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She eateth not the bread of idleness: women and work in Fremantle 1900-1940
Patsy Brown
Patsy Brown 1999, 'She eateth not the bread of idleness: women and work in Fremantle 1900-1940', Fremantle Studies, 1: 12-24.
A number of women think that the perfect wife must give up her own career, her own desires and needs and be content simply to wait upon her husband’s moods. Such a relationship is degrading not only to the women but to the man. 1
These comments were made in 1929 by a Fremantle journalist writing for the women’s page in the West Australian. Her intention was to incite wives to become ‘New Women’, accepting a contemporary role of womanhood in a changing world. Further, she was appealing to women to cry out against doctrines (held by men of course) that it was doubtful if women had souls, that they had no sense of humour, no sense of honour, and because they could not serve as soldiers, did not deserve nationality. 2 Refutation was easy. If, for instance, women had no sense of honour, why were they given ‘the most important trust of all - the training of young children, the formation of character in those earliest and most impressionable years which do much to determine the whole future of the race?’ 3
Nevertheless, between 1900 and 1940 the ‘New Woman’ was a role to which most Fremantle women found it difficult to aspire for cogent reasons. Indeed, in these years a Fremantle woman may have felt more affinity with the virtuous woman of the Bible who ‘rose while it was yet night and [gave] meat to her household’, who ‘girdeth her loins with strength and strengtheneth her arms.’ 4
This was principally of necessity. In maritime Fremantle the largest workforce comprised men who laboured on the wharves. Women’s maritime work mostly, therefore, had to be supportive, as nourisher finding ‘meat for her household’. The woman was the economic manager, even slave, because it was vital in the lumpers’ world of casual labour, insecure wages and staggered hours. Indeed the Labor Women’s Organisation saw that ‘from the standpoint of women there is not separation of the sexes but a perfect whole’. 5
Meanwhile, waiting to be part of such a perfect whole, Fremantle working-class girls, and they were in the majority, sought a job rather than a career as a rite de passage on the way to womanhood. They had to, for Fremantle schooling finished at year ten unless the child won a scholarship to Perth Modem. For them, it is recalled, ‘you couldn’t be too choosey as to the work you took.’ 6
Factories in the industrialising city offered most opportunities for these school leavers. Such factories included Pearse’s Boot and Shoe Factory, the Western Australian Brushware Factory, the Lolly Shop, Burford’s Soap and Candle Factory, Mills & Ware Biscuit Manufacturers, and the Steam Laundry. Clara Crowther remembered her experience at Pearse’s. She began work there in 1917, when she was sixteen years old, joining fifty other girls. Their day began at 7.30 am and finished at 5 pm and on Saturdays they worked from 7.30 am to noon. On the production line some girls sewed uppers on machines strong enough to stitch army boots, others operated hot wax machines. All these devices were dangerous and likely to cause serious accidents. Long hair could become entangled and on one occasion a girl had a machine needle the thickness of a six millimetre nail driven through her thumb, thread and all. The girls at Pearse’s served an ‘apprenticeship’, following which they were classed as ‘improvers’. In reality this meant that, though trained, they were not paid as journeymen. In some factories, and Pearse’s may have been one of them, improvers were not only employed at low wages but, as trainees (so called) were given wages which immediately had to be returned as fees for ‘apprenticeships’. 7
Dorothy Monich remembers working at the Western Australian Brushware Factory in Fremantle before the war. 8 It manufactured brushes of all varieties for a range of purposes: for households, foundries, flour mills, breweries, mines, bottling works, factories, street cleaning and personal needs. Like Pearse’s, the plant was dangerous. There were dust, fibres, vapours and gases to inhale. There were toxic chemicals in spray-paint and varnishes. Girls applying spray-paints may well have been masked, but a miasma of paint with all its noxious ingredients would persist in the air for everyone to breathe. The work was dirty. It is recalled that ‘you couldn’t go to work dressed up.’ 9
