Considers the relative presence/absence of women in literary production in English Canada and Australia through an anlysis of the production and legitimation of fiction between 1970 and 1979. 'While its central problem - the prominence of women writers in English Canada and their relative neglect in Australia - is substantively located in Australian-Canadian studies, [the article's] general concern is with "women's place" in cultural production, and the relation between cultural production and the social, historical, and economic structures in which it occurs' (70).