Negotiating the Politics of Inclusion: Women and Australian Labor Governments 1983 to 1995

The Hawke and Keating Labor governments have tended to practise a politics of inclusion in which women, along with other social groups, are seen to have an important part to play in building the new, internationally competitive Australian economy of the twenty-first century. Australian politics have therefore had a very different nature from that of the more exclusionary politics practised by British Conservative governments. While the politics of inclusion have given feminists room for manoeuvre, and facilitated some positive developments in areas such as affirmative action and childcare policies, feminists have had little success in challenging the overall direction of the governments' right-wing economic policies. Furthermore, the ‘economic’ has functioned as a meta-category which dissolves difference and conflict. The Australian experience therefore has both practical and theoretical implications for British feminists who may be experiencing a Labour government themselves before too long.     

Australian Lesbian and Gay Life Stories: A National Oral History Project

Lesbian and gay Australians have lived through extraordinary social change over the past six decades as attitudes towards homosexuality have shifted significantly. This article explores a collaborative project with the National Library of Australia, which was the first nation-wide oral history project to investigate the impact of these changes in the intimate lives of different generations of gay men and lesbians. Sixty men and women across Australia were interviewed as part of the project. This article outlines the methodological framework and the particular challenges and opportunities presented by an oral history project that involves members of the lesbian and gay population. It notes the increased opportunities to live an ‘ordinary’ life available to many lesbian and gay individuals and the way this was reflected in interviews.     

Warmth and Unity with All Women? Historicizing Racism in the Australian Women's Movement

In this paper I discuss the four Women and Labour conferences which were held in Australian capital cities over the seven years between 1978 and 1984. I explore the ways in which the history of Australian feminist activism during this period could be written, questioning in particular the claim that the Women and Labour conferences have been central to the history of Australian feminism. I discuss the ways in which a historical sense could be established, using writings about the conferences as historical ‘evidence’, that race and ethnic divisions between women had not been important to the ‘women's movement’ until 1984. In other words, I challenge the construction of this conference as a turning point - not only in the feminist politicization of immigrant and Aboriginal women, but also in the politicization of all feminists about race and ethnic divisions. More broadly, I am interested in how a history would be written if it aimed to get to the ‘truth’ about racism and about the feminist activism of immigrant women. How would the apparent lack of written ‘evidence’ - at least until 1984 - of immigrant women's feminist activism, and of the awareness of Australian feminists about issues of racism, be written into this history? In addition, I suggest that it is important to the writing of feminist history in Australia that published documentation has been mostly produced by anglo women, and is thus partial and mediated by the lived, embodied experiences of anglo women. Finally, my intention is to interrogate commonly understood narratives about Australian feminist history, to challenge their seamlessness, and to suggest the importance of recognizing the tension within feminist discourses between difference as benign diversity and difference as disruption.     

The Public Voice of Women

This article, first published in the London Review of Books on 20 March 2013, takes the long view on the subject of women's public voice. From antiquity to the present day there are countless examples of women either excluded from speaking out in public life or ridiculed for doing so. This essay examines the nature and experience of oratory in Western culture and the ways in which public speaking has become gendered and how issues of voice and gender continue to span the public spheres from traditional politics to modern forms of social media.     

The Prime Minister's Women

This is a biographical account of the early years of the Women's Affairs Branch, later the Office of the Status of Women, within the Canberra bureaucracy. It invokes personal experience in order to set the record straight, to address historical absences and to bring past strategies to bear on present policy.     

The Changing Role of Women in Finance

Finance is a gun. Politics is knowing when to pull the trigger.' In these few words the taciturn Mafia boss Don Lucchese in The Godfather Part III highlights the inextricable link between money and power, which together represent most significant influences on society and gender throughout history. Until the 1960s the very title for this article would have been regarded as a contradiction in terms. With few notable exceptions, women and finance did not mix, largely because they were not given the opportunity to do so. Today, women represent a significant force for change in the financial services industry, both as a target market for financial products and as key employees within the financial institutions. To place the power of financial institutions in an economic context, pension funds and life assurance funds together own about two-thirds of the UK stock market, with a further tranche owned by other collective retail funds, such as unit trusts and open-ended investment companies. As a result, the investment companies that manage these funds effectively control British industry, and are the channel through which the funding for future businesses must flow. The simple fact is, therefore, that the boards of British companies are answerable on a more regular basis to private fund managers than they are to financial regulators or the government itself.     

Sketching Women in Court: The Visual Construction of Co-accused Women in Court Drawings

This paper explores the visual construction and representation of co-accused women offenders in court drawings. It utilises three case studies of female co-defendants who appeared in the England and Wales court system between 2003 and 2013. In doing so this paper falls into three parts. The first part considers the emergence of the sub-discipline, visual criminology and examines what is known about the visual representation of female offenders. The second part presents the findings of an empirical investigation, which involved engaging in a critical, reflexive visual analysis of a selection of court drawings of three female co-offenders. The third part discusses the ways in which the court artists' interpretation, the conventions of court sketching, and motifs of female offenders as secondary actors, drew on existing myths and prejudices by representing the women as listening, remorseless ‘others’.     

The Deathly Sleep of Frederic Leighton's Painted Women

In this article, the author argues that, towards the end of his life, Frederic Leighton (president of the Royal Academy from 1878 to 1896) became increasingly preoccupied with painting sleeping and entranced women as a way of simulating death. In turn, death in Leighton's art comes to look like pleasured sinking into unconsciousness accompanied by an irreversible bodily dissolution, which is registered in the multiplying of the ‘endless folds’ in the figures’ drapery. The author analyses key examples of paintings by Leighton of sleeping and sleepy women—namely, Cymon and Iphigenia (1884), The Garden of the Hesperides (1892) and Flaming June (1895)—within the context of late Victorian anxieties around sleep and its resemblance to death. In these works, Leighton twists and elongates the sleeping women's necks and limbs to make them appear dangerously serpentine, while increasing the activity of the drapery to register both the meanderings of the subconscious and the dissolution of the body. The drapery disorganizes classical form, taking on the appearance of liquid, hair and melted wax.     

The Mechanisms of Exclusion: Women in Conflict

Women across geographical and temporal locations have faced similar experiences in conflict and post-conflict situations due to broad conceptualisations of gender and its perceived implications, which play out within all conflict dynamics. This article draws on case studies from the work of WOMANKIND Worldwide, a UK-based international women’s human rights and development organisation, to outline the challenges faced by and innovative strategies used by women’s organisations internationally to ensure their participation, voice and rights and the role of the women’s movement in uniting disparate groups and individuals. It recognises that women are not a homogenous group and that their experiences differ widely across geographical and temporal locations. To guard against biological foundationalism and to ensure a comprehensive approach to peace-building, both a human-rights approach and a gender analysis are therefore required. Only then will sufficient voice, resources, participation, services, support, reparations, documentation and respect for human rights be ensured—both for women and men.