Margaret Allen reflects on an exhibition and research project exploring the academic working lives of women in South Australia since 1970.
The Fay Gale Centre for Research on Gender at the University of Adelaide has been researching the working lives of retired women academics from South Australian universities employed between 1970 and 2024.
The project team headed by Professor Katie Barclay (now at Macquarie University) included Professor Vivienne Moore, Dr Pam Papadelos and Dr Prudence Black. Other Fay Gale centre members on the advisory committee were Professor Megan Warin and Professor Emerita Margaret Allen.
One of the outcomes of the project is an exhibition, ‘Wise and Wonderful Women’ in the Barr Smith Library, which ran from 15 May to 9 July 2025.
During this project, 45 women ranging up to 84 years of age were interviewed about their paths into academic life, their progress (or otherwise) in their careers, their experiences of doing research, seeking promotion and moving into retirement and post-retirement activities.
The era under consideration was one of great change. Formerly state funded teacher’s colleges and institutes of technology became federally funded in the early 1970s, later amalgamating into large colleges of advanced education. University fees were abolished under the Whitlam government and later re-introduced by the Hawke government. The binary system was replaced by a unitary system of tertiary education with the Dawkins reforms on the early 1990s.
Over these years, tertiary education expanded vastly, and the number of women academics increased greatly: progressing from women as ‘the eternal tutor’ in the mid 1970s to greater opportunities for promotion from the 1980s. More child-care was fought for and policies of Equal Opportunity expanded, and also waned, during the period.
Looking back on their working lives, these women tell a story of how women made careers in male-dominated institutions and fought to transform their environments to support women’s success. This exhibition celebrated the important work they performed in shaping our institutions today.
As this project reveals, women worked across many different disciplines, drawn from across the academy, participants had expertise in the social sciences, visual arts, humanities, law, architecture, nursing, psychology, maths, physics, and biology. Most would be described as part of the ‘baby boomer’ generation, although some were older. They were distinctive as a group of women for whom professional careers opened in large numbers for the first time. They had to work out how to develop a research and teaching career, often while juggling family life and child-care. They occupied roles ranging from Demonstrator, Level A lecturer to Senior lecturer and Professor.
Nowadays, the usual career path for would-be academics, proceeds from undergraduate and post graduate degrees and possibly to post-doctoral positions. It is a testing path, and sadly with the current shrinking of opportunities many highly qualified and talented women can’t get an academic job or are abruptly losing them in the current rounds of savage cuts.
When many of the interviewees began their working lives, however, there were no clear signposts and very few role models to follow.
When asked about their strategies in entering an academic career, many responded with surprise, describing themselves as just lucky and ‘accidental academics’. In 1980, women constituted only 16.2% academic staff in Australian universities and of these, 30.7% were tutors.
The exhibition also marks sone notable moments such as in 2001, when all three South Australian universities had women Vice-Chancellors, namely Professor Mary O’Kane (University of Adelaide), Professor Denise Bradley (UniSA) and Professor Anne Edwards (Flinders University).
The first of the publications that will flow from this project are:
Prudence Black, Vivienne Moore, and Katie Barclay, ‘Leaving the Institution: Academic Women and Retirement,’ Australian Feminist Studies 39, no. 121 (2024): 354-370.
Katie Barclay, Vivienne Moore, Pam Papadelos and Prudence Black, ‘Australian academic women and promotion since 1975: patriarchal equilibrium?’ Women’s History Review (ahead-of-print 2025).
Professor Margaret Allen is Professor Emerita of Gender Studies and executive member of the Fay Gale Centre at the University of Adelaide. Margaret began teaching feminist history in 1979. She was convener of the Australian Women’s History Network between 2000 and 2004, and then IFRWH executive member and newsletter editor from 2005 to 2010. Margaret researches transnational, postcolonial and gendered histories, focusing upon links between India and Australia from c. 1880 to 1940. Her recent publications include Cosmopolitan Lives on the Cusp of Empire: Interfaith, Cross-Cultural and Transnational Networks, 1860-1950 (Palgrave Pivot, 2017, with Jane Haggis, Clare Midgley and Fiona Paisley).
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