[Marxism] Enforcing marriage & family in colonial Australia

["Tom O'Lincoln" <suarsos@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I had to dig this out to send to someone, so I thought I might post it
here as well. It's about how capitalism, emerging out of the early
convict system, fought to develop general and family relations to suit a
system based on wage labour and priviate property.


***
Governor Macquarie took steps to force couples living together to get
married, though he was by no means entirely successful, nor could he be
in the midst of a convict system. The system had created a huge
preponderance of males over females, and its institutions weren?t
conducive to marriage. In Katrina Alford?s words,  ?As a capitalist
economy relies on free contractual relations between capital and labour
for its functioning and growth, so too may the institution of marriage
require for its survival and success a free population, with sexual
relations being voluntary and contractual.? (Alford 27) Marriage was a
device for regulating the inheritance of private property, and the
nuclear family was a mechanism to encourage stable work habits as well
as providing the next generation of workers. It could only sink roots
gradually as a free-market capitalist economy emerged. Then Australians
got their first taste of that peculiar capitalist ?freedom?, in which
the direct bondage of convict labour was replaced by the discipline of
the labour market and the suffocation of marriage.

Macquarie couldn?t force the pace, but he tried to help the process
along, proclaiming the virtues of marriage along with those of ?habits
of industry?, while warning women that ?the mere circumstance of illegal
cohabitation ... with any man, confers no valid title upon the woman to
the goods and effects of such person should he die intestate ...? (qu
Alford 40) In the following decades the government allowed convicts free
days to engage in private work as an inducement to matrimony, while
granting crown land to free women as ?marriage portions?. The latter
practice applied first to the upper classes, so that the land grants had
the simultaneous effect of consolidating class divisions on the basis of
property. Class and gender relations were taking shape together.

Thus the Governor?s moralistic stance was not some personal
eccentricity; in fact it was typical of a certain kind of reformer
active at the time. Fear of revolution and of the unruly masses,
provoked by events in France and Ireland as well as the social
consequences of industrialisation at home, had moved the British upper
classes to look for ways to reinforce social and ideological control.
Philanthropic movements, often associated with Evangelical Christianity,
sought to raise the moral standards of the populace, particularly the
working classes, and consolidate family structures and values. This
translated readily into the NSW environment. Upper class women both in
Britain and NSW were prominent in these efforts, playing the role of
?God?s Police?. (The term is Anne Summers? (1975), but Windschuttle
(1980) has a better analysis.)

Between 1800 and 1850 Sydney women were involved in 18 philanthropic
causes, with three of the Governors? ladies playing a leading role: Anna
Josepha King, Elizabeth Macquarie and Eliza Darling. As capitalism
developed, they could push harder: during Eliza Darlin?s stay, ?colonial
philanthropy was turned from a series of discrete activities into a
movement.? (W?schuttle: 65). The ladies of the colony ran schools for
girls and took charge of the female factory at Parramatta. They were
particularly keen on getting lower class children away from their
parents and other evil influences so that, as Elizabeth Paterson wrote
in 1800, they could be ?entirely secluded from other people -- and
brought up in habits of religion and industry ... Boys learning
different trades, and the Girls Housewifery and the use of the needle.?

Paterson looked ?forward to the time when the young men will become
useful members of Society and the Women faithful and industrious wives.?
(Paterson: 7-8.) When critics fretted that the Female School of Industry
might give poor children ideas above their station, the ladies running
the school replied that the right curriculum would avoid this danger.
(Windschuttle: 69) The courses were designed precisely to turn out
suitable candidates for domestic service, and subscribers to the school
(drawn from the colonial elite) had first call on this source of labour.
In other cases schooling was intended to strengthen the ruling class
itself. In the 1830s a number of elite schools were established in NSW.
In Van Dieman?s Land, Lady Jane Franklin, although generally ?no admirer
of a school education for girls?, was prepared to encourage it to equip
them for their role as wives and sisters of the male elite. (Quoted in
Alford 134). The charity network, meanwhile, doubled as a marriage
market for the ruling class.

For there were sharp class lines dividing the women of the colony. Much
of the mistreatment female convicts encountered was handed out by upper
class women; the factory was run by ladies, as were many households to
which female convicts were assigned. The 1827 riots at the Parramatta
factory occurred in response to mistreatment by the matron, Elizabeth
Fulloon, who was responsible for profiteering on the food ration and
apparently for the death of an inmate, Mary Ann Hamilton, from hunger
and abuse. Traveller Hume Nisbet reported that ?the daughters of
convict-owners ... think no more of striking an old servant on the face
with the whips ... than one might of whipping a disobedient hound?,
while diarist Louisa Meredith remarked acidly that among colonial
ladies, ?bad servants? were the ?staple topic?. (Quoted in Cannon: 68,
17

Efforts by male administrators and charitable ladies to impose
conservative social values were closely linked to social control. Eliza
Darling made no bones about it, advising readers of her Simple Rules for
the Guidance of People in Humble Life to ?obey the orders which your
masters or mistresses give you; obey them at once and cheerfully; always
remembering that it is their place to command and your duty to obey, and
that it is the Great God himself who appoints to all persons their
stations and their duties.? (Darling: 30) Bolstering the family
institution was also a means of generating new supplies of labour. As it
grew stronger, birthrates began to rise. Births per marriage in NSW rose
from 2.74 in 1836 to 4.64 by 1845, a higher level than in Britain,
although immigration remained the most important source of additional
population.

Slowly the authorities succeeded in imposing the institution of
marriage. In the 1806 muster, 14% of ex-convict women had been listed as
married, compared to 51% who ?lived with? someone; at the 1822 muster,
71% were married. Among those who had ?come free?, the proportion of
those married rose from 64% to 78%. Even so, we can see a significant
number of ex-convicts resisting the pressure. Family relations became a
battleground in the class struggle. That is why ?in the 1830s ? a
request for clarification of the colonial marriage laws was made, not by
the populace at large, but by the property-owning section of colonial
society.? The marriage laws were ambiguous, and the elite didn?t like
it. They ?felt much anxiety as affecting the inheritance of property and
the welfare of their children.? (Alford 233) The lower classes didn?t
give a damn; Roger Thierry lamented that not till the 1840s was the
marriage ceremony ?regarded as an indispensible preliminary to the union
of man and woman? (Quoted in  Alford 31).

The sexual tightening up reduced the life choices for women of all
classes; not only were lower class people more often obliged to marry,
but the social roles open to upper class women were largely reduced to
those of the family sphere. In the early years of the colony it had been
possible for a small number of women to participate in business and for
a handful to make their fortunes. At the time it was not unusual to
treat marriages as business partnerships, and in some the wives took the
lead, as in the case of Mary Reiby. Reiby came out as a convict, then
married an officer, who died in 1811. Beginning with a store in The
Rocks she eventually made a fortune in property development, using
capital from the warehouse and shipping trade. There were other, less
spectacular successes as well:

?Up to the 1830s, colonial newspapers bore many references to the
existence of female retailers and businesswomen ... A number of
businesswomen sold imported and locally produced clothing and
haberdashery. Others ran home-based businesses, employing their own
crafts and skills, and sometimes with the assistance of a female
apprentice ... In 1828 there were twenty independent female shopkeepers
and merchants in the Sydney area ... Not all were free women; just under
one-half were convicts or on tickets-of-leave.? (Alford 197)

God?s Police had undermined the position of all women, including
themselves, by acting in the interests of their class.

For sources go here:
http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/interventions/biblio.htm


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