Feminist history in Australia grew out of the women’s liberation movement and the theoretical challenge it posed to what counted as a proper subject for historical inquiry. Marilyn Lake and Clare Corbould trace that history from Kay Daniels’s 1975 national archival survey through the shift from women’s history to gender history, the writing of Creating a Nation (1994), the history wars of the 1990s, and the transnational networks that took Australian feminist historians well beyond the local debates. Lake describes a moment of liberation in those years: realising that if Australian male historians wouldn’t engage with feminist scholarship seriously, there were feminist historians across the world who would.

The conversation is candid about the paradox that remains. Women now make up roughly half of employed historians in Australia, and women have often led the Australian Historical Association. But national histories — written by men of both progressive and conservative persuasions — continue to treat women as peripheral.

Voices

Marilyn Lake is Professorial Fellow in History at the University of Melbourne and one of the founding figures of feminist history in Australia. Her books include Creating a Nation (co-authored with Patricia Grimshaw, Ann McGrath and Marian Quartly), Getting Equal and Drawing the Global Colour Line (with Henry Reynolds). She is currently working on a project about Australia’s founding ideals in 1901.

Clare Corbould is a Professor of History at Monash University. Her research focuses on African American history and its transnational dimensions. She is currently writing about Sally Hemings and the history of the American Revolution.

Credits

Recorded and edited by Lachlan D’Acourt. Executive producers: Michelle Arrow and Kate Fullagar. Executive producer, Impact Studios: Sarah Gilbert. History Lab is made by UTS Impact Studios and the Australian Centre for Public History. Field Notes is made in collaboration with the Australian Historical Association.

Further Reading

• Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (1970)
• Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (1985)
• Patricia Grimshaw, Marilyn Lake, Ann McGrath, and Marian Quartly, Creating a Nation (1994)
• Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilisation (1995)