Jane Ferris -19/11/1871.

 DEATH.

Ferris.— On the 19th November, at her residence, Waitahuna, Jane Murray, the beloved wife of Mr. Joseph Ferris - aged 30.  -Tuapeka Times, 23/11/1871.

One thing I have had to acknowledge to friend, while compiling this collection of stories and lives, is that women's lives have tended not to feature.  There were good reasons for this, back then.  Women had a defined role and drawing attention to themselves was not part of it.  Their virtue, their "purity" was to be protected.  They were to be brought unsullied to the church, to be "given away" by their father to their future husband.  They were then to change their surname to his - many changed their entire name, being known by the same name as their husband, literally his "Mrs."

It tended to be the women who broke the rules who were covered by contemporary newspapers.  For the virtuous majority, their graves tended to be as unremarkable as their lives.

But their lives were not unremarkable.  When I became aware of the disparity between genders, a friend remarked that, while men were doing dangerous things which sometimes led to their deaths and to interesting lines on their gravestones, women were doing dangerous things too, except that their dangerous occupation of childbearing was a private affair, bordered by their privacy and modesty and fenced with euphemism.

When their children had been born, the job of mother - and housewife - was a fraught one too, in those days.  One only needs to see the long lines of young deaths on some of the Victorian gravestones to be aware of the fragility of young lives in those days, and the anguish of a mother watching her young child die.

Jane Ferris was a name I found in the Waitahuna Cemetery, remarkable only in that she seemed to die quite young at the age of thirty.  I expected little from a search thorough the contemporary newspapers.  But a notice placed not long after her death told the story.

DEATH.

On the 19th March, at Waitahuna, Jane, the infant daughter of Mr Joseph Ferris, aged 5 months.  -Tuapeka Times, 22/3/1872.

Jane Ferris died in the dangerous occupation of childbirth.  She was one of many.

Waitahuna Cemetery.