Selected Lead Articles from The Dawn

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Selected Lead Articles from "The Dawn" by Dora Falconer (Louisa Lawson)

About Ourselves
The Dawn Volume 1, Number 1. Sydney, May 15, 1888
"WOMAN is not uncompleted man, but diverse," says Tennyson, and being diverse why should she not have her journal in which her divergent hopes, aims and opinions may have representation. Every eccentricity of belief, and every variety of bias in mankind allies itself with a printing-machine, and gets its singularities bruited about in type, but where is the printing ink champion of mankind's better half? There has hitherto been no trumpet through which the concentrated voices of womankind could publish their grievances and their opinions. Men legislate on divorce, on hours of labor, and many another question intimately affecting women, but neither ask nor know the wishes of those whose lives and happiness are most concerned. Many a tale might be told by women, and many a useful hint given, even to the omniscient male, which would materially strengthen and guide the hands of law-makers and benefactors aspiring to be just and generous to weak and unrepresented womankind. Here then is DAWN, the Australian Woman's journal and mouthpiece--a phonograph to wind out audibly the whispers, pleadings and demands of the sisterhood. Here we will give publicity to women's wrongs, will fight their battles, assist to repair what evils we can, and give advice to the best of our ability. Half of Australian women's lives are unhappy, but there are paths out of most labyrinths, and we will set up fingerposts. For those who are happy--God bless them! Have we not laid on the Storyteller, the Poet, the Humorist and the Fashionmonger? We wear no ready-made suit of opinions, nor stand we on any ready-made platform of women's rights which we have as yet seen erected. Dress we shall not neglect, for no slattern ever yet won the respect of any man worth loving. If you want "rings on your fingers and bells on your toes" we will tell you where they can best be bought, as well as sundry other articles of women's garniture. We shall welcome contributions and correspondence from women, for nothing concerning woman's life and interest lies outside our scope. It is not a new thing to say that there is no power in the world like that of women, for in their hands lie the plastic unformed characters of the coming generation to be moulded beyond alteration into what form they will. This most potent constituency we seek to represent, and for their suffrages we Sue.

Unhappy Love Matches
The Dawn Volume 2, Number 2. Sydney, June 1, 1889
MARRYING FOR WEALTH, position, or any consideration other than love is universally considered to be the Alpha and Omega of half the world's matrimonial infelicities, but it would be easy to find a corresponding number of so-called love matches, showing equally unhappy results. For who does not, among their acquaintances, count the unhappy couple, whose mating was the result of a love fit,--heartily tired of each other, yet chained together for life. The woman who cannot give a better reason for marrying than that she is in love, is likely to come to grief. It is not that she loves, but why or what she loves, that is the all important question. Realizing that when two hearts filled with love, tempered by respect, meet, melt and fuse into one, with congeniality of mind and purpose, it must be, to those participating, the realization of a perfect union in every sense of the word, still, lacking the above conditions love matches rank among the unhappiest and saddest marriages of all. Two things also necessary to happy union are perfect confidence and absolute truthfulness. The moment either of these is violated a wall is begun between the two hearts which, unchecked, will soon become so dense, so wide, so high, that even the grave itself would be less a separation. The advice given by H. Maria George, in The Household, is sound. She says--
Let every woman contemplating matrimony ask herself if she loves her prospective husband well enough to see the world with his eyes; enjoy its pleasures through his participation; see her ambitions wither one by one, or, perchance, carried on by her sons; to live a life full of petty duties, a round for which she has, perhaps, no aptitude, no congeniality, to lead a life of self-repression, self-sacrifice and buried individuality, to exchange her fresh youth and beauty for a mother's look of care; can she quiet every longing pulsation of the throbbing heart and lull her hungry soul to sleep by the thought that she is a wife and a mother?
It is but seldom that a man foregoes ambitions, or changes his life plans because he is a husband and a father. The circle of the wedding ring