Innholdsfortegnelse for Vol. 56 no. 1 2021 i Agora

When I first taught the Year 11 course on twentieth century history, I inherited a unit on Vietnam War protests with a focus on America. I knew almost nothing about this, and I wondered whether something similar had occurred in Australia. Then I discovered that my school had a DVD called Save Our Sons about a group of women in Melbourne protesting against the Vietnam War and conscription. I watched it, and I was transformed. I browsed many histories of Australia and the Vietnam War to supplement my teaching, but there was little discussion of the anti-war and anti-conscription movement. Some of it was very dismissive. I thought someone needed to do something about this. Like the women I was researching, I realised that perhaps that someone needed to be…

What, or who, inspired you to explore women’s experiences and agency? I began looking at historical issues and themes from women’s perspectives in my Honours thesis (at Melbourne University in 1991), which explored female pub culture in Australia. I was going out with a footy player at the time and I was interested in the way that post-match drinking rituals were played out along gendered lines. But I wanted to write history, not anthropology or sociology, so I conducted oral history interviews with women who had been drinking in, working in or running hotels from the 1930s to the 1970s. It was those interviews that changed my whole perspective on historical research and methodology. I went into my line of historical enquiry with a fixed mindset, taken from contemporary circumstances…

In the first half of 2020 I taught an elective called ‘Feminist Collective’ to a mixed Year 9 and 10 group of students at an inner city public school. They had been inspired by the ‘School Strikes 4 Climate’ (SS4C) protests in 2019, but their horizons were not limited to solving the environmental crisis. They had taken my elective to find ways to bust through the sexist institutions and social values they felt were constraining them. In March we debated whether we agreed with the demands of the International Women’s Day march, which included pay equality, free childcare, and an end to violence against women. We then took a vote to attend and bring as many others from school as we could. We painted a banner emblazoned ‘Unite, Empower, Disrupt’,…

In the early twentieth century, educated girls and young women in the Dutch East Indies debated politics and culture while forging friendships in the pages of local newspapers. Typically from the middle and upper classes, they shared their experiences and thoughts in poetry and prose about a variety of social issues, especially how to fuse Western-style education, deep cultural values and interpretations of Islam. Writers like Siti Alwijah from Payakumbuh, a town deep in the West Sumatran highlands, penned accounts of belonging to a community of girls and women who dreamed of opportunities. Gradually the pitch black brightened The clouds in the sky were ablaze The natural balance has emerged from the nest [This is] the age of women adept at writing.1 Print culture has long been a productive source…

‘Well, there you are girl, go and get yourself a referendum.’ Jessie Street to Faith Bandler, 1957 1 Joyce Mercy (later Clague) became active in the Aboriginal rights movement in the early 1960s. A Yaegl woman from Ulgundahi Island in the Clarence River, she attended a Federal Council for Aboriginal Advancement (FCAA) conference in Newport in 1960 and was persuaded by Faith Bandler to speak. Bandler noted: ‘Within a few years she had become one of the leading speakers.’2 Mercy soon became the first welfare officer at The Foundation for Aboriginal Affairs (FAA) in Sydney, and in 1965 and 1966 spoke to groups all over Sydney including church groups, Rotary, Apex, Lions, the Business and Professional Women’s Association, and a Country Women’s Association conference about Indigenous issues and voting ‘Yes’…

Imagine a Viking ship burial and you probably think of a fearsome warrior killed in battle and sent on his journey to Valhöll. However, the grandest ship burial ever discovered—the Oseberg burial near Oslo—is not a monument to a man but rather to two women who were buried with more wealth and honour than any known warrior burial. Since the burial was uncovered more than a century ago, historians and archaeologists have tried to answer key questions: who were these women, how did they achieve such prominence, and what do they tell us about women’s lives in this time? This article will explore current understandings of the lives and deaths of the Oseberg women, and the privileged position they held in their society. Women of the Viking Age seem to…

