‘Going her Own Road’: The Tortured Path to Economic Independence in Late Colonial New South Wales

Introduction

In late April of 1893, following the funeral of her beloved mother in Sydney, Catherine Kirchner returned home to her husband William and three children in the small town of Goulburn, an early inland city located almost two hundred kilometres south-west of Sydney in the colony of New South Wales (NSW). ¹ She brought with her several recently purchased books concerning theosophy, a philosophical and religious movement gaining popularity across the Anglophone world. Restored to her family, Catherine admitted to ‘a deep study of the creed,’ and informed William that she too had become ‘a disciple of Madame Blavatsky,’ referring here to the Russian spiritualist who was one of the theosophical movement's most significant and intriguing co-founders. ²

As a consequence of her newfound direction, Catherine explained, ‘their intimate associations must cease’: to do otherwise would deplete her ‘animal magnetism’ and impede her latent capabilities as a seer and reader of the crystal ball. ³ Four years later, in 1897, with husband and wife working and residing in separate locations, an emboldened Catherine wrote to William that she could now ‘earn honourably’ enough to keep herself and, while ‘willing to be friendly,’ was determined to ‘go’ her ‘own road.’ ⁴ But in May 1898, William lodged proceedings for divorce in the NSW Divorce Court, accusing Catherine of adultery with her business associate Oswald McMaster. By this stage, Catherine's theosophical bent was clearly on the wane, perhaps just another string in the multi-faceted bow of her income-earning strategies and a pretext to facilitate escape from a marriage that was no longer appealing.

With legal documents and courtroom testimony recounting an elaborate saga of moves between geographical locations, multiple short-lived economic ventures and an ‘on-again/off-again’ relationship between husband and wife, the timeline in the Kirchner case is complicated and often confusing. At times, it is difficult to identify the chronological thread that unites disparate locales and events in a marriage that lasted from 1881 to 1898. The last few years of the union saw Catherine move in 1894 from Goulburn to Sydney and begin a relationship with Oswald McMaster at some time before divorce proceedings commenced in 1898. For this reason, the following discussion devotes considerable attention to teasing out the chronology as it emerges in the sources.

This article investigates how the capacity to earn an independent income shaped Catherine Kirchner's intimate relations with both her husband and Oswald McMaster, whom she went on to marry in January 1900. ⁵ As British historian Jennifer Aston points out, scholarship depicting women as ‘independent female economic agents’ was notably scarce until recently, rendering significant the sources describing Catherine Kirchner's ongoing efforts to earn a living. ⁶ The chief goal in the current context, however, is to understand how Catherine Kirchner's evident sense of economic self-sufficiency effected alterations in that elusive realm of ‘the personal and the private.’ ⁷ As such, the main interest of the research lies in investigating how Catherine conducted herself as an equal stakeholder in the complex and hidden sphere of intimacy. Within that realm, the potential to earn her own living featured prominently in Catherine Kirchner's sense of independent selfhood.

The discussion begins with a brief overview of the colonial divorce process, which is necessary to understand the nature of the sources and the events they describe. It then moves on to trace the biographical arc of Catherine's life that emerges within a comprehensive divorce case file and numerous press reports of the five-day courtroom ordeal to which William Kirchner's divorce petition led. With these multiple documents as the evidence base, and using Catherine as a case study, the key question is to consider how the increasing capacity of women at this time to engage with society shaped their access to viable economic and interpersonal choices. ⁸ The discussion also highlights the obstacles that Catherine continued to face in striving for financial independence, despite a long-lasting and widespread perception that the 1890s served as ‘a golden age’ for women in the developed nations, whereby employment and other opportunities proliferated to make economic independence from men a realistic goal. ⁹

The details of financial arrangements that press and legal sources reveal here are of value not only for what they reflect about the Kirchners’ economic successes or (more often) failures, but what they suggest about the balance of marital power for an unexceptional couple. Lengthy descriptions within the sources about the couple's pecuniary arrangements have the potential to nuance and challenge our understanding of that ubiquitous concept of separate spheres, a notion still colouring the historiography. In such perceptions, women are portrayed as dependent, submissive and confined to the home, while men are independent and assertive, making their way in the world. ¹⁰ In contrast, Catherine's case threatens any sense of that proposed ‘dialectical polarity between home and world’ which British historian Amanda Vickery once rightly questioned in relation to many conventional portrayals of historical women. ¹¹ Adding such individuals to the canon not only allows us to deepen our understanding of women, but highlights the crucial role of gender relations and gendered conflict in configuring the past. ¹²

Scholars of past entrepreneurial women acknowledge that it is rare to see women of the nineteenth century attributed with financial ambition or looking outside of the domestic context for fulfilment, even though it is clear that some did. ¹³ The Kirchner case allows insight into the changing balance of power between the sexes over the last two decades of the nineteenth century, revealing how changing perceptions of gender roles in the wider society affected an unremarkable marital partnership. It also underscores the persistence of gendered disadvantage in recounting the story of a woman who sought engagement with varied means of employment as the path to autonomy, but ultimately remained reliant on her intimate male partners. Despite her innovative and relentless efforts to do so, Catherine Kirchner failed to make an independent living without the support of a man.

