Nurturing Feminist Histories in Precarious Times:
Founding Stories, Forging Communities, Feminist Futures
24-25 November, University of Melbourne
A Joint Australian Women’s History Network Conference and Celebration of the 40th Anniversary of
Lilith: A Feminist History Journal
This conference will take stock of the past, present and future of feminist history scholarship at a time when the field is increasingly under siege. The humanities are facing unprecedented challenges and ‘diversity’ of all kinds is under attack. In the context of increasing precarity, we hope that this event can replenish feminist history communities through looking back, celebrating the work we are doing now, and looking ahead to consider the future of feminist histories in Australia and beyond.
One strand of the conference will specifically reflect on Lilith’s history – the foundational role the journal has played in the development of Australian women’s, gender and feminist history over more than 40 years, and looking ahead to how it might build on this legacy. The conference will feature a plenary panel of former Lilith Collective members.
There will be two other plenary panels – one on the ‘Transformative Ambitions’ of women’s and feminist histories, and the other on ‘Speaking Out: Indigenous and Palestinian Solidarities.’ See the link for further details below.
Confirmed Plenary Speakers include: Crystal McKinnon, Sary Zananiri, Micaela Sahhar, Katie Holmes, Jane Carey, Yves Rees, Zoe Smith, Deborah Zion, Michelle Arrow, Zora Simic, Marilyn Lake, Joy Damousi and Angela Woollacott.
Registration (for the full conference or tickets for the Lilith Panel and Reception only)
Online registration will close at 12pm on Monday 17 November. See the link above for options for late registration/ticket purchases.
Venue, logistical and other information
Back issues of Lilith from 1983-2017 are available here.
We invite you to review this archive – noting the quality of the copies varies considerably! See below for further discussion of this celebration of Lilith.
Contact: auswhn@gmail.com
Organising Committee: Jane Carey, Michelle Arrow, Cassandra Byrnes, James Keating, Dylan Holdsworth, Huda Syyed and Shannon Ross
This conference is being held in conjunction with the Congress of HASS: https://www.chass.org.au/
Celebrating Lilith!
“Lilith is foundational to our field.” Angela Woollacott
‘Women have been excluded from history; their past denied them. Their myths, their oppression, their fortitude and their resistance, their sexuality, their work and their culture – all this, relegated to obscurity and pronounced insignificant. […] We want to reclaim women’s lost past. We want to change visions of the past and the future. We call our journal Lilith.(From Lilith’s inaugural editorial, January 1984)
Lilith emerged in 1984 from an Honours seminar run the year before by Patricia Grimshaw at the University of Melbourne. Pat believed that her students’ work ‘was original and should be shared’ and she encouraged them to publish a collection of their essays. This project became Lilith, which has published articles in women’s and feminist history and forged and sustained communities of scholars since its inception.
Just over forty years on, Lilith’s founding vision remains urgent. Lilith is Australia’s only women’s or feminist history journal. Since 2011 it has been the journal of the Australian Women’s History Network. Being part of its editorial collective has become a rite of passage for generations of historians. The journal has published a roll call of Australia’s most distinguished and innovative women’s, feminist and gender historians. In a time in which reactionary forces around the world seek to roll back gains for women and LGBTQI+ people, when research about and attention to gender, diversity, and inequality is under siege, we celebrate Lilith’s four decades and its future.
We encourage participants to engage closely with Lilith’s back catalogue, available here (for 1983-2017) and via Informit and ANU Press (for 1996-2025), to tease out continuities, ruptures, absences and communities across the journal’s history.