'A study corner in the kitchen': Australian graduate women negotiate family, nation and work in the 1950s and early 1960s

Australian Historical Studies

Volumn 37, Issue 127, 2006, Pages 63-80

  MacKinnon, Alison ^a   Gregory, Penny ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34347310996     PISSN: 1031461X     EISSN: 19405049     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/10314610608601204     Document Type: Article

References (81)

1. Mrs L. F Crisp, Presidential Address, 'Education and Opportunity', Australian Federation of University Women Bulletin, No. 16, Report of the Eighteenth Conference, held at the University of Tasmania (January 1964): 5
2. See Alison Mackinnon, The New Women: Adelaide's Early Women Graduates (Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 1986)
3. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (London: Gollancz, 1963). This paper focuses primarily on the lives of Australian women graduates but also points to important parallels with the American experience to be explored more explicitly in other work
4. See, for instance, Alison Mackinnon, '"Giving myself a Toni, write thesis tonight": negotiating higher education in the 1950s', in Women Teaching, Women Learning: Historical Perspectives, eds E.M. Smyth and P. Bourne (Toronto: Inanna Publications and Education Inc., forthcoming)
5. Sue Fabian and Morag Loh, The Changemakers: Ten Significant Australian Women (Milton: Jacaranda Press, 1983)
6. Madge Dawson and Heather Radi, eds. Against the Odds: Fifteen Professional Women Reflect on Their Lives and Careers (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1984)
7. Jocelynne A Scutt, ed., Different Lives (Ringwood: Penguin, 1987)
8. Janet Zollinger Giele, 'Women's Role Change and Adaptation, 1920-1990', in Women's Lives Through Time: Educated American Women of the Twentieth Century, eds Kathleen Day Hulbert and Diane Tickton Schuster (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1993), 43
9. A. P. Elkin, ed., Marriage and the Family in Australia (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1957)
10. Norman Mackenzie, Women in Australia (Melbourne: Cheshire, 1962)
11. Commonwealth of Australia, Report of the Committee on Australian Universities, September 1957 (Murray Report), (Canberra: Australian Government Printer, 1958)
12. John Murphy and Judith Smart, 'Introduction', in The Forgotten Fifties: Aspects of Australian Society and Culture in the 1950s, eds. John Murphy and Judith Smart, special issue of Australian Historical Studies 28, no. 109 (October 1994): 2
13. Ibid
14. Marilyn Lake, 'A case of male justice', Australian, 12 February 1997, Review, 6-7
15. Jean Duruz, 'Food as Nostalgia: Eating the Fifties and Sixties', Australian Historical Studies 30, no.113 (October 1999): 231-50
16. Karen Hutchings, 'The Battle for Consumer Power: Post-war Women and Advertising', Journal of Australian Studies 50-51 (1996): 66-77
17. see also Karen Hutchings, 'Beauty Begins at 7am: Cosmetics, Fashion, Consumer Goods and Beauty Mythology in 1950s and 1960s Australia', Journal of Australian Studies 64 (2000): 44-52, 269-70
18. John Murphy, Imagining the Fifties: Private Sentiment and Political Culture in Menzies' Australia (Sydney: Pluto Press, 2000), 219
19. Stephen Alomes, Mark Dober and Donna Hellier, 'The social context of postwar conservatism', in Australia's First Cold War, 1945-1953 Volume 1: Society, Communism and Culture, eds Ann Curthoys and John Merritt (Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, 1984), 1-2
20. Nicholas Brown, Governing Prosperity: Social Change and Social Analysis in the 1950s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 2
21. Max Harris, 'Morals and Manners', in Australian Civilization, ed. Peter Coleman (Melbourne: Cheshire, 1962), 63
22. Craig McGregor, Profile of Australia (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1966), 342
23. F. W. Eggleston, 'The Australian Nation', in The Australian Way of Life, ed. George Caiger (Melbourne: Heinemann, 1953), 13
24. Douglas McCallum, 'The State of Liberty', in Australian Civilization, 37-8
25. Brown, 1
26. Brown, 213
27. University enrolments rose from 30792 in 1955 to 53633 in 1960 and to 83320 by 1965. Department of Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs, 'Higher Education Students Time Series Tables, Australia' (February 1998). Secondary education was another important site in the 'production of a modern citizenry'. Lesley Johnson, The Modern Girl: Girlhood and Growing Up (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1993), 72-4
28. Brown, 218. Similarly, Nikolas Rose claims that since mid century, 'freedom has come to mean the realization of the potentials of the psychological self in and through activities in the mundane world of everyday life'. Nikolas Rose, Inventing Our Selves: Psychology, Power, and Personhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 17
29. V. H. Wallace, Women and Children First: An Outline of a Population Policy for Australia (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1946)