Colonial Divorce—a Tortuous Ordeal

To understand the events that unfolded in the Kirchner divorce trial, it is necessary to realise how complex and convoluted the process of divorce was at the time. The dissolution of a marriage in the colonial era could be tortuous if an accused party fought the charges levelled at them, which—perhaps not surprisingly—many people chose not to do. With charges and refutations framed in terms of guilt and innocence, lawyers and barristers strove to ensure that protagonists deployed idealised gender stereotypes in mounting their defence. If we consider, as legal and literary scholars Peter Brooks and Paul Gewirtz contend, that legal evidence consists of narrative and rhetoric rather than simply ‘the facts,’ and we identify those ‘stock stories’ which protagonists manipulate to achieve their ends, we may recognise how these idealised gender portrayals ‘worked’ to convince a judge and jury that one version of ‘the truth’ was more cogent than another. ¹⁴

At the time of its introduction in 1873, divorce legislation in NSW was closely based on English law, but it soon developed its own variations. Unlike the divorce rate in the United States, the Australian divorce rate remained low in comparison, as it did also in England. ¹⁵ But the process often remained difficult, even though the NSW Divorce Act had been through two amendments and by 1898, these legislative amendments had made the dissolution of a marriage considerably easier. If a judge deemed it necessary, a divorce petition could lead to a trial either with or without a jury. Chief players in the legal drama included the ‘petitioner,’ who initiated proceedings, the ‘respondent’ who answered the charges, and in adultery cases, the ‘co-respondent,’ who was the respondent's lover. When a man petitioned on the grounds of his wife's adultery, he typically named a co-respondent and demanded damages from him. (Owing to the varying grounds for divorce, the situation for women charging a husband with adultery was vastly different and is not my focus in the current discussion). As Australian historian Hilary Golder pointed out in her longitudinal study of divorce in nineteenth century NSW, most male petitioners sought damages to cover the hefty legal costs that a divorce case invariably generated. ¹⁶ Lawyers calculated damages according to the social status of the party involved, ¹⁷ and in the current instance, William Kirchner sought the considerable sum of £2000 in damages from Oswald McMaster. Given William's lowly position at the time, the damages figure was ambitious.

The process of putting a petition together necessitated extensive preparatory legwork by solicitors and tended to include numerous affidavits and other witness statements, all of which are now preserved in archival case records at Sydney's chief records repository, the State Archives and Records Authority. Although the official position of Court Reporter would not be established until the following year, by 1898 the typewriter was a typical feature of court proceedings. As a result, the Kirchner divorce archive includes a twenty-five-page typed recount of the evidence taken over the five days of the trial, as well as William's original petition, Catherine's responding refutation of his charges and many press reports relating to the case.

The abundant archival sources pertaining to the petition and trial that followed suggest what literary scholar Ann Heilmann describes as ‘a radically new script for heterosexual relations.’ The documents reveal marital and extra-marital relationships in which Catherine often acted as an equal partner in investment and other decision-making, and conducted herself with a level of authority. ¹⁸ Although the story of the Kirchner marriage and its unravelling takes place in pre-Federation Australia, it shares with countries such as Canada and the United States evidence of altering gender roles in legislative and intimate contexts and the increasing respectability of employment for middle-class women. ¹⁹ In stating her determination to live independently, Catherine Kirchner was asserting the right to selfhood and personal autonomy, those decisive features of modern womanhood. ²⁰

Scholars of late nineteenth century court process in England and the United States as well as Australia have remarked upon the melodramatic nature of trial proceedings at a time when melodrama provided a popular platform for the general populace to explore and confirm the moral status quo. ²¹ English historian Victoria Bates argues that women were expected to ‘perform’ on the stand in a particular way if they wanted to be assured of a particular legal outcome, and so their deportment followed ‘definite ‘patterns’, scripts, and gendered stereotypes.’ ²² The two chief scholars of divorce in NSW—Hilary Golder in 1985 and Claire Sellwood in 2016—have written at length about the melodramatic nature of proceedings in the late colonial courtroom. ²³ I mention melodrama because its realities render surprising Catherine Kirchner's robust and assertive courtroom conduct, and by the same token, William's willingness to expose his failures as a breadwinner and the fact that he was most definitely not the head of the household. Within the divorce archive, the effort to portray idealised gender roles is typically evident throughout the documents across time and social class. No matter the realities of an individual situation, the dominant need was to convince court authorities of how closely each legal actor conformed to the idealised version of spousal comportment then in sway. Accordingly, a ‘good’ husband strove to demonstrate his worthiness as a provider and head of the family, while the ‘good’ wife emphasised her maternal and domestic fitness. ²⁴ These idealisations were not in play during the Kirchner divorce case, and my knowledge of the divorce archive suggests that this absence is highly atypical of gendered portrayals at the time, regardless of whether a husband appeared in court as the petitioner or the respondent.

In the similarly abundant documentation of many other divorce cases, husbands appear to function as masters to submissive wives, occupying a vastly superior economic position to the latter via their control of the purse-strings. Many husbands of the era saw themselves as the sole source of domestic authority and decision-making. ²⁵ Numerous other cases within the divorce archive confirm the pervasiveness of those unequal power relations that tended to characterise the colonial marriage. ²⁶ The Horwitz divorce trial of 1883, for example, revealed financial control so extreme it constituted domestic abuse, with Michael Horwitz dictating each penny his wife Flora could spend and keeping household supplies in a locked cupboard for which only he had the key. ²⁷ Court proceedings for the Bradley case of 1892 similarly revealed that Walter Bradley kept his wife in a state of protracted financial dependence, overturning her investment decisions and thwarting her efforts to contribute to the family economy—despite the considerable assets Emily had brought to the marriage many years prior and Walter Bradley's generally benign and kind demeanour. While both the Horwitz and Bradley cases involved men of considerable wealth, other divorce cases suggest a similar financial control among the less affluent. Social class by no means buffered a woman from her husband's ability to control her through economic means. ²⁸

It is now well known that financial control helps to maintain women in a state of dependence on an abusive partner. ²⁹ A sense of inequality and an economic power differential is conspicuous in its absence from the Kirchner marriage. With William striving to make a living in paid employment outside of the home, and Catherine pursuing her own avenues of income-generation to maintain family finances, from its inception the relationship was characterised by a definite sense of equality and partnership and a diminished sense of husbandly dominance. ³⁰ Even in its decline, accounts of the Kirchner relationship confirm that by no means all men believed a woman's place was only in the home. ³¹

The Squatters’ Daughter and the German Consul's Son

To understand the couple's combined economic activities and the aspirations they evidently harboured, it is necessary to understand William and Catherine Kirchner's respective family origins. Both spouses shared the experience of childhood prosperity and upward family mobility. Each inherited considerable family money at various times and these inherited funds went on to play a vital role in the financial choices and options available to them.

