Australian women leaders centre stage

Already riding a wave of optimism after hearing that the project she heads up had received funding in the recent round of Australian Research Council Linkage grants, Professor Patricia Grimshaw ended the penultimate week of June in a state of undisguised euphoria.

“Julia Gillard epitomises what our project is all about,” said Professor Grimshaw. “One hundred years after achieving the right to enter mainstream society, the new Prime Minister is part of a groundswell of women attaining positions of leadership and, importantly, doing it differently.”

The project, titled ‘Women and leadership in a century of Australian democracy’, has attracted substantial government funding with matching contributions by partner organisations. It will be administered by Professor Grimshaw and one of the project’s chief-investigators, Professor Joy Damousi, both from the School of Historical Studies at the University of Melbourne.

For Professor Grimshaw, the difference in approach was exemplified by the first policy statement Julia Gillard made immediately after attaining the top job. When the new Prime Minister announced that she’d be pulling the federal government’s mining industry advertising campaign, following it with an undertaking that she’d be appealing to the mining industry to “cease their advertising campaign as a show of good faith and mutual respect”, Professor Grimshaw’s opinion was that this was not only a typically female approach, but an act of political astuteness. “It would make the public think ‘that’s fair, isn’t it?’”, she commented.

The project brings together an alliance of academic researchers across four universities and six partner organisations, including the National Library of Australia, the National Archives, the Museum of Australian Democracy, and the National Film and Sound Archives. Its purpose is to promote a new understanding of the nature and extent of women’s leadership – both Indigenous and non-Indigenous – throughout a century of Australian democracy.

“Our research will enable key national cultural institutions to present a more gender-balanced account of women’s achievements,” said Professor Grimshaw. “The outcome will be widespread acknowledgement of the significance of women leaders in politics and civil society, despite their need to break through persistent barriers to equity.”

The researchers also anticipate that by identifying the contribution of women’s leadership, nationally and internationally, their project will offer encouragement to Australian girls and women of diverse backgrounds to exercise their own capacities for agency and change.

“Julia Gillard’s success has been possible because of the century-long struggle waged by women to occupy the centre of the political stage”, said Professor Damousi. “That enduring struggle has been undertaken by women of many political persuasions, beginning with the campaign for women’s suffrage at the turn of the last century.”

One example is suffragist, feminist and noted orator Vida Goldstein, who in 1903 became the first woman to stand for parliament in Australia. Another is Australian politician Enid Lyons, the first woman to be elected to the Australian House of Representatives in 1943, and in 1949 the first to be appointed to Federal Cabinet (as well as being mother of twelve and wife of the Premier of Tasmania and later Prime Minister of Australia, Joseph Lyons.) Not to mention the legions of women who have achieved leadership positions within social, political, business and community organisations which have largely gone unnoticed, unrecognised, and certainly undecorated.

The project seeks to uncover the experiences of women who performed leadership roles on a range of levels with notable outcomes, for example, in the consumer and environmental movements or in Indigenous, migrant and rural communities. It also reveals for the first time the extent to which women have contributed to the development of new international norms through multilateral organisations such as the League of Nations, the International Labor Organisation and the United Nations, and through regional and international advocacy networks.

It will produce Australia’s first eEncyclopedia of women leaders supported by related initiatives including digitally-recorded interviews.

“This will be the first wide-ranging, historically-grounded study of Australian women and leadership in the 20th and early 21st centuries,” said Professor Grimshaw, “and will reveal that the very definition of leadership and who is defined as a leader is a historical and cultural process.”

Professor Damousi agreed, adding that “Our aim is to give an historical account of the campaign women have undertaken, not only to attain leadership, but to exercise and re-define it in different ways and in a range of forums.”

www.knowledgepartnerships.unimelb.edu.au