At the end of 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression, the South Australian Housewives' Association president vented her frustration over spiraling prices in the organization's journal: “What chance has the consumer with the monopoly on one side and the labour unions on the other?”Footnote ¹ By this time, the enemies had also come to include government bounties and tariffs, but, despite these challenges, the Housewives' Associations grew rapidly throughout the decade. Indeed, food prices and availability were the principal factors in the politicization of large numbers of Australian women during the Great War and throughout the interwar period, as was also the case in other parts of the Western world.

Mrs. Evans Hardy's plaintive cry indicates that, in Australia, the politicization of consumption among women was not tied to the labor movement or to socialist ideas, as it was in Britain and Canada and some American cities such as New York, Seattle, and Detroit.Footnote ² Nor were the leaders Left-feminists of the kind Landon Storrs has described in her analysis of the League of Women Shoppers in New Deal America.Footnote ³ Those who guided the Australian Housewives' Associations, while adopting some militant policies, eschewed the use of street demonstrations and violence and rejected any explicit party affiliation of the Left or the Right. Like those who joined the Canadian Housewives' Associations, they presented a respectable and maternal public image that “enabled other non-political women to become political activists.”Footnote ⁴ But in contrast to the women Julie Guard has examined, they did not cooperate with unionists, explicitly rejected communists as members, and were careful always to conform to contemporary codes of appropriate feminine behavior. Their activism during the Depression years did not include support for the unemployed; rather, they saw their mission as helping members to stretch the family budget further and so weaken laborist arguments for higher wages or more radical redistributive measures. Yet even though they were led primarily by women with conservative political affiliations, their independent gender-based position on issues of consumption defies easy political categorization, reinforcing an argument I have made elsewhere about the permeability of some of the boundaries between radical and conservative women's political engagement in this period.Footnote ⁵

Although the interwar period was marked by the formation of many other women's organizations and the expansion of existing ones, none came near to rivaling the Housewives' Associations in attracting large numbers of ordinary women, both working class and middle class. They operated in all six states and also at the national level as the Federated Associations of Australian Housewives (FAAH) and were the only consumer-watch organizations until the Australasian Consumers' Association (ACA) was founded in 1959.Footnote ⁶

Beginning in the state of Victoria in 1915, Housewives' Associations extended throughout Australia within two decades. The FAAH held its first conference in 1926, and by 1934, all six states were represented. They had achieved a combined membership of 115,000 women by 1940–1941, over half of whom were in Victoria.Footnote ⁷ At a time when the population of Australia was about seven million, this was remarkable.Footnote ⁸

This article is concerned with two issues. First, it traces the evolution of political understanding that set the Australian Housewives' Associations apart from similar contemporary organizations elsewhere, in particular their shunning of links with the labor movement. Second, it examines the means by which the leaders were able to present a growing commitment to free-market economics and opposition to state intervention, normally associated with political conservatism, as a challenge to the mainstream parties of both the Left and the Right and as an attraction to large numbers of ordinary women. This part of the discussion deals with the Housewives' struggle for recognition of consumer interest as different from but equal in importance to capital and labor. The focus is on the interwar years—when the Associations' rate of growth was greatest—and before postwar migration, the political polarizations of the Cold War, and the rapid extension of women's interests beyond the home made consensus about their economic interests more problematic and contested.

The First Housewives' Association

The first Housewives' Association in Australia originated from the cooperative impulse stimulated in the National Council of Women (NCW) of Victoria by a lecture given to delegates before the outbreak of World War One.Footnote ⁹ Led by Liberal Party luminary Ivy Brookes, these influential women claimed to have been thinking for some time about an organization pledged to “serve the interests of the woman in the home, especially the woman of limited means,”Footnote ¹⁰ but it took wartime wage freezes, the failure of price-control measures, and widespread unemployment and distress to bring politically conservative, feminist, and progressive women together to give the idea form in mid-1915.Footnote ¹¹ They were encouraged by the willingness of existing small-producer enterprises to offer “a true co-operative welcome to their new sister.”Footnote ¹²

A simultaneous expression of interest was evident in the Workers' Educational Association and socialist circles and was reinforced by ideas imported through the English journal New Age.Footnote ¹³ Despite this attention and the prewar growth of Rochdale consumer cooperatives in some Australian mining towns and other communities, the mainstream labor movement interested itself only peripherally in consumer issues.Footnote ¹⁴ The cost-of-living issue—when it was discussed at all—was subsumed in more general policy discussion about wage rates, unemployment, and “slum housing.” In their deliberations on all these issues, the Labor Party and trade unions continued to look to state provision rather than self-help or cooperativism. But a letter from a group of women published in Victoria's trade union paper, Labor Call, questioned their political will: “If the cost of living is to remain high, what does it matter whether we vote Labor or Liberal? We want a party that will reduce the cost of living.”Footnote ¹⁵

