Marilyn Lake

Getting Equal: the History of Australian Feminism

Introduction..Part One Women in a New World..1 The Power of the Ballot..Part Two Building a Woman-Friendly Commonwealth..2 The Creation of a Welfare State..3 The Rights of Mothers..4 The Independence of Women..5 Campaigning for Aboriginal Citizenship..Part Three Feminist Modes of Doing Politics..6 The Non-Party Ideal..Part Four Equality With Men..7 The Right to Work..8 No Discrimination on the Grounds of Sex or Race..9 An End to Womans Role..10 Liberation on our own terms..11 The Institutionalisation of Feminism..Conclusion

White Man's Country : The Trans-National History of a National Project.

Understandings and explanations of historical processes have been constrained and distorted by nationalist frameworks of analysis. In this article I suggest that the founding idea of Australia as a ‘white mans country’ can only be fully understood in the context of the trans‐national circulation of knowledge in the late nineteenth century, especially historical knowledge. The chief authors of the White Australia project—Alfred Deakin, H.B. Higgins and Edmund Barton—drew explicitly on American history lessons, most notably concerning the ‘failure’ of the multi‐racial experiment of Radical Reconstruction. And they drew especially on the writings of historians James Bryce, Charles Pearson, John W. Burgess and William Dunning. The idea of the ‘white mans country’ was a defensive trans‐national response to new global dynamics—in Africa, North and South America and Asia.

The limits of hope : soldier settlement in Victoria 1915-38

Over 10,000 men, women, and children were placed on farms in Australia during the 1920s as part of the soldier plan after World War II. Of the 12,000 families settled in Victoria, a majority failed to establish themselves, and the cost of this ill-conceived plan was enormous, both to the people and the state. This innovative social history focuses on the experiences of the settlers as they struggled against appalling conditions to make ends meet and maintain their dignity.

Feminist history as national history: Writing the political history of women∗

Writing feminist history as national history requires that we analyse womens political relationship to the nation state and their condition as citizens. Arguing that postsuffrage feminists sought to participate in political life as maternal citizens, I suggest further that we need a new history of Australian womens political thought, one that takes womens ideas about the vote and their changing conception of political power seriously.

THE INDEPENDENCE OF WOMEN AND THE BROTHERHOOD OF MAN: DEBATES IN THE LABOUR MOVEMENT OVER EQUAL PAY AND MOTHERHOOD ENDOWMENT IN THE 1920s

In the writing of labour history, women, for so long an absence, have more recently emerged as a problematic presence. Traditionally, labour history has been a story of conflict between men, of the struggle of organised working men against capitalist exploitation and oppression. Its theoretical underpinnings are to be found in Marxism, an analysis that constructs a world in which a violent class struggle between competing capitalist men and propertyless working men is resolved in communal control of the means

Colonised and colonising: the White Australian feminist subject

Abstract The feminist project in settler societies was profoundly shaped by white womens double identity as both colonised and colonising. They defined themselves in opposition to both the Old World oppressions of Britain and the older local ‘primitivisms’ of indigenous people. The imperative of the ‘advancement of women’ depended upon assumptions about the ‘backwardness’ of other women. In that sense, feminism was inherently imperialistic. Feminisms goal of the ‘independence’ of women was formulated n a context of preoccupation with ‘sex slavery’, evident to white women in the ‘chattel’ status of Aboriginal women and the white slave traffic, perpetrated by British agents at home and away.

Feminism and the gendered politics of antiracism, Australia 1927–1957: From maternal protectionism to leftist assimilationism

Feminists’ campaigns for Aboriginal rights in Australia between 1927 and 1957 were complicated by their conflicting loyalties to empire, nation, sex, race and their own political agendas. These agendas were in turn shaped by the conceptual frameworks provided by the League of Nations and the United Nations: During the 1920s and 1930s, the convergence of maternalist feminism and imperial protectionism produced a political focus on the specificity of Aboriginal womens oppression as mothers robbed of their children and as sexually violated bodies. Aboriginal women thereby gained a political space to speak about the pain of being separated from their children and denied their rights as mothers. From the 1940s, the belated involvement of the labour movement in support of Aboriginal mens need to speak on their own behalf led to a discursive shift in the politics of antiracism that was also gendered. The reconceptualisation of the Aborigine as ‘worker’ was crucial to winning Labor Party support for the campaig...

‘The brightness of eyes and quiet assurance which seem to say American’: Alfred Deakin's Identification with Republican Manhood

In 1885 the young Alfred Deakin made a pilgrimage to the grave of Ralph Waldo Emerson in Concord, and undertook a tour of the battlefields of the American War of Independence in and around Boston. Three years later, Deakin began a long and passionate friendship with Harvard philosopher Josiah Royce, who would, in 1908, send a copy of his new book The Philosophy of Loyalty to Deakin, now Prime Minister, in advance of the arrival of the US naval fleet in Melbourne that year. Theodore Roosevelt had decided to detour the fleet to Australia at the special invitation of Deakin, who greeted Admiral Sperry and his men by quoting Royce to invoke the two countries’ special affinity and fraternal kinship. Previous biographical and historical studies of Deakin have largely ignored his passionate identifications with American manhood and what might be called his republican desire. This article explores the possible meanings of these relationships in the context of Deakins profound ambivalence towards the British connection and his continuing conflict with the Colonial Office.

Citizenship as Non‐Discrimination: Acceptance or Assimilationism? Political Logic and Emotional Investment in Campaigns for Aboriginal Rights in Australia, 1940 to 1970

This article explores the relationship between the United Nations sponsored principle of non-discrimination and the policy of assimilation in the context of campaigns for Aboriginal rights in Australia in the 1950s and 1960s. The principle of non-discrimination was important to the elaboration of the goal of an equal citizenship, to the fight against the practice of segregation and as a basis for political organisation. The campaign for the 1967 referendum on Aboriginal citizenship was led by an inter-racial, cross-class alliance of women, whose common commitments were, however, shaped by different emotional and historical investments and different logics of pain. Hence, the large ‘Yes’ vote was an ambiguous triumph: from an Aboriginal point of view full acceptance into the nation-state could also mean their ultimate assimilation as a people. Moreover, in allowing for the leadership of women, coalitional politics could lead to the political domination of women and thus exacerbate the emasculation of Aboriginal men. This article focuses on the emotional structure of political subjectivities and the gendered and racialised dynamics of their formation.

Challenging the ‘Slave-Driving Employers’: Understanding Victoria's 1896 Minimum Wage through a World-History Approach

In 1896 the colony of Victoria introduced the worlds first legal minimum wage that also extended to adult men. It was much discussed around the world by commentators who saw its significance in terms of its radical break with the past. Traditionally conceptualised as an outcome of a domestic anti-sweating movement that focused on the exploitation of women and children in the clothing industry, I suggest that the radical innovation of the minimum wage is best explained if we adopt a world-history approach that recognises the potency of anti-slavery discourse in the nineteenth century, the encounter of British and Chinese workers in the context of urban manufacturing in 1890s Melbourne, and the ways in which the minimum wage, later theorised as a living wage, made the humanity of workers central to modern definitions of labour.