James Keating | The University of New South Wales (original) (raw)

Books by James Keating

Distant Sisters: Australasian women and the international struggle for the vote, 1880–1914, 2020

In the 1890s Australian and New Zealand women became the first in the world to win the vote. Buoy... more In the 1890s Australian and New Zealand women became the first in the world to win the vote. Buoyed by their victories, they promised to lead a global struggle for the expansion of women's electoral rights. Charting the common trajectory of the colonial suffrage campaigns, Distant Sisters uncovers the personal and material networks that transformed feminist organising. Considering intimate and institutional connections, well-connected elites and ordinary women, this book argues developments in Auckland, Sydney, and Adelaide-long considered the peripheries of the feminist world-cannot be separated from its glamourous metropoles. Focusing on Antipodean women, simultaneously insiders and outsiders in the emerging international women's movement, and documenting the failures of their expansive vision alongside its successes, this book reveals a more contingent history of international organising and challenges celebratory accounts of fin-de-siècle global connection.

Papers by James Keating

Journal of Australian Studies, 2020

History Compass, 2018

Over the past 20 years, suffrage historians have sought to reimagine their field—traditionally te... more Over the past 20 years, suffrage historians have sought to reimagine their field—traditionally tethered to the nation—as an international one. The Australasian suffragists, who strove to overcome their perceived isolation by exchanging print, personnel, and ideas across borders, seem perfect candidates for such revisionist treatment. However, despite the invigorating push to destabilise the nation, which has rewired much of Australian and New Zealand historiography, the suffragists remain ensconced in national frames. Revisiting the rich Australasian scholarship on women, mobility, and cross‐border organisation, this article discusses the political and intellectual barriers that have impeded attempts to reconstruct suffrage internationalism. Yet documenting the suffragists' cross‐border interactions requires more than replacing monolithic national histories with revised internationalist versions. Instead, responding to debates about the digitally driven rise of connected histori...

Australian Historical Studies, 2016

History Australia, 2021

Like most middle-ranking suffragists, the Sydney schoolteacher Madge Donohoe is largely invisible... more Like most middle-ranking suffragists, the Sydney schoolteacher Madge Donohoe is largely invisible in Australian historiography. Until widespread newspaper digitisation, the task of uncovering her name, let alone tracing her rise from Kogarah Girls’ School to the British National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies’ executive committee, would have been unimaginable. In this paper, I outline how Trove has enriched Australian feminist histories from the suffrage era (1890–1910). Yet, as indispensable as it has become, new histories relying on newspapers to vividly retell the suffragists’ stories also reveal the database’s distorting effects, not least the absence of the vibrant women’s advocacy press from its collections. Trove, I argue, affords vital new points of entry into lives like Donohoe’s but, without careful interrogation, risks privileging the pressman’s gaze above understanding the quotidian realities of feminist activism.

Women's History Review, 2015

History Australia, 2021

Like most middle-ranking suffragists, the Sydney schoolteacher Madge Donohoe is largely invisible... more Like most middle-ranking suffragists, the Sydney schoolteacher Madge Donohoe is largely invisible in Australian historiography. Until widespread newspaper digitisation, the task of uncovering her name, let alone tracing her rise from Kogarah Girls’ School to the British National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies’ executive committee, would have been unimaginable. In this paper, I outline how Trove has enriched Australian feminist histories from the suffrage era (1890–1910). Yet, as indispensable as it has become, new histories relying on newspapers to vividly retell the suffragists’ stories also reveal the database’s distorting effects, not least the absence of the vibrant women’s advocacy press from its collections. Trove, I argue, affords vital new points of entry into lives like Donohoe’s but, without careful interrogation, risks privileging the pressman’s gaze above understanding the quotidian realities of feminist activism.