Like the unions, the overwhelmingly masculine Labor Party not only discouraged its female members from considering economic issues from a gendered perspective, but also proscribed membership of nonlabor women's organizations.Footnote ¹⁶ Although Labor men did endorse a special campaign against the rising cost of living by party women in 1915,Footnote ¹⁷ only traditional forms of protest—deputations and public meetings—were countenanced, and the campaign soon petered out. By way of contrast, those who organized the Housewives' Co-operative Association in Melbourne at the same time took as their objective “to encourage co-operative buying and marketing of produce direct from the producer to the consumer.”Footnote ¹⁸

The Association made concerted attempts to establish depots in the poorer suburbs, but a lack of capital and unsustainable expectations of volunteer workers saw them close within a year.Footnote ¹⁹ Working-class housewives had given the new organization little support, despite their dissatisfaction with Labor Party and union inaction on the issue. Possibly they lacked cash to buy in bulk, but they may also have been suspicious of the leaders' motives. There was widespread resentment that patriotic funds run by the same women who led the NCW and now the Housewives' Co-operative Association had refused to recognize the suffering of families afflicted by wartime economic disruption as equivalent to the material consequences of enlistment in the army by breadwinners.Footnote ²⁰ The growing pressure from the NCW and other nonlabor groups in the second half of 1915 for compulsory overseas military service added to fear, cynicism, and suspicion among working-class wives, and the ensuing bitterness and division arising from the conscription referendum campaigns in 1916 and 1917 rendered cooperative enterprise across the political divide impossible, at least for the time being. The Housewives' Association, now renamed and with no pretense of cross-class membership, found its main activity reduced to preaching patriotism and thrift between 1917 and 1919.Footnote ²¹

Postwar Revival and Redirection

In 1917, consumption had finally been taken up as a major issue by Labor Party leaders and politicized among working-class women by food shortages and rising prices. In defiance of calls to tighten belts, labor activists urged vigorous protest against thrift as a ploy of capitalism, and Socialist Party women, such as former English suffragettes Adela Pankhurst and Jennie Baines, led a series of violent street riots from August to October.Footnote ²² But the labor movement failed to capitalize on the women's activism or give more lasting organization to the protest movement. In a context of continuing inflation after the war and a short, sharp recession in 1920–1921 that caused further hardship, ordinary women remained open to more permanent forms of activism. A new group of Housewives' Association leaders seized the opportunity to redirect working-class women's discontent and reinvigorated the Victorian organization in 1920, modifying its politics and offering serious economic advantages that included some cooperative enterprise. Thousands were eager to join. In just twelve months, it was claimed that 75,000 had enrolled, and there were sixty-five suburban and thirty rural branches.Footnote ²³

The Housewives' Associations from this time promoted an ideal of collective female consumer power, supported most elements of the contemporary feminist agenda, and adopted some quite radical strategies to build and deploy a mass movement of women from all classes. Influenced in part by a growing interest in cooperativism promoted by public intellectuals such as Professor Meredith Atkinson, they saw themselves as contributing to a new social order parallel to the international cooperative order presaged by the League of Nations.Footnote ²⁴ They claimed to be nonparty political and did include women from both the conservative and labor sides of the political divide. But with only one exception, all the leaders throughout the interwar period came from non-Labor backgrounds and organizations,Footnote ²⁵ and they always made it clear that their position was a strongly antisocialist and anticommunist one.Footnote ²⁶ They rejected other contemporary ideas for reorganizing society, such as industrial democracy, as too close to the dreaded Bolshevism. The Bolshevik was the harbinger of “Godless Socialism” and the focus of the hysterical demonization campaigns in 1919 and 1920 that inspired fears of a “tide of unrest and possibly devastation” passing over Australia.Footnote ²⁷ Nevertheless, the Housewives' leaders were able to attract and retain working-class women members by their equally vehement attacks on the “profiteer” and the business “combine,” and their preparedness to use militant tactics such as the boycott.Footnote ²⁸ But they rarely mentioned class in their publications, focusing instead on building an organization geared to consumer protection, the promotion of gender equity and power, and application of a secularized Christian ethic of service expressed in the Victorian and FAAH motto, “For the Good That We Can Do.”Footnote ²⁹ Their attacks on profiteering were consistent with this ethic and the biblical injunction against usury.

Monopoly and concomitant exploitation of consumers, largely associated with the terms “combine” and “middle man,” were seen as unconscionable. The “middle man” did not refer to the small-scale local trader or retailer but rather to the unethical profiteer or any monopolistic organization that hindered or prevented direct exchange between producer and consumer, colluded on prices, or put restraints on the activities of small traders. Consumer interests, the Association believed, could best be met in a state that discouraged monopoly and was supportive of open markets and competition. An open-market society need not preclude cooperative enterprise, so long as it was voluntary. Their hope that this understanding of the limited role of government was shared by the antisocialist political parties received a jolt in the mid-1920s, when an enemy more formidable than big business loomed—orderly or organized marketing and, in particular, the all-powerful government-sponsored marketing board, a monopolistic combine of producers against which resistance was difficult.

