'New Brooms They Say Sweep Clean': Women's Political Activism on the Ballarat Goldfields, 1854
Abstract
The Eureka Stockade has long been portrayed as a hyper-masculine episode in Australian history, because of the myth of the goldfields as an exclusively male domain and the tangible outcome of the Ballarat uprising of 1854—manhood suffrage. Using three interpretive cases studies of women who were politically active on the Ballarat goldfields in 1854, this article provides new empirical and conceptual ways of understanding both women's role in Australia's political history and the political history of Australian women. It argues that women's defiance of the gender order contributed substantially to the rebellious roots of colonial democracy.