A mission to the home: the Housewives Association, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and Protestant Christianity, 1920-1940

The term 'housewife' and the work of cleaning, cooking and supplying family needs that housework involves are not new. But the concept of the 'ordinar y housewife' only acquired, in English historian Judy Giles' words, 'specif ic resonances' as 'an apparently homogenous [sic] group' in the post-World- War-I period.(1) In Australia, organisations devoted specifically to the in terests and needs of this group expanded during the 1920s and 1930s at a ra te unprecedented for any earlier women's organisations. Although other wome n's associations proliferated and grew rapidly at the same time, the only o nes that were genuinely mass organisations were the Housewives Associations and the Country Women's Association. Why the Housewives Associations emerg ed at this time, who organised them, what their guiding values, aims and be liefs were, and what consequences they had for the older organisations are the questions underpinning this article.