School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemWithout natural protectors: histories of deserted and destitute colonial women in Victoria 1850-1865( 1995)This thesis combines a social history of deserted wives with a cultural history of wife desertion. It does so within a particular historical moment, the Victorian gold-rush era, when there was much attention given to wife desertion as a pressing social problem. The study covers the years between 1850, the eve of gold discovery in Victoria, and the mid-1860s, by which time the acute social disturbances associated with the gold rushes had subsided, and the state had enacted its first major piece of welfare legislation, the 1864 Neglected and Criminal Children's Act. The central argument of this thesis is that, in mid-nineteenth-century Victoria, there developed a radical disjunction between the material needs of deserted wives and the cultural need to resolve the tensions and erase the contradictions invoked by their presence. This influenced both the forms of assistance available to deserted wives and the ways in which others imagined the amelioration of their condition. The first section of the thesis explores how deserted wives and their children emerged as the principal category of the colonial poor in mid-nineteenth-century Victoria. Although deserted wives are the main subjects of the thesis, they were not the only colonial women solely responsible for their dependent children. I also consider widows and single women with children, who shared the need to provide support for their families. The second part of the thesis is a detailed examination of the survival strategies undertaken by impoverished deserted wives, widows and single women with children. It draws on the traditions of social and welfare history and explores the opportunities for agency that existed in colonial women's interactions with private charitable societies and institutions. The thesis also challenges some of these historiographical traditions, which are focused on the dominance of private charitable effort, by undertaking a close analysis of the relationships between poor white women and officers of the state. A study of the operation of the Deserted Wives and Children Act and of the broader interactions between magistrates, police and destitute supplicants at the court house highlights the complex and ambiguous association between women and the state. In the third section of the thesis, entitled 'The Politics of Welfare', I move beyond daily survival strategies to examine how these interactions led to the formation of authorities on welfare matters in the colony and created public comment on wife desertion. Although widows and single women with children also faced problems in providing for their families, their fate, unlike that of deserted wives, did not capture the public imagination. Middle-class reformers and charity groups highlighted the prevalence of family desertion in ways that revealed as much about their own social and cultural anxieties as they did about the problems faced by deserted wives. The section examines the place of deserted wives in the rhetoric of two reform movements: the campaign for industrial schools, which culminated in the passing of the Neglected and Criminal Children's Act, and the land reform movement. Deserted wives were powerful cultural symbols of the dislocations of gold discovery, and of urban poverty, that reformers appropriated and used for their own ends.