Patriarchal Dividends and the Creation of Political Elites in Colonial New South Wales

Abstract

Across the 19th-century industrialising world, expectations of access to power became based on expertise and economic role rather than birth. In the early White settler Australian colonies—where no non-Indigenous hereditary aristocracy or political institutions existed—the men who pursued status and influence and designed the political institutions of self-government justified their ambitions on the basis of their “independence”, a long-held marker of masculinity. In this article, I consider the gendered rhetoric of debates about the meaning of independence in colonial New South Wales through the lens of Raewyn Connell’s concept of the “patriarchal dividend” to argue that elites are a reconfiguration of patriarchal power in capitalist democracies. Because the criteria for rights to vote and stand for election were debated in terms of the character and conduct of men rather than their family lineage, political power accommodated more men but continued to make winners of particular men and losers of other men, as well as women.