Married women in South Australia make big gain in property rights with Australia-first law change in 1884
Mary Dillon with husband Patrick and family of Park Terrace, Bowden, in about 1887. South Australian married women gained "financial personage" with increased property rights in that decade.
Image courtesy State Library of South Australia
South Australia in 1884 was the first of the Australian colonies to pass the Married Women’s Property Act, meaning women no longer had the forfeit the right to own property after they married.
Previously, married women couldn’t own property and had few rights if they were deserted by husbands or fathers, or found themselves in violent relationships. Along with the suffrage movement, the struggle to overcome the status of women as property dominated moves for women's rights in the 19th Century.
Eliza Davies’ description of her two-year marriage to violent William Davies showed the plight of married women in the earlier 19th Century. She escaped back to Sydney in 1845 and settled in the United States where she wrote The story of an earnest life in 1880.
The separation from extended family in Britain had meant that, if South Australian married women were deserted or widowed, they often found themselves destitute and depending on the government for their welfare and that of their children. In 1858, the South Australian parliament followed Britain's lead and passed the Matrimonial Causes Act, giving women extended ability to petition for divorce, although the balance stayed in favour of men and social norms failed to protect wives and children from violent retribution.
The social costs of desertion and domestic violence placed pressure on successive governments to legislate for reform. Further laws in 1867 protected the property of divorced wives and clarified procedures. Small gains such as the Savings Bank Act 1875 enabled married women to operate bank accounts in their own name but didn’t stop husbands claiming the capital and interest earned.
The first attempt to protect married women’s property failed in 1872 but, under the Married Women’s Property Act 1883-84, a woman gained “financial personage”: a right to her own property and earnings as well as the responsibility to maintain her relatives, including her husband, if they were destitute. Married women, for the first time, could buy, hold and dispose of property, with legal avenues to sue and be sued.
The legislation’s critics included one politician declaring: “If we are going to give women power over property, and make them into women of business, politicians and doctors, we should in a very short time alter the entire course of family life”.