In the spirit of modernisation, the factory was run on lines of time and motion. The girls punched a time clock on entering and then worked on their production lines. There were ‘different machines for different brushes’ and each type of brush had its stages of creation. Girls cut, bound, trimmed, tied and sorted fibres, spray-painted broom handles and put on brush wings. On leaving at the end of the day they again punched the time clock. 10
Dorothy Monich later worked at the Lolly Factory in Bannister Street. She was one of three employees, she and two men. She performed the routine work, wrapping lollies, packing them in cans and boxes and moistening jubes and coating them with sugar. The making, shaping, colouring, pressing and stamping was done by the men, and ‘Mr Sinclair did all the coconut toffee and boiled lollies.’ 11
There was of course work beyond the factories. Shops offered one possibility. By rules of the Arbitration Courts, women shop assistants were only eligible to sell toys, women’s clothing, corsetry, millinery, perfumes, artificial flowers, jewellery, ecclesiastical and devotional articles, wools, paper pattern books, flowers, toiletries, fruit, vegetables and soft drinks. 12 Office work became increasingly attractive to girls after the Technical College in Fremantle began commercial classes in 1905. 13 Previously the office had been the domain of men. Edward Wittenoom, manager of the Fremantle branch of Dalgety & Co, for example, employed a male secretary who did typing and dictation, half-yearly reports and copied Board minutes. 14 By 1912, Wittenoom’s secretary and others like him, were replaced by girls who had left school at fifteen. 15 Girls were proving very successful in commerce. The results of examinations run by the Fremantle Chamber of Commerce in 1912 showed that ‘many of the prize winners were girls.’ 16 Indeed, offices apparently became over staffed by women over the next decades. In 1931, H Parker, lawyer and member for North-East Fremantle, complained that there were so many girls employed in offices that they were taking jobs from men with family responsibilities. 17
There were jobs for waitresses and barmaids aplenty in hotels and cafes. Fremantle was ‘the stopping-off place for tourists and impecunious seamen.’ 18 To cater for them a service industry developed, providing abundant female employment. Hotels in Fremantle in these years ranged in quality and style from the Orient, the ‘leading residential hotel in town’, 19 to the boisterous, like the tavern which stood in High Street opposite the WA Bank, where according to the bank manager’s son, ‘many unsightly things happened, sights which shocked children.’ 20
The Orient was owned by Mabel Parry. Her waitresses worked in dining rooms where the patrons were served from beautiful silver laid on damask cloths, and the waitresses were similarly immaculate. 21 At the Cabin tearooms, owned by Mrs Evans and her son, service was given in a ‘homely atmosphere, and wages were good.’ 22 Little opprobrium was levelled at waitresses. Barmaids, on the other hand, attracted a great deal. The barmaid viewed herself as a respectable woman, honestly and gainfully employed. Others saw her as seductress. In 1914 a letter writer to the West Australian protested at remarks made by Sir Walter James in regard to barmaids. ‘We would like to point out to that gentleman’ she wrote (it is assumed that the anonymous letter-writer was a woman) ‘that we have no doubt whatever that he has found many a girl, both in and out of the bar, ‘an armful of charms’, but we would like to draw his attention to the fact that there are many noble women standing behind the bar in Western Australia who have a higher ambition in life than to stand with open arms to receive either Sir Walter James or any of the young men who are his acquaintances who may have made the same pitiable choice of lady friends. ’23
Staff from the Cabin Tea Rooms in High Street on a picnic at Point Walter, 1928-30. Courtesy Fremantle Local History Collection 3883
