ABSTRACT
Embracing both parliamentary reformism and direct action involving confrontational spectacle, labour activism took a myriad of positions vis-á-vis the politics of gender and class. Post suffrage, the labour women dissolved their dedicated franchise organisation but continued their work through the Working Political Organisations and labour women’s committees. After a split in the labour movement and the subsequent conservative government, ‘Back to the unions’ became the radical call. In 1912, in Brisbane’s first general strike, Emma Miller defended the union women with her hatpin in an illegal procession. Given the success of the daily strike bulletin, labour women including Mabel Lane raised funds for a state Labour daily newspaper. With the emerging leadership of Helen Huxham, labour women were well positioned in Queensland for the advent of war, even if they had made few inroads in shifting racial and gender differentials in types of work, benefits, and pay.
The wider women’s movement and the leading more-conservative bodies such as the National Council of Women, having failed to address the rights of working people and of people of colour, along with the suppression of knowledge of the violence of settler colonisation ill-prepared the populace for the violence of the Empire that was about to be unleashed.