30. W. D. Borrie et al., 'A White Australia: Australia's population problem', Papers read at the Twelfth Summer School of the Australasian Institute of Political Science (Sydney: AIPS, 1947)
31. Jane Clunies Ross, 'The Changing Patterns of Family Life in Western Civilisation', Australian Quarterly (March 1953): 27-41
32. John Murphy, 'Shaping the Cold War family: politics, domesticity, and policy interventions in the 1950s', Australian Historical Studies 26, no. 105 (October 1995): 559
33. Harold Fallding, 'Inside the Australian Family', in Marriage and the Family, 62
34. Brown, 166
35. Brown, 193
36. Brown, xxxiv
37. A. P. Elkin, 'The Family-A Challenge', in Marriage and the Family, 208
38. see also, F. W. Clements and Norma Parker, 'Family Life and Child Care in Australia', in Marriage and the Family, 166-9
39. W. D. Borrie, 'Australian Family Structure: Demographic Observations', in Marriage and the Family, 22
40. Alison Mackinnon, '"Bringing the Unclothed Immigrant into the World": Population Policies and Gender in Twentieth-Century Australia', Journal of Population Research 17, no. 2 (November 2000): 109-23
41. H. L. Harris, 'Marriage Guidance-With Special Reference to New South Wales', Australian Quarterly (December 1956): 50 (our emphasis). Similarly, adolescent development towards adulthood was measured in terms of 'adjustment to the problems of living'
42. W. Connell, E. Francis and Elizabeth Skilbeck, Growing up in an Australian City (Melbourne: Australian Council for Educational Research, 1957), 19 and see chapters 7 and 8
43. see also, Esther Faye, 'Growing up "Australian" in the 1950s: The dream of social science', Australian Historical Studies 29, no. 111, (October 1998): 344-65
44. Elaine Martin, Changing Relationships: Marriage Guidance Council to Relationships Australia: A South Australian History (Adelaide: Relationships Australia, 1998), 17
45. Rev. W. G. Coughlan, 'Marriage Breakdown', in Marriage and the Family, 115-63
46. Elkin, 'The Family-A Challenge', 208-10
47. Graduating in the Fifties Project (hereafter cited as GFP), Interview 301
48. A term introduced by Philip Wylie who wrote of American mothers as 'a generation of vipers'. Philip Wylie, A Generation of Vipers (New York: Rinehart, 1942)
49. see also Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts' Advice to Women (Garden City: Anchor Press, 1978), 211-19
50. Murphy, 'Shaping the Cold War family', 562
51. '1950s here we come!', Australian Women's Day, 2 January 1950, 3-5
52. see also C. Sanders, 'University Selection: Its Theory, History, and Psychology', Australian Journal of Education 1, no. 3 (November 1957): 145-68
53. J. A. J. Caine, 'The Employment of Scientists and Engineers', Australian Journal of Education 1, no. 3 (November 1957): 201-8
54. P. H. Partridge, 'The Growth of the Universities', Australian Quarterly 31, no. 2 (June 1959): 23-39
55. Crisp, 7
56. 'Leading a Double Life?', 8
57. Katy Richmond, 'The workforce participation of married women in Australia', in Social Change in Australia, ed. Donald E. Edgar, (Melbourne: Cheshire, 1974), 269
58. GFP, Interview 13
59. Education News 8, no. I (February 1961): 4-5
60. Mackenzie, 130
61. GFP, Interview 91
62. W. D. Borrie, 'Australian Family Structure', 8
63. Mackenzie, 94
64. Mackinnon, Love and Freedom: Professional Women and the Reshaping of Personal Life (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997)
65. Madge Dawson, Graduate and Married (Sydney: University of Sydney, 1965), 33-4, 44-6
66. Kim Humphery points to the ways in which modern retailing constructed women as 'consuming selves'. Shelf Life: Supermarkets and the Changing Cultures of Consumption (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 91
67. Jane Clunies Ross, 35
68. Rose, 161-3
69. see also Stella Lees and June Senyard, The 1950s: How Australia Became a Modern Society, and Everyone Got a House and Car (Melbourne: Hyland House, 1987), especially chapter 4
70. Jane Clunies Ross, 35. A similar observation is made by Mackenzie, 95
71. GFP, Interview 11
72. Family Formation Study, 1994
73. GFP, Interview 93
74. The Second Sex was widely read and discussed by college graduates in Australia and the USA. 'It was "like a secret code" for emerging feminists; wrote one.' Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed America (New York: Viking, 2000), 56
75. Alva Myrdal and Viola Klein, Women's Two Roles: Home and Work (London: Routledge, 1956), ix
76. Anne Coombs, Sex and Anarchy: The Life and Death of the Sydney Push (Ringwood: Viking, 1996)
77. Mirka Mora, Wicked But Virtuous: My Life (Ringwood: Penguin, 2000)
78. Wini Brienes, Young, White, and Miserable: Growing Up Female in the Fifties (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), chapter 4
79. GFP, returned questionnaires
80. Marilyn Lake, 'Feminist History as National History: Writing the Political History of Women', Australian Historical Studies 27, no. 106 (April 1996): 167
81. Mackenzie, 95