Lucinda Sharpe on Woman's Sphere August 17, 1895.

*THE WORKER*

BRISBANE, AUGUST 17, 1895.

Lucinda Sharpe on Woman's Sphere.

There's getting to be very much woman's sphere towards the weird and cabalistic year 1900 Woman doesn't shear yet, although I have heard of a New England “cockie” whose daughters used to clip their father's few dozen sheep and, according to local reports, used to do it as though they were all “ringers” - I think that's the word. But you can see her even in the bush, in the country telegraph offices and post offices and at the railway stations waving flags and very timid at first, and putting on a devil of side when she gets used to the work and can tell the difference between the “quality” and the common everyday people. And in the towns there'll soon be very little left for man to do excepting to be a policeman and run lovely woman in when she gets drunk and won't go home till morning, and even the policeman's job is being jumped in America, it appears. A nice lookout for man, isn't it? He'll soon be kept under a glass case for ornamental purposes only. Did you never wonder how the bees happened to come along? They're funny, you know, the lady bees being the proprietresses of the hive, for the worker-bees are all undeveloped queens, and the gentleman-bees being kept on the premises as handy things to have about the house and kicked out without scruple to die on the streets when they begin to get bald. Once upon a time the gentleman-bee must have been the most important, for he still the biggest and finest; but he is a drone and doesn't work and swaggers round all summer inviting his plain looking womenfolk to admire him. I suppose the lady-bees gradually cut him out of all his jobs and he nearly died of starvation until they found out they couldn't do without him, so put him on a pension and kill him as soon as they're done with him. A new use for man that! What a come down to the lordly sex to be reduced to a few drones, doomed to be culled every year like cattle, and that's about what civilisation might come to if it kept on long enough in the way it is going.

“Oh, but it can't!” I hear somebody say, Well of course it can't, think goodness. We've fortunately got a little more delicate in the nerves than the bees and would the out altogether before we could bring ourselves to kill the poor fellow although we don't mind taking his job. But it's what it might easily come to if things kept on as they are going. Why, what else could we do with him? A man won't be able to get a job at all soon and a woman doesn't earn enough to keep him. And what does that mean but that he'll die out unless some bee dodge is invented to save him. He wouldn't be much loss either by the time that came. He's pretty worthless for many things, a man, if you come to think of it. Already he begins not to know how to get a job and by-and-by he'll forget how to work, which is what the gentleman-bee has gone through.

Talking about jobs, we're supposed to live in a very civilised age, but without joking it is certain that a man who can get work feels that he is one of the fortunate and that there are, tens of thousands who either can't or don't know how, which isn't quite the same you know. The result is quite funny sometimes.

One time we lived next neighbours to a man who was a small contractor and general handy man, made coffins and had a hearse, kept dairy cows and some bees and was generally industrious and pushing. It was a family that always talked business at the table, too, and the smallest children used to take a deep interest therein, and their spirits used to rise and fall with the family business barometer. One of these children, seven or eight years old, came over one morning smiling as though she'd just found a stick of lolly.

“Well, Polly,” I said, “ You're very glad looking this morning, What is it?”

“Oh, Mrs. Sharpe!” said Polly, in a joyful voice, “Miss Smith ids dead and father's got the job.”

And I knew that the sound of hammering that came across the paddock was my industrious neighbour cheerfully constructing a coffin for Miss Smith, and that the boys were as cheerfully cleaning up the hearse for Miss Smith, and the mother as cheerfully putting clean mourning bands on her husband's and eldest boy's hats for Miss Smith, and that there was whistling and singing and something extra for supper all because Miss Smith was a corpse and “father's got a job.” And I'm sure that if somebody had run joyfully in and said that it was all a mistake and that Miss Smith wasn't dead and it wasn't a job and that could stop making the coffin and getting the hearse ready and putting on the weepers that a general sadness would have fallen on my industrious neighbour's household and it would have been felt that Miss Smith had done them all a very grievous wrong. Indeed, my neighbour told me himself that he once made a coffin on the off chance, for a sick neighbour who recovered, and there was still a touch of sadness in his voice as he went into details on how he kept the coffin for a year.

“I hoped it would come in handy,” he observed, naively. “But it was always an inch or two too short or not deep enough, so I had to cut it down after all and lost considerably over it, I can assure you.”

And all for a job. Talk about waiting for dead men's shoes! I reckon that waiting to make dead men's coffins is a peg worse, and yet everybody does it, really. It's such a favour to be allowed to work that one would imagine work to be a luxury altogether, and it is a luxury which women are carefully monopolising in the 'prentice lady-bee fashion. And that's where her sphere now is different to what it was once upon a time. She used to work for her own family, and now she works for somebody else's family, which, of course is very socialistic and humanitarian, don't you know on paper and to hear about, but in actual practice is something very different, when the somebody else doesn't work for your family too.

I don't like this new sphere of women over much, I'll confess. A very emphatic New Woman of my acquaintance was very indignant when I said as much to her. “Do you want women to stay slaves?” she started. “Do you think we're good for nothing but to scrub floors and cook and wash shirts, and that we haven't as much intelligence as those who get drunk and loaf about, living on their wives' earnings and never do a day's work in their lives, but go swaggering about like lords and wouldn't help a woman lift a pail of water – no, not for a thousand pounds, they wouldn't.”

Here she stopped to catch her breath, where upon I took the opportunity of slipping a word in, and implored her to tell me just what all this had to do with it. “To do with it!” she retorted. “Well, I am astonished and from you, too, Mrs. Sharpe. Why, we haven't got votes, and these unions won't let us work, and we're expected to put up with everything that men like to do. And why should we, I'd like to know? Let woman do what they can and have an equal opportunity, say I, and then we'll show men that we're as good as they are.”