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society , 2022

The reconsideration of wages for housework, among the most maligned strands of women’s liberation... more The reconsideration of wages for housework, among the most maligned strands of women’s liberation in the 1970s, has provoked vital debates about gender, care work, and the problem of accounting for reproductive labor. Yet such discussions typically ignore the campaign’s roots in first-wave feminism. In examining Australian journalist Linda Littlejohn’s tenure as chair of Equal Rights International (ERI; 1934–41), a lobby group often cast as the vanguard of legal equality feminism in interwar Geneva, this article explores its surprising role in spreading Antipodean ideas about the “money value” of “home work” through the League of Nations. In doing so, it first historicizes the contentious forty-year struggle to recognize women’s domestic labor in Australasia. Shifting from Sydney to Switzerland, it traces the international circulations that allowed Littlejohn and her allies in the United Associations of Women to redirect ERI away from its founders’ concern with an equal rights treaty and toward a brand of feminism constructed around the recognition of difference in the home and equality in economic and political life. Reading ERI through the lens of Littlejohn’s years as chair, I contend, not only complicates binaries between equality and difference within international interwar feminism, revealing a messier and less centralized history of feminist ideology, it also enriches our understanding of ongoing struggles to illuminate and compensate reproductive labor.

Journal of Australian Studies

History Compass, 2018

Over the past 20 years, suffrage historians have sought to reimagine their field—traditionally te... more Over the past 20 years, suffrage historians have sought to reimagine their field—traditionally tethered to the nation—as an international one. The Australasian suffragists, who strove to overcome their perceived isolation by exchanging print, personnel, and ideas across borders, seem perfect candidates for such revisionist treatment. However, despite the invigorating push to destabilise the nation, which has rewired much of Australian and New Zealand historiography, the suffragists remain ensconced in national frames. Revisiting the rich Australasian scholarship on women, mobility, and cross‐border organisation, this article discusses the political and intellectual barriers that have impeded attempts to reconstruct suffrage internationalism. Yet documenting the suffragists' cross‐border interactions requires more than replacing monolithic national histories with revised internationalist versions. Instead, responding to debates about the digitally driven rise of connected histories, this article argues that historians should piece together suffrage internationalism as it existed in specific places—recovering often messy assemblages of transnational individuals, groups, and organisations. Such an approach will both illuminate colonial women's place in the networks that bound the fin‐de‐siècle world and provide a fresh perspective on the international women's movement.

Australian Historical Studies, Aug 31, 2016

In February 1902 the Victorian suffragist Vida Goldstein helped establish the International Woman... more In February 1902 the Victorian suffragist Vida Goldstein helped establish the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA) in Washington, D.C. Four months later, the Commonwealth Franchise Act gave white women unprecedented political privileges. Despite these pioneer achievements, Australian women struggled to achieve prominence within the international suffrage movement before the First World War. Discounting traditional explanations that expense and distance kept Australians on the IWSA’s margins, this article reconsiders the concept of national representation – a central tenet of liberal internationalism. In the wake of Federation, deep colonial loyalties persisted and women remained ambivalent about assuming the responsibilities of national and international citizenship.

Women's History Review, May 12, 2015

Over the past decade, historians have situated feminist reformers’ efforts to dismantle the Briti... more Over the past decade, historians have situated feminist reformers’ efforts to dismantle the British imperial contagious diseases apparatus at the heart of the transnational turn in women's history. New Zealand was an early emulator of British prostitution regulations, which provoked an organised repeal campaign in the 1880s, yet the colony is seldom considered in these debates. Tracing the dialogue concerning the repeal of contagious diseases legislation between British and New Zealand feminists in the 1890s, this article reaffirms the salience of political developments in the settler colonies for metropolitan reformers. A close reading of these interactions, catalysed by the Auckland Women's Liberal League's endorsement of the Act in 1895, reveals recently enfranchised New Zealand women's desire to act as model citizens for the benefit of metropolitan suffragists. Furthermore, it highlights the asymmetries that remained characteristic of the relationship between British feminists and their enfranchised Antipodean counterparts.

Retail price collection in New Zealand has a long history. Early indices were prescriptive, with ... more Retail price collection in New Zealand has a long history. Early indices were prescriptive, with price changes measured in items proscribed as staples. The development of a price index to meet the conflicting demands of government, domestic labour and international organisations was an imperfect process and these conflicts gradually changed its nature and purpose. This paper documents the history of retail prices in New Zealand, from the compilation of basic commodity prices in the 1840s through to the beginnings of the Consumers’ Price Index as we now know it, an objective, positivist index based on actual household consumption (expenditure) patterns.

