SSR 2 Blake Rathie

Secondary Source Report on Kate Murphy’s article ‘The emotional, the weak, the wayward, the innocent, the unsophisticated and the misplaced girl’: the Travellers' Aid Society of Victoria and the country girl in the 1920s

 

By Blake Rathie

 

Complete citation:

Murphy, K. (2010). ‘The emotional, the weak, the wayward, the innocent, the unsophisticated and the misplaced girl’: the Travellers' Aid Society of Victoria and the country girl in the 1920s. Journal of Australian Studies, volume 34 (issue 4), pages 447-457. DOI: 10.1080/14443058.2010.519101

 

Key Words:

Femininity, modernity, urban girl, 20^th century.

 

Brief Overview:

 

In brief, this article covers Kate Murphy’s analysis and critique of The Travellers’ Aid Society of Victoria (TASV), a philanthropic organisation whose role was to protect ‘pure and respectable country girls’ upon arrival to Melbourne, protecting them from becoming what this organisation saw as unruly ‘wayward urban girls.’

 

Summary of Key Points:

-TASV wanted women to remain uncomplicated and conform to their traditional values of how women should act.

-TASV portrayed young rural women as an exemplar of feminine purity

-This was an organisation which was against the changing representation of rurality and gender amidst modernity.

 

Important Quotations:

“-meet a need to cater for the welfare of women workers flooding into the city as part of the widely deplored but irreversible ‘drift to the city’ that characterised the period.”

 

“While Progressives were far from being anti-modern, they shared with more conservative elites grave reservations about the implications of urban modernity for national character and morality, teamed with a yearning for the values of the ruralised past.”

 

“Anxieties about the increased presence of women in the urban space were at the heart of the ‘girl problem’ which exercised the minds of middle-class reformers.”

 

“The increased presence of young women from every walk of life meant that it was becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish ‘good’ woman from ‘bad’ in the streets of Australia's cities.”

 

“The amateur was described as being a ‘good girl at home, and a fallen woman outside, [who] accepts presents … in kind’. What made her activities so difficult to regulate was the fact that she was indistinguishable to the outside observer from the other girls who worked in the factories or restaurants alongside her.”

 

“a much less sympathetic image of the hardened and sexually predatory ‘working girl’ took precedence.”

 

Usefulness to Group Topic or Individual Project:

 

This would be helpful towards my group topic of ‘cultural differences’ and my individual project, as I am writing an individual project on the gendered distinctions between men’s and women’s magazines in the past and present, and an article such as this by Murphy would be very beneficial in giving information to how women, rural and urban, were perceived amidst a period of modernity.