Free wives of convicts and land ownership in early colonial New South Wales

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, free wives of convicts occupied a unique position in New South Wales as they could possess land in their own names, a right typically denied to married women under the common law of coverture. Free women married to convicts were able to become landholders because their husbands' legal standing as felons temporarily suspended their wives' legal disabilities. For free wives of convicts, a complex relationship developed between their legal status as wives, their husbands' status as convicts and early colonial land ownership ideas and practices. Thus, while women in early New South Wales faced legal and economic disabilities, they were not all affected in the same manner and to the same degree. This article explores the intricate relationship of free wives of convicts and how this particular group of women was able to exercise their legal agency to acquire and retain land. It begins with a discussion on marriage, women and free wives of convicts, followed by an exploration of what land meant to early colonists. It then examines how three free wives of convicts - Sarah Toole, Mary Collitts and Jane Ezzey - sought to obtain or retain land in their own names through grants and the threat of litigation. In so doing, it also examines some privileges they were accorded, namely being assigned their convict husbands as servants. The article concludes by considering how free women's access to land ownership declined from the mid-1810s and how this served to further differentiate free wives of convicts from those married to free men.