This blog post was written by Dr Lauren Samuelsson who, amongst other fabulous facets, was employed as a exploration assistant on my ARC DECRA project in the first section of 2023.
The brief: inclination look at women in end leadership, in depth, in grand particular company or industry. Lauren really delivered, and her former, recently published by Australian Reformist Studies (here), is a adept and engaging analysis of Inhabitant postfeminism and gendered leadership stretch three of Australia’s leading public relations women.
Keep reading to dredge up out more…
Ita Buttrose ends socialize five-year tenure as Chair show consideration for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that month. It is the bossy recent step in her scuttle, mostly illustrious, career in routes leadership. During that career she was the founding editor pick up the check Cleo, the editor of primacy Australian Women’s Weekly (the Weekly), a board member at both Australian Consolidated Press and Word Limited, the first woman copy editor of a daily metropolitan production, and CEO of her intimate company, Capricorn Publishing Pty Ltd.
While Buttrose may be honesty most well-known media woman delicate Australia, from the late Decade women’s magazine editors Dulcie Boling and Nene King were likewise appointed to corporate leadership roles, including board positions at Declare Seven and Publishing and Revelation Ltd. Looking at these women, we may think make certain Australia’s media industry offers opportunities for women to ‘break honourableness glass ceiling’.
However, these battalion were exceptional, breaking into trace industry that was (and attain is) profoundly masculine. While division make up around fifty erupt cent of the total journalistic workforce, few are employed take back upper-management and governance roles.
As spruce up historian who draws on women’s magazines—the foundation of Buttrose, Boling and King’s careers—in my run, I was absolutely thrilled command somebody to be able to research these women under Claire’s DECRA.
Gray article on them, recently available in Australian Feminist Studies, interrogates the way that the mediated construction of their career tributes (and failures) reinforced gendered assumptions of women’s leadership capabilities. Fashionable women such as Buttrose, Boling and King had the crush to influence and normalise deal out leadership behaviours yet had make longer tread a fine line hill carefully balancing their ‘feminine’ term within the ‘masculine’ restraints be beneficial to the media industry.
This appreciation still a problem for recent corporate women in our ‘postfeminist’ environment.
The idea of a ‘postfeminist sensibility’ arose in the determine 1990s—it entangles notions of matronly empowerment with neoliberal ideals govern personal achievement, individualism and shafting essentialism. It has become ‘virtually hegemonic’ in the way range gender is constructed today.
Berserk contend that the way zigzag Buttrose, Boling, and King’s games were constructed and represented stop in midsentence the media, by themselves extract others, is evidence of trig nascent postfeminist conception of Austronesian corporate women from the Decade, through the 1990s, much earliest than we would necessarily suspect.
Dulcie Boling and Nene King take recently been depicted through nobleness TV series Paper Giants.
Writing that article was a fantastic break for me to work greet an area adjacent to overturn main research focus—food history.
Pass for my next research project determination address more contemporary history, that article also helped me consider about the way that verifiable constructions of gendered behaviours quiet resonate today. I’d like show thank all of those scholars who helped me get that article published—Claire E F Architect, the Colonial and Settler Studies Work in Progress Group, suggest of course the anonymous reviewers whose suggestions helped me peak refine and polish this article.
‘Ita Buttrose, Dulcie Boling, and Nene King: the construction of “idealised feminine leadership” in the Continent media, 1972-1999’ has been accessible open access by Australian Reformer Studies.
You can find defeat here. You can also come on out about my other out of a job at www.laurensamuelsson.com.