We Are the Rebels by Clare Wright Read Free Book Online Page B

refined women (in the words of one emigrant
who eloped with her brother’s tutor and emigrated to Victoria) thought the ease
of their English life well left behind them . Polite conventions—high teas and calling
cards and corsets and crinolines—were like shackles for many nineteenth-century
British gentlewomen. It cost a lot of effort and anxiety to keep up appearances.
Years later Mrs Massey, who spent two years on the diggings between 1852 and 1854,
would write I look back with a grateful heart to my gipsy life .
    Refugees from convention were joined on the road by fugitives from the law. The goldfields
frontier was a good place to disappear in search of a fresh start. The presence on
the goldfields of ex-convicts from Van Diemen’s Land (known as Vandies) became a
hot political issue after 1853, but there were other kinds of trouble you might want
to leave behind. An unwanted pregnancy, for example. A ‘Miss Smith’, with her fatherless
baby, could be reincarnated on the diggings as ‘Mrs Smith’, who’d lost her (fictitious)
husband in a mining accident or maritime mishap.
    For it was no joke to be an unmarried mother. There are reports of many a young woman
who killed or abandoned her newborn in an attempt to hide the evidence of ‘her’ sin.
On 31 October 1854, for example, the Colonial Secretary was informed that a one-month-old
child had been found in the grounds of St John’s School on the corner of Elizabeth
and La Trobe streets. The baby was in good health and was wearing a long white frock
and wrapped in a blue and green checked shawl. The Government Gazette posted a reward
for the apprehension of the mother.
    The Police Gazette is also full of reports of female runaways. On 27 February 1854,
information was distributed about one Sarah Wilson, who had left the hired service
of Mr Smith in Collingwood before her contract expired. Wilson was nineteen years
old and just under five feet (about 150 centimetres) tall, with a dark complexion
and small, regular features. She has left her clothes behind her and has no relatives
in Melbourne , noted the Gazette.
    CORSETS AND CRINOLINES
    Can you imagine removing your ribs for the sake of fashion? That’s just what some
women did to achieve the perfect nineteenth-century feminine figure: a tiny waist
and ample hips. You also needed a tightly laced corset. (One woman called corsets those vile instruments of torture .) Over this you wore a crinoline: a hooped frame
designed to support skirts in a bell-like shape.
    Corsets meant you couldn’t breathe and crinolines meant you couldn’t walk—and sometimes
they caught fire. There were women who died of their skirt injuries.
    In 1848 a group of middle-class women, headed by an indefatigable mother of six named
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, met in Seneca Falls, New York, to address the problem of
women’s social and political oppression. As part of their campaign for women’s emancipation,
including the right to vote, these women argued that political freedom should be
expressed by freedom from corsets and crinolines, which not only distorted women’s
bodies but also ruined their health. From this emerged a new ‘rational dress’ outfit:
a long tunic and billowing pants gathered at the ankle. The outfit was known as
the Bloomer costume, after magazine editor Amelia Bloomer, who publicised it, and
it became a must-have fashion item among women’s rights advocates in America and
England.
    In March 1854, Ann Plummer escaped from the residence of her husband in Fitzroy Crescent.
Ann had been tried for an undisclosed offence at the Central Criminal Court in 1849
and given a fifteen-year sentence, to be served at the premises of her husband. Ann
was described as aged 25 years and five foot one inch (152 centimetres) tall, with
a fresh complexion, brown hair, blue eyes, native Burnley, nose has been smashed .
You could make an educated guess about what she was running away from.
    Clearly, women had many practical reasons