Last Woman Hanged by Caroline Overington

Author:Caroline Overington
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2016-07-16T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 15

The Women Roar

In order to understand the role that women played in trying to save Louisa’s life, it’s important to reiterate the position of women generally in nineteenth-century Sydney. It won’t take long to describe: as has previously been touched on in these pages, most women — rich or poor —were pretty much powerless.

To expand on that a little, Sydney in the 1880s was a thriving commercial centre with three distinct classes. The poor lived in crowded conditions around Surry Hills, Redfern and out toward Botany, where there was work for men in the woolsheds, brickworks, and slaughter yards. Poor girls tended to work as domestics, often for no more than food and board; poor married women carried the burden of child-rearing (some also took in sewing and laundry, to make ends meet).

The middle class in Sydney was fairly new, but it was growing fast. It comprised men with clerical jobs, and of course their wives and children. The ruling class, from the governor down, controlled most of the money and all of the power. This group included the British aristocrats, the big pastoralists (also called the squattocracy) plus all of the men in serious professions — judges, doctors and so on — and their wives, who also had children, but whose burdens were eased by the presence of nannies and maids.

No women could vote, not even if they were property owners or, indeed, if they paid taxes. The idea that a woman’s place was in the home was firmly entrenched. A man could not be found guilty of raping his wife, and a woman’s children could be taken from her after divorce.

The idea that women might deserve the same rights as men was still considered radical. The suffrage movement only really came to Australia in the late 1880s — which just happens to be around the same time as Louisa’s four trials got underway.

Here, then, was a perfect example of the inequality under which women lived: Louisa had no right to vote, and no women could have a say in whether capital punishment should be abolished. Louisa had also been tried by four juries comprising forty-eight men, none of whom could easily be described as her peers. (Imagine the opposite scenario: a man sentenced to death after four trials before forty-eight women, whose fate was then debated by an all-female parliament.)

Now she was to be hanged.

Women had taken tentative steps into the debate when Louisa was first sentenced, with more than 600 of them signing the petition at Mr Palser’s shop, and by writing letters to the colony’s newspapers. Now that Louisa’s appeal had been rejected — and now that the premier and, it seems, the governor had ruled out any further appeals — more forceful action was called for.

And so, in January 1889, a small group of women formed to fight for Louisa’s life. One of the fiercest warriors in the battle was once described in one of the colony’s newspapers as ‘a dainty, pink-cheeked, blue-eyed, silver-locked

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.