Angela Woollacott

Gender and Empire

Acknowledgements Introduction Women and Unfree Labour in the 18th and 19th Centuries: Slavery, Convict Transportation, Emancipation and Indentured Labour Narratives of Interracial Sexual Assault and Crises of Imperial Rule Masculinities, Imperial Adventuring and Wars Gender and Everyday Life in Colonial Regimes Women in Anti-Colonial and Nationalist Movements Gender and Empire in the Metropole Conclusion Select Bibliography

Working-class girls in nineteenth-century England : life, work and schooling

Acknowledgements - Introduction - Patriarchy Challenged? Women and Work in Nineteenth-Century Lancashire - Womens Work in Agricultural Production: Nineteenth-Century Norfolk and Suffolk - Schooling for Social Control: the Early Nineteenth Century - Religion, Reading and Really Useful Knowledge - An Education of Principle: the Later Nineteenth Century - Schooling for Domesticity? The Later Nineteenth Century - What a Woman Knows: the Significance of Education in the Lives of Working-Class Women - From the Past to the Present - Bibliography - Index

Frontier Violence and Settler Manhood

In the Australian colonies — as in Canada and New Zealand — understandings of manliness forged on the frontiers of settlement were woven into political manhood, and thus the quest for colonial self-government. The full meanings of racial conquest and the frontier for Australian definitions of masculinity are a rich topic still to be properly understood. There is a line of argument in recent work on nineteenth-century Britain that men became less violent over the early and middle decades of the century, partly because violence became less acceptable as manly behaviour. This paper explores the writings of two men, Henry S. Chapman (1803–1881) and Thomas Murray-Prior (1819–1892), who had reason to know how frontier violence was built into colonial culture and politics. The evidence of the frontier has significant implications for understanding the meanings of political maturation in the period from the 1830s to the 1860s, including how manhood was reconfigured through political enfranchisement and vice versa, in Australia and the wider settler empire.

The fragmentary subject: Feminist history, official records, and self-representation

Abstract Official reports by First World War women welfare supervisors, women police and patrols, have the potential to reveal tensions women were working within and against in these unprecedented careers. Not usually considered within the genre of autobiography, reports which women wrote of their work for the consumption of their superiors define the construction of their official selves through their dealings with their subjects—working-class women. Drawing upon feminist literary theory concerning subjectivity and self-representation enabled me to examine these documents as textual constructions of necessarily fragmentary subjectivities. Reading these texts in terms of self-representation and the indirect construction of subjectivity allowed me to recognise women’s strategies to assert their competency, and the need for their professional work, within the contemporary conventions of report writing. Their fragmentary constructions of novel professional subjectivities allow us to see specific instances of women’s creative resistances, complicity and willful self-formulation. In this essay I call for dialogue and reciprocity between feminist historians and feminist literary critics. While feminist historians can fruitfully use literary theory, such as that relating to subjectivity and self-representation, other feminist scholars can benefit from examinations of fragmentary constructions of the self by historical subjects in specific historical circumstances, especially the ways women subjects have negotiated within masculinist systems.

Colonial Origins and Audience Collusion: The Merle Oberon Story in 1930s Australia

Colonialism has depended upon the plasticity of class status and racial categories, even as colonial elites sought constantly to shore up the boundaries and markers that sustained their elite status. As Homi Bhabha has helped us to understand, colonialism also fostered subject positions in which the colonized were supposed to emulate the colonizers, only to be mocked for their mimicry of their superiors.1 For the mixed-race, such as the Anglo-Indian community in late colonial India that Adrian Carton discusses insightfully in the previous chapter, any aspirations to be accepted as fully British were constantly checked by structural exclusion and marginalization. For the young woman who would become mid-twentieth-century film star Merle Oberon, transnational mobility, her imperial access to the metropole, was a way of escaping those constraints and reinventing herself as part of the colonial ruling elite. That she did so through a fabrication of herself as another kind of colonial — Tasmanian — suggests the connections between transnational mobility, fantasy and pretence, as well as the requirement of whiteness for stardom in the early to mid-twentieth century.