Since government was now beginning to act in the same way as the profiteer, the Housewives' Associations became increasingly suspicious of state intervention or regulation in any sphere. This had the effect of pushing them to the Right in Australian discourses of political economy, though they continued to resist association with any political party, especially now that the conservative parties had taken up orderly marketing.Footnote ³⁰ In the end, the Housewives lost this battle—at least until the neoliberal revival of deregulation and free-market orthodoxies in the later twentieth century, by which time the Associations had all but died. But the contest is important for what it reveals about the small-scale household consumer perspective in debates over interwar economic policy, an arena dominated in the historical record by the duels between capitalists and producers on the one hand and labor on the other. In the view of the Housewives' Associations, this duel was not so much a class one as an exclusively masculine one that ignored the interests of women and the home.

Australian Economic Protectionism

The peculiarities of the Australian economy before the Second World War need to be canvassed briefly in order to understand the intensity of the conflict and the magnitude of the forces the Housewives were up against. Australia, after European invasion, was a settler society and, from 1901, a federated independent dominion within the British Empire/Commonwealth. It derived its export income largely from primary produce but supported a growing manufacturing industry located in the capital cities of the six states, which even by 1911 contained thirty-eight percent of the nation's people. By 1920, this figure was forty percent and by 1939, fifty percent.Footnote ³¹ Two of the most important enactments of the new Commonwealth government before the First World War were tariff protection for Australian manufactures and a conciliation and arbitration court to resolve industrial disputes and determine wage levels (alongside a system of wages boards and industrial tribunals in the states). An attempt was made in 1907 to formally link the two forms of protection by legislating exemption from excise on manufactures if the applicants could demonstrate that they were paying a “fair and reasonable wage” to their employees. While the Act was invalidated by the High Court, the “fair and reasonable” standard was increasingly used by the multiple state and federal arbitration bodies and extended across the workforce by the 1920s. This commitment in principle to protection of both manufacturing industry and the standard of living of workers' families became a pillar of the Australian economy and central to values about what constituted a fair society.Footnote ³²

Industrial output to replace imports expanded in Australia during the First World War because necessary restrictions on shipping and trade caused shortages of goods traditionally brought from Europe. The Tariff Board was established in 1921, and the machinery of protection extended and systematized during the 1920s to minimize the impact of postwar foreign competition on the new and mostly otherwise unsustainable manufacturing industries that had arisen. Wartime disruption of trade had also stimulated an array of regulatory measures, including powers of acquisition and means to advance payment to primary producers via Commonwealth and state-run produce boards. But these were nearly all dismantled by 1920 in the belief that shortages in the war-ravaged countries of Europe would keep prices (and profits) for Australian primary produce high in the coming years.Footnote ³³

When it became apparent from 1924 onward that this was not to be the case for the growers, including those moving for the first time into export, the cry was soon mounted for “protection all round.” Much of this came from members of the new Country Party, which emerged in the latter stages of the war to represent the interests of small farmers against those of labor and the city manufacturers. Mostly they worked in coalition with the conservative parties, which they pushed toward further market regulation.Footnote ³⁴ Increasingly, acquisition, grading, release, and pricing mechanisms for primary produce were assigned to marketing boards, which proliferated in most Australian states, as well as the Commonwealth, through enabling legislation in the 1920s and 1930s. Where goods had both a local and an overseas market, a strategic mix of embargoes, bounties, and tariffs would be employed.Footnote ³⁵

But “protection all round” was a misnomer; one important economic interest was left outside its compass and at the mercy of the elements—the consumer, who was given no protection against artificially raised home prices for essential foods, suffered declining direct access to growers and producers, and was denied the option of purchasing cheaper imported goods. Leading contemporary economists observed the “heavy costs to Australian consumers” of these quasimonopolistic marketing policies,Footnote ³⁶ reinforcing Housewives' Association national president Eleanor Glencross's caustic comment in 1928 that “The average working man's family was always six months behind the cost of living.”Footnote ³⁷ What was in effect a tax on necessities, especially foodstuffs, exacted a disproportionately higher cost from such families because of its regressive nature.Footnote ³⁸ Moreover, there was no guarantee that periodic wage increases for breadwinner husbands translated evenly or equitably into money available to those responsible for putting food on the table—the ordinary housewives. As Victorian Housewives' Association president Delia Russell warned in 1929, “The housewife … represents the small purse, and artificially inflated prices for daily rations that are not luxuries waken her indignation into active protest.”Footnote ³⁹

