Women’s and Gender History in Australia: A Transformative Practice

When a new wave of women’s history burst onto the Australian national scene in the 1970s, its angry tone, revolutionary critique, and national political focus reflected its close connections with the women’s liberation movement. Subsequent research into the history of working women expressed the strength of labor history in Australia. The new concept of “gender relations” enabled feminist history to claim all historical processes and relationships, not just women’s experience, as its proper subject. More recently feminist history has been at the forefront of the transnational turn in Australian history that has reinvigorated research into biography, empire, colonialism, migration, and the women’s movement itself. Seemingly now far removed from its grassroots, the new transnational feminist history would yet seem to be appropriate in the face of one of the most urgent of contemporary political challenges: the need to address the inter-connectedness of the world, evident in the terrible plight of the tens of thousands of asylum seekers who risk and lose their lives in crossing national borders.