Australia’s first birthday party was long and lavish, with parties and parades in every capital city and country town. But for Margaret Heffernan, incarcerated within the cold bluestone of Pentridge Prison for the murder of her baby, there was nothing to celebrate.
The story of Maggie’s arrest, trial and sentencing had made the papers throughout Australia, but her situation was common enough: uneducated girl meets boy; boy seduces girl with promises of marriage, then bolts when she falls pregnant. In nineteenth-century parlance she is now a ‘fallen woman’: a disgrace to her family and a social pariah.
Concealing her condition, and with hopes of locating her lover, Maggie fled from her highly respected family in rural Yackandandah1 to Melbourne. She worked as a servant at the Junction Hotel in Preston until her shameful secret could no longer be hidden, and gave birth to a baby boy in a room at the pub. When her employer, a Mrs Ralph, discovered Maggie she sent her to the Women’s Hospital in Carlton where she remained until 9 January 1900. Then she was discharged to the streets with two shillings in her pocket.
This is when things got really grim for Maggie. Indeed, fate seemed to be against the girl, as one newspaper later surmised.2 Homeless, she knocked on the doors of two church charities, who turned her away. On 14 January, she wrote to her parents and acquainted them with her position. On the day of the letter’s arrival, her parents missed their daily trip to town to collect the mail. The following day, the post office burned to the ground. As she got no answer to her letter, Maggie considered herself cast off by the family.
There was no such thing as a single mother’s pension, and no prospect of employment for a girl nursing the evidence of her sin. What Maggie did next would catapult her from a mere statistic to a media sensation. After a week of sleeping rough, and suffering from what the doctors termed puerperal insanity—what we would today would call postnatal psychosis—Maggie wandered down to Prince’s Bridge. There, concealed beneath the bridge, she held her starving, screaming baby under the murky water of the Yarra River until he screamed no more. When the little corpse washed up on the banks a few days later, the hospital identified him by sight as Maggie’s child. She was arrested in the home of her new employer, a rich woman on the right side of the river who had advertised for a wet nurse and wasn’t inclined to ask too many questions.
The case was sad, but clear cut. Before Mr Justice Hodges, at the Criminal Court today, reported the SYDNEY MORNING HERALD on 22 February 1900, Margaret Heffernan
was charged with murdering her child by throwing it into the Yarra. Accused, who appeared to feel her position acutely, entered the dock on the arm of an attendant and throughout the hearing of the case remained in a condition akin to stupor.3
The judge determined that finding herself on the banks of the Yarra the temptation was too strong for her, and undressing the infant she slipped it into the water. She did this with averted head and did not look back.4 When the jury returned with a verdict of guilty, coupled with a strong recommendation for mercy, Maggie collapsed. Asked if she had anything to say, she whispered in the ear of a female warder, I intended to take the child to Sydney. The sentence of death was then passed, and the woman, who had fainted, was carried from court and driven to gaol in a cab. If Maggie had been in the mood for gallows humour, she might have found it amusing to reflect that some pregnant women committed minor crimes so that they could deliver their babies in prison, where they at least had a roof over their heads and three lousy meals a day.
The casebooks at the Royal Women’s Hospital reveal that Maggie was but a small drop in a vast ocean of female affliction. In the 1880s and ’90s, two-thirds of the women admitted there were under thirty years old, and three-quarters of them were pregnant. Of the married women, at least a third were ‘shotgun’ weddings. Ten per cent of admissions had tuberculosis and thirty per cent had gonorrhea—according to the hospital’s Dr O’Sullivan, one of the greatest evils of modern civilization.5
By the time of Maggie’s confinement, doctors knew that it was the gonococcus bacterium that caused chronic infection, sterility, extra-uterine pregnancy, genital malformation and blindness in the newborn, rather than university studies or bicycle riding, which had been the theory. But still, argues medical historian Janet McCalman, it was rarely acknowledged that in the realm of venereal infection, ‘the guilty were not women but the selfish and profligate men who gave it to them’.6 Bacterial theory was still underdeveloped. Post-abortion sepsis was becoming more common, and exnuptial conceptions accounted for a large proportion of its victims—although married women did use abortion as a (terrifying) form of birth control. As for childbirth itself, that was a game of Russian roulette in which putrid infections and hit-or-miss medicine were the live bullets. To be young, poor and female in the late nineteenth century was a recipe for suffering.
And, as Maggie Heffernan’s case showed, the justice system wasn’t much kinder.
When Maggie was born, women weren’t eligible to serve on a jury; there was certainly no such thing as a female barrister. The only respectable jobs available to women were teaching, nursing and domestic service. Married women couldn’t own property, or get a divorce or even a bank loan if their husbands abandoned or abused them. Post-primary education for girls was a preserve of the wealthy. There was no maternity allowance, no state welfare and no childcare services. (Unless you count baby-farming, which was the career path of Frances Knorr, the previous Australian woman to become a press sensation. Pregnant and broke, her husband in gaol, she took the children of other desperate women into her care. Some she looked after, some she sold to childless couples, some she strangled and buried in her back garden. After two such infants’ bodies were dug up, Frances Knorr was hanged at the Old Melbourne Gaol in 1894, aged twenty-six.)
Changing any of this—the conditions of daily life, the lack of access to justice, the inability to rise from the mire of poverty and misery—seemed impossible. And the basic reason for that, it seemed obvious to many, was that women couldn’t vote. They had no civic role in making the laws that governed them. Socially and economically, women were shackled by their dependence on men. Morally, they were bound by the sexual double standard. And politically, they were hamstrung by their disenfranchisement. The veteran American suffrage campaigner Susan B. Anthony adroitly summed up the situation in an 1870 speech: women are in chains.
Or behind bars. Which was where Vida Goldstein found Margaret Heffernan in the Australian summer of 1900. Languishing in a damp, airless cell of H. M. Prison Pentridge under sentence of death.