Looking up - Sydney's history from a new angle
Women in focus
Filling in the details along Pitt Street, from 'Sands & Kenny's map of Sydney and its environs' 1858, National Library of Australia nla.map-rm1272
One of the more unusual articles added recently to the Dictionary is Catherine Bishop‘s exhaustive piece on the women of Pitt Street. Catherine takes readers on a virtual walk up Pitt Street in 1858, peering in the shop doors and windows to find the women who live, work and play there. It’s a fascinating snapshot of the range of businesswomen, employees, servants, landladies, teachers, and others, who were manufacturing, selling, cleaning, teaching and generally making a living in mid-nineteenth-century Sydney.
Catherine has made full use of the possibilities of searchable digitised resources like Trove and the New South Wales Births Deaths and Marriages indexes to follow these individuals and save them from ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’, to use the phrase coined by EP Thompson. It’s a fascinating way to experience Pitt Street.
this is really great work from Catherine Bishop, and it is wonderful to see the Dictionary carrying it. but it needs visuals, too; the capabilities of the technology are not being utilised here, which is a pity. it is too text-laden.
please, can we have some illustrations to ‘guide’ us as we read Catherine’s great work?
Hi Sammy,
We’re currently working on the images for this interesting piece — usually, given our limited staffing, we put up the text first, and then the pictures follow. That’s why it’s not illustrated yet. Trust me, we’re working on it. It’s a tricky article to illustrate because it concentrates on 1858, which is before widespread photography, and because the subjects are working women, who were rarely the subjects of portraits, drawings or lithographs.
We are going to try and highlight which articles have been most recently illustrated here on the blog, with each regular update to the site, so stay posted. Thanks for your feedback, we really appreciate it.
Emma
thanks Emma
I know it is tricky, finding images of women in particular from this time period
You folks are doing really great with the Dictionary
Hello to all concerned,
This is my first time on this site as I just signed up to Clover Moore’s Eletters. I love this site as I love anything to do with the early days of Sydney as my family began arriving here from 1797.
Thank you for your efforts, Catherine and team. Keep up the good work. Busy tonight but plan to come back and really enjoy this whole site another night.
Thank you, Gai
Hi Gai,
Make sure you pop over to the Dictionary proper and have a good look around. You might even find a few relatives! We have new content being added to the site in march, so there’ll be more to see then.
cheers
Emma