A Public Space for Women: The Case of Charity in Colonial Melbourne Author(s): B. J. Gleeson Source: Area, Vol.

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Area

(1995) 27.3, 193-207

A public space for women: the case of charity in colonial Melbourne

B J Gleeson, Department Dunedin, New Zealand of Geography, University of Otago, PO Box 56,

Summary Traditionally, historians of Britain and its colonies have assumed that nineteenth century middle class women were largely, if not exclusively, confined to the home as domestic 'helpmates 'formale relatives. In this historical view, men were presumed to dominate the 'public sphere 'of capitalist societies through economic activities and formal political involvement. This paper contributes new support to the theoretical and empirical evidence which has been raised in objection to such a rigidlygendered view of nineteenth-centurysocial space. The paper is a case study of charity in colonial (nineteenth-century) Melbourne, Australia, and demonstratesthatmiddle class women in this city played an important role inphilanthropy.Moreover, as thenarrative shows, such women were able to defend theirpublic role in charity successfullyagainst a male power structure which sought to reduce their considerable influence inphilanthropy.

Introduction
A considerable tradition of social scientific analysis has assumed that middle class women in nineteenth-century capitalist societies were confined to domestic realms, whilst men dominated the 'public sphere ' of social and political life (Rose 1993). Williams (1987), for example, argues that the rise of the bourgeois home in Britain nineteenth-century signalled a 'privatisation' of women and their withdrawal from public life: 'The disappearance of women politics and their consequent from public life included their removal from local into good works and charity .. displacement

(Williams1987, 176).
In this view of history, the middle class woman was a passive, retiring 'lady' who maintained the home as a refuge for her husband from the harsh, competitive outside world in which he daily struggled (Branca 1975). Traditionally, historians of the colonial period in Australia have also assumed a gendered dichotomy of middle class social space (for example Davison 1978; Fox 1991; Godden 1982; Serle 1971). Cannon, for example, in his history of land development in late colonial Victoria, tells us that 'Until late Victorian times, woman's place remained very definitely in the home, where she was expected to rear a huge family and be prepared to see almost half die in infancy' (1966, 9). Fox (1991, 87) also sees the social space of the colonial middle class couple as rigidly

gendered
'Each had their space, their sphere. The public sphere of paid work and politics was the husband's. The private sphere of the home that of the wife and mother'

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194 Gleeson

' In the colonies, just as in the Mother Country ', the public sphere was apparently dominated by middle class man, leaving woman as thefemme d'interieur whose social influence was confined to the home. In recent times, this twin dichotomy of gender and social space has been questioned by feminist geographers for, amongst other things, its empirical inaccuracy and for its tendency to reify the notion that both politics and work only occur in 'public' realms (McDowell 1983, 1991, 1993; McKenzie and Rose 1983; Rose 1993). Feminist historians have also challenged this presumed gendering of social space through historical analyses which have demon strated the important roles that middle class women played in social and political life, both in the home and beyond, in nineteenth-century capitalist societies (Branca 1975; Daniels 1982; Lake and Kelly 1985; Mappen 1986; Levine 1990). Daniels (1982), for example, makes the important point that part of the reason for women's absence from chronicles of public life in the nineteenth-century is the fact that men have dominated history writing. Most historians would now agree that public and private moral opinion, but that spaces were ideologically gendered by nineteenth-century many bourgeois women were nonetheless able to escape the sentence of domesticity through social practices such as philanthropy and ' moral reform 'work (Prochaska 1980; Poovey 1989; Ryan 1983; 1990). Prochaska (1980), for example, has shown how the experience of philanthropic work in the Victorian period helped prepare middle class British women for entry into public professions, such as teaching and social work, in the twentieth-century. This paper contributes new evidence to support the view that nineteenth-century middle class women were active in public life. In colonial Melbourne (Australia), middle class women very clearly controlled the public provision of ' outdoor ' relief in working class districts, whilst men presided over the internal affairs of charitable asylums. This state of affairs clearly shows that, for some middle class women, charity work did not, asWilliams (1987) claims, represent their ' displacement ' into a private, domestic sphere. On the contrary, women's charitable work in nineteenth is evidence of their involvement in an important and politically century Melbourne contentious public sphere. The case study to be presented in this paper illuminates an area of nineteenth-century middle class life-organised which the charity-in space-gender dichotomy appears to be displaced. On the face of it, middle class represents a seeming reversal of the public-private charity in colonial Melbourne the minds of Victorian moralists. roles of men and women which preoccupied However, the practice of colonial charity only transposed the public-private roles of middle class men and women in a formal sense. At a deeper level of analysis, it is clear that the gendered spheres of charity represent amore complex social ontology, in that middle class women were able to act publicly in ways that challenged accepted notions both of female domesticity and the androcentrism of public society. Charity in colonial Melbourne is, thus, an example of the displacement of the public-private distinction inmiddle class life, in that some women, through charitable works, were able to create a public space for themselves that was distinctly feminine. This paper will present a case study of charity in colonial Melbourne, centring on the activities Ladies' Benevolent of the Melbourne Society. The analysis will reconstruct the Benevolent Society's role in charity in nineteenth-century Melbourne and relate an episode during which these women successfully resisted the attempts of men to displace them from public philanthropy. The narrative is drawn from an examination the principal being the minutes of the Melbourne of various historical materials, Ladies' Benevolent Society covering the fifty years, 1850-19002. The paper builds on the important work undertaken by Kennedy (1968, 1974, 1985) and Swain (1985a,b),