“Protection All Round” in Practice

The issue that had triggered the Victorian Association's revival and most spectacular spurt of growth in 1920–1921 was an artificial, government-induced shortage of sugar—then a vital component of the working-class diet, essential to household production of preserves. Sugar was seen as a “special case” by the national government, but, in retrospect, it presaged further policies of protection for primary produce. Grown in Queensland with the assistance of Pacific Islands labor in the years before Federation, sugar's continued production became bound up with the infamous White Australia policy after the Commonwealth of Australia came into being in 1901 and the Islanders were forcibly repatriated. The survival of the industry using more expensive white labor was subsidized by the government, but even though insufficient sugar was produced for domestic needs, a strict limit was maintained on imports by the use of tariffs. Demand rose after the war, but the controls were maintained, the Queensland government purchasing all sugar grown in Australia and then selling it to the federal government for marketing internally. In addition, an embargo was now placed on the import of all forms of sugar. To make the industry sustainable and encourage expansion to meet growing home demand as well as make future export possible, it was decided in 1920 to increase the price by nearly a third.Footnote ⁴⁰ Thus the consumer was hit simultaneously by a shortage and a massive price hike.

In response to the outrage this provoked, the revived Victorian Housewives' Association president, Eleanor Glencross, took up the cause and lobbied the government to release large quantities of sugar to be distributed directly to consumers by the Association. They would thus avoid the commissions to “Flinders Lane merchants,” the hated middlemen, seen as the real source of consumer exploitation alongside rapacious sugar millers. Thousands of women of all classes enrolled as members since this was “almost the only source of supply”Footnote ⁴¹ and, over three to four months, sugar to the value of £10,000 was distributed.Footnote ⁴² Depots were hurriedly set up and formed the basis of the branch structure; they were used for the distribution of berries and other fruits directly from fruit growers to members too. Plans were soon afoot to turn all this activity into a soundly based cooperative movement with branch stores. Hopes ran high that this “wholesome mixture” of women “of all classes and creeds” would generate a mass movement capable of revolutionizing the “ordinary channels of trade,” as well as asserting equality of status with men and the right of women to be included in the relevant decision-making bodies. Perhaps, in the process, they might also succeed in defusing class and accentuating gender as the main marker of social and economic division.Footnote ⁴³

The victory achieved in having sugar released for direct sale was a short-term one. The Association retained a high profile but lost some of its energy and momentum and, hence, membership during the middle years of the decade. Many of the depots were closing by mid-1921, though with the proviso that they would be reopened in an emergency.Footnote ⁴⁴ And, indeed, the Victorian Association carried out another distribution in 1923, when the Queensland government arranged direct delivery of a new consignment of sugar.Footnote ⁴⁵ Meanwhile, production expanded under the higher prices and embargo, but world prices fell just as Australian sugar entered the export market. The problem soon became one of overproduction, and thus the Commonwealth's sugar agreement with the Queensland government was repeatedly renewed in the interwar period to subsidize the industry's competitiveness at low prices internationally.

The rationale for “nursing” sugar by eliminating competition from imported supplies was that the rival product was grown with cheap “colored” labor; protection of uncompetitive Australian sugar growers was thus represented by the government as a defense of Australian racial homogeneity.Footnote ⁴⁶ In the Housewives' Associations' view, the major benefit went to the millers and merchants rather than the growers, and the price local consumers had to pay thus contributed little to preserving racial purity. By 1929, the price for raw sugar consumed at home was £27 per ton to reimburse the industry for dumping on the overseas market for £10 to £12 per ton.Footnote ⁴⁷ Less than a year later, the gap was reportedly even bigger—£9 overseas and £42 locally.Footnote ⁴⁸

Membership levels in the Victorian Association began to climb again in the last years of the decade, and support came from the newly formed South Australian Housewives and a redirection of focus in the NSW branch. The surge of interest was triggered by the government's implementation of the first steps toward “protection all round” as a broad economic policy rather than a response to a specific problem. In mid-1926, Thomas Paterson, soon to be minister for markets, suggested a levy on butter production to subsidize a bounty for the industry's export surplus, enabling it to be sold cheaply abroad—the cost would be passed on to the consumer as the “home price” and labeled “price equalization.” Soon after, a tariff was placed on New Zealand butter to eliminate the major source of competition.Footnote ⁴⁹ The Paterson scheme was at first voluntary, but the levy became a statutory charge in 1934. The effect, even before compulsion, had been to lift the price twenty to thirty percent above that of free imports and what British housewives were paying for the same product. By a system of licensing and regulation, the federal government also restricted the movement of butter from state to state and thus allowed for interstate price differentials unfettered by competitive pressure.Footnote ⁵⁰ During the interwar period, the two-price system was more broadly applied and quasimonopolies were granted to producers in a range of other export goods: cheese, dried fruits, canned fruits, meat, and, eventually, wheat.Footnote ⁵¹ The institution of state marketing boards in the 1930s on an ever-increasing number of products with mainly local markets further reduced both competition and the possibility of direct buying, and thus raised the cost of living.

