i ‘WE SHALL BE RESPECTABLE’: WOMEN AND REPRESENTATIONS OF RESPECTABILITY IN LYTTELTON 1851-1893 ___________________ A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in History in the University of Canterbury by Heidi Whiteside ____________________ University of Canterbury 2007 ii CONTENTS Page Acknowledgements iii Abstract v List of Photographs/List of Figures vi INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1 Respectability and Lyttelton 23 CHAPTER 2 Good Women: Representations of Respectability 59 CHAPTER 3 Bad Women: Transgressions of Respectability 92 CHAPTER 4 Ambiguous Respectability: Representations and Perceptions 122 CONCLUSION 159 Appendix 164 Bibliography 174 iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This thesis has been a long and often difficult journey and I wish to offer my heartfelt thanks to the numerous people who have given support and assistance along the way. Thanks go to the academics in the University of Canterbury History Department, and specifically I wish to thank my initial supervisor Dr Katie Pickles for her enthusiasm for my chosen topic and her encouragement and guidance. Associate Professor Geoffrey Rice gave helpful feedback on drafts in the middle stages and special thanks must be given to Graeme Dunstall who oversaw the completion of the thesis and helped immeasurably with overall conceptual and structural aspects, and commented on revisions of later drafts. Thanks also to Judy Robertson, the ever- cheerful Departmental Administrator. As a graduate student I have appreciated the support of my fellow students, whose encouragement and friendship have helped to ward off the feelings of anxiety and isolation that can be the unwelcome occupational hazards of the thesis writing process. Special thanks to Judith Koehler who was the best possible company in the Masters room. Thanks also to Jacinta Blank, Jean Kite, Karen Fox, Safua Akeli, Shelley Harford and Matt Morris. Thanks must go to the staff of the University of Canterbury Central Library, the Macmillan Brown Library, the New Zealand Room at the Christchurch Public Library, Archives New Zealand Christchurch and Wellington, the Alexander Turnbull Library and specifically Jo-Anne Smith at the Canterbury Museum and Baden Norris at the Lyttelton Museum. To those who consented to be interviewed for my study and willingly shared personal details of their family history I give thanks. This thesis would be much the poorer without this oral testimony component. Those who gave of their time were Shirley McEwan, Alice Tyro, Joyce Challies, Norah Summerton, Pat Tranter, Gabrielle Gibson, Irene Anderson and Robyn Stewart. Special thanks to Shirley for her hospitality in Kaikoura and the guided tour of Lyttelton. Family history information was also received from Marie Woods and Barbara Hann. I was fortunate to attend the University of Waikato Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Postgraduate Conference in October 2005, and I would like to thank the conveners Bronwyn Labrum and Linda Johnston and the academics and students in attendance for their feedback on my paper. Helpful advice was also received from iv Colin Amodeo and Lizza Rossie. Max Farr gave practical assistance in his self- appointed role as technical support, as did John Hempston who chased up some missing references. I also received financial support through a University of Canterbury Masters Scholarship. To the many friends who have been there for me during the arduous process I wish to express my gratitude. Dave Aubrey provided much needed support on a number of occasions when the going was rough. Emma Newman and Jayne Wallis in particular lent a sympathetic ear in difficult times. Finally, I would like to thank my parents Annette and Ross Whiteside and my sister Karin for their support, encouragement and belief in me. The demands of thesis research and writing have, I found, exerted a personal toll on those closest to me and so to Nick Hempston, for his support both emotional and financial, his understanding, patience and strength, go thanks beyond words. v ABSTRACT This thesis investigates the meanings and representations of respectability in Pākehā women’s lives in nineteenth-century Lyttelton, New Zealand. Respectability was a form of gendered behaviour connected to ideals of appropriate femininity and women’s proper place. It was one of the values on which Lyttelton was founded and respectable women had an important role from the beginning as agents of civilization. However, respectability was not solely a behavioural norm imposed on women and an examination of the forms of respectability in this growing colonial town reveals that women were active agents negotiating and contributing to definitions of respectability. The forms of respectability in Lyttelton were related to the town’s character as a busy port, and the associated disorder contributed to divisions between respectable and unrespectable spaces. Women understood