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Writing Women’s History pp 151–169Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Writing the History of Australian Women

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Abstract

Australia is a continent with an ancient past, the history of which has been sustained through legends, traditions and more recently the craft of archaeologists and anthropologists. Its very recent history, since the occupation of Aboriginal land by Europeans commenced in 1788, has been the province of historians who shifted over years from viewing Australia as a segment of Britain’s empire to interpreting its story as that of a significant, if admittedly small, independent country. Women, as has been noted elsewhere, were strangely absent from these tales of nation building. When women’s history emerged in the early 1970s, it stood in an adversarial position to the accounts of mainstream historians. In the 1980s the field of women’s history has become more diverse in methodological approaches and in perceptions. It remains, however, for the most part a separate development intellectually, respected yet not integrated into the central debates. The course of women’s history needs to be understood in the context of the development of Australian historiography as a whole.

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Notes

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Authors
  1. Patricia Grimshaw
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Research on Women and Gender, Stanford University, USA

    Karen Offen

  2. The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Toronto, Canada

    Ruth Roach Pierson

  3. University of York, UK

    Jane Rendall

Copyright information

© 1991 Karen Offen, Ruth Roach Pierson, Jane Rendall

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Cite this chapter

Grimshaw, P. (1991). Writing the History of Australian Women. In: Offen, K., Pierson, R.R., Rendall, J. (eds) Writing Women’s History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21512-6_8

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