235 Chapter 6 Women’s Business: Domesticity and Upholding the Faith Oh, I wish I was married and had a comfortable home and mama could live with me in peace and rest where I could repay her back all her kindness. This is my great wish in life, this is what I pray for night and morning, and patiently I try and wait God’s time in fulfilling my prayer. From Blanche Mitchell’s Diary; Friday 21 September 1866. I know that my horror at the idea of bringing a human creature into the world is morbid and unnatural but not the less can I overcome it. I do indeed lose all fear of gallows and handcuffs &c when the baby is once born. I cannot look into the innocent little face and connect it with such a future, but the sense of a dreadful responsibility remains [a] feeling of having invested heavily [in] something from which it is beyond your power to sell out, turn out how it will. You have brought a life into an uncertain world of wrecks and disease and dynamite explosions. Your heart’s love is irrevocably invested in that life. Nora Murray Prior to Rosa Praed, 15 June 1884. 236 uch has been written about women’s lives in both nineteenth century England and in colonial Australia, and though the concept of separate Mspheres for describing the lives of men and women in the period has come under criticism, it still has useful explanatory power. The centrality of the study by Davidoff and Hall of middle-class families of evangelical/nonconformist background in the debate about separate spheres reflects its size and detail, but not its scope: it is a detailed study of a fragment of English society, hedged in by class and religious belief.1 As Amanda Vickery has pointed out, the arguments made by Davidoff and Hall are not easily transmissible to other locations, classes or religious systems.2 Vickery’s criticism may be true if the notion of ‘separate spheres’ for men and women are treated as rigid categories, and we see no role for women in the public sphere in which men were seen to operate, and no role for men in the domestic sphere apportioned to women. Even a cursory examination of the autobiographical writings of nineteenth century men and women, and of recent writing about them, demonstrates that the boundaries between the public lives of men and the domestic lives of women were not rigid. The involvement of men like T.L. Murray Prior and W.L.G. Drew in the domestic affairs of their households, or that of Eliza O’Connell and Anne Drew in public philanthropy, are examples of a wider reality. The record of the lives of women in mid-nineteenth century Brisbane is quite different from the kinds of records on which men’s biographies can be constructed. There is much material about men’s lives in the public sphere, such as records concerning their employment, businesses and recreations, in archives related to those activities. Much of 1 L. Davidoff and C. Hall; Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780-1850, London, Hutchinson, 1987. 2 A. Vickery, ‘Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of Categories and Chronology of English Women’s History’, Historical Journal, 36(2), 1993, pp. 383-414. 237 the material in newspapers concerns men’s activities. There is little, however, that gives us any insight to their personal lives: diaries and sequences of letters are not common, and even then men are less likely than women to write about how they thought or felt about the events of their lives. Robert Hogg, who has been doing a comparative study of writing by men in colonial Queensland and colonial Canada, has made the point that men are mostly concerned to describe their businesses or their adventures in their writing.3 Whereas there was often little in newspapers or in official records to record the substance of women’s lives, there is a rich source in the writings of women in the form of diaries and letters. These two kinds of sources are quite different. Diaries are personal, and not necessarily meant to be shared with others. Blanche Mitchell, the twenty-three year old daughter of Sir Thomas Mitchell,4 surveyor and explorer, records that she was reluctant to read from her diary to Lizzie Rogers, because what was recorded was personal and not meant for other’s eyes or ears.5 Her diary for the year 1866, in which she visited Brisbane, is fascinating. She gives an outsider’s view of life in the very new colonial capital, and comments on the town itself, and on its social life. These comments are embedded in the rhetoric of her class, and are often quite barbed. Blanche was also a rather introspective woman and she frequently reflected on the events of her own life. These reflections are invaluable in trying to recreate some idea of her religious belief. For example, in the two months she stayed in Brisbane, she was in a household that experienced two deaths in as many weeks and in her diary she has recorded extended 3 Pers. com; Robert Hogg is a postgraduate student at the University of Queensland. 