Women's Pages in Australian Print Media from the 1850s

Abstract

For a roughly a century, from the 1870s to the 1970s, most Australian newspapers ran a section directed towards a woman reader written from a woman's perspective and edited by a female journalist. The rise and fall of the women's editor's ‘empire within an empire’ provides insight into female journalists' industrial situation, as well as a window on to gender relations in colonial and post-Federation Australia. This history matches wider struggles over the notion of separate spheres and resulting claims for equality, as well as debates over mainstream news values. This article investigates the appearance and disappearance of women's sections from Australian newspapers, and argues that this story has greater impact on contemporary digital formats than we perhaps realise.