| Sumario: | Financial abuse is a central component of domestic violence. Often difficult to disentangle from other forms of domestic violence, its complex and near invisible nature can allow it to go undetected by those experiencing it and by the legal system alike. Historicising financial abuse is a delicate and challenging task, but it is essential for a few reasons. First, although violence in nineteenth-century South Australia was largely understood as physical, many colonial women's accounts of non-physical violence closely mirror women's experiences today. Furthermore, the doctrine of coverture entrenched women's dependence on their husbands, meaning that a husband was legally bound to provide for his wife and family. Some husbands transgressed this obligation during periods of desertion, refusing to purchase food or necessary household items, or through more explicitly cruel acts like exploitation, extortion or sabotaging their wives' income or business. In examining these financial abuse categories across several case studies, this paper seeks to contribute to the nascent historical field of financial abuse in both Australia, and internationally. In so doing, I show how women's deep-rooted financial dependence on their husbands exposes the existence and prevalence of this financial abuse, both to us now but also to the nineteenth-century petitioners.
|
|---|