In this blog, Margaret Allen remembers Emeritus Professor Alison MacKinnon, AO, FASSA (1941–2025).

In April 2025, we lost Alison MacKinnon AO, FASSA , Professor Emerita of the University of South Australia (UniSA), a noted feminist historian of education, who was my dear friend and colleague for over four decades.

I became friendly with Alison on the Paper/Publications Committee of the Third Women and Labour Conference, held in Adelaide in 1982. With Carol Johnson, Marg King and Jean Blackburn, we edited two volumes, All Her Labours: Working it Out and All Her Labours: Embroidering the Framework, published in 1984. We also worked together with Mary Hutchison on Fresh Evidence, New Witnesses, a documentary history of South Australian women’s history which came out in 1989. In 1994, we co-edited a special issue of Australian Feminist Studies on ‘Women and Citizenship’ to mark the centenary of women’s enfranchisement in South Australia. We also worked on an Australian Research Council-funded project, ‘Quaker Families and the Construction of Social Difference’, from 1995 to 1997 with Sandra Holton.

MacKinnon began her career as a school-teacher in Melbourne in the 1960s. She married and had a family, and was out of the workforce for some years. In 1975, she began an M.Ed. at the University of Adelaide and was asked to tutor in Education. At first, she refused, saying that with a young family it was impossible, but eventually she was persuaded. She recalled, modestly, ‘thus began, almost accidentally, a satisfying career in academia’. She did her Ph.D., ‘Awakening Women: Women, Higher Education and Family Formation in South Australia, 1880–1920’, part-time while negotiating work and family. Such a trajectory was typical of the era, when married women graduates were beginning to enter professional careers in larger numbers.

As she negotiated a new identity as a graduate, an academic, wife and mother, MacKinnon explored these issues for Australian women in the past and then widened her research to women in the wider Anglophone world. Her publications on the history of women’s education include, One foot on the Ladder in 1984, a study of the early women students at Adelaide’s Advanced School for Girls, the first students at University of Adelaide; The New Women: Adelaide’s Early Graduates, an oral history of Adelaide’s early women graduates in 1986; and Love and Freedom: Professional Women and the Reshaping of Personal Life, in 1997, an exploration of the reshaping of personal lives of professional women who studied at university around the turn of the nineteenth century, and the associated decline in the birth-rate from later in the nineteenth century. She thus related the changing position of women to broader social change.

This work on demography led to the important 1995 paper in Gender and History, ‘Were women present at the demographic transition? Questions from a feminist historian to historical demographers’. Her important intervention led to a small expert conference, in which she was an Invited participant, ‘Were women present at the Demographic Transition?’  in Nijmegen, the Netherlands in May 2005.

MacKinnon spent 1993-1994 at the Australian National University in the Research School of Social Sciences, where she co-ordinated the Gender Strand in the ‘Reshaping Australian institutions: Towards and beyond 2001’ project, editing Gender and Institutions: Work Welfare and Citizenship with Moira Gatens in 1998.

After her time at ANU, MacKinnon was appointed Director of the Institute for Social Research (now the Hawke Centre) at UniSA, with the brief to build up social research in this young university. This led to many collaborations and publications, including Hope: The Everyday and Imaginary Life of Young People on the Margins, edited with Simon Robb, Patrick O’Leary and Peter Bishop (2010); Fresh Water: New Perspectives on Water in Australia, edited with Stephen McKenzie and Jennifer McKay (2007); and The Hawke Legacy: Towards a Sustainable Society, edited with Gerry Bloustien and Barbara Comber (2009).

In 2010, after her formal retirement, MacKinnon published Women, Love and Learning: The Double Bind. This book told of a generation of American and Australian women in the 1950s and early 1960s who embodied – and challenged – the prescriptions of their times. This involved going to college and university, training for the professions and developing a life of the mind. This was, however, the era described by Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique. MacKinnon asked, could they be both domestic women and, also professional workers and intellectuals? As she wrote, ‘They led the way for a multitude in the years ahead. They were quietly making the revolution that was to come.’ She dedicated this book to her granddaughters, in the hope that they could avoid the ‘double bind’.

