Author: James Franklin

Originally published: 'The Headmistress's Indiscretions', Quadrant 47 (9) (Sept 2003): 82-3.

HEADMISTRESS’S INDISCRETIONS

  The Suffragette’s Daughter: Betty Archdale: Her Life of Feminism, Cricket, War and Education, by Deirdre Macpherson: Rosenberg, 2002, $45.

“Didn’t you use to be someone in the Sixties?” It is a classic question. Betty Archdale, headmistress of Sydney’s Abbotsleigh girls school from 1958 to 1970, was like any Sixties icon controversial, and, up to a point at least, progressive. The media and the general culture had a vacancy into which they hoped she would fit: trendy headmistress, Jim Cairns of the classroom, leftist frontperson, mocking or earnestly questioning “convention” from a privileged position and popping up on the box to flannel on about “permissiveness”.

At a distance and in a bad light, Betty Archdale sometimes did look like that. The truth was very different.

Betty’s appointment as headmistress was what Yes, Minister used to call a courageous decision. She had never taught a class to a syllabus, and never did (though she did conduct wide-ranging discussion classes on current affairs). Although she had been Principal of Women’s College at Sydney University for a decade, her background was not in education. She had captained the first English women’s cricket team to tour Australia, in 1934-5, after gaining a degree from McGill University and at around the same time as passing LL.M. exams with a view to a career at the English bar. The war service that interrupted those plans included command of a group of Wrens who undertook codebreaking work in Singapore. Command and a certain natural sense of how to deploy it are evident in the story of her appointment to Women’s College at the end of the War: “Betty, in full uniform, suggested to her naval driver, `Look, we’ve got to do this properly. When we get there, you open the door and we’ll salute and all this sort of nonsense.’ She knew that the assembled council would see her arrival from the windows above. From that day on, Betty was called the `Ad’, short for Admiral, at Women’s College.”

That background gave her a much-needed upper hand at Abbotsleigh in dealing with matrons who thought their daughters needed deportment and discipline more than mathematics. Her success was in the creation of a school where intellectual and cultural achievement by girls was assumed to be normal, and simply happened. “Simply” is hardly right, of course, in that it required enormous amounts of work on her part in selecting like-minded teachers, fending off attacks in the school’s council, and, most of all, speaking encouragingly to great numbers of individual girls. It was done without any of the vocal feminist theorising of later years. The very recent across-the-board high achievements of girls at HSC level and women at university level prove beyond doubt that around 1960 there was a vast intellectual underachievement by women. Betty Archdale’s Abbotsleigh showed that girls en masse could perform at least as well as boys. These results were not achieved by a cramming factory, either, but by encouragement of plays, music and sport as much as of study — Betty believed that girls who performed well outside the classroom would perform well in it. Her outside contacts made possible a stream of visiting speakers, like Faith Bandler and Helen Suzman, who gave the girls “a sense of people making a contribution”, as one ex-student put it. She was also at the forefront of one of the other revolutions in education, the move from imposed to self-imposed discipline. The doubters as to the possibility of treating pupils like people without riots ensuing were refuted, like those who doubted that girls could do science, by counterexample.

The girls responded. The reason Deirdre Macpherson’s excellent biography had the most upmarket book launch of the year, a reception at Sydney’s Government House, was that the Governor, Marie Bashir, was a student from Betty’s time at Women’s College and attributes her success to Betty’s inspiration. The book is equal to its launch. Macpherson was an Abbotsleigh student in Betty’s years and later knew her well. It is an insider’s story by an admirer, though no hagiography; well paced and written with an intelligent eye for the telling detail. What sets it at the high end of the better class of such biographies is its story of the personal history that made Betty what she was. Macpherson has had unusual luck for a biographer in having available a partial autobiography of Betty’s mother, a leading English feminist of the years just after the gaining of votes for women. Long before Mr Archdale was finished off by a German torpedo in the last days of the First War, his wife had run away with the suffragettes, leaving her three children with the nanny. A later nanny was Adela Pankhurst (the subject of Verna Coleman’s biography) who, like Betty, was in some danger of being overwhelmed by the strong personalities of the parental generation (and like her, “escaped” to Australia). Mother was the editor of the leading English feminist journal of the Twenties, Time and Tide. Connections with the journal meant a wide education, as it was rather more than a propaganda organ; T.S. Eliot wrote, “There was no paper in which I felt more assurance that any serious letter of mine was likely to be accepted than Time and Tide.” Later she took the family off to Geneva for years, lobbying the League of Nations for resolutions on women. The well-informed account of the little-known world of feminism between the Wars is a highlight of the book. Betty would be worth a biography simply as a direct causal connection between the suffragettes and the feminism of the late Sixties, irrespective of her other talents.

