Union of Australian Women
The Union of Australian Women is a left-wing women's organisation concerned with local and international issues regarding women's rights, international peace and equality.
The UAW was established in Sydney on 31 July 1950 in New South Wales. Branches in Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania soon followed. In 1956 a national UAW was set up, with an executive committee based in Sydney and representatives from each state organisation.
The UAW's self-published magazine, Our Women, mixed mainstream content such as recipes with news from the trade union movement, tracts on women's equality and articles on Aboriginal rights. Although the UAW was never officially affiliated with any political party many of its founding members were in close contact with Communist Party of Australia. The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation kept the organisation under surveillance during the 1950s and '60s.
The UAW campaigned for women's rights to work, with equal pay and conditions, affordable childcare, Indigenous rights and the environment, and strongly protested against Australia's involvement in the Vietnam War. The UAW vigorously protested against the South African apartheid movement.
International Women's Day was almost solely organised by the UAW in the early years after World War II and the UAW organised the first United Nations-sponsored international conferences for women in 1975, International Women's Year.
The UAW enjoyed success in the 1950s and 1960s with their combination of the conventional and subversive, being a "product of both mainstream and left culture" but were considered conservative by the post-Vietnam Women's liberation movement.
By the late 1980s and 1990s, the UAW began winding down. Currently the Victorian UAW continues. The UAW is currently the National body as well as the Victorian body.
History
The UAW was established in Sydney on 31 July 1950 as the successor to the New Housewives' Association, with the first branch formed in New South Wales, soon followed by Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania. The Northern Territory had a branch revived from the defunct Darwin Housewives' Association, but purportedly attracted few members due to concerns of Communist affiliation.In 1956, the national UAW organisation was formed, comprising an executive committee based in Sydney and representatives from each state organisation. While executive decisions on national/international issues and state issues were planned at the national and state levels respectively, the bulk of activities were carried out by suburban sub-groups in each state. Through this grassroots approach, the UAW was on one hand able to connect housewives and mothers in local communities to national or international issues beyond the home, and on the other, provide the organisational backing to campaign for improvements in their members' immediate surroundings—such as child-minding centres in Rockhampton.
Maternalism
The UAW's name, as opposed to the NHA's, reflected their aim to attract "all women", recognising that those who stayed in the post-war workforce were no longer necessarily housewives and would want to identify otherwise.Nevertheless, the domestic focus persevered, especially through the 1950s, shaping what has come to be called UAW's "maternalist" approach. The working-class mothers and housewives who comprised the bulk of earlier UAW membership did challenge traditional maternalism by recognising the necessity for women to work, and in Victoria overcame traditional maternalist policies by advocating local and subsidised childcare for all working women. Nevertheless, they subscribed to the underlying notion that children were a woman's responsibility, which informed their stance on issues from living costs to environmental damage, and especially war. The UAW's significant peace activism stemmed from the perceived universal concern of mothers over the mental and physical well-being of children.
Maternalism provided the ideological backdrop for domestic activities, such as apron-making and millinery demonstrations, to comfortably coexist alongside equally important discussions on serious political issues in local group meetings. Similarly, the UAW's self-published magazine, Our Women, juxtaposed mainstream content such as recipes, light-hearted chat and fashion tips against the latest workers' union news, tracts on women's equality and articles on Aboriginal rights.
The UAW's discourse on the universality of motherhood followed a long tradition of uniting women across race, class, and even national divisions, providing an impetus for local women to agitate for change "from within, rather than from the fringes of, mainstream society".
Political affiliation
Although the UAW was never officially affiliated with any political party, it was associated with the Communist movement from its inception. Many of its founding members were Communist women who kept in close contact with Communist Party of Australia, which, along with the NHA and other UAW-affiliated organisations, narrowly avoided dissolution by the defeated Communist Party Dissolution Act 1950.The magazine Our Women was established and first edited and published in 1952 by Dorothy Hewett, a foundation member of the UWA, a journalist and a member of the Communist Party. She had the idea while travelling to Vienna as a UWA delegate after seeing similar initiatives abroad. Hewett and others supported a then "radical agenda" that included peace, disarmament, gender equality and Indigenous rights.
When, in 1954, the UAW collected individual signatures supporting a ban on hydrogen and atomic bombs and sent them to then-Federal Minister for Labour and National Service Harold Holt, Holt sent back each slip to its signatory, denouncing the UAW as "completely under the control of the Communist Party of Australia", characterising their methods as "insidious" and "deceptive".
