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A Japanese Boy Sees A New Light Escaping from North Korea

Shu Shimizu

A Japanese boy experienced Imperialism, Communism, and Democracy in the Korean peninsula in the period of less than a year before and after the end of World War II, and decided under which principle he would rather like to live in the future. Find out how he survived the harsh North Korean winter as a refugee.

AUD $19.95 paperback

978-1-5437-7095-7 also available in hardcover & ebook www.partridgepublishing.com/Singapore

Random Constructive Writings

Corinne Phillips

AUD $16.99 paperback

978-1-9845-0683-2 also available in hardcover & ebook www.xlibris.com.au

Corinne Phillips delights readers with a compendium of eclectic poetry reflecting her observations and thoughts about different things. Each piece is unusual and unexpected. They are odd and different — and you never know what you are going to get with her writing as she tackles about all subjects and random topics.

Down From the Mountain

The Path of a Baby Boomer

Brian Vickery

This biography takes a glimpse into the life of one man who unexpectedly found himself drafted into an Army that he had no interest in joining.

AUD $24.99 paperback

978-1-9845-0653-5 also available in hardcover & ebook www.xlibris.com.au

Run! Oongly Moongly!

Thanmolie K Vellasamy

A charming friendship blossoms between a little girl Meena and a caterpillar Oongly Moongly. Can Meena protect him as he crawls from one danger to another?

AUD $36.95 paperback

978-1-5437-6778-0 also available in hardcover & ebook www.partridgepublishing.com/Singapore

Much of the material in Who Cares? is enraging. One sixtyyear-old woman, who is caring for her mother and has a history of fulfilling her responsibilities, says of the cashless debit card: ‘They’re taking the responsibility away from me … It’s treating me like a little kid again.’ Others speak of the humiliation associated with possessing the cashless debit card instead of an ordinary bank card. The card was not only infantilising in its restrictions; it was also a brand that people were forced to wear, to display their economic and social status whenever they made a purchase.

Vincent’s larger argument is shakiest when she advocates for a new and de-stigmatised conception of dependency as an extension of the ‘primal scene’ of an infant suckling its mother’s breast. She seeks to emphasise the mutually nourishing aspects of dependency, but her ambition is in conflict with those who speak of the humiliations associated with being infantilised by a controlling and distrustful system. For such people, the invi-

History

Escaping the barriers

Debunking myths about women in science

Jessica Urwin

Taking to the Field: A history of Australian women in science

by Jane Carey Monash University Publishing $34.99

pb, 336 pp

In 1943, of the 101 science graduates of the University of Sydney, 55.4 per cent were women. That same year at the University of Melbourne the proportion was 46.2 per cent, and by 1945 women made up 37.4 per cent of all science graduates across Australia. Given contemporary anxieties about women’s involvement in science, these statistics appear unbelievable. Yet, as Jane Carey explores in Taking to the Field, between the 1880s and the 1950s women were not only completing science degrees in notable numbers but, even outside the unusual war years, were contributing valuably to Australian science through research, teaching, and social reform.

Taking to the Field aims to ‘name’ and ‘reclaim’ these women. Across six chapters, Australia’s little-known women of science are placed into their respective arenas: as amateur natural scientists in the bush; social reformers gracing community halls and lecture theatres; and as academic women in Australia’s universities. These women, Carey contends, were ‘those who escaped the barriers that restricted other women so completely’. They were women whose social and financial mobility, family connections, and education ‘expanded their horizons’. Carey maintains that these influences – i.e. those that have supported women’s participation in science – demonstrate that there was ‘remarkably little resistance’ tation to imagine themselves as a baby suckling at a benevolent and attentive mother’s breast is probably only marginally less demeaning than being treated like a naughty child.

Single carers – usually women – are worse off now than they were forty years ago. Social housing is a precious rarity, and rent prices are obscene. Full-time parenting is challenging under normal circumstances, but to care for a child or an impaired dependant while grappling with suffocating poverty requires uncommon stamina and ingenuity. Suspending essential payments to any person living under those conditions should always be taboo; instead, it has become the norm. Vincent shows that towards the end of the twentieth century Australia stopped caring for welfare recipients and began punishing them instead. g to their inclusion, despite our tendency to think otherwise.

