Growing up in Melbourne : transitions to adulthood in the late nineteenth century

Abstract

The late nineteenth century was a period of tumultuous social change throughout the English-speaking world. Nowhere was this more apparent then in Melbourne, the principal city in the British colony of Victoria. Melbourne experienced the best and the worst of the era. It enjoyed rapid economic growth and an unsurpassed level of general prosperity. However the depression in the following decade exposed and deepened cracks in the economic system which had been present for a long time. This thesis uses a wide variety of aggregate and individual-level data to chart the life courses of young Melburnians as they made they way to adulthood. It examines their schooling. It measures their entry into the work force, and investigates the types of jobs that were available and the consequences of boys’ and girls’ employment decisions. It considers what factors were important in determining the ages at which men and women married. In the early 1870s laws were passed to make elementary schooling compulsory and universal, yet children’s schooling practices were impervious to such interventions. Enrolment and attendance stayed at their former levels and in many ways parents and children circumvented or disregarded the laws to suit their own needs. Families were less successful in influencing the labour market. Mechanization and specialization went hand-in-hand with a deskilling of jobs. Youths of both sexes were forced into dead-end employment which taught them little or no skills and sentenced them to a life of low wages and frequent unemployment. The median age at marriage changed very little during the period, after controlling for changes in the age structure of the unmarried population. Most women faced no attractive alternatives to marriage. Consequently there was a relatively narrow dispersion in the ages of brides and only slight differences amongst women from different social classes. Marriage for young men was a more accurate reflection of the their perceptions of their present and prospective economic circumstances. At the furthest extreme, migrants who were working in semi-skilled and unskilled jobs were disillusioned and married very late. The unifying theme to the thesis is how the transitions to adulthood reflected the strains of late nineteenth-century family life and in particular the economic relationship between parents and children. Chapter 5 investigates marital fertility decline which is another example of how families coped. Melbourne began the fertility transition in the 1880s. Two unique features were that young married women were at the forefront of that demographic change and a large contribution to lower fertility rates came from longer intervals between births. The ideological importance of separate public and private spheres and on maintaining ‘respectability' are argued to be at the root of the fertility decline and on the progression from childhood to marriage in late nineteenth-century Melbourne. Show more