Catherine Jane Wilson was the eldest of five surviving children, born in 1859 to Scottish-born Samuel Wilson and Irish-born Margaret, nee Reid. Samuel had established himself as a successful timber importer in the Victorian capital of Melbourne and the nearby town of Geelong, before entering into several substantial squatting agreements. ³² The Wilsons owned a large Victorian grazing property known as Lima Station, where they ran almost 12 000 sheep. ³³ In 1879, the family also purchased Lake Cowell Station, situated a further eighty kilometres north of Melbourne in the Forbes district, where they went on to develop a reputation for new and innovative pastoral techniques. ³⁴ Such extensive property ownership confirms the Wilsons as elite colonial landowners and suggests the privilege and stability of Catherine's life before marriage. Before the Married Woman's Property Acts it was almost impossible for women to act independently once married. We do not know what role Catherine's mother played in the Wilson family finances but perhaps, like her daughter, Margaret Reid possessed entrepreneurial abilities and played a part in financial affairs.

Born in Sydney in 1851, William Gustave George Kirchner was the son of a German migrant, Karl Ludwig Wilhelm Kirchner and native-born Frances (or Fanny) Stirling. I know little about William's mother or her contribution to the Kirchner activities. William spent much of his childhood in the Northern Rivers town of Grafton NSW and was educated there and ‘on the continent,’ where his father was heavily invested in German migration to NSW and Queensland and developed an important bounty scheme for German workers to the colonies. ³⁵ Serving at one time as Sydney's Consul to Prussia and Hamburg, from the late 1840s the senior Kirchner travelled regularly to and from his homeland, acting as an immigration agent to promote German travel when the end of convict transportation saw a dire shortage of labour in NSW, and migration schemes extended to include those of European origin. ³⁶ William Kirchner's father was thus a highly regarded and respected citizen.

There is no record of how Catherine and William met, but by February 1881 they had begun married life at a small and well-known hotel in Sydney's Wynyard Square, before renting ‘private homes’ in Randwick and Waverley, such sole tenancy at this stage suggesting a degree of prosperity. ³⁷ The couple had three children; Lucina Dorothy born in 1882, Margaret (known as Marjorie) in 1886, and William Alex (known as Willie) in 1891. ³⁸ There is no mention within the sources of miscarriage, abortion or stillbirth, but the wide spacing of births and a child-bearing period of only nine years in Catherine's case was certainly below the average of 11.6 years. ³⁹ It is possible that Catherine practised contraception and resorted to abortion when the former failed, given that such practices were widespread. ⁴⁰ While the lengthy time spans between births may also have been the result of abstinence, there is nothing to suggest that the Kirchner relationship was anything other than harmonious during the 1880s. On the contrary, Catherine's stated intention to end ‘intimate associations’ in 1893 indicates that the couple's sexual relationship had been ongoing before her visit to Sydney and divorce proceedings suggest further that it continued until 1897, when Catherine once again vowed to end ‘cohabitation.’ ⁴¹ By that time, however, she had evidently begun to ‘cohabit’ with Oswald McMaster.

With a shared familial experience of upward mobility through hard work, William and Catherine were no doubt hopeful of attaining an equal or even greater prosperity together, but not one of their many and varied attempts to achieve financial success succeeded long-term. ⁴² While inherited money and property played some part in the couple's economic endeavours, these financial efforts also demonstrate the lengths to which a middle-class woman could go to make ends meet. When viewed in combination, such efforts confirm that Catherine Kirchner did not shy from hard work and possessed considerable financial initiative. The couple's investment plans were sometimes shared and at other times carried out independently. Notes of Evidence include extensive detail as to the timeline of the couple's many financial manoeuvres, revealing a complicated story of frequent occupational change, geographical relocation and lengthy periods spent apart while each partner contributed separately to a shared family coffer. Such flux was not unusual for the colonial individual or family, but more often characterised the lives of the working classes dependent on following short-term economic opportunities as they arose. ⁴³

When the Kirchners married in 1881, William was working as a civil servant in the ‘Money Department,’ resigning ‘a couple of days’ after the wedding to establish ‘a hardware business’ with his brother Edward, a move towards which either Catherine's father or brother contributed financially. ⁴⁴ In this and other ventures, the Kirchners’ business activities confirm the fact that throughout the colonial era, kin relationships played a vital role in individual economic success. ⁴⁵ For several years E. Kirchner and Co. thrived, but by 1887 had fallen away to a mere ‘Bulk Stores’ in Sydney's centre. ⁴⁶ Following his hardware venture, William and Catherine invested together in ‘a soda-water manufactory at Newcastle,’ but their ‘Ice and Aerated Water Company’ closed in 1888, less than a year after its establishment. Legal proceedings lodged by creditors revealed that the Kirchners owed £236 for almost 15000 glass bottles still in their possession when the soda water business failed. ⁴⁷ In that same year, Catherine found a position as a domestic servant in a boarding house, quite a comedown for someone who had once belonged to the landed gentry, while William lived and worked as a Sheriff's Officer for nine months in the town of Albury, some 550 kilometres south-west of Sydney. Unlike the United States, where the sheriff was an official law enforcement officer, his colonial counterpart was akin to a bailiff, tasked primarily with such activities as tracking down errant debtors and arranging the sale at public auction of land to repay mortgages and other debts. ⁴⁸

