Indigenous women’s work was marked as “domestic,” but this was a “domesticity” of a different nature to that envisaged within the Victorian model of separate spheres. Victorian notions of femininity were characterised by an ideal of middle-class womanhood in which the labour of women was confined to the home (defined physically and relationally) and thus rendered invisible and often characterised in terms of its moral and religious value; women were “angels in the home.” Village women’s work in the gardens was heavy physical labour, and undertaken outside of the home, and yet through the colonial classification of the village as “domestic” and as such a domain not recognised as either public or political allowed colonial agents to regard the subsistence work of indigenous women as secondary to the labour of indigenous men. Men were recognised as active economic agents, but women’s work could be ignored.

In this paper the author extends on Dickson-Waiko’s thesis, to argue that in the post-war period work done by women in the village—in the gardens, on plantations— was undertaken in their role as mothers. It was thus devalued and ultimately dismissed by outsiders and colonial officials as domestic or reproductive, even when it was work that generated income and engaged women in market-based exchange. The author further takes her cue from Dickson-Waiko in her focus on the policies of the colonial state. Much has been written about the attempts of colonial missionaries to instill in Papua New Guinean women an ideal of domesticity, to introduce them to the Victorian “cult of domesticity.” This paper, while recognising mission influence, argues that the policies and programs of the colonial state were significant, fundamental even, in reshaping the domestic life of village women.