Race and the modern exotic : three "Australian" women on global display

indication that My Left Foot (1998) appeared fi rst in 1954 and Down All the Days (1990) in 1970. Irish Autobiography is thoroughly and imaginatively researched, and structured and argued with authority and elegance. It is a pity, therefore, that it often falters at the level of the sentence, with eccentricities in punctuation and choice of prepositions, a distracting proliferation of “whilsts” and “whiches,” and the occasional dangling modifi er. Still, it makes a thoughtful and very worthwhile contribution to the theory and history of life writing, and will be warmly welcomed in many areas of Irish Studies for its illuminating and original insights into a range of important texts and the constraints, contexts, and motivations of their authors.

Rose Quong becomes Chinese : an Australian in London and New York

The story of Rose Quong (1879–1972) reveals how an Australian learned to use the pervasive Orientalism of the early twentieth century to her own ends. Quong claimed an essential ability to interpret Chinese culture, forging a career out of lecturing and writing on Chinese literature and traditions, and performing her own Chineseness. She juggled her mixed Australian, British and Chinese heritage in both London and New York, showing the plasticity and transportability of ethnic identities. Quongs story points to the role of London as imperial metropolis in the staging of an Australians transnational career, even for an Australian whose imaginary homeland was China. The fact that Quong was embraced by the Australian community in London adds a new perspective on White Australia, even though that community was instrumental in steering her towards Chineseness and Orientalism.

Women munitions makers, war and citizenship

In this century women in many nations have moved from being completely excluded from the armed forces (apart from a few military nursing units) to being included, if not equally, in the military. While technical issues remain about womens exact participation in combat, women have essentially gone from noncombatants to warriors. For many who believed that women were more inclined than men toward pacifism, and that this would help secure the peace, womens inclusion in armed forces has been a disturbing historical development. As democratic states have linked citizenship to war participation, women have embraced that participation to show their patriotism and to promote their bids for citizenship.

Ambiguity and Necessity: Settlers and Aborigines in Intimate Tension in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Australia

Using settler accounts of daily life on pastoral properties, this chapter demonstrates systemic links in the period of the 1830s–1850s between economic reliance on Aboriginal labour and ubiquitous violence. On pastoral frontiers in the non-convict colonies, settlers needed local Aborigines, yet their fundamental demand for the land allowed them to accept moral ambiguities and the use of violence. Sexual violence was woven into colonisation. Here, too, ambiguities abounded, and women’s own interactions with Aboriginal people could be fraught. Katherine Kirkland’s memoir of the years 1839–1841 on her family’s sheep station reveals the intimacy of interracial coexistence. From one particular incident when a large group of Aborigines visited, we can apprehend the tense intimacy of frontier life when violence was always possible—but did not always erupt.

Being a Women’s Adviser at the State Level: Deborah McCulloch and Don Dunstan in 1970s South Australia

ABSTRACT When Gough Whitlam appointed Elizabeth Reid in 1973, she was the first Women’s Adviser to a head of government anywhere. But the idea took off quickly across Australia. Between 1976 and 1986 all seven Australian states and territories appointed women’s advisers. In South Australia, in April 1976 the influential, reforming ALP Premier Don Dunstan appointed Deborah McCulloch as his Women’s Adviser; the third appointed at the state level following Victoria and Tasmania. This article draws on oral history interviews with McCulloch to assess what being South Australia’s first Women’s Adviser meant; and what both McCulloch and Dunstan considered her (and his) major achievements. It also looks briefly at several key women in Dunstan’s life who influenced his views. If Dunstan was slow to prioritize women’s rights, in some areas, such as the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act, SA led the way and the Commonwealth followed in 1984. Dunstan came to see women’s rights as ‘the challenge of social democracy,’ whereas McCulloch took great satisfaction in improving women’s lives. McCulloch went beyond her brief to focus on the public service, to provide innovative social services to all women. We can see too the significance of networking amongst femocrats, particularly among women’s advisers.