The goldrush colony of Victoria, Australia, was a favoured destination for aspirational emigrants from nineteenth-century Britain. Yet the persistence of high rates of infant mortality blighted the ...happiness of many first and second generation immigrant families alone in a new land. Drawing on birth, death and inquest records this paper interrogates the experience of infant death amongst the poorest families in the capital city popularly known as ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ during the second half of the nineteenth century. Although few infants died alone, the familial and community networks in which they were enmeshed were not always committed to their survival. While the paper argues that there was a hierarchy of value which determined the degree to which the death of a child would be welcomed or mourned, it also contests popular notions that evil baby farmers and unfeeling mothers were a major cause of infant death.
If leadership, as Amanda Sinclair argues in this volume, is to be defined in terms of the ability to influence and change the public agenda and improve the life experiences of people both in the ...present and in the future then philanthropy provides an excellent field in which to explore its application to women. Philanthropy, in its nineteenth-century usage, encompassed both the giving of money and the giving of time in the service of others. While women seldom commanded large fortunes, they were able to give of their time both to the administration of charitable institutions and to the provision
Drawing on the records of Melbourne's largest outdoor relief agency, this article interrogates the nature of woman-to-woman charity in the late nineteenth century. Relief, it argues, took place ...within a relationship, unequal, but unstable, in which the boundaries between deserving and undeserving were both permeable and shifting. Actors on a common stage, charity workers and those who sought their help appropriated a common script to construct a case for aid, creating a space for compassion while simultaneously justifying and underwriting social inequality.
This paper uses a range of archival sources to undertake a case study of the people and practices encompassed by the term “baby farming” in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. It argues that baby farming ...needs to be located in space and time in order to reach some accommodation between its materiality and the discursive construction that continues to distort historical debate. Neither a criminal nor a compassionate practice, baby farming emerges as an economic exchange predicated on the vulnerability of single mothers, the disposability of their children, and in many cases, the desperation of poor women who see taking infants to nurse as a way of earning an income.
Drawing on oral histories, memoirs, statistical and documentary sources, Swain et al examine the experiences of mothers in the waged workforce from 1920 to 1970, locating the ways some working ...mothers made sense of their endeavors discursively in a climate in which the dominant discourse reacted to them with denial, denigration or pity. They establish how, and why, by the end of this period, despite both the official and discursive preference for the stay-at-home mother, so many women had (re)claimed the right to be both mothers and workers, despite the negative connotations of the working mother label.
Historically, domestic servants have been overrepresented amongst women whose ex-nuptial pregnancy became a public “problem.” Despite such apparent vulnerability, female rescue-workers also saw ...domestic work as the pathway to redemption for such women. Drawing on extensive Australian data on single mothers and their children in the 19th-century, this article investigates the complex relationship between domestic service and illegitimacy. While it will argue that the overrepresentation is more apparent than real, a product of the situation of the domestic servant whose workplace was her home and whose continued employment was often dependent on maintaining high moral standards, it will also contest the viability of domestic service as a “solution” for the mother compelled to work to support her child.
The ways in which judges have approached claims of marital misconduct in property hearings on a day-to-day basis, both before and since the decision in 'In the Marriage of CK and JW Kennon' (Kennon) ...in 1997, are explored by looking at a sample of unreported cases decided in the Melbourne registry of the Family Court. The study reflects the future of fault as a decisional factor in property decision-making, in light of its apparent re-emergence since Kennon, and its adequacy as a basis for addressing the effects of violence in marriage.