Book Chapters by James Keating

Suffrage, Capital, and Welfare: Conditional Citizenship in Historical Perspective, 2024

Following the institution of responsible government in 1852, New Zealand rushed towards “full” de... more Following the institution of responsible government in 1852, New Zealand rushed towards “full” democracy. Within seventeen years manhood suffrage was won and, by 1893, all adults could vote. The feat stood foremost among the “firsts” that allowed the colony to style itself as a “social laboratory.” Unlike most competitors in the “race” to universal suffrage, New Zealand’s franchise was not accompanied by citizenship disqualification for welfare recipients. Instead, Pākehā (white settlers) had long determined that welfare would not be a public provision. Rather than distribute aid, the state regulated migration to maintain wages and alienated Māori land to settlers. 1893 constituted a turning point; thereafter the colony gradually replaced its ad-hoc charitable aid system with an expansive notion of citizenship. The vote bridged the settlers’ “world without welfare” and the social experiments of the fin-de-siècle. Nevertheless, not all enjoyed the fruits of democracy. Attending to the subsequent contraction of the polity, women’s struggle for substantive equality, and the racialized limits of citizenship—extended unequally to Māori and denied to “Asiatic peoples”—this chapter troubles Pākehā claims to have built a truly democratic society and challenges linear narratives of franchise expansion with a contingent history of Aotearoa New Zealand’s path towards universal suffrage.

Suffrage, Capital, and Welfare: Conditional Citizenship in Historical Perspective, 2024

This book explores disenfranchisement and other voting barriers before and after the introduction... more This book explores disenfranchisement and other voting barriers before and after the introduction of so-called universal suffrage. Focusing on economic voting restrictions, implemented through constitutional provisions, laws, state policies, and ad-hoc practices, we explore the many disqualifications barring people from voting in self-governing and aspiring liberal democracies, including poor relief dependency, lack of property or wealth, bankruptcy, tax debt, and low income. The notions of economic independence underpinning these exclusions built and reinforced unequal social structures, especially in terms of class, gender, race, age, civil status, and education. Examining suffrage from an economic perspective prompts new questions about democracy and political citizenship as contested concepts. This approach illuminates the histories of democratic practices, state formation, welfare states, the economic entanglements of political citizenship, gender and racial hierarchies, and the unique circumstances of colonial and settler-colonial democracies. After exploring the influence of Enlightenment ideas on liberal democratic notions of political citizenship, this introduction highlights themes that unite the chapters. These are centred around four concerns: poor relief; different experiences of suffrage at the national, provincial, and local levels; voter exclusion through policy and vernacular political practices; and colonialism.

Women in International and Universal Exhibitions, 1876–1937, Aug 2, 2017

Building on detailed research documenting New South Wales’ women’s contributions to international... more Building on detailed research documenting New South Wales’ women’s contributions to international exhibitions at the turn of the century, this chapter juxtaposes the Australian Margaret Windeyer’s experiences with the achievements of another soon-to-be enfranchised group of outsiders at the Exposition, Utah’s Mormon women. Emerging from isolation to acclaim at the World’s Congress of Representative Women, these women confounded their fellow delegates’ prejudices. Triumphant in Chicago, Mormons assimilated into the American feminist firmament. National acceptance provided a platform for international collaboration. Over the decade following the World’s Columbian Exposition, the Utahns who excelled in Chicago rose to international prominence. Yet, rather than heralding a new cosmopolitanism, Windeyer’s tour constituted the apogee of early Australian feminist internationalism. Comparing New South Welshwomen’s cross-border forays against those of their American frontier counterparts complicates any straightforward argument for Australian exceptionalism.

