Clare Burton Memorial Lectures 2005
Girls, schools and society: a generation of change
Professor Alison Mackinnon
The speaker for the 2005 Clare Burton Memorial Lecture was Dr Alison Mackinnon, Professor of history and gender studies and the Foundation Director of the Hawke Research Institute at the University of South Australia.
Gender equity in schools was one of the major initiatives of 1970s and 80s feminism. Animated by the belief that secondary schooling held key answers to the quest for equality, Australian women acted to reduce inequalities of access, curriculum and outcome for girls and women. They hoped to increase girls' school retention to senior levels, to increase their access to tertiary and vocational training, to reduce outmoded stereotypes of male and female career destinations. In all they sought 'more open life options' for both girls and boys, a world where 'sex need no longer dictate life patterns'. A key text Girls, Schools and Society (Schools Commission 1975) set out both the problems and the hoped for solutions.
Thirty years on much of that ambitious agenda has been achieved. Girls complete secondary schooling and go on to tertiary education in unprecedented numbers. Yet disadvantage stubbornly remains. Young women who leave school early (at year nine or thereabouts) are disproportionately disadvantaged in terms of long term employment and life chances. This lecture draws on a recent study which looks at those girls and their mothers, charting continuities and discontinuities in the lives of mothers and daughters in a changing society. Disturbing questions remain. While those of us who strongly supported gender equity in schools rejoice in the broader options for women, do we always agree with 'greedy' workplaces which demand full time commitment from women, and the deferral of child bearing and rearing? Are we seeing the development of 'two cultures of child bearing', 'two cultures of womanhood'? Have we really achieved gender equity and justice for girls in our schools and society? Or is there a new (old, perhaps) divide?
As an historian and a feminist Alison Mackinnon has published widely on the place of education in the transformation of women's lives over the last century. She is the author of several books including Love and Freedom: Professional women and the reshaping of personal life, which won the NSW Premier's literary award for cultural or literary criticism in 1997, Education into the twentieth Century: Dangerous Terrain for Women (jointly edited with Alison Prentice and Inga Elgqvist-Saltzman); Gender and Institutions (edited with Moira Gatens) and Gender and the restructured university: changing management and culture in higher education (Open University Press, 2001) with Ann Brooks. She was awarded an honorary doctorate by Umea University, Sweden, in 2000 for her contribution to gender and education, and was appointed Kerstin Hesselgren Visiting professor in 2002 by the Swedish Research Council, to contribute to interdisciplinary and gender perspectives in historical demography. In 2004 she was a Lansdowne Lecturer at the University of Victoria, British Columbia. She is currently writing a history of Australian and US women graduates of the 1950s and early 60s tentatively titled 'The best of all possible worlds'.