Selected Lead Articles from The Dawn

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