Self-Defense, Self-Help, and Cooperation

Distrust of government was not the Housewives' Associations' immediate response to shortages, high prices, and combines. From time to time they used boycotts—their own buyer power—to combat anticompetitive behavior, such as when “they swore not to wear gloves, and in three months the price of gloves had dropped again.”Footnote ⁵² On a number of occasions, too, the Victorian Association advised its members not to be held hostage to the Master Bakers' extortionate prices for bread but to make their own if they could not find a local supplier prepared to sell below the recommended price. The Association procured yeast for sale to members, and some independent bakers went into women's homes to teach them how to make their own loaves.Footnote ⁵³

Initially, in the case of sugar, it was actually through lobbying for government cooperation that the Housewives acquired quantities for sale to members—first from the Commonwealth and then from Queensland. By bringing berry-fruit growers and consumers together through their city, suburban, and country town depots, they had capitalized on their access to sugar and made cooperative enterprise popular and viable.Footnote ⁵⁴ They also lobbied local governments for more municipal curbside markets to sell perishable items produced mainly for the domestic market, but the councils were overwhelmingly masculine and dominated by local business interests, which saw direct marketing as a threat to their trade.Footnote ⁵⁵

As faith in government faded, a new and energetic Victorian president, Delia Russell, launched a second surge of cooperativism in 1929. “[F]illed with anger at the profiteering that was going on here,” she not only purchased quantities of butter from dairy factories outside the Paterson scheme, packaging and selling it as “Housewives' Butter,” but also sourced supplies of fresh, cheap fish, meat, eggs, quantities of blended tea, potatoes and other vegetables, and firewood. In addition, she revived a system for distribution of milk cheaply to most Melbourne suburbs by dealing directly with individual farmers and dairies. She waged a “bread battle,” too, angered that prices continued to rise despite the low price of wheat, and was able to find a baker prepared to defy the Master Bakers' dictates and supply Housewives' Association stalls and the numerous rapidly opened suburban depots with cheaper loaves.Footnote ⁵⁶ This vigorous cooperative phase was short lived, however, collapsing when the Association split in 1930 and Russell was expelled.Footnote ⁵⁷ Cooperation never revived, destroyed in the short term by the Depression as most economic activity ground to a halt, and stymied in the long term by government controls over dissident producers and the proliferation of state boards into the marketing of foods grown for domestic consumption.

The Quest for Consumer Consultation

Like most Australians, members of the Housewives' Associations at first supported the principle of protection in the national economic interest, the Victorian organization resolving in 1925 that “It is unthinkable that established industries and suitable ones to be established for the future should not be maintained for the advancement and settlement of Australia.” It was therefore “imperative” that they be “encouraged by a carefully adjusted and generously administered tariff,” though they were quick to add that it must also safeguard “the interests of the consumers as well as the manufacturers.” Housewives advocated a stringent set of criteria for “protective duties,” including that the goods “be of guaranteed standard quality” and not used “to cover ineffective methods” or become “an avenue of taxation.”Footnote ⁵⁸ “[R]emoval of competition from the outside world should be sufficient for the Australian manufacturer,” and “he should not be permitted to increase the price of articles to the public” as well.Footnote ⁵⁹ On this understanding, the Association was prepared to “undertake an education campaign for the purchase of Australian goods” and supported preferential tariffs with all parts of the Empire. But the key point of the resolution was that “As the home is the place where manufactures … are used, we are strongly of opinion that a woman should be appointed on the Tariff Board.”Footnote ⁶⁰

Realizing that the trend in marketing was compulsory acquisition of produce, they therefore also demanded consumer representation on the relevant marketing boards at the same time as they promoted cooperative enterprise and free marketing. At first, then, they did not make overt attacks on government intervention, though they did not support it with any degree of enthusiasm. Certainly they recognized and attacked the political opportunism that saw politicians of all parties continue the sugar agreement with Queensland, and they even requested members to vote against parliamentarians who supported its renewal: “The countenancing of the sugar agreement means,” said Mrs. Glencross, “that our commodities are being trafficked for political support.”Footnote ⁶¹ They continued to lobby against the scheme through the Sugar Consumers' Association, but their grievance was most commonly expressed in gendered terms—that women, as the principal consumers, were the only economic interest denied representation on the board responsible for fixing the price.Footnote ⁶²

When, during and after 1926, it became evident that butter would eventually be brought under a similar scheme, they again argued for consumer representation while protesting against anticompetitive policies. At a meeting of Victoria's council in June that year, secretary Alice Thomas argued that “the plan would benefit the rich man but not the poor man.” A lengthy resolution criticized the dual-price system, yet also suggested a practical compromise in recognition of the problems facing dairy farmers. While objecting to “the principle involved whereby any private combination can arrogate to itself the right to impose levies or taxes on the community,” they were prepared to accept the butter marketing board, so long as “representation will be given to both producer and consumer, and that prices and quality … should be considered under conditions agreeable and favourable to both.”Footnote ⁶³ A similar resolution for “consideration of the consumers' as well as the producers' interests” was passed at federal conference a few weeks later.Footnote ⁶⁴

