Beyond the Campus: Some Initial Findings on Women’s Studies, Careers and Employers

From the Introduction: (I)nstitutions of higher learning are being transformed by the discourses of economic rationalism and the marketplace so that many practitioners are discovering first-hand how readily Women’s Studies programs become vulnerable to arguments made against maintaining allegedly “useless” and “non-vocational” areas of study (see Griffin 1998, Kessler-Harris and Swerdlow 1996). The reconfiguration of higher education within a broadly consumerist logic and growing rates of unemployment and underemployment among university graduates in many western societies also mean that not just administrators, but students (and their families) are now inquiring into the vocational relevance and the long-term “rewards” of specific teaching programs (see Skeggs 1995). Indeed, given these shifts in educational, fiscal, and political priorities, we suggest it may become increasingly difficult for teachers and researchers, especially those in public institutions, to continue fostering Women’s Studies programs and their students in the absence of clear understandings of students’ vocational aspirations, their post-graduation experiences, and the changing environment in which important educational and vocational decisions are being negotiated. Beyond the immediate career and vocational context, such considerations also offer significant opportunities for reflecting on the connections between our professed teaching and learning objectives and our students’ needs, desires and aspirations, as well as opportunities for learning more about what brings students into our classrooms and the visions they have for their lives beyond graduation. In what follows, we discuss some interim findings of on-going research conducted among enrolled Women’s Studies students and among prospective employers

Women's Studies Graduates And The Labour Market: New Thoughts And New Questions

Despite almost three decades of formal study of women and gender at university and college levels, there is a noticeable paucity of debate and documentation over how Women's Studies programs relate to the domain of the vocational and how Women's Studies graduates fare in the labour market. This essay explores some of the reasons why the vocational elements of Women's Studies have, with isolated exceptions, been overlooked in most debates about the future of Women's Studies and examines cogent arguments for a more systematic consideration of these questions in the future.Malgré près de 30 ans d'étude formelle sur les femmes et les sexes au niveau universitaire et au niveau collégial, il y a un grand manque de débat et de documentation sur le lien qui existe entre les programmes d'Etudes des femmes et le domaine professionnel et comment les diplômés des programmes d'Etudes des femmes réussissent dans le marché du travail. Cet article explore quelques unes des raisons pour lesquelles les éléments du programme d'études des femmes, à part quelques exceptions, ont été négligés dans la plupart des débats sur l'avenir des études des femmes et étudie le manque d'arguments convaincants pour qu'il y ait une considération plus systématique de ces questions à l'avenir

Students, careers and employers: findings from an international study

Historically Women’s and Gender Studies programs (WS/GS) worldwide emerged from strategic political and intellectual agitation by women rather than from employer pressure for specific skills or knowledge; a fact that may foster understandings of these fields as having somewhat attenuated links to the labour market. Yet we know relationships between fields of study, anticipatory career expectations and actual labour market outcomes are increasingly complex ones in a world where the shape of work is rapidly changing. I am reporting here on findings from a three-year international study which examined three sets of stakeholders whose understandings of the possible relationships between Women’s and Gender Studies, career aspirations and employment experiences I felt we needed to understand better: (1) enrolled students; (2) careers advisers and employers with graduate hiring responsibilities; and (3) recent graduates. Survey responses were received from approximately 780 students enrolled in WS/GS programs at four universities in Australia, three in the United Kingdom and five in the United States1 and these responses were set alongside a small qualitative interview program with employers and recent graduates. In each of these national domains, Women’s and Gender Studies programs have been institutionalized for approximately three decades and the programs are generally located within the Humanities and/or Social Science faculties, although individual programs may utilize study electives and faculty expertise from beyond these areas

