'A joyous look at the history of lesbian and bisexual women in Australia – from convict times, through suffrage and liberation to today.
'Throughout history, women’s relationships have been downgraded and diminished. Instead of lovers, they are documented as particularly close friends; the type that made out, worked, lived, and are buried together. Besties, if you will. She and Her Pretty Friend aims to dispel this myth. It is an exploration of women’s relationships through Australian history, each chapter centring on a specific person, couple, or time period.
'With a focus on women such as Anne Drysdale, Lesbia Harford, and Cecilia John, She and Her Pretty Friend centres on stories of those who have remained obscured and less spoken of in the historical narrative. Throughout this retelling of Australian history, Scrimshaw explores how colonisation altered ideas of sexuality, how the suffrage movement in Australia created opportunities for queer women, and details her own part in creating queer history. Rather than continuing to deny a queer past, Scrimshaw encourages readers – and other historians – to open themselves to the idea that perhaps some people were more to each other than just ‘roommates’.'(Publication summary)
'In this hybrid work of history and memoir, writer and historian Danielle Scrimshaw examines the lives of queer women in Australia with a view to making this historically sidelined area of study both visible and accessible to a lay audience. Leaning on the work of historians such as Lucy Chesser, Joy Damousi, Ruth Ford, Rebecca Jennings, Sylvia Martin, Shirleene Robinson and others, Scrimshaw takes the reader on a journey through Australia’s queer past, with its primary period of interest being from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1980s. Across twelve chapters, the author recounts the stories of Australian women who led queer lives, and places them in conversation with her own personal history and lived experience as a young, queer woman in the present day.' (Introduction)
'She and Her Pretty Friend is a collation of stories about lesbians in Australian history, ranging from the convict women of the ‘flash mob’ in Hobart’s Cascades prison to the lesbian separatists of the 1983 Pine Gap Peace Camp. Along the way, the reader meets a couple who farmed together in the 1840s, another couple who taught swimming and started the first women-only gym in Melbourne in 1879, as well as one of the first women doctors and her lifelong companion, who both served at the Scottish Women’s Hospital in Serbia in 1916. There are other figures, like poet Lesbia Harford and her muse, Katie Lush, or suffragist Cecilia John, who rode on horseback, dressed in suffrage colours, at the head of a march of more than 4,000 women and children (Danielle Scrimshsaw credits her with ‘queering the suffrage movement’). A chapter on Eve Langley and other ‘passing women’ prompts questions about whether they would have seen themselves as transgender, in today’s parlance.' (Introduction)
'Queer women’s history is often relegated to sidebars and footnotes, ephemeral community publications, or academic texts that are prohibitively expensive if you can’t borrow a kind friend’s university library card. That’s not due to a lack of interest or scholarship: the frequency of lesbian historical narratives in fiction, film and television suggests there is audience appetite for stories of women loving women, and often just a little digging will uncover plenty of gold. But it’s nice to have someone else do the digging for you. Here, Danielle Scrimshaw and Ultimo Press have successfully identified a gap in the market for a popular nonfiction treatment of lesbian and bisexual women’s history in Australia that gathers a dozen narratives in the one volume.' (Introduction)
'Queer women’s history is often relegated to sidebars and footnotes, ephemeral community publications, or academic texts that are prohibitively expensive if you can’t borrow a kind friend’s university library card. That’s not due to a lack of interest or scholarship: the frequency of lesbian historical narratives in fiction, film and television suggests there is audience appetite for stories of women loving women, and often just a little digging will uncover plenty of gold. But it’s nice to have someone else do the digging for you. Here, Danielle Scrimshaw and Ultimo Press have successfully identified a gap in the market for a popular nonfiction treatment of lesbian and bisexual women’s history in Australia that gathers a dozen narratives in the one volume.' (Introduction)
'She and Her Pretty Friend is a collation of stories about lesbians in Australian history, ranging from the convict women of the ‘flash mob’ in Hobart’s Cascades prison to the lesbian separatists of the 1983 Pine Gap Peace Camp. Along the way, the reader meets a couple who farmed together in the 1840s, another couple who taught swimming and started the first women-only gym in Melbourne in 1879, as well as one of the first women doctors and her lifelong companion, who both served at the Scottish Women’s Hospital in Serbia in 1916. There are other figures, like poet Lesbia Harford and her muse, Katie Lush, or suffragist Cecilia John, who rode on horseback, dressed in suffrage colours, at the head of a march of more than 4,000 women and children (Danielle Scrimshsaw credits her with ‘queering the suffrage movement’). A chapter on Eve Langley and other ‘passing women’ prompts questions about whether they would have seen themselves as transgender, in today’s parlance.' (Introduction)
'In this hybrid work of history and memoir, writer and historian Danielle Scrimshaw examines the lives of queer women in Australia with a view to making this historically sidelined area of study both visible and accessible to a lay audience. Leaning on the work of historians such as Lucy Chesser, Joy Damousi, Ruth Ford, Rebecca Jennings, Sylvia Martin, Shirleene Robinson and others, Scrimshaw takes the reader on a journey through Australia’s queer past, with its primary period of interest being from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1980s. Across twelve chapters, the author recounts the stories of Australian women who led queer lives, and places them in conversation with her own personal history and lived experience as a young, queer woman in the present day.' (Introduction)