The Association also urged the government to adopt an alternative system of pricing and marketing of primary produce for export. The body they proposed would have the same oversight of these products as the Tariff Board had for schedules of duties on imported manufactured goods. They similarly suggested to the state government a Food Control Board on the British model for the same regulatory purposes locally. But a sine qua non of any such board, state or federal, must be the inclusion of “women representatives of the housewives.”Footnote ⁶⁵

In order to increase the weight and effectiveness of their representations, the 1927 conference of the FAAH resolved that all state branches “appoint special committees for the study of the tariff, and make recommendations to the Minister for Trade and Customs.”Footnote ⁶⁶ They singled out bounties as particularly objectionable, requesting that none be renewed.Footnote ⁶⁷ Over the ensuing years, the tariff committees developed an impressive level of economic expertise—sometimes acknowledged by the Tariff Board in reducing duties on certain imported products or removing them altogether if they were not competing with Australian goods. But as government controls increased overall, opposition to the whole gamut of state regulatory measures grew. The convener of the Victorian Housewives' Tariff Committee, I.J. Bowman, warned at the end of 1929 that “artificial encouragement of industry” could “defeat its own ends” by raising the cost of living to unsustainable levels, especially “[w]hen tariffs, bounties, and embargoes are used to cloak inefficiency, pamper unsuitable industries, or encourage overproduction.” It was manifestly evident that “a woman should be permanently appointed to the Tariff Board.” Their declining confidence in government was exacerbated by the minister's failure to acknowledge this expertise when the board was reorganized in 1928, even though their request had “the unanimous support of the National Council of Women,” representing the vast majority of the nation's women's organizations.Footnote ⁶⁸ Requests for representation were repeatedly refused in the following years.Footnote ⁶⁹

The Battle against Boards

At the 1932 FAAH conference, government imposts and controls took up most of the debate. The sales taxes on food items were attacked, castigated as a “class tax falling most heavily on the basic wage earner”; the revenue tariff on tea was similarly an “unjust hardship on poor people”; and the tariff on imported schoolbooks and literature was labeled “short-sighted.” In 1934, as the Depression persisted, they resolved that tariffs and embargoes generally had the “detrimental” effect of “creat[ing] monopolies which eliminate competition and cause unemployment.” They also determined to use “every means in [their] power to counteract the growing tendency of Governments—State and Federal—to appoint Boards of Control for staple foods, the result of which is to create monopolies, limit production and raise prices to consumers.”Footnote ⁷⁰ “Exploitation by private interests is bad enough,” wrote president Alice Thomas, “but it becomes intolerable when supported by the Government.”Footnote ⁷¹

In the face of the Depression, all the political parties had come round to supporting the extension of collective marketing as a “kind of half-way house between the capitalistic system and complete Government ownership and control.”Footnote ⁷² During the debates on the Dairy Products and Milk Board Bills in Victoria's parliament in 1933, the Association wrote to all members of the Legislative Council about the principles of liberty involved: “One of the most precious privileges of the people, where staple foods are concerned, is the right of free marketing within the Commonwealth.” The proposed board was “an attack on the freedom of the people,” especially since “there is no adequate protection provided … against exploitation of the consumer,” a view that was confirmed when an amendment to place a woman on the Dairy Produce Board was rejected.Footnote ⁷³

Boards were conceived by politicians purely as producer organizations. The Marketing of Primary Products Bill in Victoria in May 1935 provided government support to establish compulsory pooling through cooperative marketing boards if requested to do so by thirty-six percent of registered producers in any industry.Footnote ⁷⁴ Although the Housewives' Association was “somewhat reassur[ed]” by provision for a consumers' representative on each board, it feared conservative MP Wilfred Kent Hughes was right in observing that this government-appointed board member would not necessarily represent consumers. Kent Hughes himself believed that inclusion of consumers' representatives would “handicap” the boards' operation—“producers should have complete control.” Not everyone took such a hard line: Labor's Herbert Cremean believed the boards should have a larger number of members than proposed so that “the consuming public” is “more adequately represented,” but he too saw the legislation as “in the first place in the interests of primary producers.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Other speakers acknowledged the desirability of taking consumer needs into account, but ultimately, all came down on the side of the “preponderating voice” of the producers and their “right … to control and regulate their own industry” and “the product of their labour.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Though provision was made for a consumers' advisory committee on the English model if it was judged to be necessary,Footnote ⁷⁷ the government-appointed representative was all the concrete statutory protection consumers were actually conceded. And the Housewives' Association was right to be cynical about that. On the Victorian Onion Marketing Board, established in March 1936, for example, the government nominee represented the merchants.Footnote ⁷⁸

