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The Drover's Wife and the Drover's Daughter: Histories of Single Farming Women and Debates in Australian Historiography

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 October 2008

Kathryn M. Hunter
Kathryn M. Hunter
Affiliation:
Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand
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Abstract

In the 1980s two vigorous debates commanded the attention of economic and feminist historians alike, and they played a key part in shaping the historiography concerning rural women in Australia. One debate revolved around the use of the nineteenth-century census in determining women's occupations, including those of farming women. The other debate, part of a wider feminist conversation about women's agency, focused on the question of the nature of white women's lives within colonial families and society. Despite the centrality of rural women to these debates, and the role colonial women's histories played in shaping the historiography, these debates did not impact upon the writing of rural history in Australia. This article revisits these debates in the light of new research into the lives of never-married women on Australia's family farms and uses their histories to question the conclusions arrived at by feminist and economic historians. It also questions the continuing invisibility of rural women in histories of rural Australia and hopes to provoke more discussion between rural and feminist historians.

Type
Research Article
Information
Rural History , Volume 12 , Issue 2 , October 2001 , pp. 179 - 194
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2001

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22. My purpose is to demonstrate that women held substantial pieces of land. This purpose is best served by calculating average landholdings. It is of interest to compare briefly these averages with median acreages; for example, the average landholding in Ballan in 1880 was 282 acres, while the median was 50–100 acres; in contrast, in South Gippsland in 1920, the average holding was 303 acres while the median was 500+ acres.

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