women needed to be successful in
this world turned upside down.
WOMEN’S LEGAL STATUS
In English common law, a husband and wife were one person. A married woman was a feme covert , a woman ‘covered’—or hidden—by her husband in law. She could not incur
debts, nor could she sue or be sued in court. She couldn’t enter into a contract.
That meant banks would not lend money to women, and therefore it was almost impossible
for most women, with no access to credit or capital, to go into business.
Before the passage of the Married Women’s Property Acts in the 1870s, a married woman
couldn’t own property in her own name. A single woman, a feme sole , had the same
legal and property rights as a man—up until the time of her marriage. Then her money,
goods, income and lands became the property of her husband.
Underpinning all this was the assumption that a married woman didn’t need any independent
financial or legal status because, being ‘as one’ with her husband, her safe passage
through life was assured. The system failed to take into account wife desertion,
marital cruelty or domestic violence—not to mention a woman’s desire for autonomy
over her own affairs.
Oh, and it was almost impossible to get a divorce. Where her legal status was concerned,
a nineteenth-century woman was stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Perhaps there was also something female-friendly about the work itself. William Westgarth,
writing in 1857, remarked on the strangely old-fashioned state of mining technology
in the wake of the industrial revolution. There are few vocations , he noted, that
can boast such freedom from indebtedness to that great modern creditor in society’s
progress . He meant that the work didn’t owe a lot to science or technology.
Ballarat, he said, resembled not so much an industrial landscape as a great mercantile
exchange . It was about partnering, share-holding and other interpersonal relationships.
It wasn’t really about machinery, which women had mostly not been taught about, or
high finance, which involved bank loans and credit facilities that women could not
legally get. Gold mining was more like the family-based ‘cottage industry’ style
of work that was the norm before the industrial revolution.
Women who wanted or needed to mine for gold certainly benefited from this freedom
from science and modernity. People worked their claims in small groups or families,
relying on manual labour for the seemingly endless jobs of picking, panning, puddling
and cradling. Westgarth referred to the traditional mining cradle, in which gravel
from a river’s bed was rocked so that large rocks and nuggets were separated from
the fine particles of silt or gold dust, as this primitive and fatiguing implement .
It didn’t require great physical strength, though, or even wealth. Just patience,
perseverance and luck.
Bucketloads of luck. The daily rewards were tiny and took a long time to amount to
much unless you struck it very lucky. But for that very reason, the process exerted
a peculiar hold on the miner. One described the compulsive condition of sinking a
hole like this: not knowing what it would be like when we saw it, but fully expecting
it every moment . Like playing a poker machine today: every push of the button—every
thrust of the shovel, thwack of the pick, every flash in the pan—could mean a new
destiny, right there and then.
Mary Ann Tyler, five years a gold diggeress , said:
You work from day to day with anticipation, and soon the years pass…You can work
for very little, and all at once you drop across a fortune. That is why it is so
enchanting. You live in expectation…my very soul was lit with delight that I should
one day discover more gold.
A TAX BY ANY OTHER NAME
No one, however, could have described the licensing regulations as enchanting.
This is how the system worked: while the gold was in the ground, the Crown (the British
government) owned it. For a licence fee of 30
this world turned upside down.
WOMEN’S LEGAL STATUS
In English common law, a husband and wife were one person. A married woman was a feme covert , a woman ‘covered’—or hidden—by her husband in law. She could not incur
debts, nor could she sue or be sued in court. She couldn’t enter into a contract.
That meant banks would not lend money to women, and therefore it was almost impossible
for most women, with no access to credit or capital, to go into business.
Before the passage of the Married Women’s Property Acts in the 1870s, a married woman
couldn’t own property in her own name. A single woman, a feme sole , had the same
legal and property rights as a man—up until the time of her marriage. Then her money,
goods, income and lands became the property of her husband.
Underpinning all this was the assumption that a married woman didn’t need any independent
financial or legal status because, being ‘as one’ with her husband, her safe passage
through life was assured. The system failed to take into account wife desertion,
marital cruelty or domestic violence—not to mention a woman’s desire for autonomy
over her own affairs.
Oh, and it was almost impossible to get a divorce. Where her legal status was concerned,
a nineteenth-century woman was stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Perhaps there was also something female-friendly about the work itself. William Westgarth,
writing in 1857, remarked on the strangely old-fashioned state of mining technology
in the wake of the industrial revolution. There are few vocations , he noted, that
can boast such freedom from indebtedness to that great modern creditor in society’s
progress . He meant that the work didn’t owe a lot to science or technology.
Ballarat, he said, resembled not so much an industrial landscape as a great mercantile
exchange . It was about partnering, share-holding and other interpersonal relationships.
It wasn’t really about machinery, which women had mostly not been taught about, or
high finance, which involved bank loans and credit facilities that women could not
legally get. Gold mining was more like the family-based ‘cottage industry’ style
of work that was the norm before the industrial revolution.
Women who wanted or needed to mine for gold certainly benefited from this freedom
from science and modernity. People worked their claims in small groups or families,
relying on manual labour for the seemingly endless jobs of picking, panning, puddling
and cradling. Westgarth referred to the traditional mining cradle, in which gravel
from a river’s bed was rocked so that large rocks and nuggets were separated from
the fine particles of silt or gold dust, as this primitive and fatiguing implement .
It didn’t require great physical strength, though, or even wealth. Just patience,
perseverance and luck.
Bucketloads of luck. The daily rewards were tiny and took a long time to amount to
much unless you struck it very lucky. But for that very reason, the process exerted
a peculiar hold on the miner. One described the compulsive condition of sinking a
hole like this: not knowing what it would be like when we saw it, but fully expecting
it every moment . Like playing a poker machine today: every push of the button—every
thrust of the shovel, thwack of the pick, every flash in the pan—could mean a new
destiny, right there and then.
Mary Ann Tyler, five years a gold diggeress , said:
You work from day to day with anticipation, and soon the years pass…You can work
for very little, and all at once you drop across a fortune. That is why it is so
enchanting. You live in expectation…my very soul was lit with delight that I should
one day discover more gold.
A TAX BY ANY OTHER NAME
No one, however, could have described the licensing regulations as enchanting.
This is how the system worked: while the gold was in the ground, the Crown (the British
government) owned it. For a licence fee of 30
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