Shannon Burns is the author of a memoir, Childhood (Text Publishing, 2022).

This is evident in women’s involvement in the acquisition and dissemination of scientific knowledge prior to science’s professionalisation. Carey uses various colonial women, including writer and keen botanist Louisa Atkinson and amateur geologist and (later) anthropologist Georgina King, to demonstrate that gathering scientific knowledge of the Empire’s far-flung territories was considered a worthy pursuit for financially and socially mobile women in the mid-nineteenth century. Women’s early contributions to science as amateur naturalists aided colonisation by both ‘uncovering’ nature’s ‘secrets and treasures’ and assisting in the ‘quest for national identity’. This was especially important for a nation finding its feet.

But women’s participation in science expanded beyond amateurism. Once Australian universities opened their doors in the 1880s, the prohibitive cost of undertaking a degree and the inaccessibility of good secondary education prevented many from entering universities. Those that acquired bachelor degrees were part of an élite group. Women were not naturally excluded from this. To the contrary, women’s admission to science degrees existed as an example of Australia’s progressivism at the turn of the century, especially in comparison to the staunch tradition of Oxford and Cambridge, whose first women graduates received their degrees in 1920 and 1948 respectively. And while the number of graduates in science was still remarkably low, Australian universities were openly proud of their ‘sweet girl graduates’. These were women whose scientific pursuits seemingly placed them ‘above ordinary feminine trivialities’, while paradoxically representing the compatibility of scientific work with ‘traditional feminine activities’ as specimen jars were likened to ‘the thrifty housewife’s jam jars’.

Reading Taking to the Field, it becomes clear that women were invaluable to science not only as university students, but as educators. It is in this context that Ada Lambert became the first woman to be appointed a university lecturer in 1899. And while few other women would achieve similar permanency over the succeeding decades, university departments were heavily populated by women. Walter Baldwin Spencer’s biology department at the University of Melbourne became entirely dependent upon women as researchers, tutors, and demonstrators. This was certainly not an anomaly; the lack of career prospects in science made it an unpopular pursuit for men. The shortage of jobs also ensured that many scientifically trained women turned to secondary teaching or even scientific social reform, the latter influenced strongly by eugenics. Regardless of the space they occupied, Carey maintains that these ‘pioneering’ women demonstrated their ability to overcome many of the obstacles of gender in this period.

Yet, gender still mattered. A key enabler of women’s early inclusion in science was men’s absence. In the early twentieth century, senior male biological scientists lamented the abundance of women applying for vacant positions; considerable effort was put towards attracting men to science, not least by increasing salaries. Women, seldom promoted beyond casual positions, were often forced to give up their research careers following marriage. Nepotism was forbidden by many universities; while daughters of famous scientists (such as Douglas Mawson’s, Patricia and Jessica Mawson) were able to follow their fathers into science, women could not be gainfully employed by their husband’s institution. Naturally, this precluded many educated women from employment.

But it was the masculinisation of science following World War II that most acutely impacted women’s participation. The importance of science to the war effort resulted in a remarkable growth in male university enrolments. By the 1960s, academia was rebranded as an unwomanly pursuit, ‘at odds’ with women’s ‘feminine appearance’. Biology, where women had found a safe haven, was recast as a man’s domain. Women were actively paid less than their male counterparts and some universities forced them to retire earlier than their male colleagues. Unsurprisingly, the percentage of women science graduates dropped considerably, contributing to what Carey considers our contemporary presumption of ‘the impossibility of women scientists’ in the early twentieth century.

Challenging this presumption, Taking to the Field reiterates that women’s contemporary participation in science is not a teleological tale of progress, from absence to inclusion. Rather, it is one of ebbs and flows. By highlighting the enigmatic and unique women who participated in Australian science during its early days, Carey demonstrates that their contributions have been vastly underappreciated by historians. This has been to our detriment, not least as their stories unsettle our understandings of women in science as a markedly contemporary – and exceptional – development. In exploring the historic contributions of women to Australian science, Taking to the Field confronts contemporary anxieties about the place of women in the field by demonstrating that it has not always been – therefore does not have to be – hostile to women. g