Using 1893 as a starting point, the chapter traces New South Wales and Utah women’s participation in the international women’s movement, contending that structural inequalities hindered Australian women’s involvement in cross-border endeavors. Combined, Australia’s distance from the international feminism’s Atlantic nexus, and the vexatious question of ‘national’ representation for the federating Australian colonies, put New South Welshwomen at a disadvantage. Whereas Utah delegates received generous support to attend future international congresses and exhibitions from the Territory’s secular and religious authorities—who co-opted women’s encounters in an attempt to extinguish the ‘Mormon stigma’—the New South Wales government questioned women’s value as colonial boosters. Read alongside one another, Margaret Windeyer and her Utahn counterparts’ commitment to engage with women outside colonial and state borders, and the uneven fruits of their vision, offer an intriguing case study of the dynamics of early transnational feminist organizing at the periphery.

Book Reviews by James Keating

Australian Journal of Biography and History, 2019

Review essay on nation, race, and biography in three recent histories of suffragists and suffrage... more Review essay on nation, race, and biography in three recent histories of suffragists and suffrage-era feminism in Australia: Denise George, Mary Lee: The Life and Times of a ‘Turbulent Anarchist’ and her Battle for Women’s Rights (2018); Myra Scott, How Australia Led the Way: Dora Meeson Coates and British Suffrage (2018); and Clare Wright, You Daughters of Freedom: The Australians Who Won the Vote and Inspired the World (2018).

law&history, 2019

Katie Pickles and Catharine Coleborne begin New Zealand’s Empire with a bold proposition — they h... more Katie Pickles and Catharine Coleborne begin New Zealand’s Empire with a bold proposition — they hope to revise, expand and complicate received histories of empire and imperialism in Aotearoa. Until recently, they argue, New Zealand has been viewed as an outpost of empire rather than the centre of local and regional worlds of imperialism. Over four thematic sections, their collection extends recent scholarship concerned with New Zealand’s dynamic place within the British Empire and its long-ignored imperial ambitions at home and in the Pacific.

Distant Sisters: Australasian women and the international struggle for the vote, 1880–1914, 2020

In the 1890s Australian and New Zealand women became the first in the world to win the vote. Buoy... more In the 1890s Australian and New Zealand women became the first in the world to win the vote. Buoyed by their victories, they promised to lead a global struggle for the expansion of women's electoral rights. Charting the common trajectory of the colonial suffrage campaigns, Distant Sisters uncovers the personal and material networks that transformed feminist organising. Considering intimate and institutional connections, well-connected elites and ordinary women, this book argues developments in Auckland, Sydney, and Adelaide-long considered the peripheries of the feminist world-cannot be separated from its glamourous metropoles. Focusing on Antipodean women, simultaneously insiders and outsiders in the emerging international women's movement, and documenting the failures of their expansive vision alongside its successes, this book reveals a more contingent history of international organising and challenges celebratory accounts of fin-de-siècle global connection.

Journal of Australian Studies, 2020

History Compass, 2018

Over the past 20 years, suffrage historians have sought to reimagine their field—traditionally te... more Over the past 20 years, suffrage historians have sought to reimagine their field—traditionally tethered to the nation—as an international one. The Australasian suffragists, who strove to overcome their perceived isolation by exchanging print, personnel, and ideas across borders, seem perfect candidates for such revisionist treatment. However, despite the invigorating push to destabilise the nation, which has rewired much of Australian and New Zealand historiography, the suffragists remain ensconced in national frames. Revisiting the rich Australasian scholarship on women, mobility, and cross‐border organisation, this article discusses the political and intellectual barriers that have impeded attempts to reconstruct suffrage internationalism. Yet documenting the suffragists' cross‐border interactions requires more than replacing monolithic national histories with revised internationalist versions. Instead, responding to debates about the digitally driven rise of connected histori...

Australian Historical Studies, 2016

History Australia, 2021

Like most middle-ranking suffragists, the Sydney schoolteacher Madge Donohoe is largely invisible... more Like most middle-ranking suffragists, the Sydney schoolteacher Madge Donohoe is largely invisible in Australian historiography. Until widespread newspaper digitisation, the task of uncovering her name, let alone tracing her rise from Kogarah Girls’ School to the British National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies’ executive committee, would have been unimaginable. In this paper, I outline how Trove has enriched Australian feminist histories from the suffrage era (1890–1910). Yet, as indispensable as it has become, new histories relying on newspapers to vividly retell the suffragists’ stories also reveal the database’s distorting effects, not least the absence of the vibrant women’s advocacy press from its collections. Trove, I argue, affords vital new points of entry into lives like Donohoe’s but, without careful interrogation, risks privileging the pressman’s gaze above understanding the quotidian realities of feminist activism.

