2025/03/12 by James Keating · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Historical Gender and Feminism Studies #Oral History, Memory, Narrative Analysis #World Wars: History, Literature, and Impact
paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/14490854.2025.2454379
openalex publication_date 2025/03/12 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/15
In the 1920s and 1930s, Australian feminists – alongside their counterparts across the world – confronted their omission from collecting institutions as they fought exclusion from the entangled pursuits of history-writing and nation-making. Extending the scholarship on women’s ‘archival activism’, this article details feminists’ heterogenous mnemonic practices by studying how author Miles Franklin and suffragist and pacifist Vida Goldstein created paper trails and considered posterity. Scrutinising both women’s divergent archival strategies and memory networks not only clarifies their decisions about housing their collections in state archives or gender-dedicated institutions but reveals their deliberation over whether the nation constituted a suitable vector for the transmission of feminist knowledge.