Another section of the maritime service industry was prostitution. Some women chose this, but others were forced into it because of poverty. 24 ‘Freelance’ prostitutes worked along Fremantle streets catering to a clientele of seamen who preferred street-walkers to prostitutes in brothels. 25 These street-walkers may have had style and beauty to match the street-walkers of Sydney in the 1930s. 26 May Aherne, for example, was judged by a prosecuting Fremantle magistrate to have had ‘some claim to good looks had she not set out on a profession not usually set out in a business directory.’ 27 Rooms in particular hotels, namely the Terminus, the Duke of York, the Oceanic and the Esplanade, were used by freelancers as places of business. 28 Other prostitutes worked from their own insalubrious accommodation. A certain Mr Houston, it was claimed by an investigative journalist from the Fremantle Times, ‘lived on rack rents forced out of prostitutes and poor unfortunates who cannot afford to do other than rent his fetid dens'. 29 There were at least eight such ‘fetid dens’ in the vicinity of certain hotels, one of the worst near the Oddfellows. 30
Brothels sprouted in Fremantle as in any port city ‘sailors’ town’. Madame Marie Guidotti was madam of a brothel in Suffolk Street. She is remembered as always dressing beautifully in black and when promenading the town, leading two dogs.“ She engaged maids who doubled as prostitutes, and she herself took on that role when short-staffed. She also did the cooking for the establishment. 32 She was considered by the police to be ‘operating a good house, well-conducted in an exemplary manner.’ 33 Mary Ann Coates, also known as Collins, was the madam of Rose Cottage, a ‘smallish but superior establishment’ in Essex Street. She employed staff who had style and could tempt job applications with offers of good pay. Mrs Coates persuaded a girl that she could get more money as a prostitute than as a maid. The girl took her lure and hence worked not only for Mrs Coates but also for Madame Guidotti, ‘disporting herself on their verandahs scantily clad.’ 34 Another brothel madam was Lena Ferrari, ‘a rather attractive Italian.’ 35 The best-known brothels in the 1930s were The Palms, My Blue Heaven, Rose Cottage, and a ‘limestone cottage on the north side of Leake Street, just east of the Terminus Hotel'. 36
Some girls may have been forced into prostitution for reasons other than good pay or dire poverty. Madame Guidotti was imprisoned for two years in 1907 for ‘detaining a girl for purpose of prostitution.’ 37 There was a beautiful Aboriginal girl with the pseudo name of Jilgie, who was supposedly forced into prostitution by her brother. 38 Fremantle residents can recall Japanese sailors between the wars, coming ashore from naval vessels in port and queuing outside a brothel in High Street run for, and staffed by, Japanese. 39 It is a possible scenario that girls in this establishment had been sold into prostitution in Japan and China and transported to a hideous life in Fremantle. 40 This also raises the question as to how these Japanese women entered the country with the ‘White Australia Policy’ in operation. Could it have been that there was pressure from the British government to allow them to slip through the net because Japan was an ally? 41
Despite the educational and social disadvantages which meant most Fremantle girls could not be ‘too choosey’ as to work, there were certainly some who could and did take up careers rather than jobs. Anne Anderson was a Fremantle girl who succeeded as a teacher. She attended Princess May Girls’ School, then taught there from 1913 to the 1940s, rising to the post of head mistress. Former pupils describe her as having had ‘a loving, caring, Christian approach to her teaching.’ 42
Another profession increasingly attractive to young women in these years was nursing, perceived by the community as having womanly elements of sacrifice and nobility - woman at her finest. Hospitals were places where dedication, enthusiasm and sacrifice were certainly required. Nurses were expected to work long hours, seven days a week. 43 They performed ‘hard and unpleasant duties for ten hours a day’ for ‘scandalous pay’. 44 Indeed, it was alleged that nurses were the worst paid in the professional and semi-professional classes, and that in their probation years ‘they were poorly fed and badly accommodated and trained under a sweating system.’ A nurse was subject to oppressive discipline, forfeited individual liberty and was expected to do the duties of a domestic servant. She needed unlimited patience and a level head. 45 The career, however, afforded standing and dignity and remained a popular choice.
