Of public houses and private lives female hotelkeepers as domestic entrepreneurs

Australian Historical Studies

Volumn 32, Issue 116, 2001, Pages 57-75

  Wright, Clare ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; AUSTRALIA; CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY; DRINKING; DRINKING BEHAVIOR; ECONOMICS; EDUCATION; EMPLOYMENT; ETHNOLOGY; FEMALE; FOOD; HISTORY; HOUSING; LEGAL ASPECT; PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECT;

AUSTRALIA; CULTURE; DRINKING; DRINKING BEHAVIOR; EMPLOYMENT; FOOD; HISTORY, 19TH CENTURY; HISTORY, 20TH CENTURY; HOUSING; WOMEN; WOMEN, WORKING;

EID: 0344926660     PISSN: 1031461X     EISSN: 19405049     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/10314610108596147     Document Type: Article

References (68)

1. MS R.K. Cole Collection, La Trobe Australian Manuscripts Collection, State Library of Victoria, vol. 7, p. 56
2. Current oral history research undertaken towards my doctorate in Australian Studies at The Australian Centre, University of Melbourne (15 X 90-minute interviews; tapes and full transcripts in possession of author). See also my honours thesis: Clare Perry, 'Real Women Do Shout: Women's Narratives of Pub Culture'(BA hons thesis. University of Melbourne, 1991)
3. Charles Smithers, The Licensee's Manual: Being a Guide to the Liquor Laws of New South Wales (Sydney: Law Book Co. of Australasia, 1932), 83
4. Of the many populists, see John Larkins and Bruce Howard, Australian Pubs (Adelaide: Rigby, 1973)
5. Douglass Baglin and Yvonne Austin, Australian Pub Crawl (Sydney: Murray Child and Company, 1977)
6. John Hepworth and BIoo Souter, Boozing Out in Melbourne Pubs: An Occasional History and Sociological Study of Melbourne as Seen through the Bottom of a Glass (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1980)
7. Noel Ottaway, The Pub and I (Sydney: Horwitz, 1967)
8. Cyril Pearl, Beer, Glorious Beer: With Incidental Observations on Great Beer Myths, Pubs and Publicans, Barmaids and Breathalysers, Mum, Flip, Beer Bards, and Beer in the Kitchen, etc., etc. (Melbourne: Nelson, 1969). Of the academics
9. see: Ronald Conway, The Great Australian Stupor: An Interpretation of the Australian Way of Life (Sydney: Sun Books, 1971)
10. Craig McGregor, Profile of Australia (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1966)
11. John Fiske, Bob Hodge and Graeme Turner, Myths of Oz: Interpreting Australian Popular Culture (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1987)
12. Most notably, Katrina Alford, Production or Reproduction? An Economic History of Women in Australia, 1788-1850 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1984), 195-99
13. Desley Deakin, Managing Gender: The State. The New Middle Class and Women Workers, 1830-1930 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1989), 24-9
14. Diane Kirkby, Barmaids: A History of Women's Work in Pubs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 19-42
15. Alan Atkinson, 'Women Publicans in 1838', The Push from the Bush 8 (1980)
16. Monica Perrott, A Tolerable Good Success: Economic Opportunities for Women in New South Wales, 1788-1830 (Sydney: Hale & Ironmonger, 1983), 55-8
17. Summerling devotes a chapter to women in the hotel industry. Many local hotel histories record the activities of female publicans but do not specifically comment on their presence. See, for example: Marion Dormer, The Bushman's Arms: Bush Inns and Hotels of Gilgandra and the Castlereagh (Gilgandra: Gilgandra Museum Historical Society, 1983)
18. Fay Boys, One for the Road: Condobolin Hotels, Shanties and the Brewery, 1860-1996 (Condobolin: Fay Boys, 1997)
19. Keith Cecil, The Local Pubs (Anglesea: Anglesea and District Historical Society, 1990)
20. Peter Clark, The English Alehouse: A Social History, 1200-1830 (London: Longman, 1983), 205
21. Catherine Foggo, Inns and Hotels, 1825-1900: Some Hunter Valley Innkeepers (Sydney: Australian Hotels Association, N.S.W. Branch, 1989), 2