On the introduction of the legislation, the Housewives' Association commented wearily that “Experience in the past has left us with few illusions concerning the efficacy of boards.” To the consumer, they were “invariably expensive.” Not only was it “inevitable” that improved prices for producers would mean “consumers must pay the penalty” of “higher prices for commodities,” but they would also “foot the bill” for the boards' sitting, traveling, and administrative expenses.Footnote ⁷⁹ This was a continuing complaint, for not only were boards instrumental in “restricting fair competition,” but they also increased the margin between what the producer got and the consumer paid “with their armies of officials and inspectors” adding to the costs passed on to end-buyers.Footnote ⁸⁰

The Housewives found themselves largely in agreement with the extreme anti-interventionist conservatism of the Chamber of Commerce, which argued: “[A]ny attempt to browbeat the consumer with dictated prices by a monopoly arouses resentment and a silent but effective reply—reduction of purchases.” It was “a measure of extreme Socialism, and opposed in every sense to private enterprise.”Footnote ⁸¹ Unlike the Chamber, the Housewives' Association's “quarrel” was not with the legislation's aim to limit the control of the commercial middleman. Nor, like conservative MP John Gray, whom they quoted, was it with “the principle of giving assistance” to producers. Rather, it was with “the machinery employed towards that end,” which was autocratic and unrepresentative as well as expensive and discriminatory. “Parliament, by the appointment of so many Boards was shirking its responsibilities to the people by whom they were elected,” a practice that “was contrary to democratic principles and should be resisted.”Footnote ⁸²

Challenging the Constitution

This trend to more boards and fixed produce prices left the Housewives' Associations with little room to maneuver in their efforts to “protect the interest of the home against Government interference on the one hand and exploitation of the necessities of life by trade interests on the other.”Footnote ⁸³ But there was a legal recourse worth considering. At the 1932 FAAH conference, delegates from South Australia and Victoria had expressed doubts about the constitutional validity of the sugar agreement in relation to Commonwealth powers over regulation of trade between the states.Footnote ⁸⁴ As possibilities for bringing food producers and consumers together declined, some saw hope for reversing the trend in a challenge to the constitutionality of the whole federally sanctioned licensing system under which boards cooperated across state borders to stop free movement of goods and prevent consumers from taking advantage of price differentials between states. This arrangement stemmed from the Commonwealth government's collaboration with the states to legislate for control of marketing quotas on a nationwide basis in order to ensure a uniform “home price” system for exports. While a successful challenge would not stop price-fixing altogether, it would limit such powers to individual states.

The Housewives' Associations, along with individual producers and groups like the Sugar Consumers' Association, had long held that the federal government's actions contravened Section 92 of the Commonwealth Constitution, which guaranteed that “trade, commerce, and intercourse among the States, whether by means of internal carriage or ocean navigation, shall be absolutely free.” The states and Commonwealth believed that High Court decisions in 1916 and 1920 that the clause did not bind the Commonwealth but only the states had put the issue to rest, the argument being that the Constitution also, perversely, granted the Commonwealth the right to make laws with respect to interstate trade (Section 51(i)). But the decision of the Privy Council in James v. the Commonwealth of Australia, July 17, 1936, ruled that Section 92 must also apply to the Commonwealth, thus rendering “joint Commonwealth and State schemes for the orderly marketing of primary products … unconstitutional.”Footnote ⁸⁵

The Housewives' Association had no time for jubilation, for the Commonwealth government—a coalition of the conservative and Country parties—almost immediately announced its intention to hold a referendum to insert a new Subsection 92a into the Constitution to exempt Commonwealth laws on marketing from Section 92. This would restore the powers the federal government had assumed it possessed under Section 51(i).Footnote ⁸⁶ The enabling legislation was passed at the end of October and became law the following month. Mindful of its nonparty position and “vast membership,” and its “responsibility” as “the only organised body of consumers,” the Victorian Housewives called special executive and council meetings in December “to consider the attitude of the Association to the forthcoming referendum.” Senior vice president Cecilia Downing suggested that the “Yes” and “No” cases should be put to council just before the referendum the following March, but the executive meeting decided the “urgency of urging members to vote ‘No’” was too great to observe these niceties. South Australia's Agnes Goode, a long-term critic of the sugar agreement, was similarly concerned to make their position unambiguous: “The housewife would suffer most of all if the ‘Yes’ vote was carried.”Footnote ⁸⁷ They made no attempt at the council meeting four days later to present any arguments for the “Yes” case. “Briefly,” the president told members, “the people were being asked to give excessive power to the Government.”Footnote ⁸⁸ The executive then organized for Housewives' Association representatives to join the “No” campaign committee and for members to distribute literature and how-to-vote cards at the polling booths.Footnote ⁸⁹