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Womenand charity in colonial Melbourne

195

and

seeks

to extend

their chronicles

of colonial

charity

through

a historical

geographical enquiry.
The paper is organised as two main sections. The first section overviews the which was a reproduction of British charity network of colonial Melbourne, in all but one important aspect: the Colony of Victoria strenuously philanthropy resisted the introduction of a poor law. This section of the analysis demonstrates that women controlled the public provision of relief to working class areas, whilst men tended to dominate the boards and administrations of institutions which provided ' indoor ' relief to the poor. The second section of the paper relates the rise of a male-dominated philanthropic structure-the Charity Organisation Society-and its ultimately unsuccessful attempts to reduce the public influence of the Melbourne

Ladies' Benevolent Society.

The charity network of colonial Victoria

ColonialVictoria
The white invasion of what is now known as Victoria began in a sustained fashion in 1835. The six and a half decades which separated this date from the creation of the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901 constitute the colonial period of Victoria's history. A schematic periodisation of this period might posit a predominantly mercantile and latifundian society from white settlement to the first gold rushes of 1851, leavened afterwards by steady urbanisation and the rise of a significant industrial sector centred on the colony's capital city, Melbourne (Davison 1978). During this period, Victoria's largely British-born ruling class celebrated the colony's lavish mimicry of British institutions and social forms (see for example Davison 1978; Carroll 1982 and de Serville 1991 on this). Serle (1971, 338) observes

that,
'Almost very British institution, ancient or novel, was reproduced; legislation was often copied verbatim, and nearly all the current movements, debates and new organizations founded in Britain were faithfully reflected '. the popular press and public ritual were all enlisted in the The built environment, with Melbourne comic-drama of Anglophilia, its centre stage3. The providing ruling class of Victoria did, however, ban the importation of one of Britain's most important institutions; namely, the juridical apparatus of the British poor law. colonial bourgeoisie The abhorred the compulsory taxing of the wealthy prescribed by the English for local relief of the poor. legislation as a means the poor law's guarantee of a (very) minimum Furthermore, level of public to a state heresy in the opinion of support for the impoverished amounted powerful sections of the colonial ruling class who were devoted to the creed of laissez-faire capitalism (Kennedy 1985)4. To prevent the possibility of sentiment for a poor law taking root in colonial soil, the bourgeoisie applied a permanent ideological defoliant in the form of the ' no poverty' myth (Kennedy 1985; Watts 1988; Garton 1990). The fable of Victoria as a 'workingman's paradise ', free from destitution, was ceaselessly narrated in both the press and popular literature. In 1842 the Port Phillip Gazette trumpeted that, 'Poverty here means a deprivation of the luxuries of wealth work for his living' (quoted inWatts 1988, 93). that a man must

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196 Gleeson

Some thirty years later the Medical Journal of Australia was carolling to the 'workers' heaven ':

