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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.

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:Sex-segregated workforces were common in Australia in the twentieth century and male dominance of the massive steel industry in Newcastle, New South Wales (NSW), was especially pronounced. Although there was temporary employment of women in heavy industry during World War II, no permanent change occurred in Newcastle until the end of the 1970s, when local feminist aims for equality in the workforce were potentiated by a youth riot, which revealed the sheer extent of female unemployment. Drawing on campaign literature, reports from the 1970s through to the 1990s, oral history interviews and conversations, this article outlines the obstacles faced, and overcome, by the young women who grasped new training opportunities from the early 1980s. By the mid-1990s, the operations superintendents of both the steelmaking mill and the blast furnace at the BHP Newcastle steelworks were women. A solid groundwork of feminist activism, accompanied by supportive government policies at all levels, led to some women finding a place for themselves in the skilled workforce of Newcastle's heavy industrial sector.

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.

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.

Although a number of studies have been made on male urine to determine the presence or absence of estrogens, comparatively few have been made upon testes. This is rather surprising in the light of the work of Zondek1who reported enormous quantities of estrogenic substance (more recently identified as alpha-estradiol and estrone by Beall2) in the testes of the stallion.Zondek1while more often credited with the report on the stallion testes, examined also the bull testes. Perhaps because of the relatively minute amounts (less than 0.1 %) found in the latter as compared to the former it was not thought to be worth recording in the later literature. Zondek assumed that “the mass production and excretion of the estrogenic hormones in the testes is a peculiarity of the equines.”There is considerable difference of opinion among those who have examined testes for estrogens. A number of workers have failed to secure any results from their extracts, but on the other hand sufficient data have been recorded to indicate that estrogens occur in the testes of several species. Fellner,3Brouha and Simonnet,4Dorfman, et al.,5all reported the presence of estrogens in bull testes, while Laqueur and deJongh6report them in human testes and Dodds, et al.,7in “mammalian” testes. With the exception of Zondek all of the workers who have found estrogens in the testes have reported only qualitative results.The desirability of further quantitative study is evident, but any quantitative study based upon extraction and the assay is bound to be more or less inaccurate. About the most one can say is that there is at least as much hormone as the assay indicates.