‘White Already to Harvest’: South Australian Women Missionaries in India

In 1882, the South Australian Baptist Missionary Society sent off its first missionaries to Faridpur in East Bengal. Miss Marie Gilbert and Miss Ellen Arnold were the first of a stream of missionary women who left the young South Australian colony to work in India. Scores of women from other Christian denominations and from other Australian colonies also went to India and indeed to other mission fields in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As with other western women missionaries, these women intended to save souls and to bring India's daughters to Christ, often by means of medical work. But unlike their British sisters, these women came from the edge of empire to intervene in another, but different, colonial site. These missionary ventures coincided with efforts of the Australian settlers to elaborate for themselves an identity separate from and against that of the metropolitan centre. Within these debates, contestations over the meaning of ‘the colonial girl’ and ‘the Australian girl’ played a key role. The article explores why the women were drawn to India rather than to working with Aboriginal people in Australia. It begins to investigate how in seeking to reconstruct Indian womanhood they elaborated for themselves a separate colonial, Australian identity and how much in their missionary endeavours they affirmed an identity as white, Christian and ultimately British.     

Sex-Based Occupational Segregation in U.S. State Bureaucracies, 1987–97

Is the extent of sex-based occupational segregation in U.S. state bureaucracies related to agency policy missions? Drawing on arguments by Lowi (1985), we contend that levels of sex-based occupational segregation in state bureaucracies vary depending on whether an agency's policy mission is distributive, regulatory, or redistributive. We employ data on the distribution of administrative and professional employees by sex in several types of state agencies across all 50 states for 1987–97. Our findings indicate high levels of occupational segregation among administrative cadres in agencies with distributive and regulatory policy commitments; however, professional workforces in these agencies have become less gender segregated over time. We find no evidence of occupational segregation among administrative and professional workforces in redistributive agencies. We argue that researchers need to examine the relationship between glass walls and other kinds of sex-based employment impediments, such as glass ceilings.     

Aerial roots

This poem was written at the request of Antomina Rumwaropen for a ceremony held on the shores of Lake Burley Griffin, Canberra, Australia, to mark 40 days after the death of her mother Dina Kayukatui. Antomina left West Papua as a very young woman, and then, because of links to the independence struggle, fled Indonesia as a refugee, first to Holland and then to Vanuatu. She came to Australia in 1989, as a refugee with her extended family. Because of political sensitivities she was unable to return to West Papua before her mother’s death in 1995 in her home village of Ransiki near the Bird’s Head of West Papua. Along with several members of her family, Antomina became an Australian citizen in 1997.     

THE MIRAGE OF MERIT

This paper takes a hard look at merit and the ideal academic, twin concepts that have been accorded short shrift by the scholarly literature. For the most authoritative positions, the ideal displays all the hallmarks of Benchmark Man. Despite the ostensible ‘feminisation’ of the academy, the liberal myth that merit is stable, objective and calculable lingers on. As a counterpoint to the feminisation thesis, it is argued that a re-masculinisation of the academy is occurring as a result of the transformation of higher education wrought by the new knowledge economy. In response, the ideal academic has become a ‘technopreneur’—a scientific researcher with business acumen who produces academic capitalism. This new ideal academic evinces a distinctly masculinist hue in contrast to the less-than-ideal academic—the humanities or social science teacher with large classes, who is more likely to be both casualised and feminised.