its own paean

' In Melbourne, none but the unthrifty, the intemperate, the incapable, can be excluded from the prevalent rule of prosperity ' (quoted inWatts 1988, 93)5. The other strategy adopted by the middle and upper classes to foreclose on the possibility of a poor law was the creation of a privately-run welfare system which was calculated to prevent any direct state involvement in the relief of the poor. Welfare in nineteenth-century colonial Victoria was virtually synonymous with charity. Alleviation of poverty was almost exclusively the preserve of private philanthropy, with the colonial state limiting itself to aminimal, ad hoc involvement. Both Dickey (1980) and Garton (1990) argue that the Victorian government was the least in terms of charitable policy, of all colonial administrations in interventionist, Australia. By the 1880s, Melbourne's charity network comprised seventeen major institutions providing ' indoor' welfare within asylum settings. In addition, the city claimed a host of philanthropic organisations providing ' outdoor ' relief to the poor in their homes. Outdoor relief was largely undertaken by ladies' benevolent societies, of which there were twenty-one operating in the metropolitan area by 1891 (Kennedy 1974). The societies specialised in providing relief beyond the confines of the charitable asylum (hence the term outdoor). Most outdoor charity involved various forms of income supplements and loans being provided directly to the poor of working class districts by the ' lady visitors ' of the benevolent societies. Britain as The ladies' benevolent society had emerged in late eighteenth-century part of the protestant evangelical revival (Godden 1982; Windschuttle 1980, 1982). An important nostrum of the evangelical movement was organised 'benevolence ', through which moral and religious reform of the poor was to be effected. The possession of ' innate ' female virtues, such as tolerance and benevolence, together with the civilising advantage of class, was thought to render bourgeois women fit for the role of moral exemplars to the poor. Consequently, the movement encouraged was the growth of a number of philanthropic enterprises whose membership female. The main object of these benevolent societies was to turn exclusively proletarian homes into classrooms for the pedagogy of evangelical charity.

TheMelbourneLadies'Benevolent Society
Evangelicals established a presence soon after white settlement in Australia, and women were actively involved in philanthropy in the colonies from 1800 onwards in (Windschuttle 1980, 1982). In 1845, a small compact of Presbyterian women Melbourne founded what was to become the city's most important, and most Ladies' ladies' benevolent 1945). The Melbourne enduring, society (MLBS Benevolent Society (hereafter, ' the Society ') quickly established itself and by the principal outdoor relief agency. After 1850s it had assumed the role of Melbourne's 1855, the Society's field of operation settled upon the central city and four adjoining suburbs; the whole divided into forty smaller districts, each with its own lady visitor (Figure 1). By the 1890s, the Society's operating area was home to about 150,000

persons.
The Melbourne Society drafted most of its members from women of the lower or middle strata of the bourgeoisie, usually the wives of doctors, businessmen, and minor clergymen (Swain 1985a). Although the Society was the most prestigious of Melbourne's benevolent societies6, many middle class women shied away from the time-consuming and physically exhausting work of visiting and attending meetings.

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Women and charity in colonial Melbourne

197

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198 Gleeson

of widows, deserted families, the aged, the sick, and lumpenproletariat-composed relied on charity for survival. Amongst these, the limited the disabled-which financial resources of the Society constrained it from assisting all but the desperately

needy.
In 1881 the Society was relieving an average of just over 1800 persons per fortnight, or around one and half per cent of the total population of its five regions. By 1892, in the midst of the depression, an average of over 4600 persons were helped fortnightly, being about three per cent of the total population8. In the first few decades of its operation the Society was frequently acclaimed in the public sphere. The colonial establishment recognised the voluntary labour of the ladies as a sort of dampening preventive medicine, revolutionary fevers, and, of more immediate import, keeping the colony free of the quackery of government welfare (Kennedy into Charitable Institutions 1974). In 1870, the government's own Royal Commission gave utterance to this sentiment, declaring ' It is undeniable that we have to thank theMelbourne Ladies' Benevolent ... that we are not now subjected to an obnoxious Poor Law '9. Society

City of charity: the men stay indoors As a socio-spatial phenomenon, Melbourne's charity network is notable for its inversion of the general patriarchal landscape. The accepted notion of Victorian and public-to which social space as comprised of two gendered domains-private women and men were separately consigned does not hold for the charity system of The geography of charity was dominated by two unique colonial Melbourne. assistance presided over by men, terrains: the sphere of indoor, institutionally-based and the realm of outdoor relief dominated by women. The large hospitals and asylums providing indoor relief were run by boards recruited from amongst the male bourgeoisie by means of the ' old boy network ' of school, business or political ties (Kennedy 1974). In some instances, charitable institutions had close connections to and other denominational men's male power structures, such as the Masons organisations. The occasion for the founding of the colony's premier poorhouse, the Melbourne Benevolent Asylum, was, for example, marked by masonic pomp and rituall0, and the institution thereafter maintained close ties with the city's Masons through its Board membership. Women had no particular role in the administration of the institution, except as employed nurses or as the wives of gentlemen Board members who undertook regular fundraising ventures for the Asylum. This situation the was reflected in the administration of the city's other major poorhouse, Immigrants' Home (Uhl 1981). The fact that the larger poorhouses and asylums accommodated needy people of both sexes may account for male control of these institutions. It is possible that the prospect of women managing the difficult task of keeping asylum inmates 'orderly' (which required inter alia separate confinement of the sexes) was simply unthinkable for the Victorian middle class sensibility. In a sense, men were presiding here over domestic spaces, deciding budgets, and ordering the internal household economies of into before the 1890 Royal Commission asylums. The testimony of witnesses Charitable Institutions is revealing on this account11. The Commission's inquiries concerning indoor relief were directed to a succession of male administrators of woes, asylums and poorhouses, most of whom detailed various ' house-keeping' and the staff management centring on issues such as overcrowding, underfunding, difficulty of obtaining necessary ordinances'2. To investigate outdoor relief, the

