MARGOT NASH
As If Productions
FOR LOVE OR MONEY: A history of women and work in Australia
1983
Digitally Restored in 2017 by the National Film and Sound Archive
107 minute documentary from Flashback Films
A film by Megan McMurchy, Margot Nash, Margot Oliver, Jeni Thornley
Five years in the making, with contributions from hundreds of women and over 200 Australian films, FOR LOVE OR MONEY is a unique, superbly crafted pictorial history of Australian women.
The film chronicles the cycles of women's gains and losses as they are moved in and out of the workforce according to demands of the time. It reveals how women's unpaid and voluntary work keeps an entire system running smoothly, in peacetime and in war. As wives and mothers, women do the work of loving - the work that is never paid or recognized as real work. The film shows how women's work in the home determines the kinds of jobs they do in the paid workforce - the low-paid, low-status jobs.
FOR LOVE OR MONEY also shows how women have fought and organised for equality and wage justice for over a century. This classic documentary remains relevant today as women continue the unfinished campaigns for equal pay, maternity leave and childcare, and still carry the major responsibility for caring and nurturing.
AWARDS
1984
• Best Feature Documentary, International Cinema del Cinema delle Donne, Florence,
• Best Screenplay, Best Documentary, nominated AFI Awards
1985
• Highly Commended United Nations Media Peace Prize
FESTIVALS and SCREENINGS
1984
• 34th Berlin Film Festival: International Forum of Young Cinema
• VI Incontro Internazionale del Cinema delle Donne: Il Cinema delle Isole, Florence
• 27th San Francisco International Film Festival
• Women Make Movies Film Festival, San Francisco
• 13th Wellington Film Festival, New Zealand
• Cambridge Film Festival, United Kingdom
• 16th Auckland International Film Festival, New Zealand
• 13° Festival Internacional de Cinema Figuiera da Foz, Portugal
• Festival International du Nouveau Cinema, Montreal
• 3° Uppsala Film Festival, Sweden (
• Through Her Eyes Women's Film Festival, Toronto
1985
• 7e Festival International de Films de Femmes, Creteil, France
• St.Kilda Film Festival, Melbourne
• Tokyo International Women's Film Festival
• Women's International Filmforum, Nairobi, Kenya
• 24e Festikon Educatief Film-Videofestival, Amsterdam
• United Nations Media Peace Prize: Gold Citation, Television
• Semaine Internationale Cinema Valladolid, Spain
• Women in Film Festival, Los Angeles
1986
• U.S. Film Festival, Salt Lake City
• 2nd Scottsdale Film Festival, Scottsdale, Arizona
• Australian Film Month, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa
1987
• Women in the Director's Chair Festival, Chicago
1988
• 20° Festival International du Film Documentaire Nyon (
• Back of Beyond: Discovering Australian Film and Television, UCLA, Los Angeles
• 1° Festival Internacional de Filmes Realizados por Mulheres, Lisbon
1991
• 13ème Cinéma du Réel Festival International de Films Ethnographiques et Sociologiques, Paris
• Australian Film Event, Pompidou Centre, Paris
1992
• 2nd International Women's Festival, Bangkok
1999
• 21e Festival International de Films de Femmes, Creteil, France (March 12-21) (in retrospective ‘Section Antipode: Le Cinéma des Femmes Australiennes’)
2015
• 2nd International Women’s Film Festival Dhaka, Bangladesh
• Women’s Gaze’ Future Feminist Archive Film Retrospective, Sydney College of the Arts & AGNSW, Sydney
2017
• Feminism and Film Program, Sydney Film Festival (June 7-18)
• Screening of Restored Version, Arc Cinema, NFSA (November 22)
2020
• Cinema 3 season, Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), Melbourne
2021
• 23rd Seoul International Women’s Film Festival South Korea(August 26 – September 1) Australian Women Filmmakers and Australian Women's Film Program
2022
• Pioneering Women in Australian Cinema from the 80s and early 90s MOMI
Museum of the Moving Image, New York July 22 to August 14
DETAILED DESCRIPTION
Watch the 3 minute Trailer
Watch the 11min 1982 Pre production Promo, made to raise money for the film
PART ONE: HARD LABOUR
Rare glimpses of Aboriginal women’s traditional work introduce this archival compilation history of women’s work in Australia. The story of convict women’s enforced labour in the early years of the colonies is followed by an examination of the role of women through the decades of frontier conflict, pastoral settlement, gold rushes and industrialisation. Women’s labour – as wives and mothers, maids and governesses, cooks and farmworkers, nurses and seamstresses – is essential work but always underpaid and unacknowledged. Class and race sharply define and limit women’s roles. The growing trade union movement excludes female workers, so women form their own unions. By the beginning of the new century, women are campaigning for access to higher education, the vote, and equal pay.
PART TWO: DAUGHTERS OF TOIL
World War I calls men to the front leaving thousands of jobs in offices and factories to be filled by women. At war’s end, the minimum wage for a female worker is set for the first time - at 54% of the male rate. Returning soldiers reclaim their jobs and alarm at the declining birth-rate focuses official attention on motherhood. During the 1920s, middle-class women replace domestic servants with domestic appliances and working-class girls are increasingly employed on factory assembly lines, often under appalling conditions. Male and female jobs are strictly segregated, and women are kept in low-paid work. When the Great Depression puts thousands out of work, women are accused of stealing men’s jobs. As another war looms, women activists continue their struggle for equal pay.
PART THREE: WORKING FOR THE DURATION
World War II brings women into war work again. They enter the defence forces and are allowed into skilled technical ‘male’ trades for the first time. Some are even granted equal pay. Most remain on the old female rate, fuelling an outbreak of strikes. At war’s end, the female basic wage is raised to 75%, but women are pushed back into the home, idealised as housewives and mothers and encouraged to become consumers in the post-war boom. As the manufacturing industry expands in the 1950s and ‘60s, a huge migration program provides labour for the factories. In commerce and retail, women are concentrated in low-paid, routine jobs. But now a new generation of young women, advantaged by access to higher education (and the pill), is about to challenge traditional female roles.
PART FOUR: WORK OF VALUE
The long campaign for equal pay achieves partial success in 1969, but it’s not until the Labour Party wins government in 1975 that equal pay is finally won. The new government answers feminists’ demands for maternity leave and childcare, and enacts equal opportunity laws. Despite these reforms, most women workers remain in low-paid ‘female’ jobs and are barred from higher-paid ‘men’s’ work. Inspired by the women’s movement, successful campaigns are organised all over Australia to break down these barriers. But as the economic climate worsens during the 1970s, women are first to get the sack, and married women workers are accused of stealing teenagers’ jobs. The repeating patterns of women’s labour history from colonisation to the early ‘80’s reveal clear links between women’s lowly paid work in the workforce and their undervalued unpaid ‘work of loving’ in the home.
CREDITS:
A Film by
MEGAN McMURCHY, MARGOT NASH, MARGOT OLIVER, JENI THORNLEY
Written and Produced by
MEGAN MCMURCHY, MARGOT OLIVER, JENI THORNLEY
Edited by
MARGOT NASH
Music by
ELIZABETH DRAKE
Narrated by
NONI HAZLEHURST
Directed by
MEGAN MCMURCHY
and
JENI THORNLEY
Theatrical release: Australia 1983, UK 1984
Broadcast: Australia (ABC), Denmark, Eire, Greece.
Distribution: Ronin Films
© FLASHBACK FILMS 1983