A case study of a woman in a family living in rural Australia in the first half of the twentieth century is the text used for an exploration of how, despite this woman’s sense of herself as strong, independent, and autonomous, the structure and norms of the bourgeois family kept her in a dependent and submissive position. When her husband deserted her and their five children, she became property manager and head of the household, but only under licence to the absentee landlord, who eventually returned to evict her and repossess the property. When here turned she abandoned her rights and fled the property. This episode is recalled in her memoirs, written when she was in her eighties, as ‘a shameful failure of my strength’.
This article interprets this failure not as moral weakness, as she saw it, but as a consequence of her fragile and ambiguous position as a woman in that time and place. Her sense of self is explored through the discourses of bourgeois capitalism and individualism and through Foucauldian concepts of subjectivity, power and sexual relations in the bourgeois family. A woman had little margin for liberty in the power structure of the bourgeois conjugal relation, which was still the dominant form of family life during her lifetime.
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