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Purpose: This paper presents a descriptive analysis of elite women's biographical sketches in Who's Who-type collections, now out of copyright, published in Australia in the 1930s: Victoria (1934), New South Wales (1936) and Queensland (1939). It concentrates on information given about their schooling. Design/methodology/approach: The biographical sketches of the women, defined as "elite" by their inclusion in three collections from the 1930s, were examined for information about their and their daughters' education. Using mixed methods in a prosopographical approach, this is mainly a quantitative analysis. It outlines and compares the schools they attended where given as well as providing basic demographic details of the 491 women. Findings: The paper shows that, for those who gave educational details, the women and their daughters attended private schools almost exclusively. Three types of schools were listed – private venture, corporate, and a very few state schools. The paper demonstrates that the landscape for girls' secondary schooling was not a settled terrain in terms of type, place, religion, or age of schools available for elite girls' education in the late 19th and early 20th century. Private schools are shown to be part of the "machinery of exclusiveness which characterised the inter-war years" (Teese, 1998, p. 402) and private venture schools survived well into the third decade of the 20th century. Originality/value: Beyond the histories of individual schools, little is known about the educational profile of Australian elite women in the past. This largely quantitative analysis helps to uncover and compare across state-based cohorts, previously unknown demographic, and schooling details for interwar women who recorded their educational details, as well as for the NSW and Victorian daughters where given. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore the clubs and club memberships of 491 elite women in three eastern Australian states in the 1930s. It is the second part of a descriptive analysis of these women's biographical sketches in Who's Who-type collections, now out of copyright, published in Australia in the 1930s: Victoria (1934), New South Wales (1936) and Queensland (1939). Design/methodology/approach: Using mixed methods within a prosopographical approach, described fully in the first paper on these data, this is mainly a quantitative analysis. After the numbers of club memberships of the women are given and compared on a state-by-state basis, a taxonomy of five main types of clubs was created and the clubs and club memberships listed for each of them. The five types are: (1) social and cultural clubs; (2) sporting clubs; (3) imperial, national and patriotic clubs; (4) professional clubs; and (5) service and educational clubs. The paper then explores the similarities and variations at the state level in the women's club memberships across the five types. It should be noted that the article does not include charities to which the women contributed because they required a separate typology and analysis to be taken up elsewhere. Findings: The paper frames women's clubs as informal educative networks where women were able to acquire the knowledge and skills in modernity for effective participation in the public sphere. The analysis shows that three-quarters of the 491 women were members of one club or more. Overall, the women listed 340 separate clubs with 1,029 memberships across the five types. The state-by-state analysis giving lists of clubs, and numbers of memberships per club in each type, enumerated variations of women's clubs at the state level. Overall, the analysis suggests that the "club habit" for such women was a substantial historical phenomenon at this time. Originality/value: This is the first study to encompass women's club memberships across three Australian states. Quantification of women's involvement in clubs has proved difficult, however, by using a prosopographical approach, this study creates a unique quantitative picture of the club data contained in 491 elite women's biographical sketches from the 1930s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The article sets out primarily to fill in some of the gaps in the biography of Lucy Arabella Stocks Garvin (1851–1938), first principal of Sydney Girls High School. As a reflexive exercise stimulated by this biographical research, the second aim is to explore the transformative work of digital sources on the researcher's research processes that in turn generate possibilities for expanded biographical studies in the history of education. Design/methodology/approach: This article encompasses two approaches: the first uses traditional historical methods in the digital sources to provide an expanded biography of Lucy Garvin. The second is a reflexive investigation of the effects of digitisation of sources on the historian's research processes. Findings: The advent of digital technologies has opened up more evidence on the life of Lucy Garvin which enables a fuller account both within and beyond the school gate. Digital sources have helped to address important gaps in her life story that challenge current historiographical understandings about her: for example, regarding her initial travel to Australia; her previous career as a teacher in Australia and the circumstances of her appointment as principal; her private and family life; and her involvement in extra school activities. In the process of exploring Garvin's life, the researcher reflected on the work of digital sources and argues that such sources transform the research process by speeding up and de-situating the collection and selection of evidence, while at the same time expanding and slowing the scrutiny of evidence. The ever-expanding array of digital sources, despite its patchiness, can lead to finer grained expanded biographical studies while increasing the provisionality of historical accounts. Originality/value: The article presents new biographical information about an important early female educational leader in Australia and discusses the impact of digital sources on archival and research processes in the history of women's education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to relate the compelling story of Viennese-born and educated Anna Marie Hlawaczek (c.1849–1893) and her employment as the second headmistress at Maitland Girls High School in the colony of New South Wales (NSW) from 1885 to 1887.Design/methodology/approach Through a biographical lens, this paper uses traditional documentary research mainly in the school administration files in the NSW State Archives to explore Hlawaczek's experiences.Findings The first set of findings forms the narrative of Anna Hlawaczek's troubled employment in the NSW teaching service at the beginnings of public girls' secondary education. It shows the ways in which ethnicity, gender, career history and expectations worked on both sides to exacerbate the potential for misunderstanding between her and the all-male administrators of the NSW Department of Public Instruction. The second set of findings suggests two ways in which the national worked as a transnational shaping factor in her story, both constraining and empowering her.Originality/value The careers of non-Anglo women working in the early colonial secondary schools for girls have been rarely studied. This paper presents a previously untold story of one pioneering transnational headmistress in the NSW Department of Public Instruction. Her story complicates the transnational approach in the history of women's education by highlighting the power of the national within the transnational. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose -- The first state high schools in New South Wales (NSW) were restricted to children with high academic ability. The purpose of this paper is to explore the lived experience of over 70 former students from three such schools, one coeducational, the other two single-sex, with special attention to academic and social curricula. Design/methodology/approach -- The study investigates memories of a particular moment in the history of secondary schooling in NSW before the establishment of mass secondary education. The authors utilise theoretical concepts from recent oral history studies regarding memory communities and intersectionality. Findings -- In bringing ex-students' memories of both single-sex and coeducational academically-selective high schooling together, the study reports on the homogeneity of the memories of this type of schooling despite the different sexual structures of the schools. The respondents, it is argued, constitute a "memory community" in that they recalled their selection for high school as marking them out as intellectually superior, "special". Their main differentiating feature arose from their sex and gender socialisation. Females were made more consistently conscious of their responsibilities within their schools' gender regime. Originality/value -- The approach in this paper adjusts the focus of traditional oral history research in the history of education to "history from within" (rather than "from below"); to experiences of both academic and socialcurriculum (not "formal/informal"); to a gendered approach incorporating both sexes; and to a comparative approach across academically-selective coeducational and single-sex high schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]