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Women and charity in colonial Melbourne

199

turned to the representatives of the city's numerous ladies' benev Commissioners olent societies, acknowledging that this domain of charity was the preserve of middle class women. The women of the Melbourne Ladies' Benevolent Society, the city's largest outdoor relief agency, managed an enterprise that was firmly in the public arena. As an organisation, the Society negotiated with the state (from where it received much of its funding in the form of modest annual votes of Parliament) and various commercial bodies in the general course of its operations. In addition, the Society liaised with the major charitable institutions, and was formally held public meetings, represented before at least three royal commissions during the colonial period. Individually, the lady visitors were each responsible for the relief of at least one district in working class communities. Members were sometimes forced to supervise more than one district due to the Society's continual recruitment problems. Visitors were expected to attend every case that they were relieving each fortnight. This necessitated a large amount of travelling, both to and from their homes in the more and within the districts them genteel (usually southern) parts of the metropolis, selves. Visitors, often the only agents of charity available, exercised enormous personal power over the lives of poor men and women. An ever-vigilant eye was kept on the poor in order to ensure that none were defrauding charity. The visitors liaised closely with police, clergymen, and local storekeepers in order to monitor the circumstances of families and individuals receiving relief. In a purely material sense at least, the visitor became the most important local representative of the public sphere for charity recipients. Maps describing the individual districts have unfortunately been lost, but Swain (1985a) has painstakingly gathered enough evidence to permit a graphic reconstruc tion of the area supervised by aMrs Hughes during the 1880s and 1890s (Figure 2). This indicates that districts as large as one square kilometre in the densely-packed proletarian slums may not have been uncommon. Mrs Hughes on average assisted 30 to 40 families per fortnight in winter, and between 15 and 20 in summer. During the economic crisis of 1892 as many as 139 families relied on her for help each fortnight (Swain 1985a). The spatiality of the Society was public and it was clearly conscious of its involvement inmainstream political and social life. A Jubilee history notes that the Society was successful in obtaining funding from the Colonial Government in 1857 after having conclusively proved its status as a ' public institution ' (MLBS in May, 1862, the 1945). Some years later, in a letter to the Colonial Treasurer Society's secretary reminded the minister that, 'This Society claims to be a Public Institution, and for fourteen years it has been as such . . .' (emphasis added). recognised by Government the Society's spatiality cannot be seen as ' public ' in the sense that many However, male activities were in nineteenth-century society. Men's occupation of the public sphere centred on formal political activity and paid employment (or other economic activity). By contrast, the Society inscribed its presence in the public sphere through charitable works which projected middle class women's domestic knowledges and values into proletarian homes. In order to receive relief, proletarian families were expected to conform, not only with accepted Victorian moral standards, but also with middle class expectations concerning the proper management of household affairs. This projection of expectations was usually achieved through the lady visitor's relationship with the proletarian women amongst her cases. The visitor's dealings

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200 Gleeson

Mrs Hughes'

District

Victoria Par

500m

Richmond

Figure 2 The District supervised byMrs Hughes Source: reconstructed by author from description given by Swain (1985a) were almost exclusively with the senior women of the households receiving charity, though her power invariably also extended to resident men. The visitors carefully surveyed the domestic space of households seeking relief in order to assess the moral worth of residents. Dirt, disorder and drink were the principal nemeses of virtue, and a sure sign of depredation. The consumption of luxuries, such as meat, cheese, eggs or tea, was forbidden for all but the sick. Visitors would even peer into the family rubbish bin to ensure that nothing save the hard rations of charity were being consumed. The Society's rhetoric conveyed the strictest expectations of virtue from those it helped (though often in practice these strictures were flexible). Sometimes the ladies' collective indignation at a member's report would survive its minuting. One can almost hear the ' tut-tuts ' which must have attended the following alarming account: ' Kernot reported that on visiting she found bread and butter on the table, Miss the baby screaming, and the mother reading a " penny dreadful " '. Proletarian women, however, were hardly passive ' objects of charity ' and the minutes evidence an undercurrent of resentment towards the insinuations and accusations of visitors. There are references in the Society's records to the ' impudence ', 'bad language ' and insults which visitors encountered in working not all charity recipients were enthralled by the ladies' class homes. Obviously, 'benevolence ',which many families regarded as despotic and intrusive. the records elsewhere reveal a mutual understanding and sympathy Nonetheless, between visitors and charity recipient. Visitors carefully recorded signs of domestic

