Morals & Prejudices

Like attitudes and behaviours, morals and prejudices can be difficult to find in the sources because they are so often taken for granted. However morals and prejudices are often more contested, epscially when they are at the point of change or when they represent – as they so often do – a point of conflict between classes or generations.

Aboriginals, religions and sects, class are just the most obvious points at which morals and prejudices have been brought into relief.

More to Come:

euchre at night (disapproved by Methodist mum).1

1 Michaelides, Growing up in Dungog, pp.3-14.

The separation of the male and female sphere in domestic arrangement had one consequence in that it made it difficult for women to attend to the shopping, as men usually controlled access to the means of transportation. A solution, until the rise of the two car family, was late night shopping, usually on a Friday or Saturday night. Late night shopping was in fact seen as ‘evil’ by some and made necessary only by the inability of many women to leave home during the daytime.1 The early closing movement was not only a trade union movement, but partly a moral one, based on the idea that women should not be out late mixing with all sorts; whatever the reasoning, late-night shopping remained in Dungog town until at least the 1950s.

1 Caroline Chisholm, Sunbeam, 23/2/1861, cited in Turner, Catholics in Australia, p.196.