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MHIS245: Currency Lasses and Chesty Bonds: Gender in Australian History

This unit surveys women and gender in Australian history. Themes include: Indigenous women; race relations, and how racial hierarchies have shaped women's status and lives in Australia; women of ethnic minorities who have migrated to Australia, and their experiences here. We look at women convicts; their lives and experiences; and how women fared in colonial society. What did the colonial frontier mean for women (that is, Australia's vast open spaces; the Creole and complex societies that developed with the forced appropriation of Aboriginal land; the mapping of the continent; the establishment of grazing and agricultural industries; and the racial mixing that evolved especially in the north)? How have women fared in Australia in terms of their experiences in sexual activity; marriage; pregnancy; childbirth; motherhood; as wives and deserted wives; as widows and single women? How have women survived? What kinds of productive and reproductive labour have they done? How have their roles and experiences shaped Australian culture and vice versa? What has feminism meant and done in Australia; both the first wave in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; and the second wave from the 1960s? How was feminism shaped in Australia by transnational ideas and vice versa? How did it change Australian women's lives? What did World Wars I and II mean for Australian women, and how did they contribute to them? What has the ANZAC mythology based on Gallipoli meant for Australian women, and men? How have women contributed to Australian culture—national culture, high culture, and popular culture? And how have Australian cultural forms and media shaped ideas of gender, both femininities and masculinities?

Timetable Information

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