‘Honorary Chinese’?1 Women Citizens, Whiteness and Labour Legislation in the Early Australian Commonwealth

Abstract

With a focus on the early Australian commonwealth where progressive labour laws, the enfranchisement of white women and the exclusion of indigenous people from citizenship coincided with immigration restrictions based on racial identity, this paper explores what Adolph Reed has described as ‘the shifting role of racial hierarchy as a technology of civic status that in constraining or affirming legal and unofficial citizenship rights and prerogatives is a component of the larger political and economic framework’. In 1901 Australia shaped itself as a new commonwealth in self-consciously racial terms through the passage of restrictive immigration legislation creating a White Australia. The new nation also identified itself as a social laboratory of progressive reforms of which labour market protection, minimum wages and the extension of political citizenship were an integral part. However, constructing whiteness extended beyond immigration restriction. The connections between women's political status, the restrictions on their right to work in certain occupations, and the construction of whiteness was explicit and direct. This article traces this idea through restrictions imposed on the labour market participation of women in the licensed hotel trade.