Katie Pickles

Colonial counterparts: the first academic women in Anglo-Canada, New Aealand and Australia

Abstract During the early years of the twentieth century, women first gained permanent academic positions in most universities across the Western world. This article considers the first academic women in Anglo-Canada, New Zealand and Australia as colonial counterparts. It argues that these womens experiences were shaped by a colonial setting that was infused with powerful gender-, race- and class-specific codes concerning knowledge and the institution of the university. The first academic women were simultaneously situated as ‘insiders’, as supporters of the institutions in which they worked, and as ‘outsiders’ because of their sex and the patriarchal attitudes of the time. In recovering some of their lives and experiences, it is shown how such a positioning shaped the careers of academic women, as well as how these women attempted to subvert and change their place within the university. As a group, the first academic women in Anglo-Canada, New Zealand and Australia were much more concerned with advancing the place of women in higher education than they were with critiquing the colonial knowledges that were a part of their various institutions.

Locating widows in mid-nineteenth century Pictou County, Nova Scotia

Abstract This article takes up the challenge of how to begin to include women in the historical geography of the Maritimes. It makes an intervention through a case study of the place of widows in one mid-19th century county in Nova Scotia. For women, widowhood was a life-phase of conflicting emotions, replete with the contradiction that came from the loss of a patriarch. While it offered potential freedom, widowhood could also signal uncertainty, and often, dependence. The cultural identity and economic and legal treatment of widows represented a strongly patriarchal age in which the doctrines of a ‘cult of domesticity’ and an ideology of ‘separate spheres’ influenced the life-course of widows. Spatial change often accompanied widowhood, with widows moving into a room in their old house, or to a new location.

The re-creation of Bottle Lake: from site of discard to environmental playground?

In order to understand the workings of ecological imperialism at the local level, this essay traces the haphazard environmental history of an area of land at the north-eastern border of Christchurch. It analyses the changing environmental qualities of place over time as a chain of discourses that have formed, re-formed, cross-fertilised each influencing a new land-use or perception of the area as wasteland, playground, wetland, and site of rehabilitation and recreation. An examination of the collision of discourses from elsewhere with local pragmatism reveals the limits and contradictions of theories of ecological imperialism at a local scale.

Exhibiting Canada: Empire, migration and the 1928 English schoolgirl tour

This article examines an event in 1928 where the interests of post-war British colonialism and those of a group of pro-British Anglo-Celtic Canadians came together in a tour of English schoolgirls through Canada. A focus on the schoolgirls themselves shows how the girls were positioned to transmit an image of Canada to Britain, while themselves being on display so as to set an example to which Canadians should aspire. The tour itinerary itself constructs a narrative of superior British-based culture, economy and politics within a resource-rich, technologically advanced, democratic Canadian nation. Itineraries and diary entries, as well as the memories of two tour members, are used to reconstruct and interpret the tour. In both its itinerary and subjects, the tour of English schoolgirls can be read as a vivid geographical enactment of colonial identity that reveals fresh insights about the workings of gender, migration and empire.

Colonial Sainthood in Australasia

Concerned with the formation of national identities in postcolonial Australasia, this article compares and contrasts representations of religious women Mary MacKillop (1842–1909) and Suzanne Aubert (1835–1926). MacKillop, constructed as a contemporary popular ‘Australian legend’ is set to become Australasias first saint, while in April 2004 investigation began into the beatification of New Zealand nun Aubert. Combining religious and secular explanations, despite the two womens lives and work displaying many similar characteristics, the article offers an explanation as to why it is that MacKillop, and not Aubert, will be Australasias first saint. The article argues that representations of the two women are embedded in the construction of national identities in Australia and New Zealand that draw upon gendered ‘white settler society’ mythologies.

Radical Reformers and Respectable Rebels: how the two lives of Grace Oakeshott defined an era

This is social history at its most provocative and useful. Jocelyn Robson has a background in vocational education and knows much about the Women’s Industrial Council and the London Trade Schools o...

Pathway to Death: Arrest and Trial

Why was Edith Cavell executed? This chapter investigates the year leading up to her death. It draws upon a number of official and popular sources, including letters by Cavell herself written at the time of her death, and it also considers sources that emerged through the twentieth century. Recognizing that all historical sources are constructed from a particular standpoint, sources are compared and contrasted in order to piece together the most plausible version of what actually happened in the lead-up to Cavell’s death. This involves understanding how different versions of her arrest and trial were interpreted and re-interpreted according to interests of gender, race and citizenship.

Who Was This Heroine?: Representation and Reality

This chapter unravels the dominant discourses that have been constructed surrounding Cavell’s work and personality from the time of her death. It interprets the stories of Cavell’s individual agency to explore where they complemented and collided with the wide range of images that existed about her. Nurse, martyr, patriot, ‘soldier’, Christian, exemplary British woman and citizen — these were all immediate representations of Cavell that were to reappear and sometimes disappear through the twentieth century. Amidst the initial outrage surrounding Cavell’s execution and the use of her death for propaganda purposes that centred around recruitment, representations of an innocent and noble British nurse were to the forefront, rather than a focus on Cavell as an active individual with agency in making history. Her life and personality were constructed to fit the propaganda descriptions of a young, innocent virginal martyr, and not a 49-year-old independent matron. When details of her family, childhood, youth and career did receive attention, they were interpreted to fit within a framework influenced by her untimely death. In fact, all posthumous accounts of Cavell were affected by her arrest, trial and execution, and must be treated as such.

The Legacy of Care: Women Helping Women

This chapter continues with medical memorials, focusing on benevolent care towards wartime nurses around the British world. These memorials belonged to a group that Alex King has argued were ‘representative of the altruistic ideals which the dead [in this case Cavell] were thought to have embodied’.1 As the state did not provide as much post-war assistance for nurses as it did for soldiers, it fell upon elite philanthropic women and men to raise funds and provide for tired women who had served their nation and empire. The people involved in raising funds for nurses’ care were very similar to those responsible for other forms of memorials for Cavell. They were elite citizens whose commemoration of Cavell was part of the promotion of what John MacKenzie has termed ‘a sort of cultural federation’ of the Empire.2 MacKenzie usefully argues that in promoting imperial intentions through appealing to ‘history, to heroic myths and ancestral courage’, colonial elites ‘were playing upon a theme that was already well embedded in the consciousness of citizens of colonial territories’.3 Imperial women’s commemoration of Cavell was an expression of such empire unity. Hence, mapping these memorials reveals the construction of colonial identity.

The Geography of Stone: Placing Traditional Monuments

The initial spirit of remembering Cavell that occurred immediately after her death was carried forward from memorial service to more permanent memorials. During the interwar years there were arguably more statues, busts and plaques made to commemorate Edith Cavell than any other woman of her generation. This chapter locates and explains the patterns of these traditional stone and metal monuments to Cavell. Focusing on how Cavell was portrayed, it addresses the postwar position of women, rekindling the arguments of women’s difference versus equality from and with men that were raised in Part I of the book as vital in propaganda images. Official monuments for Cavell were largely the domain of conservative elites, indicative of Cavell being claimed as a national and imperial citizen, and of her death being associated with the promotion of the status quo. In the interwar years the wartime propaganda baton passed to organizations around the British Empire, for whom the commemoration of Cavell served to construct colonial hegemonic identities that advanced Britishness. Importantly, in both Britain and the colonies, it was elite White women who were very involved in commemorating Cavell.