Women's History Review, 2015

History Australia, 2021

Like most middle-ranking suffragists, the Sydney schoolteacher Madge Donohoe is largely invisible... more Like most middle-ranking suffragists, the Sydney schoolteacher Madge Donohoe is largely invisible in Australian historiography. Until widespread newspaper digitisation, the task of uncovering her name, let alone tracing her rise from Kogarah Girls’ School to the British National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies’ executive committee, would have been unimaginable. In this paper, I outline how Trove has enriched Australian feminist histories from the suffrage era (1890–1910). Yet, as indispensable as it has become, new histories relying on newspapers to vividly retell the suffragists’ stories also reveal the database’s distorting effects, not least the absence of the vibrant women’s advocacy press from its collections. Trove, I argue, affords vital new points of entry into lives like Donohoe’s but, without careful interrogation, risks privileging the pressman’s gaze above understanding the quotidian realities of feminist activism.

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society , 2022

The reconsideration of wages for housework, among the most maligned strands of women’s liberation... more The reconsideration of wages for housework, among the most maligned strands of women’s liberation in the 1970s, has provoked vital debates about gender, care work, and the problem of accounting for reproductive labor. Yet such discussions typically ignore the campaign’s roots in first-wave feminism. In examining Australian journalist Linda Littlejohn’s tenure as chair of Equal Rights International (ERI; 1934–41), a lobby group often cast as the vanguard of legal equality feminism in interwar Geneva, this article explores its surprising role in spreading Antipodean ideas about the “money value” of “home work” through the League of Nations. In doing so, it first historicizes the contentious forty-year struggle to recognize women’s domestic labor in Australasia. Shifting from Sydney to Switzerland, it traces the international circulations that allowed Littlejohn and her allies in the United Associations of Women to redirect ERI away from its founders’ concern with an equal rights treaty and toward a brand of feminism constructed around the recognition of difference in the home and equality in economic and political life. Reading ERI through the lens of Littlejohn’s years as chair, I contend, not only complicates binaries between equality and difference within international interwar feminism, revealing a messier and less centralized history of feminist ideology, it also enriches our understanding of ongoing struggles to illuminate and compensate reproductive labor.

Journal of Australian Studies

History Compass, 2018

Over the past 20 years, suffrage historians have sought to reimagine their field—traditionally te... more Over the past 20 years, suffrage historians have sought to reimagine their field—traditionally tethered to the nation—as an international one. The Australasian suffragists, who strove to overcome their perceived isolation by exchanging print, personnel, and ideas across borders, seem perfect candidates for such revisionist treatment. However, despite the invigorating push to destabilise the nation, which has rewired much of Australian and New Zealand historiography, the suffragists remain ensconced in national frames. Revisiting the rich Australasian scholarship on women, mobility, and cross‐border organisation, this article discusses the political and intellectual barriers that have impeded attempts to reconstruct suffrage internationalism. Yet documenting the suffragists' cross‐border interactions requires more than replacing monolithic national histories with revised internationalist versions. Instead, responding to debates about the digitally driven rise of connected histories, this article argues that historians should piece together suffrage internationalism as it existed in specific places—recovering often messy assemblages of transnational individuals, groups, and organisations. Such an approach will both illuminate colonial women's place in the networks that bound the fin‐de‐siècle world and provide a fresh perspective on the international women's movement.

