AustLit

'Ruby Lindsay was born in Creswick Victoria in 1885, into a family whose name would become synonymous with Australian art. This was also a time of immense change for Australian women with the emergence of first wave feminism, focusing on taking women out of the private domestic sphere of the home. The campaign for women's suffrage was a great catalyst for these changes, as it not only gained women the vote but a voice within a male-centric society. This article explores how Ruby was able to navigate her way through these times of change, live an independent lifestyle in Melbourne, move to London with her husband Bill Dyson and forge a successful career for herself as a professional artist during the suffrage-era. As a prolific illustrator, her drawings appeared in many newspapers and books between 1906 and 1914. Although few of her works refer specifically to the suffrage campaign many of her women subjects were strong and independent and reflect Ruby's own personality, taking full advantage of the freedoms afforded to her during the latter part of the suffrage-era and using those freedoms as inspiration in her art.' (Publication abstract)

'Dame Enid Lyons was a prolific broadcaster in the 1930s and 1940s. Perceived by many as the ideal Australian woman, she was the wife of Prime Minister Joseph Lyons, and later the first woman elected to the House of Representatives and the first woman in federal Cabinet. In December 1939, eight months after the death of her husband, Lyons began a series of weekly broadcasts on Sunday evenings on the Macquarie Network. Her archives contain the scripts of these talks and many letters from devoted listeners. These broadcasts, and the audience response to them, demonstrate the importance of radio to Lyons' public life and her role as a major figure on the medium. More broadly, they provide a key example of how radio provided a new public space in which women could speak about a range of issues and claim a voice as citizens in mid-twentieth century Australia. Radio represented an intersection of public and private spheres, and this gave women a space to articulate and perform oppositional forms of citizenship. Broadcasting challenged the gendered hierarchy of the public sphere, and as such women's radio speech needs to be taken seriously as a crucial part of Australian women's history.'  (Publication abstract)

'The story of Adela Pankhurst, the third daughter of Suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst, is a complex and uncomfortable one. Exiled to Australia by her mother and sister Christabel for her socialist ideas, Adela quickly became a darling of the left. She was a charismatic leader in the anti-conscription campaign and led women in militant marches during the great strike of 1917. In the late 1920s, however, Adela's politics took a sharp turn to the right. Disillusioned with the rise of Stalinism in Russia she became a staunch anti-communist, flirted with fascism and died a born-again Catholic. Though this paper focuses on Adela's role in the anti-conscription campaign, it also considers the methodological and ethical challenges involved in investigating such a contradictory career.'  (Publication abstract)

'The Convict’s Daughter opens in Pitt Street, Sydney in 1848 with fifteen year-old Mary Ann Gill standing precariously on a window ledge of the hotel run by her parents, former convicts Martin and Margaret Gill, contemplating whether or not to elope with gentlemen settler James Butler Kinchela, son of the former Attorney General of New South Wales. As this biography reveals the events that follow Mary Ann’s step from the window ledge and to her planned rendezvous with Kinchela engulf Mary Ann and her family in a public scandal, described in newspaper reports as the ‘Parramatta Romance’, which played out alongside the 1848 election campaign in New South Wales.'  (Introduction)

'Jones’ history of Aboriginal Country Women’s Association (CWA) branches in New South Wales (NSW), from 1956 to their disappearance in 1972, offers a new chapter in the organisation’s history. Jones uses both archival sources and oral history in her well researched and insightful book, Country women and the colour bar: Grassroots activism and the Country Women’s Association. Her book’s central focus is the ‘tracing of cross-racial mixing in CWA branches on Aboriginal stations and reserves’. Referring to the inauguration of these branches as an ‘experiment’ and ‘bold’, her research covers a seventeen year period.'  (Introduction)