For someone so involved with UniSA, it was appropriate that she charted its history and success, in New Kid on the Block: The University of South Australia in the Unified National System in 2016.

MacKinnon also contributed to the local scene in South Australia as President of the History Council of South Australia, was a board member of History SA and served on the South Australian Heritage Council. Her work was widely recognised. In 2000, she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate (Doctor Honoris Causa), from the University of Umeå, Sweden, and was elected to the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia in 2005 in the History discipline.

MacKinnon served on the Advisory Board of the Centre for Population Studies at Umeå University (now known as the Centre for Demographic and Aging Research) from 2007. She presented the Clare Burton Memorial Lecture in 2005 on the topic of ‘Girls, Society and School: A Generation of Change?’; was inducted into South Australia’s Women’s Honour Roll in 2008; and was awarded the Order of Australia in 2009. She served on the board of the International Federation for Research in Women’s History from 2000 to 2005.

Along with being a great scholar, Alison was a generous collaborator and mentor. She is sadly missed by her family and her many friends and colleagues.

Emeritus Professor Alison MacKinnon: Select Bibliography

Margaret Allen, Mary Hutchison and Alison MacKinnon (eds) Fresh Evidence, New Witnesses, Adelaide: South Australian Government Printer, 1989.

Australian Feminist Studies, Special Issue on ‘Women and Citizenship’, Volume 9, Issue 19, 1994.

Moira Gatens and Alison MacKinnon (eds) Gender and Institutions: Welfare, Work and Citizenship, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Alison MacKinnon, One foot on the Ladder: Origins and Outcomes of Girls’ Secondary Schooling in South Australia, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1984.

Alison MacKinnon,The New Women, Adelaide’s Early Women Graduates. Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 1986.

Alison MacKinnon, ‘Awakening Women: Women, Higher Education and Family Formation in South Australia 1880–1920’, doctoral dissertation, University of Adelaide, Department of Education, 1989.

Alison MacKinnon, ‘Were women present at the demographic transition? Questions from a feminist historian to historical demographers’, Gender and History, Volume 7, Issue 2, 1995.

Alison Mackinnon, Love and Freedom: Professional Women and the Reshaping of Personal Life, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Alison MacKinnon, ‘Girls, Society and School: A Generation of Change?’, Australian Feminist Studies, Volume 21, Issue 50, 2007.

Alison MacKinnon, Women, Love and Learning: The Double Bind, Bern: Peter Lang, 2010.

Alison MacKinnon, New Kid on the Block: The University of South Australia in the Unified National System,Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2016.

Emily Potter, Alison MacKinnon, Stephen McKenzie and Jennifer McKay (eds) Fresh Water: New Perspectives on Water in Australia, Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing, 2007.

Simon Robb, Patrick O’Leary, Alison MacKinnon and Peter Bishop (eds) Hope: The Everyday and Imaginary Life of Young People on the Margins, Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 2010.

Women and Labour Publications Collective, All Her Labours: Working it Out, Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1984.

Women and Labour Publications Collective,  All Her Labours: Embroidering the Framework, Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1984.

Margaret Allen, is Professor Emerita Gender Studies at University of Adelaide. She taught gender studies and feminist histories over four decades and published on Australian women writers, women and work in the universities and women and religion.  She has published on transnational gendered histories, whiteness, ‘race’ and Indian-Australian relationships c 1880-1940 and is co-author of with Jane Haggis, Fiona Paisley and Clare Midgley of Cosmopolitan Lives on the Cusp of Empire:  Interfaith, Cross-Cultural and Transnational Networks, 1860-1950 Palgrave Pivot, 2017.

She is a CI on the project Reworlding Martindale Hall, see martindalestories.org

She is a member of the Fay Gale Centre for Research on Gender. She was AWHN Convenor, 2000-2005 and on IFRWH board 2005-2010. Currently she is writing a biography of Australian writer Catherine Martin (1847-1937).

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