Catherine's Entrepreneurial Endeavours

Catherine's experience of working for someone else was short-lived. Only a few months after she began working as a servant, still in 1888, the Kirchners opened their own boarding houses first at Dawes Point, and then in Fort Street, both central city locations. ⁴⁹ Running her own lodging house was a sole venture for Catherine while William moved from Albury to Goulburn and began work again as a Sheriff's Officer in the new locale. ⁵⁰ According to Sydney's primary commercial directory at the time, the city in 1890 was dotted with more than three hundred identified boarding houses, ranging in quality from the ‘skid-row’ of sailors’ lodgings, to ‘high-class’ establishments in Dawes Point, and reflected a decidedly flooded market. ⁵¹ Managing a boarding house was a respectable occupation for women and offered significantly more autonomy than domestic service. Perhaps most importantly, it required little financial outlay to establish and could be either a short or long-term venture. ⁵²

Investigating colonial businesswomen, business and gender historian Catherine Bishop suggests that for those women with entrepreneurial ambitions boarding house keeping could be ‘a deliberate exploitation of their femininity’, but that it was also sometimes ‘a last resort’ for women without other skills. ⁵³ Bishop has uncovered many women who opened a boarding house in times of dire need, particularly when a breadwinner was unemployed, had died or deserted his family, and given the other imaginative money-making schemes in which the Kirchners engaged, it seems probable that Catherine pursued such an avenue through necessity rather than choice. ⁵⁴

Keeping a boarding house requires those numerous domestic activities which similarly comprise part of daily housewifery and constitute the ‘invisible’ chores Australian historian Desley Deacon once described in relation to the under-recognition of women's labour. ⁵⁵ Catherine's domestic management of household finances would not have been visible were it not for the court case that exposed their marital arrangements. This was part of the ‘hidden economy’ that included unpaid domestic and caring work, in the context of managing the household and family finances.

The hidden nature of Catherine's economic functioning extended to the various abortive financial schemes in which husband and wife invested both jointly and separately, and about which we would remain ignorant were it not for the Kirchners’ engagement with the law. On the stand, William deposed that he ‘always forwarded a portion of his salary’ to Catherine during those long periods he worked away from the family home. He described her as a good businesswoman who managed investments, savings, and general monetary affairs for him, which suggests that Catherine had the greater acumen when it came to money and both partners recognised the fact. ⁵⁶

During trial proceedings, each spouse gave testimony that confirmed Catherine as the linchpin of family finances. To a considerable extent, William's account of the couple's financial arrangements mirrors the situation of those working-class men of whom British historian Stephen Heathorn has written, somewhat ‘removed from the household economy,’ turning over wages to wives, and sacrificing belongings to the pawn-broker when the need arose. ⁵⁷ Such details suggest that it was Catherine rather than William who orchestrated complex financial arrangements to keep hardship at bay, and knew which items of value could be sacrificed in tough times. As for many other couples at the time, her husband's income was not enough to support the family and Catherine's contributions were essential to keep them afloat.

Even when William did have access to funds, however, he tended to view them as shared. In 1890, for example, upon receiving an inheritance of some seven hundred pounds from his father's German estate, he gave Catherine one hundred and fifty pounds to invest in ‘a farm.’ At around the same time, the couple consulted together with their solicitor about investing in a slate quarry, another indication of a shared outlook and financial aspirations and in the mention of ‘their solicitor,’ also an indication of a certain social class. ⁵⁸ In the following year, William moved to Goulburn and Catherine joined him with the children, first living in a boarding house, then in a rented ‘cottage’ and finally another more substantial property. Here, according to William's later testimony, they lived ‘very happily all the time.’ ⁵⁹

Although William faced bankruptcy in 1892, he continued to receive wages as a Sheriff's Officer at a time of sustained economic depression, drought and industrial and political unrest. ⁶⁰ When Catherine established an orchard and livery stable in 1894 in Goulburn as a sole venture (after her reported withdrawal from the conjugal bed), that initiative also failed, probably because of poor timing, given that in the following year drought conditions would take hold across the colony while industrial unrest reached a pitch in the pastoral industry. ⁶¹ Despite ongoing efforts to pursue legitimate avenues of business, nothing of William's £700 inheritance was left by the mid-1890s. ⁶²

Conjugal Rights and Cohabitation

Against the backdrop of the couple's ongoing financial failure and the ongoing commercial depression, Catherine moved to Sydney in 1894 after persuading William that he should remain in Goulburn to work. The reasons she provided—that she ‘preferred’ city life, and the children would get a better education there—were possibly a mere pretext to facilitate her escape from the marriage. ⁶³ To begin with, Catherine lived in rented rooms, but after some months became the sole lessee of a large building situated in Elizabeth Street, one of the major throughfares in Sydney's central business district. Here she ran multiple small businesses, including a commercial laundry, boarding house and tea rooms. The couple maintained a semblance of marital harmony and familial integrity, however, with William frequently visiting his wife and children at the Elizabeth Street property and sending money each month.

The evidence pertaining to the couple's marital relationship between 1893 and 1897 is confusing and contradictory. On the one hand, according to William's testimony, they lived apart for purely economic reasons, and he visited Sydney often. At the same time, they continued to ‘cohabit’ when he came to the city, despite Catherine's previous avowal not to do so. The relationship was reasonably harmonious, although he ‘objected to her carrying on the business of a palmist, and to the laundry,’ perhaps in an effort during proceedings to demonstrate his opposition to such lowly and suspect pursuits or else to imply his authority.

