Chinese Australian women’s ‘homemaking’ and contributions to the family economy in White Australia

ABSTRACT

This paper draws upon qualitative interview data to present a historical geography of ‘homemaking’ and economic activity among Chinese Australian women during the White Australia Policy era. An analysis of interview material indicates that some women dedicated their lives to unpaid work in the home, while other women worked in family businesses in subordinate positions. In some instances, Chinese Australian women took on more responsibility in these businesses in ways that challenged the ‘front’/‘back’ gender divide. This economic participation reflected the need for Chinese Australian women to contribute to the survival of their families and experience roles and subjectivities that challenged the patriarchal division of gendered labour and space. This complex historical geography of Chinese Australian family economies in the White Australia era therefore challenges traditional feminist assertions that ‘the home’ is a universal site of female oppression and Orientalist assumptions that Confucian family systems were practised uniformly by all overseas Chinese.

KEYWORDS:

• Chinese Australia
• White Australia
• historical geography
• feminist geography
• postcolonial geography
• family economy
• homemaking

Acknowledgements

The contributions of the 19 women who participated in this project are gratefully acknowledged, as are the helpful suggestions of Andrew Gorman-Murray and the two anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 ‘Chinese Australian’ is used in reference to Chinese immigrants to Australia and their Australian-born descendants who identify as having Chinese ancestry/being ‘Chinese’ (but not necessarily ‘Chinese Australian’) to acknowledge the ethnic identity, presence and contributions of these individuals in the Australian nation.

2 Song (1995) adapted Goffman’s (1959) conceptualisations of ‘the front’ and ‘the back’ (although unacknowledged) in her examination of the gender divides in the running of Chinese take-away businesses in Britain. I have similarly adapted these terms and used them in reference to other family businesses in Australia. In this way, I refer to ‘the front’ as the retail/serving space of restaurants, cafés, grocery stores, fruit and vegetable stores, etc. in which individuals had direct contact with customers, while ‘the back’ refers to areas of businesses not in public view such as kitchens and sorting/packing areas.

3 See also Blunt and Dowling (2006) for an in-depth review of the contributions of feminist and cultural geography to conceptualisations of ‘home’.

4 Beyond the sub-discipline of historical geography, see Burton’s (2003) study of twentieth-century Indian women’s memories of home in colonial India, and Johnson and Lloyd’s (2004) examination of the relationship between Australian women’s empowerment/disempowerment in the domestic realms of the 1940s and 1950s as constructed in women’s magazines.

5 Participants’ names are used with consent. Where consent was not granted, pseudonyms have been applied.

6 ‘May Fourth’ refers to the student demonstrations that occurred on 4 May 1919 in protest against China’s signing of the Treaty of Versailles. It also refers to the ensuing movement that was premised on a rejection of Chinese imperialism and tradition. May Fourth reformers became increasingly influenced by Western notions of women’s status and emphasised the victimisation and oppression of women in ‘traditional’ China. In fact, during the May Fourth Era (1917–24), ‘woman’ became the symbol of the struggle between tradition and modernity (Teng 1996, 117).