Domestic service and frontier feminism: the call for a woman visitor to 'half-caste' girls and women in domestic service, Adelaide, 1925-1928

The home has a historical significance as a space for white women's intervention in and negotiation with colonization, a significance that is both symbolic and literal. One of the first feminist campaigns for Aboriginal reform was for the appointment of a woman to go into the private homes of privileged urban women to visit and inspect the conditions of mixed-descent Aboriginal girls and young women brought to work as domestic servants from central Australia to the South Australian capital, Adelaide. Launched in 1925 by the Women's Non-Party Association of South Australia (WNPA), such an official appointment was secured two years later, but the campaign for a Woman Visitor was quickly forgotten. The struggle by white women for power on the domestic frontier preceded the struggle that followed on the frontier proper, and that later struggle would subsume its memory