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In World War I the bonds held fast, as settler scientists made a massive contribution to the war effort and, after the war, reasserted the values and friendships of an earlier era. But by the 1920s-1930s American philanthropy began to exert pressure for change, while the influx of refugee scholars from Europe altered the landscape of influence that had once been dominated by the connectedness of empire. This book provides a new perspective from which to view the history of university intellectual life while, at a local level, providing fascinating details of the global influence of many of the University of Sydney’s founding fathers. And although women inevitably feature little in this time period, the insights provided by Empire of scholars are rich food for thought in looking at those institutions, such as the Women’s College, that did employ academic women and examining the networks that they employed to find the right woman for the job. Rosemary Annable Rosemary is an historian and former honorary archivist at The Women’s College. Her numerous publications include three volumes of the Women’s College Biographical Register, covering the period 1892 to 1968. *Tamson Pietsch is Senior Teaching Fellow at The Women’s College.
Sibyl Volume 2* The second volume of Sibyl re-affirms the breadth of academic life within that much-loved institution of learning, The Women’s College. The diversity of subjects represented in the journal goes some way towards indicating the variety of disciplinary pursuits occupying the College’s undergraduates this year, and as such is probably no bad representation of Australian intellectual life today. Reprinted for the first time with this volume is the playscript of A Mask, written and produced in honour of the College’s twenty-first birthday in the early part of the twentieth century. On first glance, it is the strangeness of the play that strikes us: it seems to suggest an unknowable past of Edwardian ladies whose lives and concerns have nothing in common with ours, lives we cannot begin to imagine. The masque itself is a Renaissance genre, very fashionable in the neo-Elizabethan vogue before World War I, and pageants were internationally popular. References in the script to Helen of Troy (and thus Marlowe’s Faustus) and Lucretia (the heroine of Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece), and the tongue-in-cheek use of words like ‘malison’ (archaic, ‘a curse’) also reflect this. Louisa Macdonald, along with other leading Sydney intellectuals, was a member of the influential Shakespeare Society of NSW, and THE WOMEN’S COLLEGE MAGAZINE
it is typical of Macdonald that she would commission such a piece. The fact that notorious bohemian poets Brennan and Brereton obliged, however, demonstrates how avant garde and controversial women’s higher education, and the Women’s College in particular, continued to be. A Mask presents various views of women: the mythological, the historical and the fictional; those still well-known and those forgotten; those celebrated by history and those condemned by it; those the College’s students might be exhorted to emulate, and those whose examples serve only as warnings. In its movement from the Sibyl, Helen and Penelope of Ancient Greek myth to the present time of the play and the achievements of Marie Curie, the play offers a narrative of women’s progress from battle-prize to scientist which suited the rhetoric of first wave feminists like Macdonald. The articles in this volume, however, complicate this version of history. Two of the articles, by Eleanor Barz and Emma Campbell, reflect on political movements now identified as feminist which arose out of the European Enlightenment of the eighteenth century: the matriarchal, utopian vision of the upper class Sarah Scott in Millenium Hall, and the radical women of the French revolution like the so-called Tricoteuses, the working-class women who helped bring on the first French Republic. Scott’s novel was neglected and forgotten until two centuries after its first publication. Olympe de Gouges, author of the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and [female] Citizen, was ultimately guillotined as a counter-revolutionary. These essays suggest that gains made by and for women are never final, but that every generation must re-fight these battles. Nicole Burger’s article on Women’s History also cautions us not to assume that women in the past were necessarily oppressed because of their gender, and re-emphasises the truth that gender itself, as a social construct, is always historically contingent. The complexity and ambiguity with which these articles engage is also reflected in essays by Lindsay Scott, Elisabeth Tondl, Katherine Miller and Zaina Rayan Ahmed. In writing about subjects as various as art history, police training methods, American foreign aid and Australian immigration, these authors stress the unhelpfulness of reductive assumptions or easy answers, and argue for deeper investigations, more intensive thought, and the responsibility to consider multiple perspectives in a wide range of fields. This is not relativism, but—it is hoped—the beginnings of true wisdom. If I may venture to make a sibylline prophecy, it augurs well for the future of the Women’s College, and of our global community. Olivia Murphy Dr Olivia MURPHY (2001-04) is a former Teaching Fellow at The Women’s College. She is now Lecturer in English at Murdoch University. *Sibyl is the College’s academic journal. Copies available on request.
VOLUME 30 / NUMBER 1