‘He made it his rule never to grant licenses to married women’: Gender, licensing and the law in nineteenth-century New South Wales, Victoria and New Zealand

Abstract

This article considers hotel licensing and gender across New Zealand, New South Wales and Victoria in the long nineteenth century, creating timelines of legislative changes and exploring the impact of business regulation and its implementation on women. It exposes a disconnect between law and licensing court practices, indicative of the ways entrenched understandings of gendered behaviours and local conditions affected women in business. It demonstrates that women's rights as publicans went backwards in New Zealand and New South Wales, just as other rights were expanding. It explores Victorian exceptionalism, Victoria legalising female licensees when others did not.