A biography of Alice Henry (1857-1943), a pioneer in both the Australian and American labour movements.

This work offers a new view of suffrage-era feminism in Australia, located in rich cultural, social and political context, which also presents a new view of the decades around federation.

More than Bombs and Bandages exposes the false assumption that military nurses only nursed. Based on author Kirsty Harris’ CEW Bean Prize-winning PhD thesis, this is a book that is far removed from the ‘devotion to duty’ stereotyping offering an intriguing and sometimes gut-wrenching insight into the Australian Army Nursing Service (AANS) during World War I. More than Bombs and Bandages provides rich pickings for all those interested in nursing history, women in the Australian military the application of medical treatments and World War I. What I enjoyed most about is Dr Kirsty Harris’s ability to reflect those nurses voices in a way that was so real – one could be there, the settings were so well understood from her research and the language kind of made a time warp in the reading. Very satisfying. As you know I have that Peter Rees book, but I could not get into it after reading the historical one. It was like comparing a great documentary to Facebook trivia!!! Rev’d Dr Barbara Oudt

While leadership is an over-used term today, how it is defined for women and the contexts in which it emerges remains elusive. Moreover, women are exhorted to exercise leadership, but occupying leadership positions has its challenges. Issues of access, acceptable behaviour and the development of skills to be successful leaders are just some of them. Diversity in Leadership: Australian women, past and presentprovides a new understanding of the historical and contemporary aspects of Indigenous and non-Indigenous women’s leadership in a range of local, national and international contexts. It brings interdisciplinary expertise to the topic from leading scholars in a range of fields and diverse backgrounds. The aims of the essays in the collection document the extent and diverse nature of women’s social and political leadership across various pursuits and endeavours within democratic political structures.

The Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing contains over 800 entries ranging from Lord Acton and Anna Comnena to Howard Zinn and from Herodotus to Simon Schama. Over 300 contributors from around the world have composed critical assessments of historians from the beginning of historical writing to the present day, including individuals from related disciplines like Jürgen Habermas and Clifford Geertz, whose theoretical contributions have informed historical debate. Additionally, the Encyclopedia includes some 200 essays treating the development of national, regional and topical historiographies, from the Ancient Near East to the history of sexuality. In addition to the Western tradition, it includes substantial assessments of African, Asian, and Latin American historians and debates on gender and subaltern studies.

For every Aboriginal child taken away by the state governments in Australia, there was at least one white family intimately involved in their life. One Bright Spot is about one of these families - about 'Ming', a Sydney wife and mother who hired Aboriginal domestic servants in the 20s and 30s, and became an activist against the Stolen Generations policy. Her story, reconstructed by her great-granddaughter, tells of a remarkable, yet forgotten, shared history.

This book looks at the recent history of sex, contraception, and abortion in Australia’s most conservative state, Queensland. In western nations, there has largely been a consistent increase in available contraception and access to abortion from the 1960s onwards, yet there are a few geographical exceptions that resisted this trend, including Queensland. Cassandra Byrnes highlights the multifarious ways sexuality and reproduction were continually constructed and challenged during the second half of the twentieth century and follows the responses of key groups to changing laws and attitudes in a time of local and global sexual and social revolutions. She explores interactions between identities of gender, sexuality, class, age, marital status, and geography to illustrate how specific sexed bodies became liminal sites for legal and medical debate. This Queensland case study is contextualised within international debates concerning women’s reproductive rights and will be of interest to students and scholars interested in the history of reproductive rights, gender, and sexuality.

Becoming a mother charts the diverse and complex history of Australian mothering for the first time, exposing the ways it has been both connected to and distinct from parallel developments in other industrialised societies. In many respects, the historical context in which Australian women come to motherhood has changed dramatically since 1945. And yet examination of the memories of multiple maternal generations reveals surprising continuities in the emotions and experiences of first-time motherhood. Drawing upon interdisciplinary insights from anthropology, history, psychology and sociology, Carla Pascoe Leahy unpacks this multifaceted rite of passage through more than 60 oral history interviews, demonstrating how maternal memories continue to influence motherhood today. Despite radical shifts in understandings of gender, care and subjectivity, becoming a mother remains one of the most personally and culturally significant moments in a woman’s life.