Vocations produced women of great authority - head mistresses, hospital matrons, prison warders and police women. As regards the latter, there were five police women in Fremantle in 1919, doing ‘pioneering work’. They served as adjuncts to policemen and went into situations where men would have been intrusive. ‘Good work was done by women police, particularly with juveniles’ it was recorded in 1919. 46 They ‘spoke to’ girls on the street, removed children from ‘immoral surroundings’, met trains and boats coming to the port with immigrants, and made visits to homes and institutions. 47
Women, it would seem, were not politically quiescent in their workplaces. Outside the home they made industrial stirrings. At Pearse's Boot and Shoe Factory there was once a strike, and although it only lasted a minute 48 it was symptomatic. Tailoresses in 1896 had been the first women to found a union. In 1911 women shop assistants, including those who served in Fremantle shops such as Pellews and Fisher Bairds, were encouraged by the shop Assistants’ Union. Jean Beadle, President of the Labor Women’s Organisation, was invited to speak to them on this subject at a ‘special meeting of the ladies.’ 49 Female hotel staff needed to be strong to resist sexual harassment and other nuisances incumbent on employment in hotels and bars. Their Barmans and Barmaids Union was registered in 1921. In that year too, Cecilia Shelley, Secretary of the Hotel, Club and Caterers Union, became the first woman Trade Union Secretary in Australia. In 1935 nurses formed their Trade Union.
Marriage and motherhood, however, was regarded by Fremantle women, as by others across the nation in these years, as their ultimate destination. It was accepted that the household was at the centre of the whole economy. 50 It was believed that Women’s work within the household converted the moneys provided by the breadwinner, whether it be another or herself, into goods and services for the family and this was paramount to family survival. 51 It was believed ideally that ‘good housekeeping should be the goal of all women [who] should be capable but serene, planning her work so that she has time for other things.’ 52 How to create this paragon‘? The Fremantle Labor Women’s movement believed that a girl’s education should include housekeeping even if she were gainfully employed and from forty hours of paid work, four should be taken to learn to ‘cook, wash, polish the floor, clean the grate and stoves and make fires.’ 53 Girton College, an exclusive Anglican school for girls in Fremantle, offered needlework as a general subject and special classes in ‘cooking, mending, laundry, home nursing, dressmaking, first aid and care of the home.’ 54 The Princess May Girls’ School had similar classes in ‘home economics’. 55 On the other hand, education came through harsh reality. ‘Many [women] became educated by the sheer struggle for existence in coping with families they could not feed properly and with husbands who were unable to find work and who had lost their self-respect. They found themselves unconsciously moving towards a better recognition of their own worth as women.’ 56
To become a mother was also expected of married women. The mother was revered by church and state as being like the Roman matron, progenitor of statesmen, soldiers, and workers. 57 Many women in these years had large families. Margot Langton, granddaughter of William Watson, parliamentarian and founder of Watsonia Meats, declares that her grandmother was too busy to attend functions when her husband represented Fremantle in Canberra. ‘Grandma had ten children and a house to run.’ 58 A chilling fate of some married women is suggested in the admonition to girls that they should learn to cook so that they could ‘produce dainty teas’ for the family in order to help a mother who might be sickly with constant child-bearing. 59
The role of ideal wife and mother was defined in a speech given at the Melbourne offices of the Colonial Sugar Refinery in 1929. ‘I do not know’, the speaker proclaimed, ‘that all people thoroughly appreciate really what a woman is in a man’s life, and I do not hesitate for a moment to say that any success I may have achieved during my career has been greatly assisted to that end by my wife, whose help was ever at hand.’ 60 Similar sentiments were expressed in another speech by a retiring member at CSR. It was declared that ‘if a man is helped at all in doing his duty, it is by the wife who faithfully waits on him and labours at home. Should there be a breakdown at the factory in the small hours of the morning to which the man was called, or should he be detained at work all night, it was the wife or mother who would cheer him when he returned home after his arduous labours and help him do the right thing. If an accident occurred to him the woman took charge and nursed him through his troubles.’ 61 Employees of the Fremantle branch of CSR and of other businesses, men of their time, would, it can be assumed, have had no quarrel with these sentiments.
