Alternative imaginaries of the modern girl: a comparative examination of Canadian and Australian magazines

Longstanding meta-narratives about modernity and modernism have not only neglected gender, as the epigram above from Rita Felski suggests, but also overlooked whole nations, including Canada and Australia. Standard accounts of their literature tend to focus on narratives of either the pioneering and settlement phases of the colonial era or the development of their self-consciously national literatures in the aftermath of the Second World War. In fact, the shared origins of these settler dominions, as well as their "struggle to legitimate the national literature" and overcome "the colonial mentality" which continued well into the post-war years to "disparage... the local product" (McDougall and Whitlock 1987, 7) stimulated the first of many comparative approaches to their literatures. This chapter extends this long tradition of comparative Australian and Canadian literary studies into an comparison of magazine print culture. It focuses on the overlooked figure of the Modern Girl in these contexts, a figure more often associated with the British bright young thing or the paradigmatic American flapper. It reveals a wealth of stories about the Modern Girl that appeared in the magazines of the interwar period in Canada and Australia, which have been heretofore overlooked. Its comparative approach also unearths fascinating and complex attitudes toward her and toward writing which featured her, in this colonial milieus which were still struggling to establish their own legitimate national literatures

Feminist genealogical methodologies

This paper describes the multi-methodological approach employed in a partial, situated, contingent and interpretive feminist political analysis of Catholic mothers and daughters. The study draws on a number of sources including transcripts of mother- daughter interviews, autobiographical anecdotes, photographs, music, icons of Catholicism and poetry. It is argued in this paper that a feminist multi-methodological approach is valuable to feminist research as it disrupts the linear and logocentric construct of traditional social science research. Moreover, a multi-methodological and multi-sourced approach opens up sites so that the mothers and daughters in this study could be positioned within specific histories and contexts, and provided with a space so that as women they could reconstruct themselves as self-referential subjects