Australian Dictionary of Biography

Eileen Powell, 1935

Labor Daily (Sydney), 30 April 1935, p. 1

Eileen Louisa Powell (1913–1997) trade unionist, equal pay campaigner, and industrial advocate, was born on 3 August 1913 at Petersham, Sydney, third of four surviving children of Melbourne-born Margaret Maria Powell, née Feltham, and her English-born husband Albert James (Alf) Powell, motor engineer. Her father left the marriage in 1918; her elder sister, Doris, died in in 1919; and her parents divorced in 1920. Alf remained a presence in his children’s lives and continued to support the family, but there were few luxuries. Despite the family trauma, Eileen remembered a ‘happy’ (Powell 1979) and secure childhood. She served a political apprenticeship by accompanying her mother to the raft of organisations and meetings she occupied herself with after the marriage breakdown, including the Australian Labor Party (ALP). Eileen attended the local Crystal Street Public School at Petersham, leaving aged fourteen to start work as a shop assistant at the Grace Brothers store on Broadway, donning the required black dress, which she had sewed herself. She then did a course in shorthand and typing, completing her training as a clerk by working at a typing and copying office near Central Station.

Aged fifteen Powell joined the ALP. She attended party-organised speakers’ classes at Balmain, and by sixteen was assistant secretary of the Stanmore branch. That year a friend of her mother who worked on the Labor Daily found her a job in his Trades Hall office. Six months later she joined L. J. Macpherson, the ALP’s organising secretary, in the party’s head office, ‘Room 32.’ When he lost his job six months later, she was kept on in the ALP office. She became secretary of the drama and art group of the socialisation unit, and joined the ALP Younger Set. Around this time the Labor Daily described her as ‘the most promising young woman in the Labor movement’ (Labor Daily 1930, 10). In 1935 she gave evidence in the Female Wage Case before the New South Wales Industrial Commission about the living standard of working women necessary for their health and comfort. She earnt £3 a week and paid £2 board to her mother, and she argued that £1 was insufficient to provide for a reasonable standard of living. By the end of the Depression, the Younger Set movement had lost its energy. She considered there was ‘no hope of the Party becoming more socialist than it was’ (Allan 1974, 51) and, despairing at party factional wars, switched her focus to the industrial movement in the naive belief that it would be free of such conflict.

During 1937 Powell became a clerk at the Australian Railways Union (ARU). She began contributing to Railroad, the union’s journal, and was acting editor whenever Lloyd Ross, its editor and the State secretary of the ARU, was away. With Ross’s support, she embarked on a campaign for improved conditions for female railway employees. She organised women employed in country refreshment rooms and travelled around the State gathering evidence. In 1939 she became the first woman to present a case before the Industrial Commission, winning on appeal an award with improved conditions for refreshment room employees. She was profiled in the Australian Women’s Weekly, which described her as ‘a slim attractive girl of 26’ with ‘much organising ability and much knowledge of cold, hard statistics … tucked away behind [her] dimples and soft brown eyes’ (1939, 32). Unbeguiled by her dimples, a Federal government security file was opened on her in 1937 as a suspected communist, as much as anything because the ARU was under ‘Communist control’ (NAA A6119). In fact, she did not like being told what to do and would not have lasted long in the party.

At the same time, Powell was active in the Council of Action for Equal Pay (CAEP), which emerged in 1937 from a conference of unions and feminist organisations convened by the Federated Clerks’ Union of Australia, with Muriel Heagney as one of its first joint presidents. Powell was a member of both the clerks’ and the railways unions, and to begin with was in step with Heagney. Uncompromising, Heagney supported ‘the rate for the job’ for women during World War II. She believed that Powell, who supported gradualism, was betraying the cause. In 1942 Powell, then herself CAEP joint president, and two others were elected to pursue negotiations with government ministers, together with Australian Council of Trade Unions representatives. That year she appeared in the 1942 Female Wage Case. Women’s rate of pay, where they undertook substantially the same work as men, was set to not less than 60 per cent of men’s, as determined by the Women’s Employment Board. In Powell’s view, this was the first occasion on which the principle of equal pay had been conceded. Seconded to the Commonwealth Department of Labour and National Service in 1943, she audited women workers’ conditions in war industries—munitions, aircraft, and civilian supply factories.

After briefly returning to the ARU, in 1944 Powell resigned to care for her mother, who was suffering from multiple sclerosis. She was enabled to do so by hosting the morning women’s session on radio station 2KY—held by the New South Wales Trades and Labor Council—for which she joined Actors’ Equity of Australia. Margaret Powell died in 1949. On 24 June that year at the Registrar General’s Office, Sydney, Eileen married Fred Coleman-Browne, a widowed journalist whom she had first met when she was working for the Labor Daily and he was an industrial roundsman at the Sydney Morning Herald. She kept her own surname after her marriage, having established herself in the movement under her birth name. Her Australian Security Intelligence Organisation file noted both this and that her husband was ‘regarded as anti-Communist’ (NAA A6119).

Appointed in 1948 as the Australian member of the International Labor Organization (ILO)’s committee of experts on women’s work, Powell held this post for twelve years. She accompanied Elsie Byth, president of the National Council of Women of Queensland and Australian delegate to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, as an adviser at a commission meeting in Beirut in 1949, the first of several overseas forums she attended. In 1951 she travelled to Geneva to attend the ILO’s correspondent committee on women’s work. An executive member of the Australian Association for the United Nations, she chaired its standing committee on the status of women.

Powell was also a member of the ALP Women’s Central Organising Committee (WCOC), and during the late 1940s joined the United Associations of Women (UAW). She was critical of the party’s conservatism, which meant that she had ‘waged the struggle for women’s equality largely outside the ALP’ (Allan 1974, 55–56). In 1949 she became secretary of the New South Wales WCOC, and she was a member of the State ALP central executive from 1949 to 1951. She stood unsuccessfully as Labor candidate for the safe Liberal seat of North Sydney in the 1951 Federal election.

During the late 1940s Powell joined the Australian Federation of Women Voters. She had resigned from the UAW by 1954, considering that the feminism of its leaders was not sincere. As the Australian member of the economic committee of the International Alliance of Women, she led the Australian delegation to the alliance’s 1961 congress in Dublin. She continued to prod the ALP on equal pay as the publicity officer for WCOC (1965–67) and as WCOC vice-president (1967–70). In 1969 she represented the Australian Federation of Women Voters at the Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Commission’s hearing of the equal pay case brought by the Administrative and Clerical Officers’ Association of the Commonwealth Public Service and the Australasian Meat Industry Employees’ Union.

After Fred died in 1973, Powell retired the following year and gradually relinquished her political work. She renewed a long-standing interest in reading philosophy and science, and was consulted on a number of history projects; she was a member of the ARU history committee that marked its New South Wales branch’s centenary in 1986. She suffered ‘mildly’ (Webb 1998, 198) from Alzheimer’s disease before her death on 19 July 1997 at St Leonards, Sydney, survived by her stepchildren, Winston and Deirdre; she was cremated.