ECON F414 Family Experiments; A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

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Family Experiments: Professional, Middle-Class Families in Australia and New Zealand c.1880-1920 Shelley Ann Richardson February 2013 A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of... The Australian National University. This thesis is my own original work. Shelley Ann Richardson Acknowledgements No thesis is produced without a great deal of assi stance. Ind eed, I have many people to thank for their help and support over the course of thi s study. Firstly, I am extremely grateful to Trinity College, University of Melbourne, for allowing me access to the Alexander Leeper Papers, and to the staff of the Leeper Library who facilitated my research so readily. In this regard I would especially like to thank the Leeper librarians and archivists, past and present: Kitty Vroomen, Nina Waters and Gail Watt. Similarly, the staff of the University of Melbourne Archives, the Macmillan Brown Library at the University of Canterbury in Ch ristchurch and the Documentary Research Centre, Canterbury Museum, provided me with friendly and knowledgeable assistance. John Poynter, Marion Poynter and Richard Selleck also steered me in the right direction as I began my research into the Masson and Leeper families. I have had the good fortune to be based in the National Centre of Biography at ANU. There I benefitted from the support, friendship and expertise extended to me by the staff members of the Australian Dictionary of Biography. I am especially grateful to Karen Ciuffetelli, Christine Fernan, Barbara Dawson and Niki Francis in this regard . I would also like to thank those people who helped with my numerous technological difficulties, including Scott Yeadon and Paul Collins . Tanja Schwalm assisted me with computer formatting and proof-reading. owe my deepest gratitude to my superb supervisory team, Professor Melanie Nolan, Professor Stuart Macintyre and Dr. Nicholas Brown, for their II patience, expert advice and support. They were particularly generous with their time and assistance during the mad rush towards completion. Despite the press ure of looming deadlines, I greatly enjoyed our exchange of ideas across the Ta sman. They no doubt share in my relief at having reached this point. I have spent the last few years writing about other people's familie s. My greatest debt is owed to my own family, to whom I can only offer my thanks and apologies. My thesis took over their lives in ways that I never intended. Without their support and encouragement I would not have completed this thesis. Ill Abstract This study explores the forms and understandings of family that prevailed among British professi onals who migrated to Australasia in the late-nineteenth and earlytwentieth 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, IV 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 dau ghters might do next . This dilemma highlighted the ambiguities and hesitation s 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 , 1n the education of their sons, the phenomenon of the colonial student at a Briti sh 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. ADB AFW AFWED ALP CMDRC CWLED DNZB DOMFP GW GWLED HBHP HT HWRO JMB JMBP JW JWED JWHD LED NLA NZJH WFP List of Abbreviations The Australian Dictionary of Biography Anthony Wilding Anthony Wilding's Life Events Diary Alexander Leeper Papers Canterbury Museum Research Centre Cora Wilding' s Life Events Diaries The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography David Orme Masson Family Papers Gladys Wilding Gladys Wilding's Life Events Diary Henry Bournes Higgins Papers The Hereford Times Hereford and Worcester Country Record Office John Macmillan Brown John Macmillan Brown Papers Julia Wilding Julia Wilding's Events Diary Julia Wilding's Household Diary (ies) Life Event Diary (ies) National Library of Australia. The New Zealand Journal of History Wilding Family Papers V V I Table of Contents Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................................... i Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... iii List of Abbreviations ........................................................................................................................ v Table of Contents ......................... ..... ............................ ..... .... .... .............................................. ...... . vi Introduction ..... .... ... .. ...... ..... ... .............................. ..................................... ...... ...... .. ........................ 1 The Five Couples: Overview ...... .. .. ................................ .... ...... .. .... ............................................. 40 Section One: Departures .......................................................................... ........ ....... ....................... 41 Chapter One: The Family and Mid-Victorian Idealism .................................... ..... ....................... 