In 1895, William was transferred to Newcastle and Maitland, returning to Sydney in the latter part of 1896 after leaving his job as a Sheriff's Officer but in the following year, a serious quarrel led to his departure from Elizabeth Street, and he remained away for two months. On his return, he deposed, Catherine ‘sent’ him up to an attic room bedroom, because ‘she objected to him cohabiting with her.’ ⁶⁴ The ability to demand a separate sleeping area was a luxury available only to women of a certain class, requiring space. ⁶⁵ In Catherine's case, however, the room she located for her husband was meagre indeed, and it was only her determination to establish a separate physical and emotional space which assured success in orchestrating distance. ⁶⁶

In response to William's complaints regarding the new sleeping arrangements, Catherine immediately ‘engaged a room for him at Miss Noble's in Phillip Street.’ After his forced relocation, William admitted, he ‘never had connection’ with his wife again. ⁶⁷ Even after the move to Miss Noble's, however, the couple maintained the illusion of togetherness, with William going to Elizabeth Street each evening to see the family and occasionally take them out. In addition, Catherine and the children would sometimes go to the boarding house to have meals there, especially on a Sunday. During this time, the couple's defunct sexual relationship clearly became an ongoing source of tension. ⁶⁸ William admitted that he ‘frequently asked’ for his ‘marital rights,’ only to have Catherine refuse and inform him that ‘she did not care’ to comply.

There are several possible explanations for Catherine's determination to end marital sexual relations. She claimed theosophy did not dictate sexual abstinence, and denied suggesting otherwise. ⁶⁹ In a detailed exploration of the movement, however, Australian historian Jill Roe points out that ‘the rescue’ of the soul and its spiritual recovery indeed necessitated ‘a pure life’ for theosophy's followers. ⁷⁰

Historian Jo Aitken contends that late nineteenth century feminist reformers identified so-called ‘wife beating’ as a purely working-class phenomenon, but it was common for middle and upper-class women in divorce proceedings to accuse a husband of physical and emotional cruelty, and such accusations were in play well before 1892, when women were first permitted to cite cruelty as grounds for divorce. ⁷¹ When the Kirchner case went to court, the legal conception of cruelty was considerably transformed and no longer required proof of physical violence. New cruelty legislation included in the 1892 Divorce Amendment and Extension Act reflected a recognition by lawmakers that domestic violence perpetrated by husbands against wives was in urgent need of address, and the concept had widened to include emotional and verbal as well as physical abuse. ⁷²

I mention these cruelty amendments because it was surprising that Catherine Kirchner mentioned only a single occurrence of physical violence on William's part, rather than informing the court at length about how he had failed as a husband. Her reticence was unusual given the legislation's new cruelty and assault guidelines. ⁷³ In fact, the chief mention of violence in the case came from William, who described an incident taking took place shortly after Catherine's return from Sydney in 1893. A keen horsewoman, Catherine wanted to ‘ride hurdles’ at a nearby horse show in Goulburn, and when William directed her to stay at home and ‘refrain’ from participating in the event, she whipped him ‘about the shoulders with her riding crop,’ before leaving the house to enter the competition. ⁷⁴

Writing at length about the changing conception of legal cruelty, Australian legal historian Colin James contends that late nineteenth century legal authorities saw masculine violence as necessary and at times unavoidable. Violent women were a threat to the patriarchal order. My research suggests that generally, wives recounted male transgressions at length, and so it is surprising on the one hand that William Kirchner did not make more of Catherine's aberrant conduct and on the other that Catherine did not do the same in relation to his putative failings. ⁷⁵

British social and cultural historian Lucy Bland suggests that women had begun to scrutinise and condemn men's sexual behaviour both within and outside marriage as early as the late 1880s. ⁷⁶ Such critical comment is typically found in suffrage material and press editorials, but it is rare to find evidence of how an individual felt about physical intimacy with her husband. When Catherine received William's writ for divorce citing her adultery, she penned an enraged letter in which she expressed her feelings of physical revulsion towards him, writing

You know you have sores that won't heal on your breast and elsewhere besides the

Providing a marked contrast to the tenderness with which Catherine and Oswald McMaster negotiated their physical intimacy, the brief reference suggests that Catherine may well have resorted to theosophy as a pretext to avoid ‘cohabitation’ with William. Whatever the ‘sores that won't heal’ were, Catherine's exhortation confirms she had no wish to sleep with her husband.

Catherine Kirchner as Independent Economic Agent and Spiritualist Entrepreneur

Catherine's entrepreneurial interests were on display from the time she left William in Goulburn. As Catherine Bishop explains, despite definitional confusion over the term, businesswomen may be classed as entrepreneurial if they ‘took risks and bore the consequences of their decisions.’ ⁷⁸ These descriptors amply apply to Catherine Kirchner. In 1894, on leasing the several-storeyed building in Elizabeth Street, Catherine modified the property to include a laundry and boarding house as well as a palmistry business she called a ‘Ladies Agency.’ The agency operated within a ‘palmistry chamber,’ where one Florence Gordon assisted her, working in the laundry when she was not required for spiritualist support. In the small space created by partitioning her bedroom into two sections, Catherine read the crystal ball and predicted a client's future, before seeing the individual off clutching ‘the card of fate’ upon which Florence had scribed Madame's portentous prognostications as her mistress dictated them. ⁷⁹

