The Meanings of Protection: Women in Colonial and Colonizing Australia

Abstract

These two books, while dealing with different periods and issues in Australian women's history, are united by the themes of protection and control, and by the question: Who is protecting whom and for what purposes? In Jan Gothard's study of single female migration from Britain to the Australian colonies between 1850 and 1900, emigrants' handlers "protected" them from perceived threats of moral corruption in order to assure their marketability as domestic servants. Once in Australia, they were at first kept from earning market wages and confined in isolated domestic situations. Fiona Paisley poses her fundamental question in the title Loving Protection? Did white middle-class Australian feminists, who contributed to the interwar radical agenda on Aboriginal rights, offer Aboriginal women and men "loving protection" from the sources of their degradation? Or did they themselves love their own authority as self-appointed advocates and protectors a little too much? Both authors implicate middle-class white women in the "protection" of other women, those beneath them in economic, social, and racial hierarchies. Together, these studies address issues at the center of women's history. They also exemplify the current heterogeneous production in Australian women's history of rich social history, on the one hand, and work grounded in postcolonial theory that raises large and provocative questions, on the other hand.