Alison Mackinnon

‘Bringing the unclothed immigrant into the World’: Population policies and gender in twentieth-century Australia

This paper considers several policy responses to declining birth rates in Australia over the twentieth century, revealing key continuities in the ‘administration of population’. Early in the century pronatalist policies to enhance fertility predominated. In spite of evidence in the 1890s, 1920s and 1940s that economics shaped family sizes and that women’s lives included paid work, little acknowledgment of this occurred outside wartime. In the second half of the twentieth century, immigration largely replaced pronatalism as a desired means of building population numbers. Century’s end brought new concerns about fertility decline, an ageing population, immigration and increased asylum seeking. These concerns revitalized the call for a population policy and raised unresolved questions for women.

Fantasizing the Family: women, families and the quest for an individual self

Much is made in current sociology of the ‘individualizing project of modernity’. The assumption appears to be that women who have previously been embedded in ‘family’ are increasingly becoming, and are viewed as, ‘individuals’. But is the notion of the individualizing self a product of a late twentieth and early twenty‐first century way of viewing the world, one which frequently fantasizes the past? Is it not the case that throughout history women have attempted to retain a sense of an individual self apart from their family persona but that the various ways in which history has described them and analysed them has resulted in their invisibility within certain categories? Drawing on several diverse research projects, this essay looks at representations of ‘the family’ portrayed through the varied lenses of feminist history (the family as site of conflict and oppression) demographic history (the family as the unchanging unit of measurement) and family history where it is viewed as both a constant but changeable presence. These representations are frequently ‘at odds’, some versions offering more spaces for women’s voices and agency than others.

`Out on the borderlands`: Time, generation and personal agency in women`s lives

What tools can we use in attempting to understand the recurring patterns of some girls’ early school leaving and consequent exclusion from well-paid employment? From which disciplinary fields can we take them? Using Bourdieu’s concept of the ‘scholastic point of view’ - the inherent intellectual bias of a discipline, in his case sociology - as a springboard, we suggest that if one turns to different ‘fields’, approaches might be found which point towards differing perspectives. This article brings Bourdieu into dialogue with the work of feminist historians and their conceptual tools. Carolyn Steedman’s notion of the politics of envy and Sally Alexander’s appropriation from psychoanalysis of the idea of repetition offer generative ways of exploring the ‘unthought categories of thought which delimit the thinkable and predetermine the thought’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 40). In their focus on gender, they have much in common with feminist sociologists’ responses to Bourdieu’s work, suggesting that a gendered ‘perspective’ offers a way of avoiding the ‘singular viewpoint’ inherent in any one discipline.

Gendering computer work: An international perspective

Much feminist work on women and computing has identified the difficulties women experience in gaining entry into and acceptance in this important and developing field. Socially constructed relations of education, training and workforce participation tend to perpetuate systems of disadvantage. Yet as the social relations of particular societies differ so the experience of women in different societies can reveal fissures in an apparently seamless terrain of reproduction. This study compares experience in Australia, Finland and Sweden and finds that there are possibilities which can be gleaned from cross-cultural research for women to break with patterns of gender segregation in computing work.

Women, Love and Learning

The Double Bind P et er L a n g This book tells the story of a generation of American and Australian women who embodied – and challenged – the prescriptions of their times. In the 1950s and early 60s they went to colleges and universities, trained for professions and developed a life of the mind. They were also urged to embrace their femininity, to marry young, to devote themselves to husbands, children and communities. Could they do both? While they might be seen as a privileged group, they led the way for a multitude in the years ahead. They were quietly making the revolution that was to come.