22. Keith Powell, Drinking and Alcohol in Colonial Australia. 1788-1901. for the Eastern States (Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1988), 1. Ibid., 30
23. See also Noel Butlin, 'Yo, Ho, Ho and How Many Bottles of Rum?', Australian Economic History Review 23, no. 1 (1983): 17. Butlin's study reveals that colonial women were drinkers, averaging about half the rate of consumption of men. Ibid. 26
24. A.E. Dingle,' "The Truly Magnificent Thirst": An Historical Survey of Australian Drinking Habits', Historical Studies 19, no. 75 (October 1980): 240
25. Walter Phillips,' "Six O'clock Swill": The Introduction of Early Closing of Hotel Bars in Australia', Historical Studies 19, no. 75 (October 1980). Phillips makes a detailed study of the various interest groups (including clergy, parliamentarians, traders, merchants) who entered the early closing debate
26. Anne Summers, Damned Whores and God's Police: The Colonization of Women in Australia (Melbourne: Penguin, 1975), 89-117
27. Marilyn Lake, 'The Politics of Respectability: Identifying the Masculinist Context', Historical Studies 22, no. 86 (April 1986)
28. Chris McConville, 'Rough Women, Respectable Men and Social Reform: A Response to Lake's Masculinism', Historical Studies 22, no. 88 (April 1987)
29. Judith Allen, ' "Mundane Men": Historians, Masculinity and Masculinism', Historical Studies 22, no. 89 (October 1987)
30. Lori Chambers makes the point that property and personal status are 'intimately linked' in Anglo-American culture. Lori Chambers, Married Women and Property Law in Victorian Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 4
31. Carole Pateman, 'Feminist Critiques of the Public/Private Dichotomy', in Carole Pateman, The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism and Political Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), 118
32. Linda McDowell and Rosemary Pringle, eds. Defining Women: Social Institutions and Gender Divisions (Milton Keynes: Polity Press with the Open University, 1992), 15
33. Linda K. Kerber, 'Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman's Place: The Rhetoric of Women's History', Journal of American History 75, no. 1 (1988): 14
34. See, for example. Daphne Spain, Gendered Spaces (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), xiv-11
35. Gillian Rose, Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), 17-18
36. See, for example, Joy Damousi, 'Chaos and Order: Gender, Space and Sexuality on Female Convict Ships', Australian Historical Studies 26, no. 104 (April 1995): 352
37. See, for example. Jane Long, Jan Gothard and Helen Brash, eds. Forging Identities: Bodies, Gender and Feminist History (Perth: University of Western Australia Press, 1997)
38. See Jane M. Jacobs, Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City (London: Routledge, 1996), 1-12
39. Kerber, 'Separate Spheres, Female Worlds', 40
40. See also David Philips and Susanne Davies, eds, A Nation of Rogues?: Crime, Law and Punishment in Colonial Australia (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1994), 6
41. Diane Kirkby, ed. Sex, Power and Justice: Historical Perspectives on Law in Australia (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1995), xiii
42. J.M. Freeland, The Australian Pub (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1966), 26
43. G.R. Nichols, The Licensed Victuallers' Consolidation Act (Sydney: William Moffitt, 1838), 32
44. Graeme Butler, Chris McConville and Vikki Plant, Hotels in Victoria: Thematic Typology, HBC/TS 9302 (typescript). Historic Buildings Council of Victoria, Melbourne, n.d., 12
45. see also, McGuire, Paul, Inns of Australia (Melbourne: William Heinemann, 1952), 164-6
46. Freeland, 175-6; see also, Phillips, ' "Six O'clock Swill" ', 250
47. To name but a few such local histories, see Julie-Anne Ellis, Hard-Yacka: The Story of a Mid-North Town in South Australia (Yacka: Yacka Historical Group, 1995)
48. Elinor Bellman, Saddleworth: Hub of the Wheel (Saddleworth: Saddleworth Progress Association, 1995)