46 Julia Anthony and Frederick Wilding: ... ............ ............ ..... .... .... ... ... .. .. ... ... ...... ........ ...... .... .......... 46 Mary Struth ers and Orme Masson : ... .... .. .............. .......... ...... ........... ........ .... .... ..... ...... .. .. ............ 63 Chapter Two: The Family and Mid-Victorian Realities ............................................................. ... 81 John Macmillan Brown .... ... .... .... .... .. ....... .... ......... ............................. ................ ........ ....... .. .. .... ... 81 Al exander Leeper ..... .. .. .... ........... ... ..... ............ .. .. ................... ..... .. .. ..... .... ..................... ........... .... 89 Henry Bournes Higgins ...................... ..... ... .. ........ ........ ... .......... .... ....................... ......... ......... ...... 98 Section Two: Arrival and Establishment .................................................................................. ..... 106 Chapter Three: The Academic Evangelists ................................................................................ 112 John Macmillan Brown .......... ...................... ... ......... ....... ... ...... .... .... .. .. ... ..... ....... ... ... .. .............. . 113 Al exander and Adeline Leeper .......................... ............. .............. ...... ...... ..... ... ..... .. ................ .. 138 Orme and Mary Masson ..................... .. ................................ ........... .. ..... .... ..... .. .... .... .. .... .......... 151 Chapter Four: The Lawyers ...................................................................................................... 176 Julia and Frederick Wilding .... ........ ..... ........ .... ........ ...... ............................ ..... ...... ... .... .. .. ......... .. 177 Henry Bournes Higgins and Family .... .. .. ..... .... .. ...... .... .......... ... ....... ... ..... ............ ..... ... ..... ...... .... 196 Section Three: Marriage and Aspirations: Colonial Families ............................. ............................ 214 Chapter Five: Marriage ............................................................................................................ 217 Helen Connon and John Macmillan Brown .. .. ... ..... .. ........ ..... ........ .. .. .. ... .... .... .. ..... ....... ... ... ... .... 218 Orme and Mary Masson ........... ... ..... ... ..... ..... .......... ........... ...... ...... ........ ...... .... ....... ..... ......... .... 230 Leeper' s Angels ..................... .... ... .... .. ... ..... .. .... ... .. ......... .... .... ....... .. ..... .. .... ...... ........ .... ... .. ... ...... 238 Henry and Mary Higgins .................. .. ............................................ .. ................... .. ......... ......... ... 248 Frederick and Julia Wilding ............... .. .. .. ... ....... ........ .... .. .. .............. .. ... ........ .......... ........ .. .......... 258 Chapter Six: Educating Daughters: the Christchurch Girls ........................................................ 268 The Macmillan Brown Girls ..... .. ... ..... ..... ..... .... .... ...... .. .... ..... ... ..... ...... .................. ..................... 269 The Wilding Girls ... ....................... ... ................................. ... .. ... ........... ... ..... .............................. 293 Chapter Seven: Educating Daughters: The Melbourne Girls ..... ................................................ 322 The Leeper Girls : Kitty and Katha .. ....... ... ..... ...... ..... ........ ... ....................................................... 323 The Masson Girl s: Marnie and El sie . .. ... ....... .... ...... ..... .. .... ... ... .. .... .. .... .. ........ ........... .......... ....... 342 Chapter Eight: Boys .................................................... ..................................................... .. .. .. .. . 355 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................... 388 Bibliography ............................................................................... .. ... ..... ........................................ 401 1 Introduction In 1978, when Erik Olssen wrote the essay 'Towards a History of the European Family in New Zealand', he did so believing 'the history of the family provides the mi ss ing link . .. between the study of culture and the study of social structure, production and power'. 1 Some twenty years later he observed that 'gender' and 'ge ndering' had, in the intervening years, 'increasingly supplanted "women" and "family" on the research agenda'. 2 Since one aspect of the recent trend towards a gendered approach to history is a focus on masculinity and femininity as relational constructs, it is something of a paradox that, even though the family has been recognised 'as a primary site where gender is constructed', it has not attracted 'greater interest' in New Zealand and, by extension, Australia . 