“So say I, too,” I told her, “supposing, of course, men would fix up things as they ought to be fixed, and even if he did it would be all right that way, only not right in the way you think.”

“How right then?” asked my indignant woman's righter.

“Why, if things were right every man would get married,” I said, “and every woman would have her own house to mind and her own babies to nurse, and wouldn't go gallivanting about working at taileressing and shoemaking and all the other things that she does now, and at the sheep-shearing and mining and stoking that she'll soon be doing if things go on.” Then there was a storm if you like.

If you want to anger a women's righter – a New woman – you want to assume that getting married and having lots of babies is woman's natural sphere. And so it is, of course. And all the trouble over woman's competition is just because man won't marry her. And after all, what is the use of blaming the poor fellow for that. He can't, or thinks he can't which is exactly the same thing.

A woman must live, you know. It's no use a union saying she may work at this thing but mustn't work at that thing or that she may be a type writer but not a type-setter, or that she may make dresses but mustn't make coats. And it's no use saying she mustn't be a doctor or a lawyer or a parson or a soldier even. If she is pinched she's just going to do anything that turns up, union or no union, and when a lot of her get pinched they're going to break down any law that says she mustn't, because a much bigger law, Necessity, says she must. An odd occasional woman takes to a new trade or profession and two or three follow, then dozens, then hundreds, then thousands. And men may fume and fret and carry on and perform generally, but she gets there in the end, every time; make no mistake about that. And there's only one cure for this state of affairs – to marry her.

Of course, men are altogether right when they say that woman don't compete fairly and won't stand up for high wages and that it's bad all round when she cuts men out of a job. And its the most natural thing in the world that seeing this, and only this, they shouldn't like it and should try to stop it and talk pretty strong about it. But competition is bad all round, anyway, and if men will knuckle down to circumstances and won't keep things straight they haven't any right to turn round and abuse woman because she looks after herself, having nobody else to look after her.

It's all so miserably wrong, and yet there are many things which would be so easily put right if – Ah, that's it “if.” If there were plenty of work for every man. I suppose the average man would marry young, and it would only be the occasional woman who wouldn't have a home to look after, and she'd be so few that she'd be in great demand for teaching and nursing and things of that sort which women are born to and men aren't. She finds her true sphere naturally, for you can take it from me that it's the very odd occasional woman who doesn't want to get married, no matter what she may say on the subject.

A good woman wants to marry the man she loves, of course, but marrying somebody or other is just as natural as eating or going to sleep. That's her sphere; the same old fashioned sphere that our great-great grandmothers have had as far as the way-back and that our great-great-great-granddaughters will have if they are to take turn at grandmothering. And all the other spheres we hear about are only makeshift and won't last, because they can't last, long enough to let us reach the best civilisation with the working woman running the show and the drone man doing nothing but look pretty.

There's always this sphere business coming up, don't you know. Why, bless my heart, what does the average comfortably married woman care for a vote for, unless it is to double-bank her husband's? When women are alone on the wide, wide world and have to earn their own living and to look after themselves, and to put up with stupid laws that they feel to be bad but haven't a say about, no wonder they want votes. But if things were anyway right and most people married, a man might just as well put up both hands and have done with it as he puts up one hand and his wife another. Of course, we all say we're in favour of woman's suffrage, and so we are, because if she has got to go out into the world to work and only gets married on the off-chance and is to be treated customarily as a man, well she's got a clear right to anything that'll help her which men have to help them. It may be a broken reed and all that, but such as it is for heaven's sake let her have it. And anybody who doesn't want woman to work in competition with him or to vote in antagonism to him can stop her very effectively and simply from doing either. All he need do is to – marry her. For that is her natural sphere, as I remarked before, and when she's fairly in the middle of it she has only an enquiring curiosity for what happens outside.

Women's sphere! That's the whole question; What is woman's sphere? Ah, yes, and what is man's sphere, too? It seems to me that you can't talk of the two things apart; they are one and the same thing, don't you know , for from the very beginning of humanity and long, long before “male and female created He them.” And women can't be happy and contented if men are leading unmanly lives and prowling about lonely for bits to eat, and men can't be happy and contented if women are getting weak and ill and hysterical in the sad struggle for a crust of bread, and we aren't enemies to each other, men against women and women against men, but kin-sexes, whose every joy is bound up, one's with the other's. There is plenty of work for all, if things were any way right; work for men and work for women; work for every pair of willing hands and for every helpful brain, for the earth is fruitful everywhere, and the things we need come from the earth by man's strong arms and are made comforting to us by women's tender hands. 

Only we haven't sense enough to see it this way, and and we make stupid laws – that is, the men do – and the women would make just as stupid if they had the chance, and so we are like people in a theatre when somebody calls “fire.”

We all rush for the door and prevent each other getting out, and men trample on women's dresses and abuse them for being in the way, and women get knocked about by men and call them brutes, and it's a general mix-up altogether. And those who haven't got out say that the folks inside are disgusting, and everybody thinks himself just right and everybody else all wrong. You can't get “spheres” out of that, as far as I can see, and it's only waste of breath to try to. You've got to stop the panic first, and then you'd find that men and women would make it pretty warm for any outsider who interfered anyway. But half the men to see the performance alone and half the women, the girls anyway, do the same, which is a totally unnatural condition of things to.

LUCINDA SHARPE.