Former CPA members later claimed the CPA had little direct involvement in the UAW's actions and that the UAW was "not a danger to the status quo". However, the circumstances surrounding the UAW's formation and individual members' actions in the politically hostile Cold War environment earned it the continued scrutiny of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation through the 1950s and 1960s. Member Barbara Curthoys claimed that every state branch had "at least one ASIO agent" in a book launch of the UAW's official history. Accordingly, the UAW did not keep a full record of members during that period.
Despite initial condemnation by the New South Wales Australian Labor Party, the UAW also attracted ALP members such as Nola Barber after the party split in 1955 and relaxed its ban on members from joining Communist-linked organisations.
At the local level, the UAW focused on the everyday lives of its members and sought to relate them to broader political issues, rather than dictate party policy.
Women's issues
One of the UAW's key concerns was the well-being of women across the world. While the UAW located women within its broader campaigns, it also focused on women's issues pertinent to its largely working-class membership of housewives and young mothers in the relatively anti-feminist early Cold War era. They campaigned for women's rights to work and receive equal treatment, hand-in-hand with affordable and universal childcare. With the rise of the Women's Liberation movement in the 1970s, reproductive rights and contraception became an additional focus, although the UAW's persistent maternalist and domestic approach struggled to keep up with the eventual trajectory of feminism.Women in the workplace
The UAW started off in an environment hostile to the notion of women joining the workforce, despite the availability of work, availability of time afforded by advances in domestic technology, and the necessity for working-class households to meet rising costs of living. Initial protests and letter-writing campaigns for equal pay therefore received little support from the public and even from worker's unions, whose ideas of equal family wages rested mostly on men earning the bulk of income. Nevertheless, the UAW realised working with unions would be the most effective, petitioning and vocally advocating for the issue without letting it be ignored, even as many UAW members did not personally insist on being independent earners.By the late 1960s, the tide was inevitably turning as women continued to take up work; most UAW members were now employed, although regular participants necessarily accorded their own jobs a secondary role in order to participate in UAW activities. At this point the UAW voluntarily cooperated with the nascent Women's Liberation Movement organisation in Australia, actively distributing leaflets at rallies. The UAW's most noted contributions were submissions to the National Wage Cases: firstly in 1969, where 6-year UAW member and future Parliament member Joan Child acted as spokesman for the ACTU's test case; then in 1972 alongside the Women's Electoral Lobby with partial success, followed by 1974 and 1983.
As the UAW saw their efforts come to fruition with the introduction of progressive legislation and encouraging results in the workforce, they remained persistent in supporting equal treatment at the workplace. In 1981, for example, NSW state secretary Lee Gorman pledged the UAW's support in pursuing the case of four women appealing to the Anti-Discrimination Board for being stood down by the Urban Transit Authority for being pregnant.
Childcare
was one of the UAW's earliest and most significant concerns. Their advocacy for working women was inextricably linked to their push for government-supported childcare accessible by all women. This was consistent with their position that mothers, not both parents, were responsible for children's welfare, and thus childcare was purely a women's issue. While this position fell out of favour with the feminism of women's groups from the 1970s onwards, it was once ahead of its time, challenging the traditional maternalist thinking dominant in the 1950s and 1960s, which dictated that women had to look after their children at home.The UAW's efforts were particularly vigorous in Victoria, where childcare through the 1950s and 1960s was considered a last resort—a recourse only for single mothers, the destitute and otherwise "unfortunate". Married women who required childcare to work were urged to put their family first instead. Local authorities were slow in regulating the mushrooming private childcare institutions, and insistent that childcare/pre-school services not enable mothers to "park children". In response, the UAW, despite their relatively limited political influence, worked at local levels by making mothers aware of existing efforts, and collecting data to present to local authorities as evidence establishing the pressing need for quality, accessible childcare and preschool services. Crucially, this involved lobbying for local government funding as well as higher child endowments.
Although the UAW met with limited success in the 1950s and early 1960s, it was ironically near the end of the 1960s, when they started losing members to the Women's Liberation movement, that their efforts to lay the necessary groundwork paid off. Childcare became a mainstream concern, and prominent UAW members such as Alma Morton built on their experience to become leaders in the successful Victorian community childcare movement. Anne Sgro was active in her local area in establishing an early childcare centre.