WOMEN IN NEW AUSTRALIA.

Southern Cross, Volume 1, Issue 49, 3 March 1894, Page 4

WOMEN IN NEW AUSTRALIA.

Referring to the subject of women in New Australia, the chairman of the association (Mr W. Lane) says : —“ The New Australia movement is rapidly drawing to itself girls whom any honest man may be proud to claim as, a sister or win as a wife. The conditions under which they join the association are such that while questionable characters will be rigidly excluded, no honest, healthy young woman could possibly find a better opportunity to live out her life in a truly womanly way. Safeguarded by the wives of married members, and doubly safeguarded by the royal respect of every man in the settlement ; given absolute equality in voice and vote and earnings-dividend ; absorbed in a life from which immorality will be banished by the positive removal of all bars to marriage, and by the loyal maintenance of the marriage-tie, the position of single girls who accept membership will be one of the first evidences of the humanity which inspires and pervades the New Australia movement. “We take women members without payment, either with their husbands — who pay, of course —or as single girls. Our reason for the latter is that a large number of our member s are single men, who desire to marry women of their own race and language, to make homes for themselves, and to lead an honest and a honest and a moral life. In the western districts of New South Wales and Queensland the men vastly outnumber the women ; in Tasmania the proportion between the sexes seems almost reversed ; in our settlement we want a fair balance, which is natural in healthy communities, so that every Jack may have his Jill and every Jill her Jack. There will be no compulsion upon single women to many—not the slightest. Every single girl who joins us can die an old maid if it please her to be so erratic, and will in that case be found suitable work, and given, as we give to all women, equality in voicing and voting and sharing all her life. “ But as our bachelors will be as fine a body of men as ever came together in any part of the worldstrong and straight and manly, with the manliness that town life destroys —and as there will be neither fear of want nor any financial difficulty to impede honest love and honorable marriage, the girls who go will be less than human if one or other do not win their hearts and make them loving wives and happy mothers. We take single girls of manageable age as members without any payment whatever, offering them equal share in our settlement, to take them to the settlement from their present homes without cost to them, to secure them while single in such work as is suitable for them, and to treat them in every way as we would have our daughters and sisters treated.”