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Women and charity in colonial Melbourne

201

violence, and the tenor of these observations is generally one of empathy with the victims of 'bad ' and intemperate men. A strong stand was taken against shirkers who deserted their wives and families. The Society frequently arranged arrest warrants for deserters, and many a bolter, cribbed in one of Her Majesty's stables, must have cursed the 'meddling ladies'. The most significant manner in which the women of the Society manifested empathy with their proletarian contemporaries was in their interpretation of the prevailing ideology of philanthropy. The Society, like most charitable bodies in colonial Melbourne, claimed adherence to the principles of the 1834 English Poor Law. Very simply, these tenets proscribed outdoor relief to able-bodied labourers and their dependants (Checkland and Checkland 1974). Assistance was to be confined to workhouses where the 'undeserving' could be weeded out from the ' deserving' through the application of work tests. There is amarked difference between the Society's codified ideology-which was its practice of relief. The women realised directly derivative of the English law-and the impracticality of fully implementing the English scheme in a colony lacking a formal system of workhouses wherein the undeserving could be strained from the worthy poor. Moreover, the women were genuinely compassionate people, unwilling to countenance gross deprivation and suffering for the sake of rules (Kennedy 1974; 1985). The minutes testify to the pragmatic charity practised by the Society. There was a general agreement to show clemency to those whom the English code would have judged undeserving, and relief was extended at times to the families of the able-bodied unemployed (Kennedy 1974). The visitors would even on occasion turn a blind eye to moral infidelities, like drink, gambling and prostitution, where need was great. The Society's records indicate its strong conviction that women and children, in particular, were not to be abandoned because of the failure of a husband and father to maintain his family respectably.

The

challenge

to women's

public

role in charity

Charity Organisers The Society's philanthropic pragmatism did not go unnoticed and eventually became the focus of ire for certain male power structures in the last decade of the In 1887, following British and American antecedents, a' Charity nineteenth-century. Organisation Society' (COS) was formed inMelbourne with the principal object of spreading the gospel of scientific charity in the colony. This philanthropic theory embodied an austere understanding of the English poor law principles, coupled with a conviction that charity should be a scientific enterprise (Kennedy 1985; Hollis 1987; Scates 1990). Scientific charity held that careful investigation of cases, combined with the litmus test of labour in the ' laboratory ' of the workhouse, could successfully identify the species of ' undeserving poor ', known popularly as paupers. ' scientific ' approach dictated a careful geographical control of relief for The able-bodied labourers and their families, which was to be strictly delimited to institutional spaces. The pauper-etymologically, the ancestor of the contemporary 'welfare cheat '-became the homo diabolos of the charity organisation movement's demonology. Pauperism-the imposition on a naively benevolent systematic 'public ' (read bourgeoisie)-was the demon at loose in the social body, and the movement was determined to cast it out by making charity a more rigorous and suspicious enterprise (Scates 1990). The agenda of scientific charity sought improve ment to philanthropy through the rationalisation of support to the poor, and not