It was in all sorts of family troubles that women showed their worth. Two such women were Mrs Wade and Mrs Jeffrey. RC Wade established the Fremantle Printery in 1911. In 1914 he enlisted to fight in the Great War, but after his return he lost all interest in his business. His wife, perforce, had to carry it through. She worked long hours and did traditionally masculine jobs as a compositor and a bookbinder. Her son recalls that ‘it was hard work for a woman and took a great toll of her health.’ 62 In 1919, Cecil Jeffrey, owner and editor of the Fremantle Times, fell victim to the Spanish Influenza epidemic which was then sweeping the nation. His widow, left with two small children, assumed the jobs of writing copy for the paper, canvassing for advertising, and by mortgaging her home, underwriting the finance of the whole project. 63
Advertisements for various household products tell of unrelenting labour for wife and mother. Solvol Soap promised to remove the grime of dust and the stains of vegetable preparation from women’s hands. Relax polish claimed that its use would remove the ‘aches and pains on polishing days’. The aproned figure of the heroine of the advertisement endorses its benefits. ‘Polishing used to take so much out of me that I dreaded it.’ She tells us. ‘I used to rub and rub until I was full of aches.’ After using Relax, ‘my floors are like mirrors and I don’t get the aches and pains on polishing day now.’ 64 The vast areas of polished boards in Ivanhoe, Captain Biddle’s mansion in Fremantle, used to fill the children with wonder at how the housemaids accomplished the shine. ‘And those boards! You had to get down on your knees to put polish on them and then take a cloth to shine them,’ Captain Biddle’s niece recalled. 65 With linoleum and bare boards in most houses, polishing was a general chore. It is small wonder that a medical condition is named ‘housemaid’s knee’!
A most onerous task for women was the laundry. The Fremantle Steam laundry or a laundry woman visiting the home, relieved those who could afford them. For women with no help, and for the laundry women, washing day was a grievous all day task to be undertaken once a week. Starching and ironing followed the washing and drying. Fremantle’s Burford Soap Factory which manufactured Snow White Naptha Soap promised to ‘banish washday smell’ from the whole house. Velvet soap claimed to give whiteness to clothes that was a pleasure to behold while not roughening the hands. 66 Mrs Troy, the wife of Paddy Troy, official of the Coastal Dock, River and Harbour Workers’ Union, might have had a sarcastic comment to make about such claims. Her daughter recalls that wash day rubbed the skin from her mother’s knuckles. 67
Working in the Fremantle Steam Laundry, c 1920.
Courtesy Z Kronberger and Fremantle Local History Collection 2364
Washdays began with lighting a fire, chip, or for the more privileged, gas, under the copper and boiling ‘the whites’ - sheets, towels, table linen and white clothes. This boiling was then transferred to a tub and scoured with bars of soap and then to another tub for rinsing with water into which Reckitts Blue had been squeezed. In the Biddles household the children wore the end products of wash day, the starched, ironed clothes. Captain Biddle’s niece said of his son, Fergus Biddles, ‘I remember Fergus dressed up in a poplin suit. Think of ironing it! That’s what Mrs Thomas [the laundry woman] did. ’68
Household work for women in the homes of lumpers was doubly burdensome because of the nature of the lumper’s work which, being casual, meant irregular pay, irregular hours and sometimes no work at all. The result was threatened or actual poverty. Good economic management of the home was vital and the labour of the woman meant the household’s survival. The extent to which the family relied on the good wife and mother is evidenced by her absence as given in an account by the daughter of a lumper whose mother died in childbirth in 1930. Her father, left without a partner, and with daughters too young to help, had to attend to his own duties as breadwinner as well as those of his now absent wife. He laundered, shopped every day as there was no cold storage, cooked, cleaned (which meant scrubbing floors) and made pyjamas and petticoats for his children with the sewing machine. The vegetable garden and the poultry also had to be tended. 69
