The Wife Drought by Annabel Crabb

Author:Annabel Crabb [Crabb, Annabel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Australia
Published: 2014-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

6

WHAT’S A WIFE WORTH?

Edith Brown was fifteen years old when her father was hanged. It was 1876.

Her mother had died in childbirth when Edith was seven, and the young girl was sent off promptly thereafter to a Perth boarding school run by the Misses Cowan. But even as Edith undertook her education, her father – pastoralist Kenneth Brown – addressed himself assiduously to his own self-destruction, drinking himself into madness, beggaring himself on the horses and eventually shooting dead his second wife, Mary Tindall, a crime for which he was crisply sentenced to the ultimate sanction then available under Western Australian law.

Now, one might ordinarily expect a teenager subjected to such Gothic detail in her early years to take things relatively quietly for a bit. But Edith rallied. Three years after her father’s execution, she married James Cowan, the brother of her schoolmistresses. They had four daughters and a son, between which happy events Edith also immersed herself deeply in charitable work, and in 1921, much to everyone’s surprise and by a margin of only forty-six votes, Edith Cowan became the first woman to be elected to any Parliament in Australia.

When I say ‘to everyone’s surprise’, I include Edith, and most certainly I include the man she deposed in the seat of West Perth, Mr Thomas Draper, who was WA’s attorney-general at the time, and had moreover been primarily responsible for the legislation allowing women to run for Parliament in the 1921 election in the first place. Mrs Cowan’s election remains a small but reverberant matter of national pride; keep in mind, another twenty-three years would pass before Frenchwomen even got the vote.

Her campaign was reasonably orthodox. She concentrated on law and order, industry assistance and reduction in the cost of living. Her husband James assisted by knocking on doors and handing out pamphlets; he was at one point ushered into the drawing room of a lady who assured him earnestly that this Mrs Cowan was neglecting her children (the youngest of whom was by then thirty) and that her poor husband was dying of a broken heart.1

Edith – an inveterate campaigner, suffragette and activist – in the end spent only three years as a state politician. But during that time she gave Australia the closest legislative run we’ve ever seen at a minimum wage for housewives.

The question arose rather elliptically, in the course of an established parliamentary debate about whether domestic servants and – of all things – insurance brokers, should have access to the arbitration courts. At the time, there was no formal regulation of servants’ wages, though it was a common joke in the periodicals of the day that the rather emancipated servants of the Australian colonies tended to set their own terms, and did well owing to the high demand for their work.

Mrs Cowan was still a newcomer to the Parliament. The Bulletin had not yet exhausted its cartoon series ‘The New “House” Wife’, which depicted the Member for West Perth variously scrubbing the despatch box,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.