History Brown Bag talk: Dr James Keating on Interwar Feminists' Archival Activism

Name: History Brown Bag talk: Dr James Keating on Interwar Feminists' Archival Activism
Start: 2024-10-17T12:00:00+10:00
Location: 263 Old Arts, University of Melbourne

Schedule

Thu Oct 17 2024 at 12:00 pm

UTC+10:00

Location

263 Old Arts, University of Melbourne | Melbourne, VI

Dr James Keating (SHAPS, University of Melbourne), "‘Give it to the Mitchell, it would be there for those that come after us’: Interwar feminists’ archival activism and the (un)making of Australia"
History Brown Bag Seminar
Jill Roe, Miles Franklin’s most prominent biographer, positioned her subject—marooned in Sydney from 1932 after decades abroad—as a literary ‘elder’. Age and status not only behoved Franklin to ‘reflect, to supervise the young, [and] to support good causes’, but to dwell on generational change. What concerned her was the place of her own elders, mentors from within the constellation of fin-de-siecle feminism, in the consolidating national consciousness of settler Australia. In my new project, I consider Franklin’s memory activism, which extended beyond the cultivation of her nachlass to cajoling comrades and their families to publish memoirs, deposit their papers, and entrust her with their manuscripts. As her patience with fiction waned, Franklin fashioned herself as a literary executor-cum-memory keeper, determined to preserve the richness of women’s contributions to a maturing national culture.
Franklin was hardly alone in her desire to ensure ‘feminist things’ found their place in state and federal repositories, and in this paper I consider her efforts within a wider push to institutionalise feminist memory in Australia. The solution her comrade, Vida Goldstein, found to the problem of posterity illuminates both the nativism that warped Franklin’s desire to transmit feminist memory and the influence of transnational memorial cultures on Australian activists. Moved by her encounters with the sites of memory created amid the crescendo of suffragette militancy in Britain, thirty years later Goldstein expatriated her archive to London, rebuking the national idea Franklin had nurtured. Compared contemporary efforts to create a women’s collection at the National Library of Australia, Franklin and Goldstein were imperfect memory-keepers. Nevertheless, their labours offer the chance to extend the emerging scholarship on twentieth-century Australian feminists’ historical consciousness and imagination of archival futures.
James Keating is a gender historian based in Naarm/Melbourne, on unceded Boonwurrung land. He is a Teaching Associate at the University of Melbourne, and his writing on suffrage; feminist historiography, material culture and memory; mothers’ economic rights; world’s fairs; and the limits of enfranchisement in democratic societies has featured in a range of journals and edited collections. His book, Distant Sisters: Australasian Women and the International Struggle for the Vote, 1880–1914, was published by Manchester University Press in 2020.