Family experiments : professional, middle-class families in Australia and New Zealand c. 1880-1920

Abstract

This study explores the forms and understandings of family that prevailed among British professionals who migrated to Australasia in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. As children of the mid-Victorian age, their attempts to establish and define family in a colonial suburban environment contribute to our understanding of how the public and private dichotomy posed in the notion of separate spheres was modified in practice. The term 'experiment' employed in the title is borrowed from William Pember Reeves's influential State Experiments in Australia and New Zealand (1902). It is used here to suggest that, in different ways, the five families of this study sought to establish, in colonial circumstances, the conditions that would promote social progress more speedily than the old world seemed capable of doing. The attitudes and assumptions that shaped these family experiments, this study argues, may be placed on a continuum that extends from John Ruskin's concept of evangelical motherhood to John Stuart Mill's rational secularism, which sought a pooling of talent in the quest for the reproduction of the useful and cultured citizen. Central to the thinking of all families was a belief in the power of education to produce civilised and humane individuals, who would individually and in concert nurture a better society. A defining characteristic of this shared conviction was an emphasis upon the education of daughters. This preoccupation produced changes in maternal and paternal roles within the family. Contemporaneous with the emergence of what colonial newspaper editorialists dubbed 'the woman question', the middle-class pursuit of higher education for daughters merged with and, in some respects, defined first-wave colonial feminism. As pioneering families in the quest for university education for women, they became the first generation of colonial middle-class parents to grapple with the problem of what graduate daughters might do next. This dilemma highlighted the ambiguities and hesitations of their class and generation: how might the conception of the family as an instrument of social progress embrace occupational relationships within marriage? The quest for the civilised and cultured individual produced, in the education of their sons, the phenomenon of the colonial student at a British university. Variously seen by historians as part of a process of recolonisation or evidence of a persistent colonial cringe, within the professional middle-class examined here it emerged as part of a natural evolution of an educational ideal. In pursuit of this ideal, the colonials drew upon the resources of such an extended British family as remained available to them. In this, as in much else, they were venturing into experimental territory largely uncharted, unpredictable in its outcome and as much a part of the embryonic history of the transnational family as it is of colonialism.