Remaking a Scholarly Elite? Insiders, Transnationalism, Outsiders and Australian Women Historians

This article considers a group of Australian women historians trying to break through the employment “glass ceiling” (a colloquial term for invisible social barriers based on gender) before the 1970s. The experiences of this group provide a case study of the ways they entered, and thereby remade, a scholarly elite in the period before second-wave feminism. These academic women built transnational careers that took them to universities elsewhere in the Anglophone world, which served to improve their employment prospects back home. I argue that this transnational employment strategy relied on an insider-outsider divide, whereby Australian women historians accrued qualifications and experience outside Australia to try to leverage entry into a local elite formerly closed to them.