4 Tony Harvey brought to my attention a biography of Sir Thomas Mitchell by William C. Foster. Foster is diligent in documenting Mitchell’s public life, but not his private life; William C. Foster, Sir Thomas Livingston Mitchell and His World 1792-1855, Sydney, Institute of Surveyors, 1985. Baker’s study of Mitchell focuses on his relations, as a surveyor and explorer, with the Aboriginal people; D.W.A. Baker, The Civilised Surveyor; Thomas Mitchell and the Australian Aborigines, Melbourne, MUP, 1997. 5 In the end, Blanche did read some of what she had written to her friend Lizzie Rogers 238 meditations on these events. Letters, however, perform a different function. Writers in the 1860s and 1870s were generally immigrants writing to friends and family ‘at home’. The letters were often handed around the family for others to read.6 Nora Murray Prior records in her letters that she has sent her stepdaughter’s letters to other family members to read.7 Rose Paterson’s letters to Nora also provide evidence for this practice. The content of letters is substantially different. The salutations and farewells often give some clues to the worldview of the writers and the receivers of the letters. There may be responses to queries and comments about people, events or ideas. Rachel Henning wrote to her sister Etta of the countryside, of town and country life, of houses, the weather, livestock and crops, about people and their doings, and gossip about mutual acquaintances.8 The content is dependent also on the receiver of the letter; the English working-class immigrant Julia Cross, in writing to her mother in Cambridgeshire, reveals a shared religious faith.9 When Julia wrote that she expected to eventually join her mother in heaven, the implication was that it was her mother’s expectation, too. Among the letters from Katie Hume to her family, there is one by her husband Walter to his sisters-in-law, suggesting a shared interested in the Tractarian Movement.10 The collections of letters used here have these kinds of elements, and all, in their different ways, give considerable insight into the lives and thoughts of the women who wrote them. 6 Rachel Henning attests to the practice of ‘passing round’ the letters she received; David Adams, ed., The Letters of Rachel Henning, Ringwood, Penguin, 1988 [The Bulletin, 1951-2]. 7 Her correspondent was Rosa Praed. 8 All these matters arise in the letters of Rachel Henning. A good example of this diversity is her letter of Christmas Day, 1864, Adams, p. 186ff. 9 Julia Cross lived at Goodna, near Ipswich. Her letters to her mother are preserved by Pam McClymont, The Cross Family Book, Brisbane, privately published, 1992. There is a copy in the Oxley Library in Brisbane and a photocopy is held by the author; my thanks to Val Hillier of Chinghee Creek, who brought the Cross family history to my attention. 10 Nancy Bonnin, ed., Katie Hume on the Darling Downs, Toowoomba, DDI Press 1985, pp. 66-68. 239 What, then, constituted the woman’s domain? It was negatively defined by an English male trade unionist in 1877: [men] had the future of their country and children to consider, and it was their duty as men and husbands to use their utmost efforts to bring about a condition of things where their wives should be in their proper sphere at home, seeing after their house and family, instead of being dragged into the competition for livelihood against the great and strong men of the world.11 This English vision of a woman’s proper sphere was part of a public discourse about women’s life and work that extended to Australia. Katrina Alford quoted from Women’s Work in Australia, by Susan Nugent Wood, to open her discussion of colonial women’s work: Women do not, must not, live for themselves. It is their mission to combat against the worldly spirit which men too often cherish at home and abroad; it is theirs to soften the hard selfish feelings of the business life, to refine, exalt, purify and strengthen – and all this may be done without giving up the seat by the fireside, without one curtain lecture, without declamation of women’s rights . ‘Women’s Work’ must begin at home, and very often she need never move from the common round of the uneventful life to fulfil her noiseless part.12 Alford questioned the reality of this prescriptive view of the women’s place in colonial society where nearly one in three women between 15 and 64 were in the paid workforce.