School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemCountryminded Conforming Femininity: A Cultural History of Rural Womanhood in Australia, 1920 – 1997( 2021)This thesis explores the cultural and political history of Australian rural women between 1920 and 1997. Using a diverse range of archival collections this research finds that for rural women cultural constructions of idealised rural womanhood had real impacts on their lived experiences and political fortunes. By tracing shifting constructions of this ideal, this thesis explores a history of Australian rural womanhood, and in turn, centres rural women in Australian political and cultural history. For rural women, an expectation that they should embody the cultural ideals of rural Australia — hardiness, diligence, conservatism and unpretentiousness — was mediated through contemporary ideas of what constituted conforming femininity. This thesis describes this dynamic as countryminded conforming femininity. In this respect, this research is taking a feminist approach to political historian Don Aitkin’s characterisation of the Country Party as driven by an ideology of countrymindedness. This thesis uses countryminded conforming femininity as a lens through which cultural constructions of rural womanhood may be critically interrogated, and changes in these constructions may be traced. This thesis represents the first consideration of Australian rural womanhood as a category across time that is both culturally constructed and central to Australian political and cultural life, drawing together histories of rural women’s experience, representations and activism. It theorises what ideals of Australian rural womanhood have meant across the twentieth century and finds that they have had an under-considered role in Australian political life, and on constructions of Australian national identity.
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ItemLabour pains: working-class women in employment, unions, and the Labor Party in Victoria, 1888-1914( 1987-05)This study focuses on the experiences of working-class women spanning the years from 1888 to 1914 - a period of significant economic growth and socio-political change in Victoria. The drift of population into the urban centres after the goldrush marked the beginning of a rapid and continual urban expansion in Melbourne as the city’s industrial and commercial sectors grew and diversified. Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, the increasing population provided a larger workforce which also represented a growing consumer market. The rise of the Victorian manufacturing industries in this period also saw the introduction of the modern factory system. With the increasing demand for unskilled labour in factories, it was not only men who entered this new factory workforce. Young women and older children were, for the first time, drawn in appreciable numbers into the industrial workforce as employers keenly sought their services as unskilled and cheap workers. Women were concentrated in specific areas of the labour market, such as the clothing, boot, food and drink industries, which became strictly areas of “women’s work”. In the early twentieth century, the rigid sexual demarcation of work was represented by gender-differentiated wages and employment provisions within industrial awards.
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ItemGlory boxes: femininity, domestic consumption and material culture in Australia, 1930-1960( 2009)This thesis investigates glory boxes as cultural sites of consumption, production, femininity, sexuality, economy and transnationalism between 1930 and 1960 in Australia, a period of considerable economic and social change. Glory boxes were the containers and collections kept and accumulated by many young single women in anticipation of their future married and domestic lives. The nature and manifestations of the glory box tradition have uniquely Australian qualities, which had its roots in many European and British customs of marriage preparation and female property. This study explores a number of facets of women's industrial, communal, creative and sexual lives within Australian and international historical contexts. These contexts influenced glory box traditions in terms of industrialisation, changing consumer practices, the economics of depression and war, and evolving social definitions of femininity and female sexuality. Glory boxes provide an effective prism through which to scrutinise these broad social and economic developments during a thirty year period, and to highlight the participation of young women in cultural practices relating to glory box production in preparation for marriage. Oral testimony from migrant and Australian-born women, the material culture of glory boxes and the objects collected, and popular contemporary magazines and newspapers provide important documentation of the significance of glory box practices for many Australian women in the mid-twentieth century. Glory boxes track twentieth-century shifts in Australia in terms of a producer and consumer economy at both collective and individual levels. They reveal the enduring social expectations until at least the 1960s that the role of women was seen as primarily that of wives, mothers and domestic household managers. Nonetheless, a close investigation of the meanings of glory box collections for women has uncovered simultaneous and contradictory social values that recognised the sexual potential of women, while shrouding their bodies in secrecy. This thesis suggests that a community of glory box practitioners worked through a variety of collective female environments which crossed time, place, generation and culture. It demonstrates the impact of the act of migrating on glory box practices which were brought in the luggage and memories of many post-war migrant women to Australia. These practices were maintained, adapted and lost through the pragmatics of separation, relocation and acts of cultural integration. This research has identified the experiences of young single women as critical to expanding understandings of the history of domestic consumption in Australia, and the gendered associations it was accorded within popular culture. It has also repositioned the glory box tradition as an important, widely practised female activity within feminist historiography, by recognising its legitimacy as female experience, and as a complex and ambivalent symbol which defies simplistic interpretations.
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ItemIn her gift: activism and altruism in Australian women's philanthropy 1880-2005( 2008)This thesis examines the experiences of Australian women philanthropists who donated money to social causes and public institutions in the decades from the late nineteenth to the beginning of the twenty-first century. In a colonial society where wealth generation and its disposal was essentially the province of men, a small but significant number of women who were wives and daughters of men of substance found themselves in a position to use family resources for their own chosen philanthropic ends. They did so in a context of colonial women's activism through women's associations, and derived motivation from their religious faith. Australian women's philanthropy drew upon British and American traditions. The remarkable wealth generation of the industrialising United States underwrote philanthropic women's very considerable donations, deployed with a moral authority that was fostered by evangelical Protestantism. Likewise, in Britain, evangelical work was supplemented by funding from elite wealthy women who could access familial fortunes. Australian women's philanthropy was distinctive because, despite the country's comparatively modest prosperity, the energetic and pragmatic association of women around philanthropic causes, often with a religious imperative, emboldened women of independent means to become exceptional givers. In the first half of the twentieth century, possibilities for women's active involvement in philanthropy expanded. Women in Australia gained political citizenship for federal elections in 1902, and by 1908, had been awarded political rights in each state. The 'new woman citizen' was able to assume a stronger profile in the workforce, in the professions and in business; social change that was mirrored in the activism of women philanthropists. Rapid economic growth after World War Two, and a developing national consciousness of the importance of philanthropic endeavours saw the backgrounds of women philanthropists diversify, just as a new women's movement arose to challenge and reshape women's public roles. There are undeniable continuities in women's philanthropy from the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries: in direct giving and fundraising, in commitment to women's causes, and in the influence of religion. Nevertheless, by 2005, women were sustaining an unprecedented and outstanding presence, not only as individual philanthropists, but in the highest levels of decision-making in an arena increasingly referred to as the 'third sector' of the economy. They have assumed a central role in the growing number of Australian philanthropic foundations and in the shaping of policies on funding for social change. Moreover there are clear signs that the influence of women in philanthropy, as in other public spheres including mainstream politics, will amplify in future. In investigating the development of women's philanthropy in Australia, with a focus on those who had money within their gift, this thesis profiles over fifty women with specific reference to Mrs Anne Bon, Janet Lady Clarke, Mrs Ivy Brookes, Dr Una Porter, Ms Barbara Blackman, Dame Elisabeth Murdoch, and Ms Jill Reichstein.
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