Australian Historical Studies, Aug 31, 2016

In February 1902 the Victorian suffragist Vida Goldstein helped establish the International Woman... more In February 1902 the Victorian suffragist Vida Goldstein helped establish the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA) in Washington, D.C. Four months later, the Commonwealth Franchise Act gave white women unprecedented political privileges. Despite these pioneer achievements, Australian women struggled to achieve prominence within the international suffrage movement before the First World War. Discounting traditional explanations that expense and distance kept Australians on the IWSA’s margins, this article reconsiders the concept of national representation – a central tenet of liberal internationalism. In the wake of Federation, deep colonial loyalties persisted and women remained ambivalent about assuming the responsibilities of national and international citizenship.

Women's History Review, May 12, 2015

Over the past decade, historians have situated feminist reformers’ efforts to dismantle the Briti... more Over the past decade, historians have situated feminist reformers’ efforts to dismantle the British imperial contagious diseases apparatus at the heart of the transnational turn in women's history. New Zealand was an early emulator of British prostitution regulations, which provoked an organised repeal campaign in the 1880s, yet the colony is seldom considered in these debates. Tracing the dialogue concerning the repeal of contagious diseases legislation between British and New Zealand feminists in the 1890s, this article reaffirms the salience of political developments in the settler colonies for metropolitan reformers. A close reading of these interactions, catalysed by the Auckland Women's Liberal League's endorsement of the Act in 1895, reveals recently enfranchised New Zealand women's desire to act as model citizens for the benefit of metropolitan suffragists. Furthermore, it highlights the asymmetries that remained characteristic of the relationship between British feminists and their enfranchised Antipodean counterparts.

Retail price collection in New Zealand has a long history. Early indices were prescriptive, with ... more Retail price collection in New Zealand has a long history. Early indices were prescriptive, with price changes measured in items proscribed as staples. The development of a price index to meet the conflicting demands of government, domestic labour and international organisations was an imperfect process and these conflicts gradually changed its nature and purpose. This paper documents the history of retail prices in New Zealand, from the compilation of basic commodity prices in the 1840s through to the beginnings of the Consumers’ Price Index as we now know it, an objective, positivist index based on actual household consumption (expenditure) patterns.

Suffrage, Capital, and Welfare: Conditional Citizenship in Historical Perspective, 2024

Following the institution of responsible government in 1852, New Zealand rushed towards “full” de... more Following the institution of responsible government in 1852, New Zealand rushed towards “full” democracy. Within seventeen years manhood suffrage was won and, by 1893, all adults could vote. The feat stood foremost among the “firsts” that allowed the colony to style itself as a “social laboratory.” Unlike most competitors in the “race” to universal suffrage, New Zealand’s franchise was not accompanied by citizenship disqualification for welfare recipients. Instead, Pākehā (white settlers) had long determined that welfare would not be a public provision. Rather than distribute aid, the state regulated migration to maintain wages and alienated Māori land to settlers. 1893 constituted a turning point; thereafter the colony gradually replaced its ad-hoc charitable aid system with an expansive notion of citizenship. The vote bridged the settlers’ “world without welfare” and the social experiments of the fin-de-siècle. Nevertheless, not all enjoyed the fruits of democracy. Attending to the subsequent contraction of the polity, women’s struggle for substantive equality, and the racialized limits of citizenship—extended unequally to Māori and denied to “Asiatic peoples”—this chapter troubles Pākehā claims to have built a truly democratic society and challenges linear narratives of franchise expansion with a contingent history of Aotearoa New Zealand’s path towards universal suffrage.

Suffrage, Capital, and Welfare: Conditional Citizenship in Historical Perspective, 2024

This book explores disenfranchisement and other voting barriers before and after the introduction... more This book explores disenfranchisement and other voting barriers before and after the introduction of so-called universal suffrage. Focusing on economic voting restrictions, implemented through constitutional provisions, laws, state policies, and ad-hoc practices, we explore the many disqualifications barring people from voting in self-governing and aspiring liberal democracies, including poor relief dependency, lack of property or wealth, bankruptcy, tax debt, and low income. The notions of economic independence underpinning these exclusions built and reinforced unequal social structures, especially in terms of class, gender, race, age, civil status, and education. Examining suffrage from an economic perspective prompts new questions about democracy and political citizenship as contested concepts. This approach illuminates the histories of democratic practices, state formation, welfare states, the economic entanglements of political citizenship, gender and racial hierarchies, and the unique circumstances of colonial and settler-colonial democracies. After exploring the influence of Enlightenment ideas on liberal democratic notions of political citizenship, this introduction highlights themes that unite the chapters. These are centred around four concerns: poor relief; different experiences of suffrage at the national, provincial, and local levels; voter exclusion through policy and vernacular political practices; and colonialism.

