The Lilith Editorial Collective’s Petra Mossman reflects on the Australian academic feminist publishing resources held at The University of Melbourne Archives.
In May 2015, Lilith: A Feminist History Journal held a conference entitled Flesh and Blood: A Feminist Symposium on Embodied Histories at the Australian National University’s Gender Institute in Canberra. At the back of the symposium program, the Lilith Editorial Collective of 2015 reproduced ephemera from the Lilith Archive, which is held by The University of Melbourne Archives (UMA).
The 1988 Lilith Collective created this flyer for their conference. Many now well-known Australian feminist scholars and activists presented at the 1988 Lilith Conference. Professor Joy Damousi, one of the Flesh and Blood keynotes in 2015, also presented in 1988. Damousi published her paper titled “Socialist Women in Australia 1890-1918” in Lilith’s 1988 Conference Special Issue. By reproducing a photograph of the 1988 flyer in our 2015 Symposium program, the Lilith Editorial Collective turned toward our own archive and participated in feminism’s “archival turn.” We used our archive to support feminist scholarship in the present, and to connect past and present collectives. Lilith has significantly shaped the writing of feminist history in Australia.
The first issue of Lilith was published in 1984, tracing its origins to a fourth year undergraduate seminar taught by Professor Patricia Grimshaw at Melbourne University. According to the first editorial, it was her encouragement and certainty that their work was original that convinced her students to found Lilith Collective and publish the first issue titled Lilith: A Women’s History Journal. The following year, the journal clarified its agenda and scope, and renamed itself Lilith: A Feminist History Journal. In 2007 the journal folded, and was relaunched in 2011, when Lilith became the official journal of the Australian Women’s History Network. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, the journal was published intermittently. In 2011, Lilith became the official journal of the Australian Women’s History Network and became an annual publication. The journal is still produced by a collective of postgraduates and early career researchers.
Unlike most journals, Lilith has two archives. The first is a private digital archive. All current members of the Lilith Editorial Collective have access to this archive. It documents everything relating to the production of the journal since 2011 and also includes digitised copies of every issue of Lilith. The second Lilith archive is a public archive, held at The University of Melbourne.
The current Lilith Collective only became aware of our public archive at UMA in February 2015, when I was doing research in Melbourne. I was primarily looking at material from the Victorian Women’s Liberation and Lesbian Feminist Archive (VWLLFA). When doing general key word searches of the UMA collection, “LILITH COLLECTIVE” unexpectedly appeared in the results list. I ordered all 4 boxes and spent an afternoon leafing through the contents.
The Lilith Collective archive at UMA dates from the late 1980s and early 1990s. It contains ephemera relating to the journal’s production, Collective meeting minutes, correspondence with authors and subscribers, journal proofs, linocut prints of the cover art, and several early editions of the journal.
Papers imply that in the late 1980s Lilith Collective were discussing all the hot feminist topics of the period, such as the place of lesbian women and indigenous women in the women’s movement. They worried about whether the journal was too “academic,” and whether it was connected enough with the broader women’s movement. As well as feminist debates, they had many rather mundane but important conversations about financing and producing the journal. Reading the meeting minutes from the late 1980s reminded me at times of the collective’s recent meetings. However, in many respects the 1980s collective’s concerns and strategies were quite different. These differences are partly due to the demands of contemporary academic publishing, but also reflect shifts in feminist thought.
Finding the Lilith Archive at Melbourne University was uncanny. I was accessing an archive that “we” as the Lilith Collective “own.” Since we own the copyright, we can reproduce material from the archive without permission. However, none of the current Collective had known that we even had a public archive. When I shared my find with the 2015 Lilith Editorial Collective, then-social media manager and conference logo designer Ana Stevenson suggested we reproduce a photograph of the 1988 conference flyer in the 2015 Flesh and Blood program.
The Lilith Editorial Collective would like to expand the Lilith Collective archive, both public and private, and make it accessible to future Collectives. Additionally, when possible, we will make material publicly available. Although archives direct us towards the past, we believe that improving our archive is important for the journal’s future.
There is now a large community of retired Lilith Collective members. If you have papers, ephemera or digital material relating to the collective from any period, please contact us at lilithjournal@gmail.com. We are interested in anything you have that relates to the Lilith Collective, but would particularly like to see:
- Drafts, notes or reading lists from the fourth year undergraduate seminar that inspired the journal
- Ephemera, papers, material culture, digital material or oral testimony from the 1984-2007 Lilith Collectives
- Ephemera, papers, material culture or digital material relating to Lilith: A Feminist History Journal’s re-launch in 2012
Our plan is to digitise all material and make it available to current and future Lilith Collectives, and where possible, place material at The University of Melbourne Archives.
Petra Mosmann is a Ph.D. Candidate in the School of History and International Relations at Flinders University in South Australia. Her current research explores the relationship between Australian feminist collection practices and histories. Petra has been a member of the Australian Women’s History Network’s Lilith Editorial Collective since 2013.
Follow Petra on Twitter @petra_mosmann.
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