Human Services

Short Paper

In this essay I will discuss Weeks’ and Thompson’s arguments and interpretations of women’s place in society and compare them to my own views about work, welfare, women and citizenship.

In building family and community life, the white colonists imported British ideas and practices of paternalism (Weeks,1996,p56). The ideology of the British was that women stayed at home and ran the house while the men ran society. The man was always the ruler, whether it was the household or the society he would always be head of the system over all women and children.

Women have been fighting for equal gender rights for centuries and things are finally looking up for them. According to Marilyn Lake (1994, p29) ‘ In acquiring her husband’s name, domicile and nationality upon marriage, a wife lost her personal and national identity to her husband. She lost thereby her “personality and her “nationality”.’ By marrying and taking her husbands name a woman lost all her citizenship rights. There were a number of active organizations formed to campaign for women’s rights after this, such as the Victorian Women’s Suffrage Society(1884), the Women’s Christian Temperance Union(1886), Women’s Social and Political Crusade(1895) and the National Council of Women(1896). These organizations were all formed to help women gain control and improve their conditions of living.

One of the first victories for women was the Maternity Allowance (1912). Even with them achieving this however, there was still much argument by opponents that the allowance was anti-family and anti-marriage because of its availability to single mothers (Weeks,1996,p61). Maternity Allowance was introduced to financially support stay at home mothers. The allowance was given not only to married women but to single as well which caused outrage in the community as people saw it as turning women against marriage and family. The access of women to the payment was a great success for women as mothers, rather than as wives (Weeks,1996,p61).

Another major struggle for women has been discrimination in work. The Sex Discrimination legislation (1984) was introduced to eliminate all forms of discrimination