.44 For working women these activities and locations fostered an industrial awareness, reinforcing their militancy at times such as the Depression, when otherwise short-term private need could overrule class principle. 45

Trades Hall sites

Accounts of networks and cooperation, particularly for cross-party or cross-organisational combinations of women, commonly locate that cooperation at particular sites. Location, place and space are factors of ritual and convenience to be considered in analysis of labour movement dynamics, particularly for women. Given the multiplicity of occupations and geographic dispersal of workplaces and home sites, central gathering sites were not only convenient, but were symbolically important for women involved in the industrial and the political sphere. Recognised gathering places facilitated informal and formal meetings, which enabled them to develop approaches to issues important to women. This was apparent in a brief discussion between Muriel Heagney and Edna Ryan in the Trades Hall, when Ryan raised the issue of the family wage with Heagney following a Labor Women’s meeting.46 These were two women who did not usually work closely on issues: Ryan remembered as a young woman feeling intimidated by Heagney.47 The substance of the exchange was that the latter rejected the concept of the ‘family’ wage by reminding Ryan ‘There ought to be a rate for the job’. The meeting stimulated Ryan’s evolving position on financial assistance to mothers, a position at odds with much of the labour movement. Hence, this chance meeting facilitated by a labour women’s network within Trades Hall prompted further development in her feminist awareness.

Such instances show how spatial dynamics and buildings are crucial to understanding the community of Sydney female activism in the 1920s. Buildings such as the Sydney Town Hall and the Trades Hall allowed female labour activists, organisers, and union officials to share working accommodation and formal meeting places. Together with the proliferating teahouses and cafes that provided less formal links, these became the spaces in which overlapping social and industrial networks were initiated.48 This applied particularly to Trades Hall, with its importance stressed by both Edna Ryan and Eileen Powell. This was one place where, as Ryan put it in the conversation providing the title quote for this paper, ‘you always bumped into people’.49 Powell made it very clear that the Trades Hall was crucial to her political and industrial education. As she remembered in 1997: ‘the ALP and the union had offices in the same (building) Trades Hall … mother used to be in the Trades Hall. … I more or less grew up knowing all the officials, (the) Trade Union people’.50

Formal and informal meetings in the rooms and corridors of Trades Hall, together with the shared experience of industrial work, initiated and reinforced the sisterhood of industrial women. This dynamic is in part explained by Taksa when, drawing on Craig Calhoun, she comments that ‘the perception of mutual interests based on the shared experience of everyday activities’ is more likely to promote collective action than the mere existence of common interests unsupported by regular contact.51 Working in the building gave these organisers an ‘everyday’ occupational link. The Trades Hall corridors could be explained as providing organisers with such shared experience, giving them easy access to other unions and to casual information or debriefing, providing a ‘web’ of contact points to facilitate women’s communication. In 1940 Mel Cashman retired from the PIEUA to become a Commonwealth Arbitration Inspector, and her farewell function testified to the cohesion and durability of labour sisterhood in Trades Hall. It was ‘the Trades Hall girls’, led by shop employees’ organiser Carmel Nyhan and ‘some union officials’, who made a point of attending a women’s gathering in the building to say goodbye: it had been her workplace, and the workplace of many at the farewell, throughout the interwar years.52

Labour women needed a flexible approach to place in order to enhance their formal and informal collaborations. For example, because in Sydney women were legally banned from entering hotel bars, they were excluded from the pub culture which was an important focus for informal contact between trade unionists. Being in this way locked out of an important avenue of union collaboration and communication, they needed to secure alternative sites where women could share knowledge between themselves, and also with men. As Edna Ryan remembered, Mockbells coffee shop was one of these sites.53 Furthermore, buildings designed and built by men were domains organised according to male needs, which deliberately or by ‘accidental’ effect restricted female occupation. Because of this, the women who worked in Trades Hall had to negotiate having the building itself modified to female needs as well as men’s, hence the lobbying for a restroom, noted earlier.54 Shared purpose and common challenges can generate bonding amongst individuals meeting those challenges. In Trades Hall, women’s responses to exclusion encouraged a sisterhood amongst those using the building. This concept of a sisterhood is supported by Eileen Powell’s evidence. When asked whom she worked with on pay issues, particularly who in Trades Hall would be called on to contribute to particular campaigns, she replied (for) ‘anything to do with women’s welfare, people would tend to come to whoever happened to be handy at the time who was active in the women’s movement’.55 This describes the broader process of women’s activism in Trades Hall, with working women’s issues seen as the responsibility of female activists, and with those female activists, whatever their union, perceived as linked to the women’s movement.

Trades Hall nurtured significant long-term connections between trade union women and those involved with the ALP and the CPA, as well as others whose business brought them there, such as workers at radio station 2KY, also located at this site in its early years. That one location enabled Eileen Powell to sustain her networks after she resigned from her organising position at the ARU. ‘Others’ who came to Trades Hall as workers included journalists, and industrial roundsmen for the newspapers such as Fred Coleman-Browne (the two later married). Edna Ryan described her friendship with Carmel Nyhan and Mel Cashman in terms showing her own labour networks to have been sustained by this site.56 Indeed, many of Ryan’s observations relate to these networks: ‘meeting people, never knowing who you might pick up with, particularly of course in Trades Hall in Sydney at that time’.57 As she explained (about Nyhan) ‘Well, I used to be quite chummy with her, because you could go to Trades Hall and meet organisers’. Hence this site not only strengthened labour women’s networks, but the unions themselves: common location allowed cross-union communication and efficient industrial practice, facilitating effective and informed organising.

Conclusion

The concentration of unions in Trades Hall reinforced the ‘sisterhood’ of organisers (and labour women), particularly in the face of male unionists who worked within a labour movement structured around male hierarchies and priorities and saw trade unions as male territory. Beyond that space, individual and social networks were critical resources for interwar women activists and industrial organisers. Network resources included non-labour feminist organisations like the National Council of Women and the Feminist Club which at times specifically addressed the needs of working women, as well as non-working women and girls.58 Conflict inevitably arose for labour movement feminists because many men (and women) in the labour movement disputed the integrity of that support.59 This challenged the class loyalties of labour movement feminists, creating crises of decision because, while the political left and labour asserted that feminism was neither political nor pro-worker, feminist ideology and activism was far more ‘pro-woman’ than most labour and Labor institutions. Collaboration was a necessary strategy against the male labour culture which had shaped Sydney’s inner city labour movement locations. Female organisers and labour activists, using the familiarity accorded by their own parochial spaces, resisted the undermining potential of that culture in order to pursue their goals for working women. Ultimately, confronted with obstructionism from labour men and ruling-class bias from non-labour feminists, interwar labour women were reinforced in identity and purpose both by their labour-feminist networks and by the trade union and labour precincts around the
Trades Hall in Sydney.