and represented respectability in different ways depending on their class position, social status, family responsibilities and involvement in the workforce. Not all women were able to conform to dominant norms of respectability, and others demonstrated an ambivalent commitment to ideals of respectable behaviour. The discourses of respectability in Lyttelton were complex and diverse, illustrating the anxieties and tensions of a migrant community. vi LIST OF PHOTOGRAPHS Page Photograph 1 3 Photograph 2 4 Photograph 3 79 Photograph 4 80 LIST OF FIGURES Graph 1 137 Graph 2 138 Graphs 3 and 4 139 1 Introduction On 3 February 1876, 24 year-old Elizabeth Jane Harvey married William Carter at his residence in Jacksons Road, Lyttelton, New Zealand. It was not her first marriage. Elizabeth’s first husband had died in April the previous year, and she had lost two children from that union. Her daughter, aged one year when they left England in 1874, had not survived the voyage to New Zealand, and a son born in Lyttelton in August 1875 survived only until December. 1 A photograph thought to have been taken around the time of her second marriage shows the couple standing posed unassumingly against the mundane background of a garden fence with a fallen tree stump and a mix of dirt and stones around their feet. They stand about a metre apart. Sarah’s face is composed but enigmatic. She wears the archetypal garb of respectable Victorian femininity, her starched white apron a stark contrast with the dark ground. [Photograph 1] In September that same year Sarah Buchanan was called to appear in the Lyttelton Magistrate’s Court by the commission agent George McKay, over unpaid rent and ‘possession of tenement’, the sum in question being £14 6s 3d. 2 Sarah was a widow with children to support and had for some years been in straitened circumstances, gaining some income by taking in washing. 3 The judgment in the case went against her and she was ordered to give up possession of the property by 28 November. What happened to her in the period immediately after this is not known, but by around 1880 she had married again and a photograph from this time survives. Seated studio fashion, upright in a chair, she is dressed for the occasion, in a smart gown with lace cuffs, a shawl, gloves and with an elaborate bonnet tied under her chin. Like Elizabeth Harvey, her clothes and demeanor suggest respectable nineteenth-century womanhood. She gazes sternly from the frame. As one of her descendants puts it, ‘it is a hard face, but she had a hard life.’ 4 [Photograph 2] We can speculate that perhaps Elizabeth and Sarah may have known each other. Lyttelton was a small town. How they felt about the blows life had dealt them is 1 2 Joyce Challies, interview with the author, 18 July 2005. For further discussion see Chapter 2. Plaint Books 1875-1877, 21 September 1876, Lyttelton Magistrate’s Court Records, Archives New 3Zealand, Christchurch Branch. 4 Shirley McEwan, interview with the author, 7 July 2005. For further discussion see Chapter 2. Ibid. 2 more difficult to answer. The experience of these two women was not unique. Women living in nineteenth-century Lyttelton had their share of physical toil, hardship, and experienced the loss of family members to disease or accident. However, what is unusual in these cases is that photographs of both women have survived and some knowledge of their character and circumstances is known to descendants. Both women’s lives were constrained by the circumstances of marriage and widowhood. In nineteenth-century colonial New Zealand marriage, motherhood and family was the expected ‘career’ for women and most ‘respectable’ women did marry. Women’s lives were governed by the limited choices available to them. How they negotiated these choices and made sense of their lives has been addressed in a plethora of ways by the explosion of scholarship in women’s history that came out of the second-wave feminist movement. This study takes a feminist perspective and aims to address women’s experience in Lyttelton in terms of the discourses of respectability, a subject which has not been subjected to sustained analysis in New Zealand historiography. A central aim of women’s history as first conceived was to recover the experience of women in the past, and to address the invisibility of women in the writing of traditional history; the ‘hidden from history’ phenomena as Sheila Rowbotham’s significant early work phrased it. 5 This study is firmly within that tradition, and while it goes a small way towards illuminating the lives of women in Lyttelton in the nineteenth century, it does not claim to be a definitive study. While the ‘recovery’ of women’s lives provides a context for this work, it is also influenced by trends in feminist thought that recognize the danger of generalizing the experience of all women into a universal category ‘women’ and instead strives for accounts that accentuate difference and diversity.