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My Brilliant Career and feminism.

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`Do you remember Miss Spence's novel Clara Morison,' Miles Franklin asked Alice Henry in September 1930. `I had no idea the dear old valiant was of such stature in that direction. For a literary artist to be drawn away by causes is a form of infidelity and has its punishment.' (1) Catherine Spence had certainly been punished by the evaporation of her literary reputation by the end of the nineteenth century. (2) In this essay I want to take a tangential approach to my central concern with the feminism of My Brilliant Career by considering, first, the question of whether Franklin herself was `drawn away by causes' from her writing.

Franklin's biography certainly could suggest that she had been distracted from a literary career. As Susan Sheridan has observed, the young woman `who had wanted so badly to have a "brilliant career" as a nationalist Australian writer, went on to become an expatriate professional feminist instead' (82). From 1906 until 1915 she earned her living by working for the National Women's Trade Union League of America in Chicago, and for nine years following that she worked for a philanthropic pressure group, the National Housing and Town Planning Council, in London. When she returned to Australia to stay, in 1932, she was fifty-three. (3) Only then did she begin to publish at anything like the rate at which she had been writing. Such an account suggests that she lost time, the focused attention desirable for writing, and literary reputation, to the causes that she embraced.

That suggestion is complicated, though, by the number of novels, and plays, that she wrote at the same time as working for causes, and by the pseudonyms and the secrecy in which she entangled her literary reputation. Could it be argued, instead, that Miles Franklin was so committedly a feminist, and a nationalist, from the moment she began to write that what she calls `causes' formed a central element in her creativity, and that working for one fuelled the other? This is the argument that I endeavour to make, here, focusing on the feminism of My Brilliant Career, the place of feminism in Franklin's formation, and, finally, on the responses of Australian feminists--Franklin's contemporaries--to her first novel.

I discovered, in preparing this article, that at an international conference in the United States some fourteen years ago, I had maintained that the narrative of My Brilliant Career could not properly be called feminist. `It is an account of an individual struggle for freedom and independence', I wrote. `It lacks the recognition that such struggles occupy many women and require feminine solidarity--a recognition that can be found in her later novel, Some Everyday Folk and Dawn' (Magarey, `Contested'). Since writing that wonderfully arrogant and doctrinaire note, I have done more research on the feminism of the period of campaigns for votes for women in Australia. As a result I would now describe the feminism of the times of My Brilliant Career as far broader and more various than my earlier image of a trade union of women had allowed, encapsulating the struggles of some thousands of individual women for freedom and independence.

The Woman Movement of the turn of the nineteenth century into the twentieth depicted the principal sources of women's grievances as three. Chief among them was the current condition of marriage and, with it, the double standard of sexual morality, including what would, today, be called `marital rape'. `We seem to be all agreed for the moment that among human institutions marriage is the completest failure,' observed one of the articles in Maybanke Wolstenholme's journal, the Woman's Voice. (4) Enforced motherhood is the bane of hundreds of women's lives today' wrote a correspondent by the name of `Veritas' to the same publication (15 December 1894). `The crux of social reform is the establishment of equal marriage and the individual responsibility of parents.' The `question of compulsory motherhood', wrote Wolstenholme in June 1895, is `the question that underlies the declaration of the rights of woman' (Woman's Voice, 29 June 1895).

Second among women's grievances ran their disadvantage in the labour market. Louisa Lawson made the point forcefully, coupling it with the oppression of women as wives, in her journal, the Dawn, with the headline for her leading article in November 1890:

THE STRIKE QUESTION/10,000 WIVES TO BE CALLED OUT!!/MASS MEETING OF THE AMALGAMATED WIVES'...

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