Alarums and Excursions: Women Versus Women Versus Men

Abstract

The campaign for equal pay was not without its contradictions. Some men were staunch supporters or became so as the campaign continued. Men who supported from the outset often grew up in families where they saw their mothers working hard, their fathers ill or injured on the job, absent at the racetrack or pub, or deserting the family altogether. Some came to understand the injustice, whether by persuasion, simple observation of women’s cost of living struggles, or through working on industrial commission claims for women’s wage justice. However, some men were aggressive in their opposition to equal pay for women, or saw ‘wages and salaries’ as the issue – meaning their (male) wages and salaries. For them, women’s incomes and equal pay were a distraction from what mattered. Yet this was not the whole story. Alongside women committed to the campaign were women who spoke out against it. Women’s opposition was based in notions of men’s pre-eminence in business and industrial affairs, whether on the domestic front or the world stage. Some considered that a man’s duty to provide for a wife and family meant men should have higher wages (whether or not they had wives and dependants), and that a wife going out to work for money undermined her husband’s status and confidence. If women were paid more, more women would enter the workforce and more husbands would become resentful, even displaced. Some women said equal pay would ‘kill’ chivalry: if women earned as much as men, women would have to pay their own way socially, again denying a man his rightful place in the firmament. Some said men had more responsibilities than women, so deserved higher pay. Men were starting out on careers, so needed more money, said some. Others claimed men took their careers more seriously, and rightly so, and women should not be bosses anyway. When debates and media reports confirmed that women were not united, this was used to undercut women’s equal pay claims. It erected another obstacle standing in the way of intrepid campaigners.