Clare Wright

When Clare Wright’s new history, You Daughters of Freedom: The Australians who won the vote and inspired the world, landed in my mailbox, I opened it with some trepidation. It was big, a fact I now realise I should have expected but nevertheless a somewhat disheartening one – arriving as it did at the beginning of our lambing season on the farm. It sat on the kitchen table, slightly out of place beside tractor catalogues, long-term rainfall predictions (depressing), and pamphlets advertising ram sales.

As the smoke cleared over the ruins of the Eureka Stockade on 5 December 1854, a male diarist observed that a woman was among those ‘mercilessly butchered’ by troopers and police. According to her descendants, Catherine Smith was another casualty, shot by soldiers and dead three weeks later. In the 1880s a female correspondent to the Ballarat Star also claimed to have been among the wounded. This woman was not one of the twenty-seven-odd civilians killed; nor was she among the unknown number who later died from their injuries. Yet still soldiers shot at her as she fled, and she was lucky to escape alive.

Clare Wright’s Beyond the Ladies Lounge, a history of Australia’s female publicans, has been engulfed in a haze of marketing. Rarely has a thesis-turned-book attracted so much publicity. This book has been brilliantly promoted and has excited media attention.

Female publicans: it’s a great subject. Wright turns the spotlight on Australian pub culture and discovers women not just serving behind the bars but running the hotels. Apparently, this has always been the case. Her research reveals that as many as thirty per cent of Melbourne’s city and suburban hotels were licensed to women by 1889, and more than half a few decades later. Her work, therefore, upends both the view of the pub as a male stronghold and the contention that in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries women had almost no self-employment opportunities. It also complicates the notion of separate spheres deployed by many gender historians as an analytical tool, where women are confined to the private sphere while men venture into the public domain.