In any home, if the woman could not manage, it brought suffering. Such a failed family was described in the Fremantle Herald in 1919. In a Fremantle tenement a family of eight lived in conditions of indescribable filth and squalor. The youngest of the six children lay on a bed of dirty rags and was covered with flies. The other children were presumably in a similar state of physical neglect. 70
Fortunately for women, even poor women, by the 1920s, household appliances were easing the burdens of hard physical labour in the home. Housework was becoming ‘de-skilled’, but as a corollary, less arduous, so did they care? Magnet stoves were guaranteed to cook ‘easily - quickly - perfectly - all the time.’ There would be, the manufacturers promised, no more need for the owner of such a stove to be anxious that her dishes be cooked too little or too much, for the Magnet controlled the cooking and promised that each recipe would be done to perfection. 71 Other electrical appliances after the 1920s included irons, heaters, fans, vacuum cleaners and washing machines. All of these substituted technology for manual skills. Such technology had the approval of the Labor Women’s Organisation. ‘Women should be provided with all the assistance that science has to offer’, it was asserted in 1930, for ‘the existing conditions of hard work for women are a disgrace to the community.' 72 With the advance of science and technology the visual images of ordinary and less-advantaged women were changing. Advertisements began to present the ‘housewife’ as less the aproned and dowdy drudge featured in the Relax polish advertisements, and more the woman of elegance as featured in the advertisements for Persil Soap Powder. 73
Finally, charitable work by women cannot be forgotten, work performed by married and unmarried women, the rich and the poor. In 1928 Mrs Frank Gibson, Mayoress of Fremantle, named some of the charities to which Fremantle women gave their time and efforts: the Silver Chain, the Kindergarten Mothers’ Club, Parents and Teachers Association, the Hospital Auxiliary, the Ugly Men’s Association, the RSL, and church social centres. Football clubs, so essential to Fremantle’s life, should also be mentioned. ‘Women’, Mrs Gibson concluded, ‘did most of the work ’74
Fremantle woman, like her sisters across the nation, ‘gird[ed] her loins with strength and made her arms strong’. 75 She may have repeated this in the words of the modern feminist song, ‘I am woman, I am strong.’
Presented at the Fremantle Studies Day
4 May 1996, Fremantle History Museum
ENDNOTES
1 M Jeffrey, West Australian, 5 May, 1929
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
4 Proverbs, 31, vs. 15 and 17
5 Jean Beadle papers, Battye Library Private Archives, 31 14A, items 12-13
6 Dorothy Monich, oral history transcript, Local History Collection, Fremantle Library. Oral history tapes and transcripts in this collection are at present filed alphabetically.
7 Clara Crowther, oral history transcript, Local History Collection, Fremantle Library
8 Dorothy Monich, op.cit.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid.
12 Shop Assistants and Warehouse Employees Union, record books 31 July 1911. Records held at the Union Headquarters. Adelaide Terrace, Perth
13 G Reekie. ‘Female office Workers in Western Australia 1895-1920’ in Time Remembered No. 5, 1982, p 7
14 Dalgety’s, (Fremantle Branch), Noel Butlin Archives, ANU, N8/ 106
15 Evelyn Frame, oral history transcript, Local History Collection, Fremantle Library
16 The Golden Gate, (journal), 15 March, 1912, p 3
17 Western Australian Parliamentary Debates, 1930-1931, p 386
18 Fremantle Times, 4 April, 1919
19 Mabel Parry, hotel proprietor, oral history transcript, Local History Collection, Fremantle Library
20 WG Clifton, unpublished manuscript, Battye Library
21 Mabel Parry, op. cit.
22 Irene Ladnor, Cabin Tea room waitress, oral history transcript, Local History Collection, Fremantle Library
23 West Australian, 8 October, 1914
24 Fremantle Herald, 10 October, 1919
25 R Frances, Prostitution in Perth, Fremantle and the Eastern Goldfields 1895-1939, M.A. thesis, University of Western Australia, 1979, p. 16
26 R Perkins, ‘Being and becoming ‘Working Girls’: an oral history of prostitution in Sydney 1935-1985’ in J. Shields (ed.), All Our Labours: Oral Histories of Working Life in Twentieth Century Sydney, Sydney, 1985
27 Fremantle Herald, 9 January, 1914
28 Ibid., 10 October, 1919
29 Ibid., 17 October, 1919
30 Bill Latter, unpublished manuscript in the hands of the author
31 Hero Wilkinson, oral history transcript, Local History Collection, Fremantle Library
32 Magistrates’ Journals for 1913, An 17 Fre, items 1-29, State Records Office
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid.
