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The prevalence of the discourse of "successful girls" (and failing boys) in Australia and internationally has been widely documented. Against the much-vaunted lifting of barriers to opportunity for girls and women, it might reasonably be expected that their educational experiences and career paths are expressive of wider opportunities, greater confidence and autonomy. This article draws on qualitative research with young women in regional Australia to argue that supposedly outmoded but evidently durable patterns of educational and occupational experience remain and are accompanied by new burdens and anxieties. Importantly, young women are now obliged to account for these unfashionable arrangements, using the ubiquitous belief in choice and the possibility of self-actualisation to demonstrate the volition and agency deemed appropriate to a post-feminist ethos. Thus, techniques of reflective selfhood and neoliberal accountability are mobilised to justify social reproduction, while at the same time showcasing invigorated notions of meritocracy and social mobility. (Contains 1 table and 1 note.)

Despite much research which demonstrates the remarkable stability of the inequitable division of domestic labour within heterosexual couples, this key feminist issue is frequently neglected in the literature about contemporary young womanhood. This article begins with a review of literature about the politics of housework. Following this, young women's expectations and experiences of housework are explored through analysis of qualitative interview data in order to explore how they make sense of and respond to the resilience of the traditional sexual division of labour. Men's unequal contribution to housework is conceptualised in this article as an ‘awkward relic of modernity’ because it represents evidence of structures of male dominance at odds with widespread beliefs about progress towards sexual equality. The post-feminist environment of Western neo-liberal democracies, in which assumptions of individualised female empowerment co-exist with the continuation of manifestations of gendered inequality, provides the context against which these issues are theoretically considered. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Abstract: The safety and tolerability of primaquine (PQ) administered as a short higher-dose (30mg twice daily for 7 days) regimen in 203 Australian Defence Force personnel was evaluated in an open-label presumptive anti-relapse therapy study. No clinically significant differences were measured in the subjects’ haematological and biochemical indices before and after PQ treatment. The most common adverse events were nausea, abdominal pain, headache and insomnia, many of which were mild in severity (30%; 60/203) and transient; 19% of subjects (39/203) experienced moderate (with some interference with daily duties requiring no or minimal medical therapy) adverse events. Two subjects (1%) had severe gastrointestinal adverse events requiring cessation of medication, but neither was seriously ill. Ten subjects (5%) had peripheral cyanosis (blueness of the lips), but none reported any respiratory compromise. These findings suggest that the short higher-dose PQ regimen is safe and well tolerated, which could improve PQ compliance and effectiveness. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In this paper, the experiences of young mothers are examined in the contemporary context of a heightened emphasis on individuated personhood and suggestions of a vastly changed modern femininity. Sociological preoccupation with the features of post-industrial society has emphasized the declining influence of preordained and institutionalized structures. The declining influence of such structures in turn ushers in new requirements for personal agency and decision-making. Under the influence of such posited de-traditionalization, the family is widely conceived to be constituted less through obligation and more through negotiation. Understandings of the regulatory dimensions of neo-liberalism and the post-feminist sensibility are drawn on to consider how young women are implicated in this landscape of de-traditionalization and individualism. This paper reports on Australian empirical research with young women who are mothers that reveals the continuation of supposedly outmoded but evidently enduring features of traditional motherhood. Significantly, though, these supposedly superseded gendered features of family life are now encountered amidst the requirements of reflexive modernity, and it is argued that they are responded to in ways that reflect transformations in the experience of the personal; particularly the construction of individualized biographies of reinvention through motherhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]