There were many indications of Catherine's financial initiative, and her circumstances confirm that exercising such initiative was increasingly possible. Catherine's capacity to engage with diverse business activities suggests she did not face those multiple barriers which impeded economic survival for so many women. As sole lessee, Catherine could adapt the Elizabeth Street property for multiple purposes, sectioning off a tearoom to provide meals for lodgers and members of the public. ⁸⁰ She catered ‘luncheons’ for workers at the recently opened Cooperative Wool Stores in Dawes Point and had meals ready by six o’clock each morning. In addition, Catherine worked as a paid caretaker for the Stores’ nearby offices in Hunter Street, acting as an employment broker in hiring workers, and sometimes just serving as an on-site presence, possibly to bolster illusions of prosperity. ⁸¹ Most impressively, she wrote articles and performed clerical tasks for The Co-operator Newspaper, a small monthly trade publication of the Cooperative Wool Stores, for which the prominent feminist journalist (and later wife of NSW Premier William Holman) Ada Kidgell served at one stage as chief editor. ⁸²

The diverse nature of Catherine's business activities lends further weight to Desley Deacon's allegations of the substantial under-recognition of colonial women's contribution to household income, and the level of their engagement outside of the domestic context. ⁸³ Catherine's financial initiatives included opening the boarding houses, regular pawning to supplement income, negotiating interest rates for loan and other debt repayments, and maintaining detailed records of these actions. These various activities often provided the family's main income source, rendering her an ‘important contributor’ rather than a ‘minor economic actor.’ Nonetheless, Catherine would not have been acknowledged as such within statistical enumerations, simply because so much of her work took place within the domestic sphere and was impossible to quantify. ⁸⁴

Despite recognising that the late 1890s offered women some move forward from their subjected position, I am not suggesting late nineteenth century colonial life did not remain intensely patriarchal, or that women across social class enjoyed the same access as men to resources and opportunities., and gender and class combined to outweigh merit, even though many women were branching out from a narrow concentration in domestic service and entering the manufacturing and commercial fields, and to a small extent the professions. ⁸⁵ Accordingly, a significant portion of the credit for Catherine's ability to abandon her marriage lies in two factors stemming directly from her class status.

Most importantly, Catherine's close relationship with Oswald McMaster provided her with an informal loan broker. McMaster finalised the loan agreement enabling her purchase of the equipment she needed to operate her commercial laundry, negotiated an additional loan to pay boarding school fees for her two daughters, and furnished Catherine with various employment positions by virtue of his position as manager of the Co-operative Wool Stores. Furthermore, through its inheritance provisions, Catherine's propertied family guaranteed her an ongoing income source which further strengthened her capacity to engage in business and provided some leverage in her financial negotiations with McMaster. These details will be discussed further within the article.

Catherine was only able to carry out these various initiatives, furthermore, by negotiating a loan agreement with her former lodger and now invaluable business associate Oswald McMaster, who furnished the capital allowing her to purchase the necessary ‘plant’ for the enterprise. As collateral, McMaster used Catherine's financial interest in the family properties for which she was a subsidiary owner. ⁸⁶ Oswald McMaster was a forty-two-year-old civil engineer with diverse business interests, who in addition to other achievements would later build the railway from Milson's Point to Hornsby, now one of Sydney's main rail arteries. ⁸⁷ In contrast to her beleaguered spouse, McMaster was a prosperous and successful member of Sydney's mercantile community. He had been a friend of the Wilson family in Catherine's youth, and in the late 1880s lodged for more than two years with William and Catherine in one of their boarding houses. After Catherine's move to Sydney in 1894, he employed her in several capacities. McMaster also rented space from Catherine to display samples of the dried meat produced for his Oxford Meat Works company.

Various financial and employment arrangements connected Catherine and McMaster and frequently brought them together. While Catherine swore the relationship was purely professional, the evidence certainly suggests otherwise. According to servants and lodgers who later testified in the trial, Kate and Ossie, as the couple evidently addressed one another, were clearly more than just lodger and boardinghouse keeper, employer and employee. While McMaster claimed he rented rooms elsewhere for sleeping, several servants testified in the trial that he shared Catherine's bed. A former employee swore that each Sunday he watched ‘Madame’ as she cut McMaster's toenails, curled his magnificent moustache, and washed his hair in her bedroom washbasin. ⁸⁸ Catherine's former ‘lady's help’ told the court how her mistress had asked her to prepare special meals for McMaster, who suffered from a digestive complaint, informing her as she did so that ‘if you please him, you will please me.’ ⁸⁹

Perhaps most damning of all was that in early January 1900, ‘Catherine Jane Wilson, spinster,’ married Oswald McMaster in the small Northern Rivers town of Casino only a few months after receiving her Decree Nisi. ⁹⁰

Disciple of Madame Blavatsky

From 1893 until at least 1898, Theosophy figured prominently in Catherine's professional life and the spiritualist movement appears to have played an important role in her escape from the marriage and efforts to earn an income. Historical investigations suggest that mediumship and spiritualism could offer women a sense of liberation from Victorian constraints, although before Alana Piper's study of fortune-telling in Australia, these works pertained predominantly to British and American contexts. ⁹¹ Other research within the broad field of occult studies points to the role of fin de siècle anxiety in engendering fascination with the unknown, and confirms that the 1890s saw intense public interest in the mystical. ⁹² With these considerations in mind, I contend that spiritualism played a complex role in developing Catherine's empowered selfhood.

