Susan Magarey

History, cultural studies, and another look at first‐wave feminism in Australia∗

Another look at first‐wave feminism, one that considers cultural productions as well as the materials usually accepted by historians as ‘sources’, offers a new, revisionist, account of the ‘Woman Movement’, focused less on motherhood and/or work than on (hetero)sex. This account also suggests that Australian feminism was not only born modern but was a force for modernism, at least two decades sooner than anywhere else.

DREAMS AND DESIRES

‘The challenge’, wrote Marilyn Lake*describing Women’s Liberation as ‘The Great Awakening’* ‘was to invent new frames of reference, new forms of knowledge, new modes of living’ (Lake 1999, 230). Late twentieth-century feminists could, and did, readily produce critiques of the current positioning of women, of ways of thinking about women, of relations between women and men. But at least some of the most compelling emotional potency of such critiques emerged when they were positioned in contrast with a vision of an entirely different cultural, political and social order, an imagined ideal, a utopia. Activist feminists from a century earlier in Australia understood this well. Henrietta Dugdale, for instance, elected president of the Victorian Women’s Suffrage Society in 1885, was also the author of a short novel titled A Few Hours in a Far-off Age (Dugdale 1883). It depicts a society called Alethia, several centuries in the future, that vantage point providing a position for perception and analysis of the evils of the late nineteenth-century present. Most of the action takes place in a city of clusters of huge buildings that are ‘truly works of art’ (1883, 5). Dugdale held that the key to women’s emancipation was education, so, not surprisingly, these buildings are Instruction Galleries, each alcove equipped with a display cabinet and books demonstrating some aspect of past life among humans. There, young people of both sexes from the age of seven to early adulthood are taught by their parents for two mornings a week. The substance of that education, which occupies most of the novel, involves a thoroughgoing critique of ‘what was once called the ‘‘Christian Era,’’ subsequently designated by historians as ‘‘The Age of Blood and Malevolence’’’ (1883, 7), lasting*presciently, if over-optimistically*until the twenty-first century. The principal target in the present that Alethia’s future perspective identifies was, Mrs Dugdale declared, ‘what has been, during all the ages, the greatest obstacle to human advancement; the most irrational, fiercest and most powerful of our world’s monsters* the only devil*MALE IGNORANCE’ (1883, Dedication). The work illustrates this dictum, encapsulating Dugdale’s conviction that women were more morally and emotionally intelligent than men, as well as more technologically competent, in its account of a kind of technological innovation that would come to be considered characteristic of twentiethcentury science fiction. Transport in Alethia is provided by vehicles that can fly (1883, 7). One is ‘a handsome, comfortably constructed carriage’ that starts when one of its passengers moves a small handle: it rises over the throngs of people, clear of the buildings into the air (1883, 73), apparently soundlessly, and can travel at about eighty miles an hour (1883, 83). Another, called ‘Scud’, is a new invention which can fly much faster, 140 miles an hour (1883, 100). When men first devised flying machines, even with the most skilled guiding them, ‘they frequently collided several hundred feet above the ground, and went crashing through the air*a burning tangled mass! Corpses sometimes fell upon living

Women's Liberation was a Movement, Not an Organisation

Abstract This article argues that understanding any relationship between the Womens Liberation Movement and the state depends upon a recognition of the variety and change through time encompassed by each. It considers, first, some of the key concerns of the Womens Liberation Movement in the years of its initial eruption, then three instances when individual participants in the Womens Liberation Movement engaged with government, and concludes, finally, that the driving force in each instance was ultimately the utopian dream of a level of transformation unimaginable in conjunction with any government that we know.