3 British historian John Tosh observed that 'once the focus shifted to the structure of gender relations, rather than the experience of one sex, the family could be analysed comprehensively as a system, embracing all levels of power, dependence and intimacy' . 4 Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall produced such a work, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780-1850, in 1987 . 5 Historians of Australia and New Zealand have been slow to follow the British historians' lead; the family as a social dynamic has been squeezed to the margins of 1 Erik Olssen, 'Families and the Gendering of European New Zealand in the Colon ia l Period, 1840-80' , in Caroline Daley an d Deborah Montgomerie (eds), The Gendered Kiwi, Auckland University Press, Auckland, 1999, pp. 37; Erik Olssen and Andree Levesque, 'Towards a History of the European Fam ily in New Zealand', in Peggy G. Koopman -Boyden (ed .), Families in New Zealand Society, M ethuen, Wellin gton, 1978, pp . 1-25 . 2 Olssen, 'Fam ilies and the Gendering of Eu ropean New Zealand', p. 37 . 3 Olssen, 'Fam ili es and the Gendering of European New Zealand', p. 37 . 4 John Tosh, A Man 's Place : Masculinity and the Middle -Class Home in Victorian England (1999], 2 nd edn, Yale Un iversity Press, New Haven and London, 2007, p. 2. 5 Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fo rtunes : Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (1987], 5 th edn, Routledge, London, 1997. 2 hi storical concern . Even less interest has been shown in the role of th e elite middleclass family in shaping Au strala sian society. This thesis set s out to explore middle-c lass family life in two Au stralasian cities in the late-nin et ee nth and ea rly-twenti eth centurie s. It do es so through the experience of five families con structed in the 1880s and 1890s within the m arriages of male Briti sh migrants in profess ional occupations. It seeks to uncover the understandings and expectation s of family that they brought with them from the old world as individuals, and to trace the evolution of these ideas as they endeavoured to turn ideals into reality. The close textual analysis necessary to reveal how family life was envisaged and experienced require s strong archival records and dictates a small sample. Christchurch and Melbourne provid e significant sets of family archives that allow such close historical interrogation from within a similar occupational band (lawyers and academics), whose members sa w themselves, and were seen by others, as part of the colonial intellectual community. Put simply, and to prefigure an argument throughout the thesis, for this generation of professional newcomers, the migrant/colonial experience was empowering. The timeliness of their arrival and the generally favourable economic circumstances of their establishment years brought public prom inence an d bred confidence. They secured a level of financial secu rity that allowed for a comfortable, though not luxuriou s lifestyle, supported by a small domestic staff. Success fanned the hopes of starting anew that had accompanied the migration and encouraged a sense of cautious social experiment within their attempts to build a colonial fam ily. Nowhere more apparent than in the education of their children, this 3 desire for change prefigured within the family is a central concern of thi s th esis. Through a close study of a small slice of profess ional middle-class experience, it is hoped to throw light on the range of meanings that were invested in late - nineteenth and early-twentieth century Au stralasia . A feature of the emergent middle class in the latter part of the nineteenth century was its rapidly expanding professional segment. It was an expansion that rested upon migrant families from provincial British towns and cities attracted by what they saw as the more congenial nature of Australasia's urban frontier. Economic and urban historians have noted that new world cities developed a distinctive suburban character. 6 'Commercial' cities rather than industrial ones, they typically exhibited a low population density that was widely dispersed and permitted the existence of big homes of a semi-rural character. Such cities appealed to a segment of provincial middle-class professionals who valued retaining something of the rural lifestyle that was becoming increasingly difficult to preserve in the old world. No Australasian city matched Melbourne in attractiveness to middle-class familie s seeking the amenities of the city in a context that had not extingu ished the virtues of suburbia . The conduit for British investment in pastoralism, manufacturing and mining in Victoria and beyond, Melbourne became the destination of most of a 6 Lionel Frost, The New Urban Frontier: Urbanisation and City Building in Australasia and the American West, New South Wales Universi ty Press, Kensington, 1991; Trevor Burnard, 'An Artisanal Town : The Economic Sinews of Christchurch', in John Cookson and Graeme Dunstall (eds), Southern Capital Christchurch :To wards a City Biography 1850-2000, Canterbury University Press, Christchurch, 2000, pp . 