'At this year’s Australian Women’s History Network Symposium ‘The Past is a Position: History, Activism and Privilege’, Dr Chelsea Bond urged that the past is not a position; it is ever-present. If historical representations of Aboriginal women are products of their time, Bond posed, ‘what time are we in now?’1 She suggested that stories and representations of Aboriginal women continue to enact the damage of colonial constructions. The statement resonated with those who attended as Dr Bond, Associate Professor Barbara Baird and Professor Suvendrini Perera reflected on the ways in which their academic work intersected with their activism. Beyond the symposium, the presence of the past, our past, and the academic and political conflict over its meanings and legacies, has not eased its heavy weight on the intellectual and emotional labour of feminist academics in 2018.' (Georgina Rychner : Editorial introduction)
'The intersecting fields of women's, gender and feminist history are no longer new.1 They can now claim at least fifty years of scholarly practice, and much longer traditions outside the academy.2 The heady radicalism of the early years, when the simple act of writing women's history was an activist intervention, has in some ways been muted (or at least transformed) in the process of 'mainstreaming' and intellectual development that has taken place since the 1970s. This period has seen significant growth in practice and a sophistication that has come with the proliferation of new approaches, internal (sometimes acrimonious) debate and significant challenges to some of the foundational assumptions on which these fields were initially based. As the only history journal in Australia dedicated the fields of women's, gender and feminist history, 'Lilith' has been, and continues to be, a prism through which major developments, and schisms, in the field can be read.' (Publication abstract)
'This article inverts the title of Hayden White's 1974 essay 'The Historical Text as Literary Artifact' by exploring literary texts as historical artifacts. It uses three novels published by Australian women writers in the mid-nineteenth century - Catherine Helen Spence's Clara Morison (1854), Caroline Louisa Atkinson's Gertrude the Emigrant (1857), and Mary Theresa Vidal's 'Bengala, or Some Time Ago' (1860) - 'as historical sources to explore the emotional culture of colonial Australia in regard to romantic love. Following Sarah Pinto, this article takes the romantic couple as the centre of its analysis, and asks four key questions of the novels in the corpus: What kind of people fall in love? Who do they fall in love with? What kind of love do they fall in? And how do their lives and their loves interact with the colonial Australian landscape? It finds that romantic love in these novels is dependent on romanticised similarity and shared sensibility rather than eroticised otherness. It argues that while this might not necessarily be uniquely nationally distinctive, the Australian chronotopic context means that this narrative would have strong and specific resonances with a female colonial audience.' (Publication abstract)
'In the early twentieth century, a preoccupation with ensuring the strength, morality, and whiteness of the new Australian nation heightened anxieties around female sexuality and the single woman. However, women did not passively accept these ideals. Instead, they utilised the periodical press to voice their opinions and experiences. The 'Weekly' welcomed reader contributions and offers a rich archive through which to consider changing Australian attitudes towards sexuality, single women, and marriage in the early twentieth century. This paper explores the ways that readers perceived and engaged with the values and ideals that affected their lives. Histories of Australian women's magazines that did not claim a feminist political affiliation, especially in the years prior to and including WWI are largely missing from the literature. This paper begins to fill this gap through analysing the articles and humour pieces in the Australian Woman's Weekly, not its more famous namesake, the Australian Women's Weekly (1933- present). It discusses how the magazine used both humour and serious discussion to challenge and negotiate mainstream values. Through the Weekly, women asserted that single women's sexuality was not a 'problem' to be dealt with and argued that they could be valuable and happy members of society.' (Publication abstract)
