Selected Lead Articles from The Dawn | Page 7

the most powerful form, merely in the course of the
necessary expenditure of your weekly income, whether that be 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