Betty herself was an occasional player in direct action in the suffragette style, by then becoming unfashionable. “She worked for Mrs Wintringham, the first woman who actually took a seat in the House. And at a rally for the MP Sir Oswald Mosley, who was not only a staunch supporter of Hitler but also bad about women, Betty unfurled a flag which said, `Don’t Vote Mosley—Down with Fascism—Anti-Nazi’.” She was promptly ejected from the Albert Hall. But her personal style did not run to harangues from public platforms or the issuing of orders. When Brian Penton tried to get a rise out of her during the Australian cricket tour, she just played a straight bat: “Although it proves, perhaps, that I have a debased, Oriental, a pre-Pankhurst mind”, he burbled, “I cannot conceive of a Bradman in skirts. So I went to see these women cricketers … `Why do you play cricket?’ I asked. She looked me over hostilely. `Because I like it.’ … `You can’t believe that athletics are good for women’s health?’ `I didn’t say so,’ Miss Archdale replied.” In her later occupation of many positions of leadership, her dealings with troublesome elements in governing bodies and among parents avoided direct confrontation.

Macpherson gives a subtle and sensitive account of the difficult subject of Betty’s close personal relationships, or lack of them. She undoubtedly looked strange, in a St Trinian’s sort of way, and more so as a young woman than as a child or older woman. It cannot have helped with relationships. Nevertheless the reasons for her never marrying seem to have been internal. There was a trader in Mombasa, shortly after the evacuation from Singapore, who gave her a leopard skin and at one point “got sloppy and kissed” but he was hard to take seriously. Though well aware of homosexual relationships in feminist and female cricketing circles, she seems to have had no share in them herself and was hurt by occasional later accusations of lesbianism. Real love, she said, “I haven’t felt with any of the men or women that I’ve met.” Her dealings with the students at Women’s College and Abbotsleigh were on the intellectual plane first and foremost — what girls from backgrounds where thought was stifled or unmentioned found inspiring was exactly the sense of the intellectual world as “a realm into which one might enter” — and although she could move on to more personal matters, she was not exactly maternal. The medical students at Women’s College several times had to insist she take students’ illnesses more seriously. During her Abbotsleigh years and later, she shared a house with her brother Alec, a moderately successful but chronically disgruntled actor. They got on well, though disagreeing on everything, and although he was “a male chauvinist of the worst kind” (her words) and was not safe to leave alone with the girls who sometimes came to visit.

The title of Betty’s own book, Indiscretions of a Headmistress, once raised the suspicions of officials at Rome airport, but there is nothing in it to frighten the horses. There is enough, though, to disturb the more fundamentalist Sydney Anglicans who were a trial to educators in Sydney as much in her day as in the present. Her views were Christian and informed by considerable theological reading, but distinctly non-denominational. She writes that the fear that too much thought and knowledge might endanger faith is well known in the Catholic Church but should have no place in a Reformed one. “It is odd that a very Low Church diocese such as Sydney should become almost Roman Catholic in its attitude. The strong anti-intellectual attitude is surely evidence of the same fear.”

“Whatever happened to poise?” Dame Edna asks. It has not exactly disappeared, but its reversion to a more lowly place in the scheme of things is a sign of the comprehensive success of Betty Archdale’s model of how to be a woman.

James Franklin’s Corrupting the Youth: A History of Australian Philosophy was published by Macleay Press.