Mrs Street-Now There's a Subject

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Eleanor Dark to Jean Devanny, 11 January 1944. See Dark (Citation1944, 109). 2. As Maria Grever has stated, ‘knowledge of the feminist past is generally not self-evident. It must be explained and acquired again and again’ (Citation1997, 364). Barbara Caine has further acknowledged that feminist historiography has been hampered by a lack of functioning feminist tradition, developed around certain dominating and legitimating figures and texts that are passed from one generation to the next (Citation1995, 3). 3. See Barbara Curthoys and Audrey McDonald (Citation1996) and Suzane Fabian and Morag Loh (Citation2000). 4. See, for example, Andree Wright (Citation1975), Patricia Ranald (Citation1982) and Kate White (Citation1982). 5. Marilyn Lake has written extensively on Street and her peers, most definitively in Getting Equal: the History of Australian Feminism (Citation1999). 6. As early as 1976, Lake wrote a review of Miriam Dixson's The Real Matilda for Hecate in which she disputed Dixson's dismissal of earlier Australian feminisms by using examples of active women's organisations at the turn of the century as evidence (Citation1976). 7. Jessie Street continues to be figured as visionary and somehow outside time. In 2002, the ABC programme Dimensions in Time commemorated Street for her ‘colourful’ and ‘controversial’ career and added, ‘In many ways, she was a woman way ahead of her time’ (‘Rebels: Jessie Street’ Citation2002). 8. Indeed, one of the most vocal critics of Creating a Nation, historian John Hirst, insisted on assessing the book's merits in terms of how the authors represented Gallipoli, ‘the great test’ for a history of the Australian nation. It was hardly surprising, then, particularly considering Hirst's proclamation that ‘defining the nation, ruling the nation and defending the nation have been done mostly by men’, that Creating a Nation was declared a failure as a historical narrative of nation on the basis of its overwhelming feminist emphasis. See John Hirst (Citation1995). 9. Street was never a member of the Communist Party of Australia, though she was active in associated organisations such as the Russian Friendship Society. 10. See The Sunday Telegraph, 30 October 1966; and ‘Notes’, CitationJessie Street Papers, National Library of Australia, MS2683/2/1723-1732. 11. Street had remained uncritical of the Soviet Union, even after the 1956 invasion of Hungary. 12. See Irene Greenwood (Citation1967, 30). Jessie Street was also featured in the 10th Anniversary edition of Our Women, published in 1963, as a ‘feminist pioneer’. 13. All references to this review are from Irene Greenwood, draft review for Our Women magazine, undated, Jessie Steet Papers, National Library of Australia, MS2883/2/1744. 14. Greenwood mentioned, for instance, that the UA were not mentioned in Norman MacKenzie's Women in Australia, published in 1962. It is particularly interesting that she locates historical significance here in terms of a book commissioned and published at a time when this generation(s) of feminists was fading from public life

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