Women in 'Ballarat" 1851-1871: a case study in agency

This thesis argues that European women exercised agency in mid nineteenth century Ballarat. It develops an understanding of women as active agents who engaged with, and negotiated, relationships of power. It highlights the fluidity in gendered roles, the blurred lines between the public and private domains, and the complexity of colonial life and relationships. This social and feminist history situates women within the system of patriarchal power which systematically and overtly benefited men. It reveals the complex operation of patriarchal power in which women accepted, challenged, and resisted social values and constructs. Such a consideration of the structure of power dislodges the notion of women as oppressed bodies who passively accepted universal and monolithic patriarchal values, and instead highlights diversity within gendered power structures. Drawing on public documentation, narrative, biographical, and statistical information from a diverse, extensive, and comprehensive range of archival sources, this thesis utilises a form of microhistorical methodology to detail and analyse the ways in which colonial women helped to shape society. It then draws a broader interpretation from such analysis to locate this thesis among other feminist and goldfields discourses. Through the central themes of health, birth, death, marnage, family, law, religion, temperance, philanthropy, work and public protests, this study_ identifies strands of agency exercised by Ballarat' s colonial women during the city's metamorphosis from the heady early days after the official discovery of payable gold in 1851 and the subsequent expansion of colonial settlement, to the consolidation of the City of Ballarat in 1871. Women predominantly acted as domesticating, nurturing and civilising agents, their actions deriving legitimacy from patriarchal values and endorsed by men. Women also contested, challenged, negotiated, manipulated, resisted and rejected socially accepted values, while playing out their lives within the colonial society in which they lived.Doctor of Philosoph