115-137. 4 wave of British migrants that deposited forty thousand newcomers in the city in 1888 alone. 7 While 'Marvellous Melbourne' grew too quickly and was already exhibiting many of the evils associated with older British cities in the 1880s, it was still able to satisfy the middle-class suburban dream. 8 In New Zealand, such families were drawn in large numbers to the Wakefieldian cities, and especially to Christchurch and Dunedin. Whatever the failings of the systematic colonisers, it was the Wakefieldian ideal, with its stress upon concentrated settlement, as much as any compelling economic consideration, that determined the location and the suburban nature of the city of Christchurch as it emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century. The Wakefieldian influence may have been less pronounced in Dunedin, but, as Olssen comments, it shared with 'Marvellous Melbourne' a slower 'transition from pre-industrial community to modern city' that proved fertile ground for the suburban ideal. 9 The Australasian 'commercial city' was not only born suburban, it was born and remained, in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, a British city. 10 Christchurch can be seen as something of an exemplar. The Wakefieldian settlement had never been heavily masculine in the manner commonly associated with new world pioneering communities. By 1881 its population of thirty thousand 7 Stuart Macintyre, A Colonial Liberalism : The Lost World of Three Visionaries, Oxfo rd University Press, Melbourne, p. 170. 8 See Graeme Davison, The Rise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne [1978], Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1981; Bernard Barrett, The Inner Suburbs: the Evolution of an Industrial Area, Melbourne, 1971; Sean Glynn, Urbanisation in Australian History, 1788-1900, Nelson, Melbourne, 1970. 9 Erik Olssen, A History of Otago, John Mcindoe, Dunedin, 1984, p. 102. 10 Nicholas Brown, 'Born Modern : Antipodean Variations on a Theme', The Historical Journal, vol. 48, part 4, 2005, pp. 1139-1154. 5 was demographically mature and ethnically homogeneous. A city of families, 40 per cent of the residents were native born, 63 per cent of its 'foreign' component was English born, and more than three-quarters came from England, Scotland or Wales. Moreover, as was typical of the commercial city, Christchurch managed to submerge social tensions in the mutual interdependence of its professional and artisanal elements. The middle-class suburban dream rested upon the existence of a stable and well-paid body of craftsmen able to realise a level of home ownership and independence that allowed them to share in the ideal they helped build. In social terms, this was to produce a city housing landscape with a low level of segregation and thus an environment that satisfied the desire of many of the professional middle-class to contain, if not obliterate, the social evils and degradation that marred the cities of the old world. 11 Historians on both sides of the Tasman acknowledge the relative ease with which British middle-class professional families, arriving in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, found a niche among the colonial elite. Stuart Macintyre has suggested that in Australian cities, while it was becoming increasingly difficult to enter the 'moneyed circle', wealth was still able to command entry. 12 The professions, as he points out, offered an 'alternative' pathway : doctors and lawyers, followed by architects and engineers, were able to meld readily into the ranks of the elite. 13 Indeed, 'in a society with little regard for inherited privilege or prestige', 11 See W. David McIntyre, 'Outwards and Upwards: Building the City', in Southern Capitol, pp. 85- 114; Jim McAloon, 'Radical Christchurch', in Southern Capitol, pp. 162-192; Jim McAloon, 'The Christchurch El ite', in Southern Capitol, pp. 193-221; Burnard, 'Artisanal Town', in Southern Capitol, pp. 115-137. 12 Stuart Macintyre, The Oxford History of Australia, Volume 4, 1901-1942: The Succeeding Age, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, p. 51. 13 Macintyre, Oxford History of Australia, Volume 4, pp . 51-3. 6 such professions 'enjoyed an exaggerated influence' . 14 It was an influence, moreover, that extended to the political arena . When the first Federal Parliament assembled in Australia in 1901, a quarter of its members were lawyers, and its first cabinet drew two-thirds of its members from the legal fraternity. 15 The political involvement of the legal fraternity and urban professionals wa s not as obvious in New Zealand. As W. J. Gardner has put it, the years between 1890 and the mid-1920s was the 'classic period of small-farmer predominance' in politics. 