Nationalist Historiography, Feminist Scholarship, and the Promise and Problems of New Transnational Histories: The Australian Case

History, as has often been noted, made its career as a handmaiden to the nation-state. Both enterprises—history and the nation-state—spoke to, and privileged, men's ambitions, interests, desires, and fantasies. History was, as often as not, the record of men's public work of nation-building—through parliaments, politics, commerce, and war. History shaped national identities by construing past experience as a record of collective national endeavor, exemplified in revolution and reform, exploration and settlement, wars against nature, natives, and foreign neighbors. In reality, women had also been writing history, in a multitude of genres, as Mary Spongberg and her co-editors and contributors to the Palgrave Companion to Women's Historical Writing (2005) have made amply clear, but such historical writing was mostly not recognized as real history and rarely taught in universities—or understood in the public domain—as national history.¹

When women's liberationists began, in the 1970s, to demand representation in the historical record, as in political assemblies, they mostly focused on documenting women's contribution to the national story. In Australia, especially, early women's liberationist texts—by Anne Summers, Bev Kingston, Edna Ryan and Ann Conlon, and Miriam Dixson—targeted not patriarchy in general, but the fictions and fantasies of our particular national history, which had celebrated such men's achievements and masculinist mythologies as mateship and Gallipoli.² The titles of the Australian books reflected the contemporary preoccupation in the 1970s with national identity and women's place in the nation, past and present. So exclusionary was the national identity deemed to be that Australian women—who had in fact been the first in the world to win the right to stand for their national parliament in 1902—had come to feel, according to Miriam Dixson, that they were "Doormats of the Western World."³ National history—that is national historical writing and myth-making—was blamed for this sorry condition.

Thus national history became a contested domain and prime site of battle. Women, like other groups positioned as "outsider/insiders," such as Aboriginal Australians, ethnic minorities, and gays and lesbians, claimed that they had been marginalized—or simply excluded—from the national story, although Aboriginal women also made the point that white women were not in fact "the colonized," as historian Anne Summers had suggested, but the "colonizers," a vital element in the imperial/national enterprise of conquest and colonization.⁴ White women historians have since had to recognize and rethink their complex national condition as both ruling race and subordinated sex.⁵ The writings of such Aboriginal women as Pat O'Shane and Jackie Huggins in the 1970s and 1980s were important in pointing to the perceived whiteness of feminism.⁶ For Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australian women, history was central to their contemporary mobilizations and political claims.

In 1994, four feminist historians—Pat Grimshaw, Ann McGrath, Marian Quartly, and myself—extended our engagement with national history by publishing a feminist version of national history, Creating a Nation, which aimed to provide a feminist rendering of national experience—focusing on relations of reproduction, as well as production—and also providing an account in which the colonial dispossession and destruction of Aboriginal peoples and cultures were central to the story.⁷ The book was generally well received (and has been republished in a revised and updated edition in 2006), but our intervention provoked outrage on the part of some male custodians of national history, notably, John Hirst, coeditor of The Companion to Australian History, who rushed into print in a two-page article entitled "Is Feminist History Bunk?" in the national newspaper, the Weekend Australian, to tell us that women should stick to family history, because it was mostly men who had defined, built, and defended the nation.⁸ Creating a Nation was clearly subversive of vested interests, but in contesting masculinist versions of national history, we were also subject to their constraints and conceits, the primary conceit being that past experience could be best comprehended in a national frame of analysis.

When researching my...