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202 Gleeson

through increased resources. The COS, although including various women inminor capacities (for example support staff), was a male power structure; both the COS ' scientific ' executive and its principal officers in the 1890s were all men. The epistemology was overtly patriarchal, believing woman, as the possessor of an essentially ' nobler ' nature, to be incapable of resisting the conniving entreaties of the professional pauper. For the COS, nature had exclusively endowed men both with the diagnostic faculties necessary to identify the pauper, and the fortitude to confront such rogues when discovered. Women, by contrast, were merely useful assistants, garnering information about charity recipients through home visiting, and caring for the few real specimens of deserving poor (Kennedy 1985). Almost from its outset, the COS determined to break the power of theMelbourne Ladies' Benevolent Society, and enforce the rule of scientific charity (Kennedy 1968). Through its ties to the colonial government the COS was instrumental in the in 1890 of a Royal Commission on Charitable Institutions. The establishment Commission was stacked with COS members and sycophants. Although its reports were generally critical of the Victorian charity network, the Commission reserved the full force of its censoriousness for the ladies' benevolent societies. Amongst these, the Melbourne Society was singled out and upbraided for its lack of scientific method. The Commission recommended the amalgamation of all ladies' benevolent societies, and the creation of a Central Board of Charity to disburse funding. in Representatives of the city's ladies' benevolent societies were unanimous rejecting the Commissioners' suggestion that their organisations be combined under the watchful eye of a central organising body. Mrs Turnbull, Secretary of the Melbourne Society, pointed out that it would be an ' immense labour ' to supervise all the ladies' benevolent societies in the city'3. Mrs Clendinning, for the Prahran Society, also ventured that the ladies' management of outdoor relief explained why it was so ' economically conducted' (a comment that must have discomfitted the for the COS, and for the progress of exclusively male Commissioners)'4. Unhappily scientific charity, a subsequent change of government led to the Commission's report and recommendations being permanently shelved. The COS was not content to rest, however, and over the next few years assailed the Melbourne Society on a range of fronts, including various public meetings, in its Annual Reports, and at an inter-colonial charity conference. At the charity conference held in 1891 the ladies of theMelbourne Society were pilloried by the charity organisers whose comments cast them as a closed cabal presiding over an irrational system of poor relief. One critic, clearly resentful of the power of the ladies' benevolent societies, complained that they were ' rather too much like a close community 15. This line was amplified over the next few years in the Annual Reports of the COS. In its 1892 Report the COS championed the American system of' Friendly Visiting'. This was explained as a more rational alternative to the method of relief practised by ladies' benevolent societies (which the Report termed ' District Visiting'). The charity organisers ladies as regarded the spatiality of the relief system deployed by the Melbourne indiscriminate support of the deserving and irrational, and one that countenanced undeserving alike. The system of District Visiting, with a single lady visitor being responsible for an areal unit containing numerous supported cases, was seen as preventing the collection of detailed intelligence about the individual recipients of (compas charity. The COS feared that a combination of' womanly understanding' sion) and an excessive caseload would prevent the proper assessment of cases needed to trap scheming paupers. The Friendly Visiting system would restore a proper discipline to the exercise of philanthropy by placing both charity workers and charity

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Women and charity in colonial Melbourne

203

recipient under the supervision of a central authority which would monitor all relief in the metropolis-indoor and outdoor. The COS advocated a radical reconstitution of the spatial structure of philan thropy whereby the metropolis' balkanised formation of ladies benevolent societies would be placed under the suzerainty of a Central (read male) Board. The ladies of the benevolent societies would become ' friendly visitors ', dispensing advice rather than doles. Friendly visitors would also relay information about their proletarian clients to a register administered by the Central Board. This intelligence bank would in turn fund a permanent inquisition of all who dared spite the gods of Thrift and Independence by throwing themselves on charity. For the charity organisers, such a system would guide the 'innate' virtues and special domestic skills of women to a more useful (and subservient) end than that achieved by the philanthropists well-intentioned, but incapable, ladies of theMelbourne Society. The Report of 1892 provides the following description of the friendly visitor ... the first duty of the " friendly visitor " is to act as a friend and adviser . . .She strives to study each case, gain the friendship of the family, and break down the barriers between the classes of society; and she does not leave the case until it is in a position of comparative independence. She weans the family from unthrift, is more useful than the truant officer in seeing that the children attend school, saves the growing girl from the streets, cures the wife of slovenly and wasteful housekeeping, and perhaps the husband of his fondness for the bar parlour. All the while she is in constant communication with a central office, and her visits and observations enable her to supply invaluable hints and information . . .16. From its reports and public submissions, it is obvious that the COS saw itself as the bearer of enlightened philanthropic reason struggling to reform a dangerously ossified ancien regime of charity17. The landscape of philanthropy, with its uneven terrain of ladies' benevolent societies, occluded the centrally-positioned, utilitarian gaze imagined by scientific charity, and provided a haven for paupers and lurkers. (The COS explicitly argued for the establishment of a geographically-central 'Charity Hall ' from where the operations of all philanthropic agencies in the metropolis could be monitored and controlled by a Central Board of Charity.) Put simply, the COS wished to replace the localised and ideologically uneven terrain of public benevolence with a 'panoptic plain' of surveillance (Foucault 1979) where infractions of the rule of scientific charity could not escape detection. Importantly, both charity recipient and charity worker alike were to be fixed by the panoptic eye. The COS had, however, seriously underestimated the strength of theMelbourne ladies' resentment of the ' scientific critique '. The charity organisers had also misjudged both the ability of the women to defend their charitable territory, and their great resolve to do that. At the end of 1892 theMelbourne Society's Committee rejected the charity organisers' proposal for a Central Board of Charity. In January of 1893, the Melbourne Society convened a private meeting of benevolent societies with the result being that it, and the six leading organisations, determined to oppose the COS plan to amalgamate, or confederate, them. In the face of the organised contumacy of the ladies' benevolent societies the COS was forced to capitulate and, thereafter, nothing is heard of the amalgamation plan. The COS continued to argue for the reform of philanthropy-sponsoring lectures on 'Friendly Visiting ' and 'The Newer Methods in 1895 for example-but of Charity' its voice sounded shrill and was increasingly ignored by a newly critical public (Kennedy

