2025/05/12 by Zoe Smith · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Australian History and Society
paper · doi:10.1080/14490854.2025.2489403
openalex publication_date 2025/05/12 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/14
In 1982, Judith Allen argued that colonial women’s economic dependence on the male breadwinner was both ‘the precondition for family violence and the reason for its continuation’. Although the economic constraints of coverture were seemingly eroded with the intermittent passage of Married Women’s Property Acts throughout the Australian colonies, women’s economic dependence in marriage was not only maintained, but endorsed. This article historicises economic violence in turn-of-the-century Australia. I connect and compare feminist concerns about women’s economic dependence in marriage expressed in colonial women’s writings to wives’ divorce petitions and the masculine marital behaviours they framed as ‘cruelty’. Significantly, I demonstrate how financial abuse in marriage persisted, and in some cases was exacerbated following the passage of Married Women’s Property Acts, with both colonial women’s fiction and divorce petitions revealing how the economic foundations of marriage continued to render wives vulnerable to desertion, neglect, exploitation, extortion and violence.