16 By his estimate, small-farmer representation stood at 25 per cent in 1893 and reached about 35 per cent in the 1922-5 parliament. If farming was the most common occupation of the parliamentarians, the Liberal Party that controlled the government benches was essentially, as David Hamer described it, the 'party of the towns and especially of the urban frontier'. 17 For newspaper editors and proprietors, businessmen and land agents, all of them joined in town-boosting, politics was an extension of the business of a town; they loomed large in party ranks and played the critical role in the articulation of party policy. City support for their policies was grounded in consensus around the need for closer settlement of country areas as a means of halting the drift of the population to the cities and averting old world evils such as unemployment, destitution and congestion. The search for social harmony held particular appeal for the middle-class professional families in their suburban enclaves, who formed the basis of the Liberal party's 14 Macintyre, Oxford History of Australia, Volum e 4, p. 52 . 15 Macintyre, Oxford History of Australia, Volume 4, p. 52 . 16 W J. Gardner, The Farmer Politician in New Zealand History, Massey M emoria l Lecture 1970 , Massy University Occasional Publication No.3, Palmerston North, 1970, p. 3. 17 David Hamer, The New Zealand Liberals: The Years of Power, 1891 -1912, Auckland University Press, Auckland, 1988, p. 150. 7 alliance with urban labour. 18 Between 1896 and 1914, the presence of lawyers and solicitors in the House of Representatives had increased markedly from five to thirteen of its seventy-six members. At the outbreak of war they were the second largest occupational group and constituted 17 per cent of the New Zealand I . t 19 par 1amen . If the New Zealand political environment did not give lawyers quite the parliamentary presence they attained in Australia at the outset of the twentieth century, its ethos was a broadly congenial one. Jim McAloon's definitive study of the wealthy in the Wakefieldian South Island settlements of Canterbury and Otago provides an illustration of the status the middle-class professional family was able to attain in nineteenth-century New Zealand. 20 As he sees it, the original intentions of the systematic colonisers were 'explicitly elitist' . 21 Their ideal male colonists were to be 'English, Anglican, educated at Oxford or Cambridge'. 22 In the new world they expected to be accorded a status similar to that which they enjoyed at 'Home'. Such exclusivity was unable to be maintained in the face of colonial realities that demanded different attributes and greater versatility. At first the crucial division in society was that between 'land purchasers', designated 'colonists', and 'labouring emigrants' . 23 As a category, 'colonist' was flexible enough to encompass newcomers but, in McAloon's view, they and their families provided until 1914, and perhaps until the 1940s, the core of the Canterbury and Otago elites. 18 Hamer, The New Zealand Liberals, pp . 150-194. 19 New Zealand Official Year Book, 1915, pp . 343-344. 20 Jim McAloon, No Idle Rich : The Wealthy in Canterbury & Otago 1840-1914, University of Otago Press, Dunedin, 2002. 21 McAloon, 'The Christchurch Elite', p. 194. 22 McAloon, 'The Chri stchurch El ite', p. 194. 23 McAloon, 'The Christchurch Elite', p. 195. 8 Around this landownin g circle clustered the profess ional s, who, in one way or another, were essential to the servicing of a pastoral economy. Its more prominent members were bankers, land agents, financier s and lawyers. Within the city their res idences defined 'enclaves' that tended to maintain exclusiveness . 24 The men who dominated the membership of the city's most exclusive club were prominent among provincial and then colonial politics, were the gatekeepers of the city's educational institutions and the powerful voices behind the local press. Some indication of the collective social influence of the group is captured in McAloon's characterisation of the typical male member of the elite: 'a lawyer, merchant, bank manager, large-scale farmer or manufacturer, a member of the Christchurch Club, the Provincial Council, the House of Representatives and the A & P Association, a Governor of Canterbury College and a Fellow of Christ's College-and therefore Anglican' . 25 Like all typologies, McAloon acknowledges a degree of fluidity, a capacity to remake itself as changing social circumstances demanded and, above all, an ability to accommodate those who might not satisfy all requirements . 26 The extent to which the consolidation of this colonial elite gave birth to a distinctive class structure has been the subject of considerable recent hi storical debate. While only its broadest outline is relevant here, it is a debate that is critical to the understanding of the elite family, whether rural or urban. It is a debate moreover grounded in a historiographical context in which the layering of colonial society was rarely couched in class terms . The dominant view was that the early 24 McAloon, 'The Christchurch Elite', p. 205. 