The Dame School of Experience

This essay, written in 1920, illustrates that the issue of learning through experience has long been fundamental to the debate over how best to raise and educate young people.     

From autobiography to biography: Roma the First

Roma Flinders Mitchell, 1913–2000, AC, DBE, Queen's Counsel, Judge, Founding Chair of the Human Rights Commission, Chancellor of the University of Adelaide, Governor of South Australia, was the first woman in Australia—often also the first in the British Commonwealth—to gain the positions and honours that gild any narrative of her life. How did she do this? What was it like for her? Such questions follow immediately. And then, making it more complicated, what else was there in her life besides achievements and honours? What other doors opened before her as she moved through her days? And what doors closed? How did she choose some doors and not others?

These are questions that we are addressing in our biography of Roma Flinders Mitchell. They are not questions that we will consider here, though. Rather, our subject in this article is not our narrative but Roma Mitchell's own story of her life. It develops into a three‐stranded narrative, composed principally of interviews for press and television, predominantly during the last decades of her life. It is therefore a story shaped by her recognition of herself as exceptional, ‘Roma the First’, and also by other people's desires that she be—for them—precisely that: ‘Roma the First’. This is the ‘authorised’ narrative of Roma Mitchell's life, the story that she told herself. Many regard it as unquestionably definitive, and therefore determining. Yet, it does, itself, prompt an array of questions.

The story is set in Australia, ‘the last of lands, the emptiest’ wrote poet A.D. Hope, in a time that historian Michael Ignatieff deemed ‘“the worst century there has ever been,” in wanton destruction of human life and in murderous unreason masking itself as reason’. More specifically, it takes its beginning from the early years of the twentieth century, in the city of Adelaide, core of a British colony founded less than a century earlier, on the plain that had basked in the custodianship of the Kaurna people before the arrival of the ships from Britain, roughly in the middle of the southern curve defining the Australian continent. The forms that appear in the story derive from those origins: the British law which the colonists practised, with all its theatrical paraphernalia and terminology; a gradually developing copy of Westminster government, but with deference to British rule and allegiance always observed; education adopted from schools and universities in England and Scotland. Only in its churches was it distinct, for, among all of Britain's colonies in Australia, South Australia was the ‘paradise of dissent’. Here, on the edge of the anglophone world, this story did not so much unfold as gather itself together and take off.     

Dame unise,feminist maiden who fares well with the patriarchy: Jessica Amanda Salmonson's ‘the prodigal daughter’ and the emerging tradition in feminist speculative fiction

In her discussion of recent feminist utopias, Joanna Russ notes that the authors have likely read one another and that their ‘works form a remarkably coherent group in their presentation of feminist concerns and the feminist analyses which are central to these concerns’ (Russ, 1981: 71). My essay further explores the emerging tradition in feminist speculative fiction. It notes the common elements connecting three novels—Anne McCaffrey's Dragonsong (1976), Suzy McKee Charnas' Motherlines (1978), and Elizabeth A. Lynn's The Northern Girl (1980)—and analyses Jessica Amanda Salmonson's ‘The prodigal daughter’ (1981) in terms of its relationship to these connections. References to Louise Bernikow's Among Women (1980) link these feminist imaginative works to feminist reality, reality which is more closely adhered to by Salmonson than by the authors of the novels. While the novels' feminist protagonists succeed in isolation from the patriarchy, Salmonson's feminist hero, Dame Unise, succeeds because she is able to cooperate with a patriarch. Positive images of patriarchy are absent from the novels; Salmonson's story emphasizes such positive images.     

The Pulaski News:

This article describes one of the longest lasting experiential education programs in the country. High school students in Pulaski, Wisconsin have produced a community newspaper since the 1930s.     

The National Leadership Conference:

This article describes a leadership development program that uses a challenging outdoor setting to help teenagers develop self-confidence, ethical awareness, and communication skills.     

The Warnock report: The politics of reproductive technology

The Warnock Report (the report of the Committee of Inquiry into Human Fertilisation and Embryology, requested by the government of Great Britain) is a crucial text in the discourse on reproductive technologies. This paper is an investigation of the Report to find out exactly what is being said about women's bodies. I explore the relationship between the state and science, between ideology and technology, and the attempt of the Warnock Inquiry to construct a meaning of technology practice.After a brief introduction, the scope of the report is considred in part I. Part II discusses the Inquiry's treatment of infertility and the family. It includes sections on artificial insemination, invitro fertilisation, egg donation and surrogacy. The analysis reveals the Inquiry's preoccupation with the meaning of motherhood and social control of breeding. Women as women are not a presence in the discourse. Part III covers the Report's consideration of scientific research. I show that genetics is an inextricable part of research associated with artificial reproduction and that there exists an undercurrent eugenic meaning of genetics in the discourse on reproductive technology. An epilogue ties together the main points of my analysis.In short, what the text of the Report revealed was that the state and science require that women's bodies be available to serve the patriarchal nuclear family and the needs of scientists. The state empowers science because politicized technologies can be utilized by the state to intervene in population control. This is the logic behind eugenics and the policing of women's sexuality via reproductive technologies.     

Pilgrimage: The necessary journey

Pilgrimage, by Dorothy M. Richardson, is the portrayal of Miriam Henderson's struggle for independence and freedom in a society hostile to female self-reliance. The novel explores the external barriers to her liberation and analyses what it actually means to be a woman. Whilst accepting many of the masculine definitions of feminity Richardson asserts that the traditionally foolish and endearing characteristics of women — their illogicality or lack of abstract reasoning — are actually virtues that make women the deeper and wiser sex. More important, however, is the internalised conflict of Miriam, who as the surrogate son, the woman who contains ‘masculine’ qualities, becomes a symbol of the confusions and tensions of the transitional age in which she lives. And today as much as yesterday Richardson speaks for thousands of women who also feel they fight alone.