Australian feminist historians

Australian feminist historians

The history from below movement did reach Australia in the form of feminist historians during the 1970s. When people think about feminism they think about writers like Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch or Betty Friedan with the Feminine Mystique. The actual historians who attended universities throughout Australia like Ann Curthoys and Beverley Kingston are usually overlooked. What people tend to focus on the issues of the time like women’s rights and equality. Books about women’s roles in the history of Australia began appearing as before then people would usually write about the male role and the writers were mainly men themselves. People usually think of the Second Wave feminism as the only feminist type movement when women were actually fighting for rights like voting back in the late 1800s with the suffrage movements.

The feminist literature and history coincided with the increase of women entering universities that had began in the early 1960s. Some during this time had been involved with protest movements within Australia like the Freedom Ride in NSW and anti-Vietnam war movements. Women studies had increased during the 1970s when more women were present and several in the mid 1970s has their PHDs or their Masters under their belt when they became lecturers in the universities like Beverley Kingston who had her book published around this time. Many women were looking into the roles of their female counterparts of the past. Text books began changing to include women when women had been largely ignored or their role in society had been omitted.

Before the 1970s there had been little interest in researching women in Australian history. The year of 1975 meant that it was International Women’s Year, which meant more publications would be published from books to journals. The most common books to appear in 1975 Australia were actually Beverly Kingston’s My wife, my daughter and poor Mary Ann, Anne Summers Damned Whores and God’s Police, Edna Ryan’s The real Matilda and Anne Conlon’s Gentle Invaders. Of these major publications they are known about today and still used for historical research. There were myths around that the Australian woman was better off from other women in the world. Much in the way of literature showed women in Australia to be very different from the reality of what was actually occurring. Women liberation or feminist magazines began appearing during the 1970s like the Refactory Girls and Hectate. They did spread around to different parts of the country where different branches existed in the Australian states. Some did not last for very long and others lasted until the 1980s. Many periodicals had appeared during the International year of the woman alongside the books. There has been within the feminist history during the 1970s something that had been lacking within their research. This had been the research of the Aboriginal woman, although this history would be looked at in later years. The feminist would usually look at the history of white woman and almost ignoring that of Aboriginal people.

Local or regional histories that had been written were usually written by women and were not thought about under the term of feminist writing. These were written around the 1920s and 1930s with The Country Women’s Association promoting competitions for the study of rural history. Many of the people involved with writing these were local women who ended up writing about their local community. History is usually interchangeable at times and there are many changes or revisions that tend to occur especially when politicians become involved especially during the Whitlam election and the feminist movement was thought to have gone until the early 1980s. There are thoughts that the movement was still around into the 2000s and not a whole new movement.

Sources

Arrow, Michelle ‘It has become my personal anthem’, Australian Feminist Studies, 22, 2007, pp. 213 – 230.

Curthoys, Ann ‘Gender studies in Australia: A history’, Australian Feminist Studies, 15, 2000, pp. 19 - 38.

Curthoys, Ann ‘Race and gender in recent Australian historiography’, Journal of Interdisciplinary gender studies, 1, 1995, pp. 1 – 9.

Curthoys, Ann ‘Feminism, Citizenship and national identity’, Feminist Review, 44, 1993, pp. 19 – 38.

Curthoys, Ann ‘Visions, Nightmares, Dreams: women’s history, 1975’, Australian Historical Studies, 27, 1996, pp. 1 – 13.

Curthoys, Ann and Docker, John Is History Fiction?, Sydney, UNSW Press, 2010.

Davison, Graeme The use and abuse of Australian history, Crows Nest, Allen & Unwin, 2000.

Gilding, Michael The making and breaking of the Australian family, St Leonards, Allen & Unwin, 1992.

Kingston, Beverley My Wife, My Daughter and poor Mary Ann, Melbourne, Thomas Nelson, 1975.

Kingston, Beverley ‘Home truths from the 1970s: Twenty years on’, Australian Historical Studies, 27, 1996, pp. 30 – 36.

Kingston, Beverley ‘Women in the nineteenth century Australian History’, Labor History. 67, 1994, pp. 84 – 96.

Jones, Megan ‘Historicising feminist knowledge: Notes toward a genealogy of academic feminism of the 1970s’, Australian Feminist Studies, 13, 1998, pp. 117 – 128.

Sewer, Marion ‘The impact of feminist scholarship on Australian political science’, Australian Journal of Political Science, 39, 2004, pp. 553 - 566. 

Summers, Anne Damned Whores and God’s Police, Camberwell, Penguin, 2002.

Thompson, E. P.  ‘Preface from The making of the English Working Class’, The Essential E. P. Thompson, New York, New Press, 2000, pp. 3 – 8.