25 McAloon, 'The Christchurch Elite', p. 197 26 The same fluidity is noted by Erik Olssen and Clyde Griffen with Frank Jones, An Accidental Utopia? Social Mobility and the Foundations of an Egalitarian Society, 1880-1940, Otago University Press, Dunedin, 2011, especially pp . 181-182, 192-194. 9 achievement of male suffrage, a high degree of social mobility and relativel y unrestricted access to land produced something very close to an open society. Similarly, relation s between capital and labour were moderated by the peculi ariti es of a colonial environment characteri sed by a relatively scattered and transient workforce and the small scale of its enterprises that readily allowed workmen to become 'little masters'. 27 Miles Fairburn' s influential The Ideal Society and its Enemies {1989) provides an interpretation of the foundation of modern New Zealand society from 1850 to 1890, in which class all but disappears as a feature of colonial life. 28 By his account, in the second half of the nineteenth century, New Zealand spawned a distinctive colonial ideology that enshrined bourgeois individualism . 29 At its core w as an 'assumption' that independence could be achieved 'outside a social framework' and 'did not depend upon collaboration, mutuality [or] collective arrangements'. 30 Significantly, the only exception Fairburn allows to this charter of self-reliance is the family. 31 It is a critical exception and one that has drawn comment. The family, as McAloon writes, 'was absolutely crucial to bourgeois identity and economic mobilisation' . 32 The espousal by self reliant individuals of their profess ed ideal, the classless society, did not so much provide evidence of its ach ievement, argues McAloon, as illustrate the class consciousness of colonial capital ism. 33 The effective 27 Jim M cAloon, 'Class in Colonial New Zea land : towards a Historiograph ical Rehabilitation', New Zealan d Journal of History , vol. 38, no.1, 2004, pp . 3-21. 28 Mil es Fairburn, Th e Ideal Society and its Enemies: The Foundations of Modern New Zealand Society 1850-1900, Aucklan d University Press, Auckland, 1989 . 29 Fairburn, Th e Ideal Society, pp . 50-52 . 3 ° Fa irburn, The Ideal Socie ty, pp . 50-51. 31 Fairburn, The Ideal Socie ty, pp. 51, 111-112, 163, 198-200. 32 McAloon, 'Class in Colon ia l New Zea land', p. 13. 33 McAloon, 'Class in Colonial New Zealan d', p. 14. 10 neglect of the colonial professional elite is more pronounced in th e New Zea land historical literature than in its Au stralian counterpart. 34 Nevertheless, there is no comprehensive history of this group in either New Zealand or Au stralia, let alone the Au stralasia n region . This study of middle-c lass urban professional families in New Zealand and Australia between 1880 and 1920 is a small step in the process of filling this gap. That the debate about the role of class in New Zealand history should turn, in part, on the role of the bourgeois family also underlines the need for deeper analysis of such families in their own right and as a social entity. McAloon's study of the wealthy in Canterbury and Otago provides a starting point and demonstrates the making of a distinct colonial middle class of considerable coherence and longevity. As a group the emergent colonial elites of Otago and Canterbury, McAloon suggests, remained relatively open to newcomers. He presents a range of social markers likely to provide admission to its ranks. Being British mattered; arriving with some capital helped; a professional occupation was useful, as was Anglicanism. Neither individually nor collectively, however, did these attributes guarantee acceptance. Fundamental to an understanding of the nuances that determined how this accommodation of newcomers by the colonial establishment was achieved is the need to explore the nature of middle-class family life, and the 34 For example : John Higley, Desley Deacon and Don Smart, with the collaboration of Robert G. Cu shing, Gwen Moore and Jan Pakulski, Elites in Australia, Routledge and K. Paul, London and Boston; Desley Deacon, Managing Gender: The State, the New Middle Closs and Women Workers 1830-1930, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1989; John Hirst, Sense and Nonsense in Australian History, Black Inc. Agenda, Melbourne, 2005, pp . 149-173; Paul de Serville, Pounds and Pedigrees: the Upper Closs in Victoria, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1991. 11 social relationship s that developed between elite and would-be elite families, further. 35 It is still possible to write a general history of New Zealand without direct reference to the family as an institution . 