GIRLS, SOCIETY AND SCHOOL

Firstly, I would like to acknowledge what a great privilege it is to be speaking here in honour of Clare Burton, an inspiring feminist and researcher whose work has been instrumental in the field of gender equity and organisational change. I am also conscious of following the other wonderful speakers who have delivered earlier Clare Burton memorial lectures and I am most grateful for the opportunity to be the seventh speaker in this historic series. As an historian, I like to tell stories. Let me begin, then, with a tale of two young women known to me. One, Marian, is a young European professional with an MBA from the most prestigious US university. She has impressive Chinese language skills. She is married, pregnant and currently working with a multinational firm in China. Her husband, a young Englishman, is studying in Switzerland. Speaking to me recently of the impending birth of her baby, planned to take place in Switzerland, Marian, a native Dutch speaker, fluent in English and Mandarin, worries that her French may not be up to the trials of the delivery. She has not yet arranged for a midwife in Lausanne but realises she must do so soon*or rely on her husband to do it for her in time. Discussing where they will live after the birth of the baby and the completion of her husband’s study, she muses that it is his turn to choose the country of domicile and she will fit in. I listen in wonder. Her life is extraordinary to me, a woman of a generation that did not envisage this life of the new global professionals, the wandering tribes of the new economy. She is an entirely new phenomenon. Let me now introduce Ruby (not her real name), a 15 year old we have interviewed several times for a study of early school leavers. Ruby lives on the outer fringe of an Australian capital city and attends a large state high school with a nominated disadvantaged status. She lives with her mother, a single parent, who has experienced some of the worst domestic grief that life can deliver. Ruby’s brother died some years ago in brutal circumstances, so Ruby and her mother are keenly aware of the dangers in the world out there. Ruby would like to stay at school and achieve her ambition to be a fashion designer, or perhaps a hairdresser, but she is considered by the school to be ‘at risk’ of early school leaving. She loves to visit the local shopping mall but knows she must avoid eye contact with certain people as she might be seen as too uppity, to think ‘she’s all that’ (Simmons 2002, 103). As Richard Sennett reminds us, ‘You survive in a poor community . . . through keeping your head down’ (2003, 34). She prefers not to visit the local capital city, a short train ride away, preferring her own comfort zone. Ruby is as different from Marian as it is possible to be. The pattern of her life is not new but depressingly familiar for those who for decades have studied the school and home life of working-class girls. In this era of much-vaunted opportunities for women, Ruby will

Educated doubt: women, religion and the challenge of higher education, c. 1870-1920[1]

Abstract The advent of higher education for women, with its emphasis on reason, on scientific thought and on critical approaches to knowledge, constituted a potential threat to religious belief. The stories of male ‘doubters’ are legion but what happened to thoughtful women, confronted with challenges to their belief systems? This article shows that educated doubt was not only a male affliction. Women responded to the challenge in a variety of ways. Some rejected belief, turning their religious impulses to aesthetic or social ends. Others brought scientific reasoning to bear on religious phenomena, hoping to ‘prove’ the existence of spirituality. Some saw in science and reason a further manifestation of the spiritual impulse; in education further possibilities of the life of the spirit. A common thread unites the responses, the search for a voice, an authority which women sought in the new secular institutions of higher learning.

Women's agency in Australia's first fertility transition: a debate revisited

The place of womens agency in the fertility transition of the late nineteenth/early twentieth century is a contested one. Some argue that the transition was achieved mainly through male methods of contraception. Others, including many arguing from an Australian perspective, contend that womens agency in fertility decline was significant. In this article, the authors revisit the issue of womens agency in Australia. Drawing on a range of archival sources and scholarship, they seek to demonstrate that women in Australia in the last quarter of the nineteenth century had access to contraception, albeit limited, and, where that failed, to abortion. The authors argue that the changing political and educational climate, which saw women gaining the vote in 1894 in South Australia and admission to secondary and higher education and paid work, provided the setting for womens changing status. Their increasing agency – an agency many women worked to secure – encouraged women to challenge many traditional practices.

‘Allowed and expected to be educated and intelligent’: the education of Quaker girls in nineteenth century England 1

Looking back on the [eighteen] sixties, we may feel satisfied that among girls’ schools of the country, Quaker schools were indubitably in the front rank. The very narrowness of the curriculum ‐ no music, dancing, or singing, no fine needlework ‐ left space and time available for better grounding in history, arithmetic, and geography, and for relatively wider reading in English literature. 2 1This paper is part of a larger project, Quaker Families and the Construction of Social Differences. We wish to thank our fellow investigators, Margaret Allen and Sandra Holton, for the comments on this paper. The project was funded by the Australian Research Council. 2H. Winifred Sturge and Theodora Clark, The Mount School York (London: I. M. Dent & Sons, 1931), 109–10.

‘A study corner in the kitchen’: Australian graduate women negotiate family, nation and work in the 1950s and early 1960s 1

History has begun to reclaim the 1950s from its original designation as dull, dreary and conformist, the high point of the suburban dream. Women are frequently deemed to have contributed little to the task of developing citizenship or the newer self required for postwar modernity. This essay focuses on highly educated women who confronted head on the contradictions of the period. Taught by the emerging disciplines of psychology and sociology that their family role was crucial, they were also urged to join the growing workforce, to avoid becoming a ‘wasted resource’, and to express their real selves. Many crafted a new form of citizenship, one which combined a sense of individuality with the tasks of contributing to the nation through both family and work.