page_title: Jane Barton
section_title: Public life
hierarchical_section_title: Jane Barton / Public life
caption_attribution_description: English: Jane Barton wearing court dress - possibly on a visit to England for the coronation of Edward VII?
context_page_description: Jane Mason "Jeanie" Barton was the wife of Sir Edmund Barton, the first Prime Minister of Australia. After her husband's knighthood in 1902 she was known as Lady Barton.
context_section_description: Barton was a member of the first committee of the Crown Street Women's Hospital. She shared her husband's enthusiasm for the federation movement, and served as a vice-president of the Sydney Women's Federal League. She was reportedly reluctant to speak in public. She was the hostess of her husband's open-house meetings on the subject of federation, whose attendees included prominent federationists like Robert Garran, Atlee Hunt and Thomas Bavin.
  During Edmund Barton's term as prime minister, his wife and children continued to live in Sydney. There was no official prime minister's residence in the temporary capital, and "the prime minister's salary of £2,500 [...] was not enough to allow for Jeanie and their younger children to live with him while in Melbourne". She did accompany her husband to the 1902 Colonial Conference in London, and attended the coronation of King Edward VII; she was tasked with presenting Queen Alexandra with a possum-fur carriage rug as a gift of New South Wales. The Bartons took on daily social engagements during their visit, and were well received. According to Geoffrey Bolton, "the daughter of a Newcastle publican and the son of an unsuccessful Sydney stockbroker found themselves moving easily in a closed society intolerant of the parvenu or the ill behaved".
caption: Barton in the dress she wore to the coronation of King Edward VII in 1902
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