A full-page advertisement in the Housewife advising a “No” vote testifies to the Association's continuing opposition to the “extension of the many Boards in Australia that have helped to increase the cost-of-living and embarrass housewives. Let the Parliamentarians attend to the Laws of the country, not members of Boards and Commissions.” Similarly, Mrs. Downing, in addressing a public meeting at the Melbourne Town Hall just before the referendum, urged the housewife to “say ‘No’ to any further Government or Board interference,” since the resulting “restraint of trade” would frustrate efforts “to bring the producer and consumer in direct touch” in order to reduce the “truly staggering” “difference between the cost of production and the price charged to the consumer.”Footnote ⁹⁰

Although the Labor Party had opposed the proposed change to the Constitution on the grounds that it did not go far enough to extend Commonwealth economic powers, the party caucus finally agreed to support the “Yes” case when it was clear that none of its amendments would be accepted by the government.Footnote ⁹¹ Only the breakaway section of the party (known as Lang Labor) and a couple of mavericks, notably Victoria's Maurice Blackburn, took up the “No” case on the hustings.Footnote ⁹² Thus the “No” victory on March 6 was a great triumph for the Housewives' Association and its supporters against all three major political parties; only 36.26 percent of the electorate voted “Yes” and the referendum proposal was defeated in all states.Footnote ⁹³ But the win was more symbolic than real, for it did nothing to reduce the number of state boards, though it did allow for some access to cheaper interstate food products, which now could not be prevented from crossing state borders.

The Housewives' Associations continued to stress that marketing boards as constituted were “opposed to the principles of democracy,” to agitate for greater consumer representation on boards, and to point out anomalies and faults in their operation. At the FAAH conference in 1940, Mrs. Downing referred to boards as “parasites on our economic system,” and reiterated that “They consist almost entirely of men whereas women, in all cases, should be the consumers' representatives.”Footnote ⁹⁴ The Associations also revived the idea of a Food Control Council “charged with the duties of watching prices and supplies of principal foodstuffs, advising the Government on food questions, examining complaints, and making public from time to time in periodical reports, important facts about food prices etc.” In addition, they wanted such a council “to be responsible for overseas marketing of surplus produce and to supersede all existing Boards dealing with primary produce.”Footnote ⁹⁵ It took the outbreak of war for Food Control Committees to be appointed, though they did not replace or stop the proliferation of marketing boards, against which the Association continued to rail, adding now that they were a waste of manpower as well as money.Footnote ⁹⁶ In late 1939, the New South Wales and South Australian governments agreed to Housewives' Association representatives on the state Food Control Committees,Footnote ⁹⁷ but not until February 1944 did the Commonwealth government arrange liaison between the Association and the national Food Control organization.Footnote ⁹⁸ And it was late 1942 before the Commonwealth Director of Rationing agreed to meet regularly with an advisory committee from the Housewives.Footnote ⁹⁹

Alternative Strategies

The Housewives' Associations had to concede that there was little they could do to revive direct selling once marketing boards became entrenched from the mid-1930s. Yet their membership expanded rapidly after the referendum of 1937, especially in Victoria. It was nearing 60,000 by May of 1938 and the organizing secretary, Rachel Robinson, reported that 34,725 of these had joined up in 1937, many as a result of a special effort made in rural areas.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Clearly, Robinson was endeavoring to assure those outside the metropolitan area that the Association's opposition to increased government powers and marketing boards did not mean they were city-focused. Their advocacy of a “No” vote evidently did nothing to alienate ordinary housewives and may indeed have played a part in the organization's spurt of growth. Perhaps more importantly, they stressed the obvious economic advantages membership would provide—especially in rural townships—through the discount-for-cash system, whereby local traders and retailers agreed to lower prices for paid-up members of the Association. This now became the organization's chief strategy and the major material attraction it could offer, advertised through its “Pink Guide” to recommended retailers.Footnote ¹⁰¹

The discount-for-cash scheme, like direct marketing, was represented by the leaders as a defense against profiteering and helped to assure potential members that the Housewives' Associations' general opposition to government interference with the “natural laws of supply and demand” did not mean they had thrown in their lot with the economic libertarians on all issues. In opposition to “vested interests” and the political influence of large retailers and the Chamber of Commerce, Housewives' leaders instructed the branches in the most effective means of exerting pressure on politicians—including questionnaires and petitions—and were successful in having the discount system preserved. Only with the introduction of rationing and price control in the war years was this suspended.Footnote ¹⁰²

Regular lectures and demonstrations of new products and labor-saving devices for the home were also popular well into the 1950s, as were the cooking, dressmaking, and millinery classes and, in earlier years, the informative articles and recipes in the Associations' monthly journals.Footnote ¹⁰³ The formation of a “younger set” in Victoria in June 1940 extended the net of the organization among young unmarried women too.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The growth continued through to the 1960s before the organization began to decline in the wake of the major demographic and social changes that saw large numbers of married women entering the workforce, a reconceptualization of consumer interest beyond domestic science and nutrition issues, and a new generation confronting assumptions about the centrality of the home to women's civic identity.