Throughout modernity, women have led movements for reform. Yet, women activists are less well remembered than their male counterparts in the historical record and collective memory. Their memory has fallen victim to patriarchal structures and a male-dominated public narrative. What is often overlooked is the immense, time-consuming and often costly project of documenting, organising and maintaining the record of women’s activism for these recovery projects to be possible.
2020 National Library of Australia Fellow, Associate Professor Sharon Crozier-de Rosa, examines the rationale, strategies and tactics that Australian women and women’s organisations employed to preserve their own histories, analysing how they acted as gatekeepers of their own memory until wider social shifts allowed that memory public visibility.
Sharon Crozier-de Rosa is an Associate Professor in the School of humanities and Social Inquiry at the University of Wollongong. Her research focuses on exploring the tactics and tracing the memory of women involved in intersecting nationalist and feminist campaigns across the British Empire and United States from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth-century.
Dr Sharon Crozier-de Rosa is a 2020 National Library of Australia Fellow, supported by the Stokes family.
Type
Fellowship presentation
