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‘WANTED, A STRONG GIRL, ABLE TO MILK AND MAKE HERSELF AGREEABLE’

In 1916 the Australian artist Vida Lahey came to London to form a home base for her three brothers and 12 cousins who were fighting in Europe. The visit was also an opportunity to connect to her Irish heritage. During some ‘off duty’ time, as she was cycling through the Irish countryside, she came across the notice that forms the title of this paper: ‘Wanted, a strong girl, able to milk and make herself agreeable’ (Lahey 1919, 9). That Vida even recorded the advertisement in her journal says something about the impression that it made on her. The roles of domestic worker and ‘agreeable’ object form the twin poles of an ideologically determined continuum along which single women have traditionally been expected to define themselves. It is a short, rather constrained continuum because the definition of femininity has been articulated in tandem with the heterosexual institution of the family. Consequently, those who exceed or challenge normative femininity have been considered at best deviant, and, at worst, subversive and threatening to the social order. I argue that this idea of the single woman as domesticated labourer and agreeable object can be the starting point of an analysis of Vida’s capacity to move beyond those categories. At the same time, however, I want to recognise that this shift is not a severing of ties that bind single women to family but a movement that accommodates normative aspects of femininity. In other words, instead of seeing the desirable domesticated labourer and the agreeable object as opposite ends of a continuum that limits women, I want to place them alongside one another at one end and think about what it is that single women might place at the other end. Additionally, I want to recognise potential movement back and forth along the continuum. I use Vida’s paintings to explore a more complex form of femininity that is foreshadowed by a couple of salient points made by British feminist Katherine Holden (2006). The first is that single women sometimes want the status of married women. Holden’s concrete example of this was the existence, in the United Kingdom, of 92 branches of the National Spinsters Pension Campaign which represented single women whose chances of marriage were denied as a result of the First World War. They demanded treatment as war widows rather than spinsters. This acknowledges that there are intrinsic benefits to ‘single’ women in gaining the status of (once) married (now widowed), even to the point of compensation when that naturalised expectation is thwarted. In this paper, the example is less concrete but nevertheless provocative and perhaps more prevalent than recognised. Vida’s relationship to her family sheds light on the way in which this particular single woman continued to have and enjoy her emotional investment