The ancient Greeks blazed a trail into modern history books. They invented the idea of democracy and started numerous cultural institutions that remain with us today, such as the Olympic Games. Yet the empowerment of women was not among their enduring legacies. Ancient Greek society was strictly patriarchal, with men at the centre of power and decision-making while women were relegated to the domestic sphere. Against this backdrop it is all the more surprising that one of the most powerful positions in the ancient world was open exclusively to women—the priestess Pythia at the Delphic Oracle. From about 800 BCE to 390–391 CE, when the Roman emperor Theodosius I closed down all pagan cults, delegates from all over the ancient world consulted the priestess at the oracle of Apollo at…

According to academics Heather Ford and Judy Wajcman, Wikipedia has ‘become one of the most powerful global media of our time’.1 In 2020, the English version of Wikipedia had 119 billion page views and there were 269 billion page views across all the Wikipedia sites in all languages.2 In Australia, English Wikipedia had 244 million page views in January 2021 and Australia was the country with the fifth highest page views in the world in that month.3 Wikipedia is often at the top of the results list when searching online for a current or historical figure or event, and it is recognised as a useful source for students.4 In this context we suggest that Wikipedia is a platform we should take seriously. Wikipedia was created in 2001 as a free…

By the beginning of World War I, the burgeoning movement for women’s suffrage in Britain was facing a crisis of repression. Women protesting the British government’s refusal to grant women the vote were being routinely imprisoned and sent to mental hospitals, where they faced frequent beatings and assault from those who felt threatened by changes to the established political order. Many of the women went on hunger strikes to protest their status as criminals, arguing instead that they were political prisoners. The leader of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), Emmeline Pankhurst, was arrested and underwent hunger strikes eight times between 1913 and 1914. Their actions were dismissed as hysteria, and the women were vigorously suppressed by the British government and police. Some of them were subjugated by brutal…

When World War II broke out, Australia was a profoundly gendered society. It was assumed that men and women had very different roles in society, and war did not challenge those assumptions at first. As men enlisted for active service, women were sought as nurses to care for the wounded. Initial attempts by women to join the services were rejected out of hand, and they were directed to the traditional voluntary roles women had filled so effectively during World War I. Organisations like the Australian Red Cross, the Salvation Army and the Australian Comforts Fund had well-established networks that expanded readily. So many sought to help that the National Council of Women created a National Women’s Volunteer Register to help coordinate resources. Most workplaces also had their own patriotic funds…

Anne-Josèphe Théroigne (or Terwagne) was born in 1762 at Marcourt, a village south of Liège in modern Belgium. From a comfortable farming family, Théroigne had a remarkably unsettled life after her mother died when she was five years old, living with relatives who provided only erratic access to education. While working as a governess, she lived and studied singing in London and Paris, but also survived through unhappy relationships with far older, wealthy men, including the sixty-year-old Marquis de Persan, an officer of the Parlement de Paris. By 1789 she was living in Rome, from where she rushed back to Paris after news arrived of a revolution that immediately inspired her with its promise of individual freedoms and civic equality. This frail and often hated woman became a passionate advocate…

In 1907, the Commonwealth Court of Conciliation and Arbitration introduced the principle of a ‘living’ or ‘family’ wage for male breadwinners.1 This ruling, known as the Harvester Judgement, occurred alongside changes in arbitration, electoral laws, social welfare and racial exclusion within the recently federated Australian nation.2 In setting a new minimum wage at a level that would enable an unskilled male labourer to support a wife and children in ‘frugal comfort’ by paying for ‘food, shelter and clothing,’ Justice H. B. Higgins assumed that men were providers and women were their dependants. This construction of a male basic wage impacted on women’s wages throughout much of the twentieth century, with women receiving only 54–75 per cent of male wages. Yet women did not accept unequal wages, and campaigned for equal…

Have you ever tried to incorporate the tales of ordinary and extraordinary women into your history lessons but, when writing ‘history’ on the whiteboard, been struck by the implied gender bias that now undermines its Ancient Greek and Latin origins as a word to describe an ‘expert’ or ‘research’? Have you then thought to ask your students, ‘What about “her story”?’ While the Victorian curriculum encourages the incorporation of multiple perspectives in the study of History, the scarcity of women in mainstream global and local history is certainly frustrating, and the online hunt for female perspectives to include in its curriculum can be arduous and exhausting for the most well-meaning and inclusive of teachers. However, help is at hand. Museums focusing on the lives and achievements of women have been…