Authority control:Wikidata: Q132707387

Professor Deborah Gare works in the School of Arts and Sciences of Notre Dame University in Fremantle.

Books

  • Gare Deborah 2011, The Female Frontier: Race and Gender in Fremantle, 1829-1839, UND.
  • Gare, Deborah [2013], Divorcing Bridget Taafe: The Mad, Bad and Sad Women of Fremantle, 1850-1900, unpub.

    The careful observance of good behavior in colonial Fremantle, by men and women, was an instrument used to set good society apart from what might have been considered ‘savage’. A ruthless code of etiquette regulated expectations of women in all aspects of the colonial world: on the street, in private company, in education and, most importantly, in their home. Fremantle’s middle class women rose magnificently to the challenge of abiding by such etiquette codes, despite the extra burden this added to life on an isolated frontier of Britain’s empire. A rare woman, like Mary Higham, might succeed despite living beyond the rules established for respectable women. But there were many who fell short of the rigid expectations of colonial women in Western Australia, and it was into the institutions of Fremantle the asylum, the courts and the prison that they were swept. Bridget Taafe, Anne Tippett and Mary Kelly were just a few. In fact, so many troubled women were flung into the town’s institutions that Fremantle might be considered the home of Western Australia’s abandoned women. The experiences of such women now point to the disconnection between expectations of colonial women and the reality of their existence; their forced separation from ‘respectable’ society; and the failure indeed, the complicity of the state in their disempowerment.

Articles

  • Gare, Deborah 2014, [[../fhs/fs/8/Gare.html|'The female frontier: race and gender in Fremantle 1829-1839']], Fremantle Studies, 8: 1-18.

References

Freotopia

This page incorporates material from Garry Gillard's Freotopia website, that he started in 2014 and the contents of which he donated to Wikimedia Australia in 2024. The content was originally created on 28 August, 2017 and hosted at freotopia.org/authors/gare.html (it was last updated on 26 October, 2023), and has been edited since it was imported here (see page history). The donated data is also preserved in the Internet Archive's collection.