Cruelty, Coverture, and Colonial Women’s Writings: A Social and Cultural History of Domestic Violence in New South Wales, Queensland, and Victoria, 1880-1914.

Domestic violence was arguably at its most visible in colonial society by the end of the nineteenth century. As a result of developments in law and literature, as well as a growing consciousness amongst women about the unacceptability of their experiences, both colonial female writers and wives used print, press, and divorce petitions to place ‘wife-beating’ under the spotlight and challenge its stereotypical associations with working-class, urban, alcoholic men.

Furthermore, between 1880 and 1914, judicial delineations of ‘cruelty’, influenced by the lived experiences that wives testified to in divorce petitions, expanded beyond physical violence to define what we would now term coercive control, reproductive coercion and abuse, marital rape, and economic abuse as unacceptable masculine marital behaviour.

In this pre-submission seminar, Zoe demonstrates how her thesis reconciles contemporary understandings of domestic violence with historical social and cultural understandings, whilst also offering one of the first period-specific histories of domestic violence in Australia – with a focus on New South Wales, Queensland, and Victoria – that moves beyond an emphasis on the policing and prosecution of marital abuse. By focusing on the rhetoric and realities of domestic violence in this period, she elucidates the endemic nature of domestic violence and male brutality towards women at the time of Australia’s national foundation.

Zoe Smith is a PhD candidate and gender historian in the School of History at the Australian National University. Her doctoral research is a feminist, social, and cultural history of domestic violence in New South Wales, Queensland, and Victoria between 1880–1914, with a focus on both colonial women’s divorce petitions and the fiction and non-fiction writings of Barbara Baynton, Ada Cambridge, Louisa Lawson, and Rosa Praed.

She has published and presented award-winning research on histories of domestic violence (including marital rape and coercive control), sexual violence, Australian literature and film, colonial literature, masculinity, and gender and race in the context of nineteenth-century Britain and Australia. She was the 2024 National Library of Australia Seymour Scholar and serves as an associate editor for the ANU Historical Journal II, and a member of the editorial collective, as well as the social media manager, for Lilith: A Feminist History Journal.