Making, Shaping, and Resisting Nations in the Twentieth Century: Women in Australia, Occupied Japan, and Postwar United States and Canada

This issue features a remarkable trio of paired articles. All investigate the ways that women have made, shaped, and resisted the nations within which they reside, but each pair also opens a separate conversation of its own. The first two articles consider the political rights of white Australian, and the survival strategies of disfranchised aboriginal, women. The second duo examines the role of gender in U.S. occupation strategies. The third considers how maternalism expanded and delimited women’s political power in postwar United States and Canada. We are excited to present you with this distinctive publication in which thematically and geographically focused conversations play out within the context of the broader theme of women and nationhood. As usual, we conclude with a number of review essays that bring recently published books into productive and dynamic conversation.

We open with Clare Wright’s fascinating reinterpretation of one nation’s founding, “‘A Splendid Object Lesson’: A Transnational Perspective on the Birth of the Australian Nation.” Historians have attributed the rise of an independent and democratic Australian state to its men’s military accomplishments during World War I, especially the legendary heroism exhibited at Gallipoli. Wright, however, shows that the fledgling nation earned global respect as early as 1902 for providing white women political rights equal to white men. Wright thus challenges “the centrality of militarism in historical and popular accounts of nationhood,” moving gender equality to the heart of Australia’s founding story by demonstrating how reformers and leaders of western democracies—most notably in the United States and the United Kingdom—looked to Australia as a model of democratic governance and gender equality. Wright acknowledges that white women’s political empowerment in Australia accompanied the disfranchisement of aborigines in what proved for white women “a timely alignment between the ideals of international feminism and the historical coincidence of federalism.” This fascinating story, then, counters “the androcentric underpinnings of Gallipoli’s enduring ‘birth of a nation’ mystique.” That mystique effectively drowned out collective memories about the nation’s founding achievements in legal equality. Indeed, Wright shows clearly that long before the First World War offered men opportunities to show off their military might, white Australians reveled in their global status as pioneers in the quest for more egalitarian political processes.

If Wright recounts the history of Australian nation-building from elite white women’s perspective, Kathryn Hunter aims to rewrite Australian history from the vantage point of indigenous women near the bottom. In “Aboriginal Women in Australia’s Travelling Shows, 1930s–1950s: Shadows and Suggestions,” Hunter explores the murky and poorly documented world of women who performed in “sideshows,” “tent shows,” and other ephemeral entertainment venues. The performances staged multiracial groups, including many aboriginal women who were presented as “Polynesian” or “South Seas” women—primitive but glamorously exotic Pacific Islanders rather than local, colonized aborigines. Hunter demonstrates that the nomadic lifestyle required of these performers placed them beyond the bounds of respectability drawn by white Australians who “celebrated settlement as the core of modern nation-building.” But aboriginal women who performed in travelling shows were, according to Hunter, actually pursuing a modern lifestyle in one of the few independent occupations open to them. Indeed, as the modern Australian state increasingly invaded the lives of indigenous peoples—by confiscating their wages and their children, for example—travelling performers escaped much of the state surveillance that kept others dependent and impoverished. Thus Hunter argues that indigenous performers were not simply objects of a modernity imposed on them by the Australian state; they were, rather, agents who participated in “making themselves modern” by claiming independence from that very state.

The next two articles examine the central role of gender in nation-building—or, to be more precise, nation rebuilding—and they add foreign policy to the mix in their explorations of women in U.S.-occupied Japan. Meghan Warner Mettler’s piece, “Modern Butterfly: American Perceptions of Japanese Women and their Role in International Relations, 1945–1960,” uses American newspaper articles, novels, and movies...