Program Overview

Unit Overview

The unit HIST231 - Women in History explores how historians have worked to record, recover, and interpret silenced or forgotten women's voices, histories of everyday experience, and gendered national narratives.

Unit Rationale, Description, and Aim

Historians often refer to 'silences' in history and seek ways to retrieve missing 'voices'. This unit provides students with opportunities to do 'hands on' history investigating the changing experiences and perspectives of Indigenous and non-Indigenous women in Australia from the colonial frontier through to modern times in a variety of cultural and ethnic contexts.

Learning Outcomes

To successfully complete this unit, students will be able to:

1. Examine and compare the changing experiences of Indigenous and non-Indigenous women in Australia from colonial times to the present across diverse cultural and ethnic contexts.
2. Identify and analyse primary and secondary sources to recover previously forgotten, silenced, or marginalised women's voices.
3. Apply feminist historical approaches and digital history techniques to conduct independent research projects that centre on women's public and private lives.

Unit Content

Topics will include:

• Finding women's voices in Australian History
• Indigenous and non-Indigenous women's experience, activism, and advocacy
• Women's voices in historical sources; written letters, diaries, images, and digital newspaper databases; oral history collections
• Public representations of women's history
• Women's History: Rethinking Domesticity
• Migration, women, and work
• The women's liberation movement: the personal is political
• Sex and Sexuality
• Contemporary issues and debates
• Gender, Transgender, and diverse voices in history

Assessment Strategy and Rationale

The assessment tasks will develop students' historical research skills while addressing learning outcomes.

1. Assessment Task 1: Public and Private Lives Task - Students select and analyse primary and secondary sources from a specific decade to build a profile of the public or private life of an individual woman.
2. Assessment Task 2: Hands-On History Project - Advances skills from Task 1 by requiring comparative analysis of Indigenous and/or non-Indigenous women's experiences while developing digital or oral history literacy and public engagement capabilities.
3. Assessment 3: Secure Summative Task - Students complete a secure supervised in-class workshop or specified time in the exam period, where they are provided with previously unseen source materials and must produce an analysis applying methodologies examined in the unit.

Learning and Teaching Strategy and Rationale

This unit provides hands-on learning through classes that develop deep understanding of women's history and fundamental historical research skills. The pedagogical approach combines multiple learning formats to support diverse learning styles.

Representative Texts and References

• Bellanta, M, and Alana Piper. "'Looking Flash: Disreputable Women's Dress and 'Modernity', ", History Workshop Journal , 78:1 (2014), 58-81.
• Carey, J. Taking to the Field: A History of Australian Women in Science , Monash University Publishing, 2023.
• Chesser, L. Parting With My Sex: Cross Dressing, Inversion and Sexuality in Australian Cultural Life, Sydney University Press, 2008.

Unit Details

• Credit points: 10
• Year: 2026
• Locations: Melbourne