Gender in the Social Sciences

Abstract

This paper considers the three main ways in which social scientists are concerned with gender—as a field of study, as an analytical tool and as a social phenomenon structuring the social sciences themselves. It begins with a reconsideration of a report I wrote for the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia in 1998 on gender in the social sciences, and moves on to consider what has changed since then, emphasising the substantial internationalisation of Australian scholarship in thinking, method, focus, collaboration and communication. With the growing alliance of gender studies with cultural studies and the transformation of the latter from an interdisciplinary project into a new discipline, I suggest, feminist scholarship has become much more disciplinary in focus. For this reason, it has become important to understand why it is that women have found it much harder to achieve parity with men in some disciplines than others, and why it is that within disciplines, there remain strong gender differences. It concludes by observing that the vitality of gender scholarship depends significantly on its continuing engagement with public concerns and issues.     

Family history,identity, and public history: writing a history of The Benevolent Society in its 200th year

Abstract

Since 2011, the authors have worked together on outputs associated with the bicentenary of The Benevolent Society of New South Wales, Australia's oldest charity, established in 1813. This article focuses on one of those outputs—a project making use of family histories of clients of The Benevolent Society's Asylum, in the second half of the nineteenth century, to reveal the histories of these families in colonial New South Wales. The project also involves an exploration of the many different ways in which contemporary Australians are active agents in the creation of historical knowledge when practicing family history.     

’The privilege of being born aboriginal‘

Rita Huggins and Jackie Huggins, Auntie Rita (Aboriginal Studies Press) Canberra, 1994. Margaret Somerville with Marie Dundas, May Mead, Janet Robinson, and Maureen Suiter, ’The Sun Dancin’: People and Place in Coonabarabran (Aboriginal Studies Press) Canberra, 1994.     

Adventures of Feminism: Simone de Beauvoir's Autobiographies,Women's Liberation,and Self-Fashioning

While The Second Sex is usually taken as Simone de Beauvoir's major theoretical contribution to feminism, in the 1960s and 1970s it was very often through her autobiographies – especially Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, The Prime of Life, and Force of Circumstance, along with novels such as She Came to Stay and The Mandarins – that her feminist ideas were most thoroughly absorbed. The autobiographies became nothing less than a guide for the fashioning of a new kind of feminine self. Where The Second Sex had intimated that a significant aspect of human liberation lay in women not losing their identity or their sense of self in those of men, it was the autobiographies which suggested and demonstrated in great detail how this might be done. In them, the rejection of conventional marriage and children was no mere slogan, but the foundation of what seemed to young female readers to be a fascinating and challenging life. In this paper, I reflect on de Beauvoir and her historical and contemporary relevance: first through reminiscence and re-reading of the autobiographies themselves; then with an historical examination of how they were read, taking Sydney, Australia, as my example; and finally by offering some reflections on subsequent feminist critique.