The first Australian woman to serve as a judge was appointed in 1929 — but not in her native land. May Darlington Lahey took up the position in Los Angeles County Superior Court, not far from where she had completed her law degree. It would be another thirty-five years before Australia had its own woman judge.
Although American women had been given the vote nearly two decades later than Australian women, in many respects the United States in the first half of the twentieth century offered white middle-class women more fertile terrain for meaningful professional careers. It’s one reason the country beckoned to adventurers like Lahey. In Travelling to Tomorrow historian Yves Rees tells the stories of ten such Australian women. In addition to Lahey, there’s a decorator, a swimmer, a writer, an artist, a pianist, an economist, a health guru, a dentist and a nurse. All were remarkable for their time. Driven by the usual cocktail of ambition, restlessness and chance, they sought new lives in a new country.
Rees identified them because their exploits were covered by newspapers, and by now most of them have modest Wikipedia pages. But despite often impressive accomplishments, their names are little known. By recovering their stories, Rees revises our picture of Australian relations with the US, suggesting that Australia’s postwar reorientation away from Britain and toward a new northern protector was less abrupt than we often see it. Rees’s ten case studies, taken from the more than 600 women they covered in their PhD dissertation, show currents of intellectual and cultural exchange that have been largely unrecognised. These women fostered new ways of thinking in both countries and gave each side a deeper view of the other.
By 1940, about 12,000 Australians were living in the US, roughly half of them women. The exodus to Britain was much more substantial, but the numbers heading to North America were surprisingly large considering the affective strings lacing Australians to “the mother country” and the US chokehold on immigration. Some of Rees’s women could compare the US and Britain directly, having visited or lived in both. “After America how small, and squat, and grey, this city was,” nurse Cynthia Reed remarked when she ended up in London.
To Rees’s subjects, America epitomised modernity. They felt they had travelled not only across sea and land but through time, to the future. The status of women was pivotal to these perceptions: the country seemed a woman’s paradise because it offered university degrees, professional pathways and consumer goods. Legal and cultural regimes constraining women’s lives were somewhat less onerous. Freedom from the constraining influences of parents along with more permissive social norms — an acceptance of young single women living on their own in big cities, for example — also mattered.
Rees uses terms like “love affair” and “passionate liaison” to describe how these women felt about their adopted country. These generalisations seem slightly too weighty for the intermittent expressions of enthusiasm the book quotes, which were often made for public consumption or to fretful family members back home. And using the language of love too easily slots into longstanding stereotypes that women are ruled by their feelings. But there is no doubt these women found the US more congenial for their career aspirations.
Rees’s subjects spent most of their time in buzzing metropolises. New York was a global hub with a population of seven million in 1930, while Sydney was a provincial outpost that barely topped a million residents. When artist Mary Cecil Allen said that nowhere else was it “possible to live to complete a life” she was talking about New York City, not Youngstown, Ohio.
As we might expect, most of these women struggled to get a foothold in their early days. Isabel Letham, scrabbling to earn a living in Los Angeles, took a miserable job cutting hair for $6 a week, skipping meals on Fridays, before landing a job as a swimming instructor. Persia Campbell’s husband died as she was finishing her PhD in economics at Columbia University, leaving her with two children to support; once she landed a job, her promotion applications were rejected for years because she was a woman. Cynthia Reed was forced to quit nursing school and leave the country when authorities realised she had flouted immigration laws to enrol. (One of Rees’s interesting points is that white Australians were unintended victims of immigration quotas set up in the 1920s to restrict migrants from the un-WASPy countries of southern and eastern Europe. By 1929 the annual quota for Australians was just one hundred per year.)
Though the narrative lingers on struggles more than triumphs, it wasn’t all hard knocks. Rose Cumming, the interior decorator, entertained a parade of aristocrats at her Park Avenue digs. When she threw a party on the Champs Elysée, Hollywood stars showed up.
Over time, these women racked up accomplishments. Campbell, for example, gained a national reputation. She worked for the JFK and LBJ White Houses on consumer affairs advisory committees; wrote and hosted a television series; and served as UN representative for an international consumers union. Against prevailing views that production was the key indicator of national health, she pioneered a consumer-centred approach to economics, arguing that human wellbeing had to count, too.
What themes emerge from the experiences of these very different women? Looks opened doors for women. Cumming’s success as a decorator, for example, was propelled in part by her beauty. Whiteness — all these women were white — offered considerable privileges. (It was also the age of hats: author Dorothy Cottrell had twenty-four in her luggage.)
One thread is that women with the strength of character to leave their native countries in search of professional careers — and to do it in the days before working outside the home was common — often had the courage to buck other trends; stepping outside one box made them better able to step outside others. Campbell did it in economics. Health guru Alice Caporn challenged the dairy industry’s campaign to turn cow’s milk into a health food. Almond milk was healthier, she presciently argued. Letham was an early surfer who tried to bring surf lifesaving to California. Allen defended modern art in the face of sneers and jeers back home.
Rees’s women arrived before Henry Luce declared “the American century” in 1941, but they were among millions of foreigners who saw the US as a beacon. Were white Australians better suited to American life than natives of other lands? What exactly were their preconceptions of the US — shaped, surely, by Hollywood films in the golden age of cinema? For centuries migrants have descended on the US, filling libraries with scholarly books and novels about their experiences. Fleshing out this broader context would have helped us understand what made Australian women different.
Rees’s priority is recovering the stories of their ten subjects, and the book does this brilliantly. These accounts are underpinned by years of painstaking research leavened with imaginative reconstruction. The author often steps in with informed speculation derived from hard-won, intimate knowledge of these women, fleshing out scenes the patchy sources don’t fully illuminate.
Along the way Rees interweaves thoughtful observations about their own experiences in the United States and reflections on changing norms around gender identities. Their narrative voice is chatty, empathetic, wise. The reader feels like a charming guide is leading a tour of interwar America. All of this makes the book an engrossing read.
Though Rees has travelled to archives across the US and Australia and sifted through tens of thousands of pages, including diaries, letters and memoirs, disappointingly few of the documents that would reveal the inner lives of these women have survived. With much of the narrative relying on newspaper reporting, we watch the women as distanced observers more often than we look out at the world through their own eyes. The sources leave the reader longing for a deeper view of the inner lives of these women. We often miss out, for example, on the grainy texture of the sexism they encountered. Lahey’s entering class at the University of Southern California’s Law School had twenty women. By the time she graduated, all but five had found the going too hard — surely deterred by social challenges rather than academic rigor.
The stories in Travelling to Tomorrow are important and compelling, and Rees has done everything possible to reconstruct the lives of these women. Even so, the book will leave readers wishing for a fuller accounting of what Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie describes as “the layers of losses and gains” immigrants experience. It is a testament to Rees’s storytelling that their book awakens curiosity only a novelist could sate. •
Travelling to Tomorrow: The Modern Women Who Sparked Australia’s Romance with America
By Yves Rees | NewSouth | $34.99 | 240 pages
