Domestic Service and Frontier Feminism: The Call for a Woman Visitor to "Half-Caste" Girls and Women in Domestic Service, Adelaide, 1925-1928

There is a paradox in the history of the WNPA. A feminist organization that took the leading interest in the welfare of Aboriginal women and children, the WNPA has been identified as one of those bodies that actually advocated, at least in the early years, Aboriginal child removal. In South Australia, as the leading historian of Aboriginal child removal points out, state legislation of 1923 enabling child removal had to be suspended almost as soon as it was introduced because of public outrage triggered by a widely publicized individual case in which a WNPA member played a leading role as villain; nevertheless, the provisions of that legislation were gradually reintroduced and then restored in consolidating legislation in 1934·37 The problematic relationship between contemporary feminist activists and Aboriginal issues of the tune is addressed in a now substantial body of argument and counter-argument. While there were ambiguities and outright contradictions in the stance taken by various feminist groups on the questions of both Aboriginal child removal and Aboriginal rights, what is relatively clear is that the groups of conservative and elite women who were the mainstay of the broader feminist movement shared "the racial anxieties and assumptions of their generation."38 Arguably, the success of the campaign for female suffrage at the turn of the century, in the face of sustained male opposition and a misogynist culture, had been due largely to the feminists' success in making their concerns and demands compatible with the concerns of the modern state; that is to say, couched in terms of the salvation of the white race and the strengthening of the nation.39 In their Aboriginal platform, they were consistent in their continuing emphasis on the health of the race and of the nation. Despite their challenging readiness to condemn male behavior, there was no essential conflict between the feminist concern to "protect" Aboriginal women from sexual abuse at the hands of undisciplined white men, and their endorsement of the more widely held concern that mixed-descent people were a potential threat to "White Australia."

Nor was domestic service then the thorn in the side that it has come to signify for late twentieth-century women's activism. As Anne Summers discussed in her classic study, the early feminists did not reject the importance of women's role in the home but rather sought a "radical reappraisal of the relationship between domestic and social existence," necessitating public, political action by women.40 It followed then that securing a regular and reliable supply of domestic servants-with state assistance-was one of the predominant concerns of the contemporary Australian feminist movement. Effectively, they demanded support in their roles as wives and mothers in terms of the strengthening of the race, at the expense of those judged less worthy to reproduce.41 The willingness of feminists to engage young mixed-descent women and girls as domestic servants in their homes meant a dovetailing of personal and political interest that was so subtle as to be barely perceptible. As Fiona Paisley noted, the white feminists' assumption that Aboriginal women should silently attend discussions "in their place" compounded the difficulties Aboriginal women had in being heard by the white community,42 but it is that telling phrase-"in their place"-that alerts us to the inexorability of the domestic service relationship. The "maternalism" of the feminist pro-Aboriginal agenda was seamlessly located within the "maternalism" of the domestic service relationship.43