Selected Lead Articles from The Dawn | Page 7

large or small. If it is made clear to your tradesmen that you deal with them because they advertise with us, the boycott is immediately defeated. Subscribers alone never entirely support a newspaper: the expense could not be borne without the profit of advertisements. Therefore, of course, the most effective way to injure any publication is to prevent the possibility of advertisement support. We are told that a Sydney journal on which two women were engaged, was recently interfered with and effectually extinguished in this way. Union men personally visited those who advertised in that journal, and threatened them with a union boycott if they continued their support. As a consequence the tradesmen withdrew their advertisements, and some newsagents who had also been visited, refused to sell the paper, producing of necessity, the stoppage of the journal and the bankruptcy of the proprietor. This is not likely to be our fate, since we possess the sympathy of so many Australian women, but we shall need the aid of our friends, and we ask them to give it in this way--the most potent and conclusive way discoverable--namely, to deal as far as due economy and your circumstances allow, with those tradesmen and others who advertise in The Dawn, and to tell them that you do so deal with them because their advertisement appears in our columns. We have no bitter feelings of hostility, but unjust treatment must be opposed in some way, and the method we ask our friends to adopt is both effectual and comparatively pacific. The question raised is not merely a question of the employment of women on a woman's journal, for though this is the immediate point of conflict, there is a larger principle in the background. Trades' unions would dispute, or force out of sight if possible, the right of women to enter the labour market at all. But women must have work, for there are thousands not depending on any man for support, and yet possessing, as far we know, as good a right to live as any other human being. Men have made the avenues to dishonour (among which we include the mere marrying for support) plentiful and easy, while the avenues to honourable competence are few. Of nurses, governesses, and housekeepers, there are already too many, and though housework, if well done, is as honourable as any employment whatever, we cannot forget that there are a great many women with abilities leading them in other directions than these. The trades which women can manage easily and well are filled by men: the muscular arms of men are handling postage stamps and millinery, big men sit cross-legged on benches, sewing. You can see such anomalies as a six-foot Hercules leaning over two skeins of floss-silk matching the colours, another in the feather and flower department drawing an ostrich feather over the back of his white hand to display it. In like occupations are thousands of men slowly wasting their physique, while the women are crowded out, and as far as possible, kept out. Setting type is perhaps a less unmanly employment than those enumerated, yet, an old compositor admitted to us that he was often ashamed to be doing nothing all day but such light-finger work. There are parts of printing work which men must do; but the work of a compositor is both light and healthy and as in our office the girls do no night work we can defend ourselves and ask the support of our reader with a clear conscience, certain that in fighting our own cause we are also advancing that which we have quite as much at heart: the cause of all women workers, present and future.

Modern Chivalry
The Dawn Volume 2, Number 7. Sydney, November 5, 1889
OF the many smaller troubles which women silently endure, probably one of the worst is the incivility to which they are exposed at the hands of clerks, countermen and officials. The little business a woman may have to do in the city, is in general a severe ordeal to her, and even in shops where it might be supposed that self-interest would ensure courtesy, unless she is an habitual customer, or one the splendour of whose appearance foreshadows a large order, she cannot be sure of courteous attention and treatment. Of course, the behaviour of men towards a recognised champion of "women's rights" does not come within the scope of our comments, because it is understood that such a creature is little more than a perambulating vinegar-bottle armed with an umbrella, and she, being ready to eject acidulous language against any male creature of differing views, must expect an occasional exhibition of venom in return. No, it is not the treatment of the sour-tempered militant female (if such there be) which excites our