Pouring a beer and dishing out advice, female publicans have long been a drawcard for many pub goers

Female publicans made their presence felt beyond the ladies lounge.

Pubs used to be talked about as 'no place for a woman', but a Melbourne historian has found that Australian pubs were a place of empowerment and opportunity for the women who owned them.

And female publicans were many.

In the gold rush days of the late nineteenth century, a third of Melbourne's city and suburban hotels were licensed to woman. That grew to 50 per cent in the early 1900s.

Clare Wright has just republished her book Beyond the Ladies Lounge: Australia's Female Publicans, which was written a decade ago after public reaction to her honours thesis 'Real Women Do Shout: Narratives of Pub Culture'.

'One of the reasons that I wanted to do the book was because every time I told people I'd written the thesis, they would say to me "Oh you have to talk to my Aunt Margaret. She ran a pub out in Bourke" or "There was this woman in the country town where I grew up", and I also had my husband's aunts, the Tiernans, who were publicans in Murgon in southeast Queensland,' Ms Wright said.

'I felt that there was really something within Australia's popular understanding of what the pub meant, that was different to the way it was represented in literature or study.'

She found that women were granted hotel licences, controlled the businesses, and played a very important role in setting the standards of behaviour in the pub.

'There was a third really interesting fact which was that up until the 1960s, the publican had to live on the premises and they had to provide meals and accommodation, so it was seen as a domestic industry and this really empowered women to go into it and raise their families there as well,' Ms Wright said.

She said court reports and parliamentary debates from the early days showed that unlike Britain and America, Australia started a new trend in encouraging women to run pubs because it was a mostly male population, and it was seen that women would be able to have more control over men and their drinking habits if they controlled the flow of alcohol.

'In oral history interviews, the female publicans would say women make much better publicans because men actually want to be controlled, they want to be told "you've had enough now go home to your missus", but a male publican can't tell them that."

Source : ABC News   Wednesday 29th October, 2014  Cameron Wilson