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204 Gleeson

as it did, with the colonial depression of the 1890s, the 1974; 1984). Coinciding, struggle between the Melbourne Society and organised charity appears now as an internecine skirmish between claimants for a dwindling philanthropic landscape. The manifest inadequacy of philanthropy to cope with the mass impoverishment created liberals and radicals to reject charity by the depression spurred progressive altogether, and to demand that welfare relief be accepted as a state responsibility (Dickey 1980; Garton 1990). Although the Melbourne Society had prevailed in the irrelevant by the conflict with charity organisers, it too was made progressively welfare reforms initiated by the new Commonwealth (federal) and state governments of the early twentieth-century.

Conclusion
As this case study and other analyses (for example Branca 1975; Lake & Kelly 1985; Levine 1990) have shown, bourgeois women in nineteenth-century capitalist societies were not simply powerless ' ornaments' of the private, domestic sphere. Nor were such women, when they did appear on the public stage, merely always vicarious participants, as wives of powerful men, or as auxiliaries of male organisations. Speaking of nineteenth-century Britain, John has noted that ' the fervour with which so many middle-class women undertook ventures speaks volumes about their constraints ' (1986, 3). philanthropic

the stifling domesticity which was a powerful expectation of bourgeois Doubtless, women in the nineteenth-century drove many to seek social interaction outside the home through charitable works. However, recognition of the important constraints imposed by the notion of female gentility must not be allowed to overshadow the distinctive and important public role which middle class women achieved collectively through philanthropic activity. The case of charity in colonial Melbourne shows some bourgeois women to have been important participants in the public sphere, assisting in both the production of philanthropy, and in the reproduction of class. To some extent, this position was equivocal as these same women also challenged certain class ideologies by identifying closely at times with their ' inferiors '.Ultimately, however, the Society's work must be seen as a powerful projection of middle class expectations concerning domesticity and work into proletarian households. It is important also to recognise that the Society provided material support to proletarian households which both relieved the worst aspects of deprivation and prevented the institutionalisation of family mem bers. By often keeping households and families intact, this material support also helped to prevent the advent of a crisis of reproduction amongst the working class and a consequent these fragmentation of proletarian social space. Importantly, middle class women's involvement in the public sphere contrasted with men's role in social affairs. Observing the British experience, Prochaska (1980, 7) notes: 'A distinctive feature of women's work in nineteenth-century philanthropy is the degree to which they applied their domestic experience . . . to the world outside the home'. In a real sense, women's charitable endeavours were both a material and discursive engagement of two class-divided domestic spheres. Women philanthropists achieved

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Womenand charity in colonial Melbourne 205

this connection of bourgeois and proletarian domestic settings through their control of a public institution, the Melbourne Ladies' Benevolent Society. The Society was the vehicle through which middle class women were able tomobilise the political and financial resources which their charitable works required. From this perspective, the Society appears as a public nexus between domestic spheres which were otherwise divided by class. This fact would caution against analyses which assume either that nineteenth-century women had no role in the public sphere or that their involvement in social life simply paralleled the activities of males. This analysis demonstrates that middle class women did occupy the public sphere in one nineteenth-century society, but that this presence was distinctively gendered and motivated by a desire to connect class divided domestic spheres. In this sense, then, the practice of charity by middle class women created a distinctively feminine public space, and thereby displaced the accepted distinction in roles for the sexes. Levine (1990) is correct to point out the danger of reducing nineteenth-century to feminism, as women's philanthropy charitable activities hardly constituted a radical threat to Victorian patriarchy. Nonetheless, the real, though constrained, social power which middle class women managed to express through their public involvement in charity must be acknowledged. Writing on colonial charity, Godden (1982, 98) asserts that ' When women philanthropists attempted to assist the destitute in ways which challenged the ideology of the woman's sphere, they were quickly brought into line '. The case of the Melbourne Ladies' Benevolent Society challenges this declaration. women philanthropists saw public charity as a legitimate Colonial Melbourne's as the struggle between the Society segment of the 'woman's sphere '.Moreover, and the COS demonstrates, such women were quite prepared to resist attempts by male power structures to challenge their public role in charity. According to Kennedy (1984, 139), the colonial establishment regarded the Society as a ' bastion against a poor law '. From the evidence presented in this analysis, it seems equally true that the Society was something of a gender redoubt which created an important, and distinctive, public place for middle class women in the patriarchal social space of

