Founders, Firsts and Feminists is a collection of studies of individual women leaders in 20th-century Australia. It seeks to redress the gender imbalance in existing scholarship of leadership in this country, but it also aims to complicate understandings of leadership itself. In doing so it deals with questions such as: what was it that made a woman a leader during that period, or what made her contemporaries see her as such? To what extent did she see herself in this light and how did she define her work? At another remove, why do historians judge a particular woman to be a leader when looking back on her life? Was there something about her style of leadership that can be recognised as uniquely feminine? Were there common impediments a woman leader typically faced? In looking at these questions, we canvass a variety of styles and types of leadership across many fields of endeavour, including women working for Indigenous rights, becoming leaders in their professions, working inside and outside of Australia’s political system, and driving non-government agencies. Though we detect a general preference for networking and collaboration in the varied styles of leadership revealed, it is not uniform and, as in so many other aspects of scholarship relating to women over the past 40 years, the evidence points away from essentialism to difference, away from uniformity and simplicity to inconsistency and complexity.
Table of Contents
| Introduction | FULL TEXT PDF |
| Katie Langloh Parker and the Beginnings of Ethnography in Australia | ABSTRACT PDF |
| 'Mother, Teacher, Adviser and Missionary': Matilda Ward in North Queensland, 1891–1917 | ABSTRACT PDF |
| Eleanor Rivett (1883–1972): Educationalist, Missionary and Internationalist | ABSTRACT PDF |
| Gladys Nicholls: An Urban Aboriginal Leader in Post-war Victoria | ABSTRACT PDF |
| Kooris, Ghubbas and Others: Cross-Cultural Collaboration in the Work of Aboriginal Leader Mollie Dyer | ABSTRACT PDF |
| 'They will both go to heaven and have crowns and golden harps': Dr Vera Scantlebury Brown and Female Leadership in a First World War Military Hospital | ABSTRACT PDF |
| Maude O'Connell and 'the need of the mother' | ABSTRACT PDF |
| Teresa Wardell: Gender, Catholicism and Social Welfare in Melbourne | ABSTRACT PDF |
| 'It's a Woman': Molly Brennan and Gender, Social Justice and Leadership in the Victorian Education Department, 1960s and 1970s | ABSTRACT PDF |
| Reading the Life Narrative of Valerie French, the First Woman to Sign the Western Australian Bar Roll | ABSTRACT PDF |
| Audrey Ann Fagan (1962–2007): The High Cost for Women Leaders in Policing | ABSTRACT PDF |
| Muriel Heagney (1885–1974): Pioneering Labour Woman Leader | ABSTRACT PDF |
| Fran Bailey and the McEwen Electorate: Women's Leadership in Representative Democracy | ABSTRACT PDF |
| Lee Rhiannon: A Lifetime of Political Activism | ABSTRACT PDF |
| 'Passion around Violence against Women': Billi Clarke and the Victorian Domestic Violence Services Movement | ABSTRACT PDF |
| Margaret Cooper: Feminist and Disability Activist | ABSTRACT PDF |
| Lady Helen Munro Ferguson and the Australian Red Cross: Vice-regal Leader and Internationalist in the early Twentieth Century | ABSTRACT PDF |
| Constance Duncan: Translating Women's Leadership and Internationalism in Asia and Australia, 1922–1958 | ABSTRACT PDF |
| Ada Norris (1901–1989): Champion of the Impossible | ABSTRACT PDF |
| 'Stacks of friends': Kathleen (Kay) Gordon Cameron (1899–1987) and the Broadening International Focus of the Country Women's Association of Victoria in the 1960s | ABSTRACT PDF |