Catherine's circumstances suggest that the desire for a different life spurred her on to break with convention and follow a new direction involving the primacy of a professional rather than maternal or wifely identity. In prioritising that identity, Catherine's spiritualist persona provided an initial and legitimate springboard from which to surmount gender constraints. By living as Madame Hygiea ‘in the guise of a palmist’, she tried to surmount the gender constraints that continued to stifle women's potential for autonomy. ⁹³ Madame Hygeia possessed the ability to read palms, the stars, and a crystal ball. While the popularity of spiritualism at this time developed from the widespread sense of uncertainty which characterised the age, it also implied a forward and modern thinking individual practitioner and follower. ⁹⁴

It is impossible to gauge the validity of Catherine's occult activities, or to know if she believed fully in her spiritualist self. It may well have been purely an entrepreneurial decision to adopt the persona of Madame Hygiea and open the palmistry agency, although William deposed during the trial that Catherine's decision to ‘go in for palmistry’ arose from her lengthy study of spiritualism. ⁹⁵ Certainly, her assistant Florence Gordon's testimony during the trial did little to substantiate Catherine's spiritualist credentials, when the laundry worker laughingly admitted under cross-examination to having little understanding of the crystal ball. Her derisive response displayed a disrespectful attitude towards her mistress's work and brings to mind literary scholar Elana Gomel's conceptualisation as ‘spiritualist entrepreneurs’ those women who acted as mediums and palmists, a term implying charlatanism. ⁹⁶

Overall, spiritualism and theosophy appear to have been more earnest pursuits than the fortune-telling which Alana Piper describes as a popular ‘fad’ in the early twentieth century, and as Piper points out, spiritualists worked hard to distinguish themselves from fortune-tellers. ⁹⁷ While Catherine's commercial laundry was listed in the Sands Directory under the name of Madame Hygeia rather than her own, this was probably because fortune-telling was a criminal offence. No doubt she realised this in describing the business under the ambiguous term of a ‘Ladies Agency.’ ⁹⁸ By insisting her employees and even her husband and children address her as ‘Madame Hygeia,’ a fact revealed during court proceedings, Catherine ensured this identity became supreme. Through the illusion of Madame Hygeia, Catherine asserted her authority, distanced herself from the disempowered feminine and constructed an empowered alternative persona. ⁹⁹ The various practices constituting spiritualism worked to form and shape identity for its acolytes. ¹⁰⁰ Madame Hygeia was thus ‘an attempted fashioning of the self’ which, for Catherine and others like her, involved the creation of a new subjectivity. ¹⁰¹

As a somewhat deviant practice, despite the great popularity of spiritualism in Anglophone fin-de-siècle societies, spiritualists escaped social censure or exclusion by virtue of the deviant group to which they belonged. Such membership allowed them a degree of exceptionality not otherwise acceptable within mainstream society. Through its connection to the immaterial world, the spiritualist self offered women significant potential to develop a professional identity and earn a related income. So-called ‘spiritualist women’ were seen as ‘gender transgressors,’ whereby the medium possessed a male soul trapped within a female body. ¹⁰² Safely buffered by the empowered public persona of ‘Madame,’ Catherine could conduct herself in personal and professional affairs with a degree of authority otherwise difficult to sustain. In essence, Madame Hygeia bestowed upon her the sense of autonomy which the surrounding society sought to withhold. ¹⁰³

Catherine's spiritualism, however, did not endure; by the time of trial proceedings in 1898, no doubt also due to the illegal nature of fortune-telling activities, ‘Madame Hygiea’ had vanished, along with the palmistry business. The commercial laundry had also failed. ¹⁰⁴

Despite her entrepreneurial failures and abandonment of spiritualism, Catherine's circumstances illustrate the remarkable effects of financial autonomy upon feminine subjectivity and confirm that the capacity to earn an independent income was the most significant and dramatic factor to transform relations between the sexes. As British historian Gillian Sutherland contends, without economic independence, women would be forever unable to lead autonomous lives, particularly when it came to intimate sexual relationships. ¹⁰⁵ Catherine's own documented recognition of the link between the capacity to end her marriage and her potential to earn a living suggests it formed a psychological springboard from which a woman felt she could expand her limited horizons. ¹⁰⁶

Catherine's determination to go her ‘own road’ confirms the increasing potential of individual women to support themselves adequately, rather than merely eke out a miserable living. ¹⁰⁷ The money Catherine could earn was an alternative to the board and lodgings which marriage provided women in exchange for their ongoing sexual and domestic services. ¹⁰⁸ The Married Women's Property Act (MWPA) of 1879 meant that a deserting or abandoned wife was no longer forced to apply for a Protection Order or Judicial Separation to retain control of her earnings or property. ¹⁰⁹ Under a ‘family arrangement,’ Catherine was entitled to a one-sixth share of and received a small income from the Lake Cowell property, which later proved invaluable in keeping the bailiff at bay. ¹¹⁰ Although the Act was limited in its applications, the facts of Catherine's family income suggest it had some benefits if a wife retained control over her assets, rather than allowing her husband to manage or subsume the property. ¹¹¹ If, however, a wife surrendered her assets to a husband upon marriage, she had in effect lost control of those assets and any financial benefits it may bestow. That was certainly the case for Emily Bradley, who told the Divorce Court in 1892 how her husband Walter had sold the property she brought to the marriage in 1859, recounting a sense of grievance at the ongoing financial dispossession she had experienced over the lengthy marriage. ¹¹²

Catherine's capacity to function as an independent legal entity confirms amendments to the Act were of benefit to some women. ¹¹³ Nor did Catherine's marital status threaten her ability to find and maintain work, because she was self-employed, in contrast to those women working in the Australian Public Service, for example, who until 1966 were forced to renounce their employment upon marrying. ¹¹⁴ For this particular colonial woman, legislative attempts to improve the legal status of married women had borne fruit, while the feminist goal of marriage reform appeared to be gaining purchase. ¹¹⁵

To counter such an optimistic assessment, it is important to acknowledge that the diverse activities by which Catherine strove to earn an adequate income comprised an extensive list, and earning an income was a considerable challenge. On the one hand, Catherine's involvement in work-related activities suggests the degree to which a middle-class woman—albeit one forced to abandon pretensions of gentility—could potentially engage with commerce and the public sphere. On the other hand, the list also confirms the continuing unfairness of the colonial gender order, in which low wages forced Catherine to work several jobs to make ends meet. If it had not been for Oswald McMaster's intervention with an offer of employment in remote Queensland, where he had purchased a vast property in need of a caretaker, it is difficult to know what may have lain ahead when the laundry and boarding house failed.