colonial Melbourne.
Notes
1 Fox (1991) nonetheless provides a rich picture of the middle class colonial family which acknowledges the important 2 The activities in 41 minuted 3 The humorous role that women of the Melbourne played in charity. Ladies' Benevolent

Society for the period between are 1850-1900 volumes, held in the Latrobe Collection of the State Library of Victoria (Australia). nature of the colonial ruling class' adoration of all things British was not lost on certain contemporary observers. The opening of the palatial Melbourne in July 1851 was Benevolent Asylum marked by an extraordinary soiree attended by 250 colonial potentates, and presided over by the 'Garryowen ' (Edmund Finn), observing newly-appointed Governor Latrobe. The the journalist

to remark that ' to inaugurate a Poor-house feasting throng, was moved by holding a grand public ball there, seems incongruously amusing ' (Finn 1976, 248). For this observer the auspicious event was 'the most hilarious Terpsichorean in Port Philip ' (1976, 248). demonstration ever witnessed 4 Perhaps one must recognise denominations amongst the general body of adherents to laissez-faire in the nineteenth ideology century. The Victorian to a particular, and ruling class subscribed somewhat contradictory, catechism which, whilst repudiating state involvement in charity, embraced trade protectionism with a passionate fervour (Davison 1978).

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206 Gleeson

5 The and

proletarian its fabulists

fairyland remained

of colonial Victoria legion.

lasted as a discursive Twopenny,

reality until celebrated

the 1890s depression of the native

In 1883, Richard

belletrist

that 'there is no poor class in the colonies' (1973, 111). bourgeoisie, proclaimed 6 This is perhaps with the exception of the Queen's Fund after 1887-see Hateley (1972) on this. to Parliament, Victoria, 7 Report of the Royal Commission into Charitable Institutions. Papers presented 1871, volume 8 These II, 24. calculated from census data and the fortnightly returns recorded in the Society's figures were

minute books. 9 Report of theRoyal CommissionintoCharitableInstitutions. Papers, 1871, Victorian Parliamentary volume II, xii.
10 The Argus, 25 June, 1850, 2. IV, No 60. of the Melbourne Home Benevolent Louis, and Henry

on Charitable Institutions-Synopsis, Minutes of Evidence and Appendix. 11 Refer Royal Commission

12 These Victorian Parliamentary Papers, 1892-3, volume men included: David Stobie, Secretary Asylum; Medical James Greig, Officer Secretary and Superintendent

and Superintendent

of the Immigrants' of Evidence

of the Immigrants' Home. Minutes 13 Royal Commission on Charitable Institutions-Synopsis, Parliamentary Papers, 1892-3, Volume IV, No 60, 577. 14 Royal

and Appendix.

Victorian

Minutes of Evidence and Appendix. Victorian Commission on Charitable Institutions-Synopsis, IV, No 60, 578. Parliamentary Papers, 1892-3, Volume 15 This was aMrs Morris, wife of the founder of the COS, whose remark was recorded at an intercolonial in 1891 (COS 1891). charity conference held inMelbourne

(1892, 70). 16 Annual Report of the Charity Organisation Society of Melbourne. 17 In later years the COS was to lament its failure to impose a ' scientific ' logic on the exercise of charity. In 1908, the COS recalled that in the 1890s, the organisation had ' strongly urged a union of forces to contend against the unexampled distress, but amidst the universal turmoil it was hard tomake the voice of reason heard' (COS 1908, 6).

Dedication This paper is dedicated to Richard Kennedy whose indefatigable labours have contributed much to the struggle againstWhig history. Acknowledgements I am indebted to Robin Law and Ruth Fincher for their critical reactions to the argument in this paper. I am also grateful to Felix Driver and an anonymous referee for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of the paper. References
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