From autobiography to biography: Roma the First

Roma Flinders Mitchell, 1913–2000, AC, DBE, Queens Counsel, Judge, Founding Chair of the Human Rights Commission, Chancellor of the University of Adelaide, Governor of South Australia, was the first woman in Australia—often also the first in the British Commonwealth—to gain the positions and honours that gild any narrative of her life. How did she do this? What was it like for her? Such questions follow immediately. And then, making it more complicated, what else was there in her life besides achievements and honours? What other doors opened before her as she moved through her days? And what doors closed? How did she choose some doors and not others? These are questions that we are addressing in our biography of Roma Flinders Mitchell. They are not questions that we will consider here, though. Rather, our subject in this article is not our narrative but Roma Mitchells own story of her life. It develops into a three‐stranded narrative, composed principally of interviews for press and television, predominantly during the last decades of her life. It is therefore a story shaped by her recognition of herself as exceptional, ‘Roma the First’, and also by other peoples desires that she be—for them—precisely that: ‘Roma the First’. This is the ‘authorised’ narrative of Roma Mitchells life, the story that she told herself. Many regard it as unquestionably definitive, and therefore determining. Yet, it does, itself, prompt an array of questions. The story is set in Australia, ‘the last of lands, the emptiest’ wrote poet A.D. Hope, in a time that historian Michael Ignatieff deemed ‘“the worst century there has ever been,” in wanton destruction of human life and in murderous unreason masking itself as reason’. More specifically, it takes its beginning from the early years of the twentieth century, in the city of Adelaide, core of a British colony founded less than a century earlier, on the plain that had basked in the custodianship of the Kaurna people before the arrival of the ships from Britain, roughly in the middle of the southern curve defining the Australian continent. The forms that appear in the story derive from those origins: the British law which the colonists practised, with all its theatrical paraphernalia and terminology; a gradually developing copy of Westminster government, but with deference to British rule and allegiance always observed; education adopted from schools and universities in England and Scotland. Only in its churches was it distinct, for, among all of Britains colonies in Australia, South Australia was the ‘paradise of dissent’. Here, on the edge of the anglophone world, this story did not so much unfold as gather itself together and take off.

Beauty Becomes Political: Beginnings of the Women’s Liberation Movement in Australia

ABSTRACT A foundational statement of the campaigns of the Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1970s–1990s is ‘The Personal is Political’. This article explores ways in which that statement was demonstrated at the beginnings of the Women’s Liberation Movement in protests against requirements that women be, or aspire to be, beautiful. It provides accounts of three major protests against beauty contests in 1970: one in the United States, one in Australia and one in Britain. It provides a fourth account, this one of the first Women’s Liberation conference in Australia, where beauty was still an issue. The article concludes first with an example of personal demands being placed firmly on the stage of world politics in 1975, but finally with present day examples of the stubborn and degrading persistence of the political dominance that still requires women to conform to masculinist definitions of personal beauty.

Larrikins: A History

She also makes intriguing arguments about how a transcolonial perspective encourages scholars to seek fresh ways of interrogating the archival production of knowledge. Thus the book also advances another exciting growth area within the historiography of psychiatry: colonial psychiatry and the relationship between race, empire and madness. Coleborne’s book is a rewarding read throughout. While one shouldn’t really pick favourites where family is concerned, one of the sections I enjoyed most was chapter three, ‘Families and the Language of Insanity’. This chapter provides a rich analysis of family and lay language surrounding insanity, and how that language became part of clinical discourse, offering important insights into the interface between popular and ‘expert’ understandings of madness. Gender, class and household composition become important variables here. Chapter four, ‘Writing to and from the Asylum’, is equally fascinating, offering an investigation of the emotional lives of patients and their families. By tracing these emotions through patient case histories and family correspondence, it adds significant insights to a further growth area in our discipline, the history of emotions. Taken together, these chapters offer new ways for the historian to gain insight into the complex relationship between patient, family and medical authority, and to chart the impact of mental illness upon family life in a rich and emotive way. I have few gripes about this study. Given the size of these enormous public asylums, one might question quite how representative 215 patients across four institutions can be. Nonetheless, a diverse array of archival sources has been explored, including patient case files, which I know through my own research are voluminous and complex documents that require a great deal of attention to do them justice. The patient cases, we are told, were carefully selected in order to shed particular light on the dynamics between family and institution, and are helpfully contextualised within broader patterns of committal and discharge. The fleeting appearances of families in most records generated by the asylum system are a reasonable explanation for the sampling method. Indeed Coleborne’s study is a demonstration of both the visibility and invisibility of families in asylum archives, and makes convincing and interesting arguments about how these institutional records represented and produced ‘the family’. As I have myself argued in relation to asylum patients, Coleborne argues that these records construct the family, and mediate their opinions and input to proceedings, rather than providing an unproblematic window into it. Madness in the Family is an articulate, engaging and sensitive book which I found a fascinating and hugely worthwhile read. It deals with important themes and unquestionably advances existing scholarship. For anyone with an interest in the history of the family, the history of emotions, transnational history, or colonial psychiatry, and for those who want to enrich their understanding of family conceptualisations and responses to madness and its treatment, which should be pretty much every scholar of psychiatric history, Coleborne’s book is a must-read.

LITERARY FRIENDSHIP: A Tale of Two Catherines: A Tribute to Margaret Allen

Abstract This article offers a tribute to Margaret Allen by sketching a friendship between two Scottish-South Australian women writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first section considers the sources of their bond. The second relates Spences efforts to secure publication and markets for Martins novels. The final section touches on Margaret Allens own research and writing about Catherine Martin, and about other subjects, and her—intellectually and politically adventurous—refusal of conventional hierarchies.