AustLit

'In this article I consider approaches taken to questions of intimacy and estrangement in feminist history in Australia since 1975. Pioneering works, namely Damned whores and God’s Police (Summers 1975); The Real Matilda (Dixson 1976); and My wife, my daughter and poor Mary Ann (Kingston 1975) demonstrated that in order to understand the nature of women’s subordination, feminism needed histories that would describe the changing contexts in which oppressive forces had shaped women’s relationships, as well as the variety of their oppressive effects. The trajectories of feminist engagements with theory in the 1970s generated particular historical questions that enabled accounts of intimacy and estrangement to feature in these early works. This ambitious body of scholarship laid a solid foundation on which Australian feminist historians have since built, offering vivid depictions of women and the contexts and dynamics of their relationships, but the story of the emergence of this rich body of work is complex and at times contested.' (Source: Author's introduction)