Employment offered many other rewards in addition to economic autonomy. Of chief value was a sense of self-reliance and independence. ¹¹⁶ In Catherine's case, however, it was significant that under a ‘family arrangement,’ she owned a one-sixth share of Lake Cowell Station, as well as a property in Sydney's beachside location of Bondi from which she received a small but regular income. Upon her mother's death, moreover, Catherine inherited a quantity of household furniture which, although worth only one hundred pounds, gave her a significant collection of items to pawn in difficult times. Intriguing lists and detailed explanations as to when she pawned various objects ranging from her children's mugs to a prized telescope confirm the crucial role of the pawn shop within the family economy. ¹¹⁷

Catherine's circumstances were not necessarily representative,. ¹¹⁸ Without inheritances from their respective families, Catherine and William Kirchner could not have engaged in their diverse investment schemes. Most significantly, from the time she left Goulburn and her marriage, Catherine depended on Oswald McMaster for support, and so while we may admire her confidence and verve, she was not truly autonomous.

While the 1892 Divorce Amendment Act allowed William to sue for desertion, rather than the more expensive and difficult to prove grounds of adultery, it is noteworthy that he chose the latter. According to Hilary Golder, many male petitioners preferred to cite adultery rather than desertion, for instance, and a mere twenty-five percent used the new legislation's alternative grounds. Golder suggests that the prospect of obtaining damages from a named co-respondent motivated most petitioners, and there were definite indications that William's primary incentive was financial. ¹¹⁹ When the trial began, William was ‘entirely without means and out of employment.’ Several months before lodging his petition, he had been suspended and then discharged from his position as a Sheriff's Officer, after being found with his hand ‘in the till,’ as it were. ¹²⁰ When the case came to court, he was almost destitute, prompting Catherine's barrister to accuse the petitioner of ‘not only seeking a divorce, but to sell his wife.’ ¹²¹ Several witnesses swore to overhearing William admit he was prepared to take less than two thousand pounds in damages, and would share his spoils if they testified on his behalf. ¹²² A former employee was even reported as telling ‘a girl named Alice at the laundry’ that she would ‘go on the side…which gave her the most money.’ ¹²³ Since William had no money to pay his own or Catherine's legal fees, he was counting on damages to meet costs, and evidently tried by greasing various palms to ensure that remuneration would be forthcoming.

After five days of witness testimony and cross-examination, the jury found Catherine guilty of adultery, and awarded William the relatively paltry sum in damages of four hundred pounds. As was common, McMaster was ordered to pay both Catherine's and William's legal fees in addition to his own. ¹²⁴ Although Oswald McMaster was a successful businessman, he was not wealthy, and it is unclear whether he could afford such a considerable sum.

Catherine Jane Wilson, Spinster

In her extensive study of businesswomen in colonial New Zealand, Catherine Bishop points out men found it significantly easier to access loans and mortgages and that indeed, women faced significant obstacles in obtaining finance. ¹²⁵ While Catherine and Oswald's business arrangements were amply formalised through legal channels, and their professional relationship was separate and distinct from the private, Catherine was heavily reliant on McMaster's financial support for her economic activities and by no means autonomous.

When Catherine married Oswald McMaster in January 1900, she had abandoned both her married surname and marital status, signing the marriage certificate as Catherine Jane Wilson, ‘spinster.’ ¹²⁶ The couple moved to Queensland, returning often to Sydney where they lived in the Lower North Shore suburb of Waverton. When Catherine died of ‘heart failure and exhaustion’ and ‘carcinoma of the uterus,’ at the relatively young age of forty-eight in February 1907, the couple had been struggling financially for some time. ¹²⁷ In 1903 Oswald had faced a forced sale at public auction of land for which he was unable to pay the mortgage, ¹²⁸ he suffered bankruptcy only a few months after Catherine's death, and in September of that same year, the Bank of New South Wales was chasing the pair (unaware of Catherine's demise) for payment of almost £300. ¹²⁹ McMaster's most significant achievement as ‘the inventor of several patents,’ among other activities relating to his career in civil engineering evidently took place well after Catherine's death. Despite the realities of her economic failures, Catherine's death certificate at least states her occupation as ‘Grazier,’ in welcome contrast to those innumerable women whose occupations were encompassed within the desultory and dismissive nomenclature of ‘Home Duties.’ ¹³⁰

In death at least, Catherine Kirchner McMaster was perhaps able to attain the level of distinction to which she had long aspired, but failed to achieve. Her story offers significant insight into the changing balance of power between the sexes as the nineteenth century came to a close.. Catherine's entrepreneurial efforts reveal the opportunities available to women as well as the gendered disadvantages that continued to limit their success in escaping legal and economic dependence on men. ¹³¹ Her story is an important window into the lived experience of late nineteenth-century women, a story that would be forever hidden without her divorce court appearance. As feminist historians continue to work to overturn the common perception that women of the past were acted upon, rather than actors in their own right, Catherine Kirchner serves as a singular model of the independent new woman and an active historical being who strove to shape her own life. ¹³²