Listen to episode 155 of The Adelaide Show podcast, which was published August 10, 2016, to find out which story is fake. This week’s pieces cover attitudes to women in the workplace in Adelaide. This week’s IS IT NEWS was researched and presented by Michael Shanahan while Nigel is away.
Boss the host: Tea for the girls
Mail, September 1929
History was made in the Sydney Industrial Court this week, when an employer was fined for failing to observe the section of an award compelling him to provide morning tea for his employees. It was the first prosecution that has taken place for this offence.
The morning cup of tea among most business women in Adelaide is as important a function as the luncheon hour. In most offices at 11 o’clock there is a sudden cessation, for 11 o’clock is the milestone that marks the end of the first two hours’ work for the day. Then over the teacups the typists take up the gossip which was terminated at yesterday’s lunch or afternoon tea hour. The brisk businesslike woman becomes again the truly feminine creature engrossed with a hundred and one topics. Love affairs, dreams, the peculiarities of the boss, the charms or idiosyncrasies of various clients are discussed with enthusiasm along with the nibbling of the morning biscuit.
An Adelaide doctor stated that eating between meals is not always beneficial to health, but that a cup of tea at 11 o clock undoubtedly is an advantage to women who have to sit closely over knitting or sewing. ‘It is the relaxation rather than the tea which has the good results,’ he said.
South Australia leads: Reforms and women’s rights: Other nations copy
News January 1925
A wire from Melbourne stating that, for the first time in the history of Victoria, a woman justice of the peace had sat on the bench with tile magistrate, and that she was Mrs. Wallington, of Adelaide, causes one to glance back over the various reforms which have had their inception in South Australia.
The University of Adelaide was the first in Australia to grant degrees to women and to institute a commercial course. South Australia was the first State to grant Parliamentary franchise to women. The Act was passed in 1894.
WOMEN JUSTICES.
The Adelaide City Council was the first in Australia to appoint a trained nurse to its health staff. It was in Adelaide in 1915 that women justices were first appointed in Australia, and this was the first Australian city where a woman justice presided on the bench without a magistrate. The experiment of women police was first tried in Adelaide. Two were appointed, but this number has now been increased to 10 or more. The experiment proved such an unqualified success that it has been copied in other States. The appointment of women on the advisory censorship board was. first made in Adelaide. That was in 1917, and it led to their appointment elsewhere.
A strange anomaly exists in the fact that though South Australian women have the right to sit in Parliament and on municipal councils they have never done so, with the exception of a short period where there was a woman councillor for Seacliff.
Medicine – A career for women
Register, February 1924
In these days of woman judges, doctors of divinity, ships’ engineers and Ministers of ‘State, it would be superfluous and almost savour of impertinence to say of any profession that it lay quite within the capacity of the gentler sex.
But when having to choose a vocation for a girl is almost as’ much a matter of course as it is for her brothers, it may not be out of place to point out the peculiar fitness for the former of – a career in Medicine — of which the latter has, till recently, had almost a monopoly. I refer chiefly to the comparatively light character of the’ work from the muscular standpoint; to the cleanliness and delicacy of the manipulations required in putting together the various preparations of elixirs and medications; True, there is heavy’ work, and patients have to be lifted, but male assistance can generally be had on these occasions.
The fear of blood and ghastly injury is one of the most frequent deterrents to women taking up Medicine but reference to it is hardly relevant here since there is no sex-distinction in such timidity. At demonstration lectures and in hospital wards, quite as many women as men disdain the sight of some patients. And for a woman to treat a ghastly injury without a second thought, while’ male doctors stand at a distinctly respectful distance, is an incident which may be both satisfying and allow the women to give an amusing account of such a scene.
For the woman with the will and the ability to succeed, medicine offers a full and useful life, and an assured income, in one of the most honourable vocations in the world.