Cruelty, Coverture, and Colonial Women's Writings: A Cultural and Social History of Domestic Violence in New South Wales, Queensland, and Victoria, 1880-1914

Abstract

When Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese declared domestic violence to be a 'national crisis' in April 2024, he was likely unaware that he echoed Victorian Chief Justice Sir John Madden, who, 110 years earlier, similarly declared domestic violence, or 'wife-desertion and wife-persecution', to be a 'national crime' and a 'social menace'. Although the nature and prevalence of domestic violence in Australia have received significant scholarly, public, political, and legal attention in the last decade, historians have been at pains to demonstrate that it is not a new issue. This thesis builds on and revises existing scholarship, using a corpus of new evidence to explore the formative period of 1880-1914 when domestic violence was arguably at its most visible. As the writings of feminist authors, wives, judges, and journalists reveal, not only was 'wife-beating' a considerable source of cultural debate and social anxiety in this period, but from 1890 onwards, judicial delineations of 'cruelty' expanded. Influenced by the lived experiences that victim-survivors graphically detailed in their divorce petitions, judges redefined 'cruelty' to include what we would now term coercive control, reproductive coercion and abuse, marital rape, and economic abuse as unacceptable masculine marital behaviours. Examining this expanded conceptualisation of marital cruelty, this thesis reconciles contemporary understandings of domestic violence with historical social and cultural understandings to offer one of the first period-specific histories of domestic violence in Australia - with a focus on New South Wales, Queensland, and Victoria - that also sheds light on the long and insidious history of our 'national crisis'.

The thesis focuses on both the rhetoric and realities of domestic violence in this period, drawing 35 literary works by five key colonial female writers (Barbara Baynton, Ada Cambridge, Leontine Cooper, Louisa Lawson, and Rosa Praed), 320 petitions for the dissolution of marriage, and articles from over 60 local and regional newspapers into conversation with each other. It argues that a significant but hitherto unexplored group of feminist writers including victim-survivors, journalists, and colonial female authors used print, press, and the petition to protest the enduring grasp of coverture and challenge cultural stereotypes of 'wife-beating' as purely physical abuse inflicted by drunk, working-class men. These women articulated the multiple physical and non-physical forms a husband's abuse could take, which they demonstrated to be perpetrated by even the most 'respectable' or 'gentlemanly' of husbands in both urban and rural spaces. In doing so, they elevated domestic violence to the status of a national failing, even when their suffragist sisters were silent on the very same subject. Indeed, this thesis disrupts existing understandings about the historical relationship between domestic violence and feminism by challenging misconceptions about the level of concern Australian suffragists devoted to the issue and spotlighting the women who did make domestic violence a key topic of contemporary calls for social and cultural reform of gender relations. In doing so, this thesis not only elucidates the endemic and multifaceted nature of domestic violence at the time of Australia's national, political, and cultural foundation, but also shows it as the pivotal period when domestic violence first became simultaneously a 'feminist' and national issue. Show more