36 Its discus si on tends to be subsumed under feminism, the suffrage campai gns and the demogra phic and racial concern s that underlay colonial definitions of motherhood. Such an emphasis tells us much about the perceptions of the family in settler societies . To a degree, it is grounded in the separate 'spheres ideology' with its rigidly defined public and private world s. In heavily male-dominated colonial societies, the boundary between these two worlds readily became, as Macintyre has pointed out, a gender boundary. 37 So pervasive were the evils of the new world male frontiers that women, it was argued, needed to be protected from them and this was best achieved within the private sphere, where they could cultivate the 'higher morality of the ir sex'. 38 Colonial feminists of the late-nineteenth century generally chose to build their suffrage campaigns around this assertion of difference. This 'private sphere feminism ' accepted, for the most part, the segregation of the sexes and sought to raise the status and authority of women within the fam ily. From this base, they were able to set their sights upon the public sphere. If this involved a conscious strategy, then historians of women' s suffrage acknowledge a correlation between women's mobilisation as moral reformers and the ach ievement of the vote . 39 35 McAloon, No Idle Rich; McAloon, 'The Christchurch El ite'. 36 Philippa Mein Smith, A Concise History of New Zealand, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 2005. 37 Macintyre, A Co lonial Liberalism , p. 203. 38 Macintyre, A Co lonial Liberalism , p. 203-204. 39 Raewyn Dalziel, 'The Colonial Helpmeet: Women's Role and the Vote in Nineteenth-Century New Zealand' NZJH, vol. 11, no. 2, October 1977, pp. 112-113; Ph illida Bun ki e, 'The Origins of the 12 Historians of women's suffrage in Australasia have stressed-and perhaps exaggerated-the middle-class nature of first wave feminism . 40 Its leading advocates are frequently presented as part 'new woman' and part 'colonial helpmeet', thus exhibiting both public and private sphere feminism . 41 Such a depiction draws attention to the role of the middle-class urban family as arguably the crucible in which 'women's rights' were redefined in 'men's countries' . 42 The achievement of women 's suffrage becomes less a by-product of colonial politics, in which the votes of women provided a conservative bulwark against the encroachment of class and party, and rather more a creative achievement of 'colonial liberalism' . Macintyre's A Colonial Liberalism provides an interpretation of the phenomenon, in its Australian context, that moves beyond the dismissive implications of 'colonial'-'derivative, imitative and deficient'-and suggests that Woman's Movement in New Zealand: The Women's Christian Temperance Union 1885-1895', in Phillida Bunkie & Beryl Hughes (eds), Women in New Zealand Society, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1980, pp . 52-76; Patricia Grimshaw, Women's Suffrage in New Zealand Society, Auckland University Press, Auckland, 1972; Mein Smith, A Concise History of New Zealand, pp. 102-105; Audrey Oldfield, Woman Suffrage in Australia: A Gift Or A Struggle?, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and Melbourne, 1992; Judith A. Allen, Rose Scott: Vision and Revision in Feminism, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1994; Susan Magarey, Unbridling the Tongues of Women: A Biography of Catherine Helen Spence, Hale & lremonger, Sydney, 1985; Marilyn Lake, 'The Politics of Respectability: Identifying the Masculinist Context', in Susan Magarey, Sue Rowley and Susan Sheridan (eds), Debutante Nations: Feminism Contests the Nineties, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1993, pp. 1-15; Katie Spearitt, 'Ne w Dawns : First Wave Feminism 1880-1914', in Kay Saunders and Raymond Evans (eds), Gender Relations in Australia: Domination and Negotiation, Harcourt Brace Jovanich, Sydney, 1992, pp . 325-349. 40 Melanie Nolan and Caroline Daley, 'International Feminist Perspectives on Suffrage: An Introduction'; Patricia Grimshaw, 'Women's Suffrage in New Zealand Revi sited: Writing from the Margins'; Susan Magarey, 'Why Didn't They Want to be Members of Parliament : Suffragists in South Australia'; Nancy F. Cott, 'Early Twentieth-Century Feminism in Political Context: A Comparative Look at Germany and the United States'; Ellen Carol DuBois, 'Women Suffrage Around the World : Three Phases of Suffrage Internationalism', all in Caroline Daley and Melanie Nolan ( eds), Suffrage & Beyond: International Feminist Perspectives, Auckland University Press, Auckland, and Pluto Press, Annandale, 1994, pp. 7, 30-33, 72, 236-238, 260-265 ; Eric Olssen, 'Working Gender, Gendering Work', in Barbara Brookes, Annabel Cooper & Robin Law (eds), Sites of Gender. Women, Men & Modernity in Southern Dunedin, 1890-1939, Auckland University Press, pp . 44-49 . 41 Donald Denoon and Phil ippa Mein Smith with Marivic Wyndham, A History of Australia and New Zealand and the Pacific, Blackwell, Oxford, 2000, pp . 204-208. 42 Denoon et al, A History of Australia, p .204. [Show More]

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