36 AH Chate, Fremantle 50 Years Ago, PR 3907, Battye Library
37 Police Occurrence Books, State Records Office, Acc. 419, Items 7-29
38 X Herbert, Disturbing Element, Collins Angus & Robinson, Sydney: 1991, p 189
39 J Clements, oral history transcript, Local History Collection, Fremantle Library
40 Such a proposition is derived from the thesis of James Francis Warren, Ah Ku and Karayuki-san: Prostitution in Singapore 1870-1940, Oxford university Press, Singapore: 1993
41 B Cohen and D Black, Australia: a Topical History, revised edition, Carroll’s Pty. Ltd., Perth, nd, p 177
42 E Silbert, ‘The History of Princess May Girls’ School’, unpublished typescript manuscript, Local History Collection, Fremantle Library
43 West Australian, 27 February, 1899
44 Fremantle Herald, 14 February, 1919
45 Fremantle Times, 25 June, 1920
46 Western Australian Votes and Proceedings of Parliament, 1919, vol. 2, paper 23
47 Ibid.
48 I Crowther, op. cit.
49 Shop Assistant and Warehouse Employees Union, Record Book, 31 July 1911
50 GD Snooks, Portrait of the family within the total economy: a study on longrun dynamics, Australia 1788-1990, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge; 1993
51 A Game and R Pringle, ‘Sexuality and the Suburban Dream’ in T Jagtenburg and P D’Alton (eds), Four Dimensional Social Space: Class, Gender, Ethnicity and Nature, a reader in Australian social sciences, 2nd edition, Harper Educational Publishers, Artarmon, NSW, 1992, pp 284-289
52 The Golden Gate, 26 April, 1912, p 8
53 Jean Beadle papers, Battye Library Private Archives 2600A
54 Girton College, Prospectus, Battye Library Private Archives MN 614
55 Sunday Times, 25 September, 1935
56 J Clement, ‘A History in All Men’s Times: a review of G. Bolton, A Fine Country to Starve In, unpublished typescript manuscript, Local History Collection, Fremantle Library, p 3
57 Ibid.
58 Personal interview with Margot Langton, 5 September, 1995
59 West Australian, 26 February, 1910
60 Records of the CSR, A20, F4D10, 18 May, 1929 in Noel Butlin Archives held at ANU
61 Ibid.
62 RC Wade, oral history transcript, Local History Collection, Fremantle Library
63 M Theophilus, daughter of Myrtle Jeffrey, personal correspondence
64 West Australian, July, 1933
65 Bay Black, personal interview, 21 August 1993
66 Advertisement, West Australian
67 Hazel Buterac, daughter of Paddy Troy, Union Official, CDRHWU, oral history transcript, Local History Collection, Fremantle Library
68 Bay Black
69 Phoebe Freeman, oral history transcript, Local History Collection, Fremantle Library
70 Fremantle Herald, 2 January, 1919
71 West Australian, November, 1928
72 Jean Beadle papers
73 West Australian, advertisements, July 1933
74 Fremantle Advocate, 20 December, 1928
75 Proverbs, 31.17.
This page incorporates material from Garry Gillard's Freotopia website, that he started in 2014 and the contents of which he donated to Wikimedia Australia in 2024. The content was originally created on 25 August, 2017 and hosted at freotopia.org/fhs/fs/1/Brown.html (it was last updated on 4 June, 2024
). The donated data is also preserved in the Internet Archive's collection.
The title is from Proverbs 31:27. 'She looketh well to the ways of her household, and eateth not the bread of idleness.'