Australian Women's History

Living Feminism: the impact of the Women's Liberation Movement on three generations of Australian women CHILLA BULBECK, 1997 Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. xxii + 279 pp., A$29.95, ISBN 9 780521 465960     

Women's Micro-Entrepreneurial Homeworking

Enabled by the global distribution affordances of the Internet, increasing numbers of creative producers of the handmade—the majority of whom are women—are working from home as sole traders. Selling their wares via online marketplaces such as Etsy, such women often do so as a means by which to balance caring responsibilities with paid employment. In this article I argue that rather than seeing the exponential growth of an online craft economy as a ‘back to the future’ moment for the status of women, these business practices are best seen as part of the process of the folding of the economy into society, a process which Lisa Adkins has located as positioning the home as an increasingly productive space for both men and women.     

The Women's Movement and Government

Some scholars have suggested that institutionalisation and professionalisation of women's movement organisations leads to ‘feminist fading’. This article examines whether such propositions hold true for the Australian women's movement. It maps changes in the women's movement that had emerged by the 1990s, including increased diversity and increased national and international networking as well as increased institutionalisation. It finds that loss of political influence has less to do with institutionalisation than with a changed discursive environment that constructed the welfare state and women's reliance on it as a problem. Nonetheless, women's movement institutions have continued to sustain feminist values and engage in differently organised but effective campaigns. A case study of the women's health movement in Victoria shows how it succeeded in having abortion removed from the criminal code in 2008. Repertoire had changed since the 1970s but the goal remained the same.     

Women's suffrage campaigns in Britain

Abstract

The British Women's Suffrage Campaign, 1866–1928 HAROLD L. SMITH, 1998 London: Longman. 122 pp., ISBN 0 582 98113, paperback, £6.99     

Historicising the Women's Liberation Movement

ABSTRACT

The Women's Liberation Movement of the late 1960s, 1970s and 1980s emerged out of a set of economic and social circumstances where women collected together in disparate groups and contexts to express their dissatisfaction with their role and position in society. Through consciousness-raising and activism women raised their voices, profiles and visibility. This important moment of women's history is revisited in this collection of essays, which look afresh at the diversity of the movement and ways in which we might historicise the feminism of the time.