Greta Garbo's foot, or, sex, socks and letters

In November 2006 I found myself staring at item no. 80 from Box 23 of the Greta Garbo material held at the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia. Item 80 is an envelope from the Pont-Royal Hotel on the front of which is written ‘Greta’s foot Sept. 1958’. Inside is a pencil tracing of Garbo’s foot extending across two small sheets of unlined notepaper. I held the two pieces of paper in mid-air and stared at them with what I hoped was a look of sufficient scholarly intensity to satisfy the two archivists looking on. ‘Looks about a size 8’, I have written in my notes, but in my excitement I failed to note down whether it was her left or her right foot. Elsewhere in the collection - that of Mercedes de Acosta - I encountered a yellow cotton ankle sock with a lipstick kiss still visible upon it. Further afield in the same papers, there is a single silk stocking that once belonged to Marlene Dietrich. Nowhere present is the pair of slightly used socks that Greta generously offered to Mercedes in a note from 1938. But this is not what took me to Philadelphia; no, this visit was the culmination of a six-year desire to see what ‘nothing’ looked like. What took me on this hiding to ‘nothing’? In April 2000, the world’s press reported on the opening of a long-embargoed cache of letters from Greta Garbo to Mercedes de Acosta, the Spanish-born aristocrat turned screenwriter widely thought to have been Garbo’s lover. At issue was whether the letters would somehow ‘prove’ the nature of the relationship between the two women

Archiving Feminism: Papers, Politics, Posterity

This article explores the process of securing for the National Library of Australia Merle Thornton’s personal archive, which documents decades of feminist activism. Thornton, a noted figure in Australia’s early second-wave women’s movement, is best known as one of the “Bar Room Suffragettes,” who in 1965 chained themselves to the front bar of the Regatta Hotel in Brisbane, demanding women’s right to drink alongside men in public bars. In reflecting on the process of securing these papers, the author poses a series of questions concerning archives and aging, the folding of personal history into collective memory, and the role of archival source material in determining the conditions of possibility for writing histories of feminist activism. Further, in reflecting on her own role in the project, the author asks whether it is possible to perform the work of “archiving feminism” on radically non-nostalgic terms that challenge the discursive positioning of second-wave activists as a generation whose political legacy is threatened by a contemporary “culture of forgetting.” Finally, the article necessarily engages with the tension between the archive as a memory device and the archive’s entanglement with anticipation and futurity. RÉSUMÉ Cet article explore le processus par lequel la bibliothèque nationale australienne a acquis les archives personnelles de Merle Thornton, qui documentent des décennies d’activisme féministe. Thornton, une personnalité éminente des débuts de la deuxième vague du mouvement féministe australien, est mieux connue comme l’une des « suffragettes des bars » (« Bar Room Suffragettes »), qui en 1965 se sont enchaînées au bar principal de l’hôtel Regatta à Brisbane, réclamant le droit des femmes de boire aux côtés des hommes dans les bars publics. En se penchant sur le processus par lequel on a sauvegardé ces documents, l’auteure pose une série de questions au sujet des archives et du vieillissement, de l’intégration de l’histoire personnelle dans la mémoire collective et du rôle des sources archivistiques pour fixer les conditions rendant possible l’écriture de l’histoire de l’activisme féministe. De plus, en se penchant sur son propre rôle dans ce projet, l’auteure se demande s’il est possible d’effectuer le travail de « l’archivage du féminisme » sur des bases radicalement nonnostalgiques qui contestent le positionnement discursif des activistes de la deuxième vague comme une génération dont le patrimoine politique est menacé par la « culture de l’oubli » contemporaine. Enfin, l’article aborde nécessairement la tension entre les archives comme mécanisme de la mémoire et l’enchevêtrement propre aux archives entre attentes et possibilités futures

Australian women writers 1910-1950: an exhibition of material from the Monash University Library Rare Books Collection 29 March - 31 July 2007

The exhibition was held in the Rare Books Exhibition space, Sir Louis Matheson Library, Monash University from 29 March - 31 July 2007 Opening address given by art historian Dr Janine Burke. This exhibition includes works by over 100 novelists and poets, represented in first and early editions drawn from the rich collection held in the Monash University Library Rare Books Collection. As well as mainstream literature there are representative selections from such genres as romance and crime fiction