Women in International and Universal Exhibitions, 1876–1937, Aug 2, 2017

Building on detailed research documenting New South Wales’ women’s contributions to international... more Building on detailed research documenting New South Wales’ women’s contributions to international exhibitions at the turn of the century, this chapter juxtaposes the Australian Margaret Windeyer’s experiences with the achievements of another soon-to-be enfranchised group of outsiders at the Exposition, Utah’s Mormon women. Emerging from isolation to acclaim at the World’s Congress of Representative Women, these women confounded their fellow delegates’ prejudices. Triumphant in Chicago, Mormons assimilated into the American feminist firmament. National acceptance provided a platform for international collaboration. Over the decade following the World’s Columbian Exposition, the Utahns who excelled in Chicago rose to international prominence. Yet, rather than heralding a new cosmopolitanism, Windeyer’s tour constituted the apogee of early Australian feminist internationalism. Comparing New South Welshwomen’s cross-border forays against those of their American frontier counterparts complicates any straightforward argument for Australian exceptionalism.

Using 1893 as a starting point, the chapter traces New South Wales and Utah women’s participation in the international women’s movement, contending that structural inequalities hindered Australian women’s involvement in cross-border endeavors. Combined, Australia’s distance from the international feminism’s Atlantic nexus, and the vexatious question of ‘national’ representation for the federating Australian colonies, put New South Welshwomen at a disadvantage. Whereas Utah delegates received generous support to attend future international congresses and exhibitions from the Territory’s secular and religious authorities—who co-opted women’s encounters in an attempt to extinguish the ‘Mormon stigma’—the New South Wales government questioned women’s value as colonial boosters. Read alongside one another, Margaret Windeyer and her Utahn counterparts’ commitment to engage with women outside colonial and state borders, and the uneven fruits of their vision, offer an intriguing case study of the dynamics of early transnational feminist organizing at the periphery.

Australian Journal of Biography and History, 2019

Review essay on nation, race, and biography in three recent histories of suffragists and suffrage... more Review essay on nation, race, and biography in three recent histories of suffragists and suffrage-era feminism in Australia: Denise George, Mary Lee: The Life and Times of a ‘Turbulent Anarchist’ and her Battle for Women’s Rights (2018); Myra Scott, How Australia Led the Way: Dora Meeson Coates and British Suffrage (2018); and Clare Wright, You Daughters of Freedom: The Australians Who Won the Vote and Inspired the World (2018).

law&history, 2019

Katie Pickles and Catharine Coleborne begin New Zealand’s Empire with a bold proposition — they h... more Katie Pickles and Catharine Coleborne begin New Zealand’s Empire with a bold proposition — they hope to revise, expand and complicate received histories of empire and imperialism in Aotearoa. Until recently, they argue, New Zealand has been viewed as an outpost of empire rather than the centre of local and regional worlds of imperialism. Over four thematic sections, their collection extends recent scholarship concerned with New Zealand’s dynamic place within the British Empire and its long-ignored imperial ambitions at home and in the Pacific.

Angela Woollacott argued in 2000 that historians rarely render the Australasian suffragists trans... more Angela Woollacott argued in 2000 that historians rarely render the Australasian suffragists transnational relationships beyond simple declarations of amorphous ɩnternationalism. This lacuna is attributable to the patchy archival record left by the myriad short-lived suffrage societies. The meticulously documented Women Christian Temperance Union aside, the traces of suffrage organisations vary dramatically by organisation and colony, the subjects of most existing research. Drawing on evidence from New South Wales, South Australia, and New Zealand, this paper argues the suffragists cross-border relationships can be reconstructed through a careful multi-archival study encompassing individuals and organisations, exposing a vibrant history of connection and interaction.