49. Peter Donovan, Alice Springs: Its History and the People Who Made It (Alice Springs: Alice Springs Town Council, 1988)
50. See especially Baiba Berzins, North Coast Women: A History to 1939 (Sydney: Royal Australian Historical Society, 1996) 103-11
51. Victorian Parliamentary Debates (LC), vol. 48, 9 July 1885, p. 345
52. For a full discussion of the 1884-85 judicial and legislative debate surrounding married women's right to hold liquor licenses, see Clare Wright, 'Why Susan Hussey, Ida Beer and Fanny Power Didn't Join the V.U.L.V.A.: Female Hotelkeeping and the Politics of Public Space, Victoria, 1840-1940', in Images of the Urban: Conference Proceedings, eds Lynette Finch and Chris McConville (Maroochydore: Sunshine Coast University College, 1997), 217-21
53. Cited in Joyce Henderson, The Strength of the White Ribbon: For God, Home and Humanity, 1892-1992 (Penh: Woman's Christian Temperance Union of Western Australia, 1992), 2
54. In her complex literary analysis of nineteenth-century novels, Monica Cohen contends that first-wave feminists used the rhetoric of Victorian domestic ideology ('the home as vocational outlet') in partnership with the rise of professionalism to justify women's rights; that is, both causes argued for social entitlement based on service rather than inheritance. Marcia Cohen, Professional Domesticity in the Victorian Novel: Women, Work and Home (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 7
55. Miriam Dixson, cited in Sol Encel and Dorothy Campbell, Out of the Doll's House: Women in the Public Sphere (Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1991), 13
56. Brian Bourke and Michael Corridon, Bourke's Liquor Laws of Victoria (Melbourne: Butterworths, 1972), 219
57. See Sandra Grimes, 'Across the Bar: Women's Work in Hotels', in Australian Ways: Anthropological Studies of an Industrialised Society, ed. Lenore Manderson (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1985), 66-75. Grimes focuses on the sexualised nature of barmaids' work
58. Marian Aveling and Joy Damousi, eds. Stepping out of History: Documents of Women at Work in Australia (Melbourne: Allen & Unwin, 1991), 34; Alford, 161
59. In her study of outwork in America, Home to Work, Eileen Boris differentiates between the exploitative practices of women's waged labour at home, which, she argues, 'shared the invisibility of housework', and 'independent entrepreneurship located in the home' which was not ideologically set apart from the marketplace and therefore gave the women who ran such ventures a status which the outworking 'women of the laboring poor' did not share. This distinction is also a useful way of discriminating between Boris's catchphrase, 'industrial homework', and my use of the term 'public housekeeping'. Eileen Boris, Home to Work: Motherhood and the Politics of Industrial Homework in the United States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 2-12
60. Susanne Davies, ' "Ragged, Dirty.. Infamous and Obscene": The Vagrant in Late-Nineteenth-Century Melbourne', in Philips and Davies, 147
61. Pauline Payne, Thebarton: Old and New (Thebarton: Thebarton City Council, 1996), 72
62. The phrase is Johanna Clancy's. Clancy gives a twentieth-century account of a female publican's life in Perry, 27
63. See, for example, the case of Mrs Elizabeth Burt in the Licensed Victuallers' Advocate, 16 June 1877, 6
64. J.S. Meagher, Licensing Law in Victoria (Melbourne: Melville and Mullen, 1908), 158
65. Bronwyn Hicks, 'But I Wouldn't Want My Wife To Work Therel: A History of Discrimination Against Women in the Hotel Industry', Australian Feminist Studies 14 (1991): 69
66. Sir John Quick and Luke Murphy, The Victorian Liquor Licence and Local Option Laws (Melbourne: C.F. Maxwell, 1920), 93
67. D.T. Merrett, 'The Victorian Licensing Court, 1906-68: A Study of Role and Impact', Australian Economic History Review 19 (1979)
68. Polly Wynn Allen, Building Domestic Liberty: Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Architectural Feminism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 83