This home page post was written by Dr Lauren Samuelsson who, amongst other fabulous articles, was employed as a research helpful on my ARC DECRA project reduce the price of the first half of 2023. Loftiness brief: to look at women note corporate leadership, in depth, in graceful particular company or industry. Lauren in fact delivered, and her article, recently publicised by Australian Feminist Studies (here), attempt a skilful and engaging analysis be more or less Australian postfeminism and gendered leadership call three of Australia’s leading media division. Keep reading to find out more…
Ita Buttrose ends her five-year tenure sort Chair of the Australian Broadcasting Gathering this month. It is the first recent step in her long, chiefly illustrious, career in media leadership. Beside that career she was the establishment editor of Cleo, the editor accept the Australian Women’s Weekly (the Weekly), a board member at both Inhabitant Consolidated Press and News Limited, say publicly first woman editor of a circadian metropolitan newspaper, and CEO of go in own company, Capricorn Publishing Pty Ltd. While Buttrose may be the domineering well-known media woman in Australia, strange the late 1980s women’s magazine editors Dulcie Boling and Nene King were also appointed to corporate leadership roles, including board positions at Channel Heptad and Publishing and Broadcasting Ltd. Awaiting at these three women, we can think that Australia’s media industry offers opportunities for women to ‘break rendering glass ceiling’. However, these women were exceptional, breaking into an industry mosey was (and still is) profoundly macho. While women make up around greenback per cent of the total journalistic workforce, few are employed in upper-management and governance roles.
As a historian who draws on women’s magazines—the foundation call upon Buttrose, Boling and King’s careers—in empty work, I was absolutely thrilled figure up be able to research these unit under Claire’s DECRA. My article respect them, recently published in Australian Reformer Studies, interrogates the way that righteousness mediated construction of their career launder (and failures) reinforced gendered assumptions confront women’s leadership capabilities. Elite women specified as Buttrose, Boling and King esoteric the power to influence and change particular leadership behaviours yet had add up to tread a fine line in densely balancing their ‘feminine’ traits within loftiness ‘masculine’ restraints of the media manufacture. This is still a problem expend contemporary corporate women in our ‘postfeminist’ environment.
The idea of a ‘postfeminist sensibility’ arose in the late 1990s—it entangles notions of female empowerment with neoliberal ideals of personal achievement, individualism tube gender essentialism. It has become ‘virtually hegemonic’ in the way that union is constructed today. I contend go off the way that Buttrose, Boling, dowel King’s careers were constructed and representational in the media, by themselves famous others, is evidence of a nascent postfeminist conception of Australian corporate unit from the 1970s, through the Decennary, much earlier than we would by definition suspect.
Dulcie Boling and Nene King own recently been depicted through the Boob tube series Paper Giants.
Writing this article was a fantastic opportunity for me tackle work in an area adjacent stunt my main research focus—food history. Significance my next research project will talk more contemporary history, this article very helped me think about the go mouldy that historical constructions of gendered behaviours still resonate today. I’d like disturb thank all of those scholars who helped me get this article published—Claire E F Wright, the Colonial spreadsheet Settler Studies Work in Progress Heap, and of course the anonymous reviewers whose suggestions helped me to civilize and polish this article.
‘Ita Buttrose, Dulcie Boling, and Nene King: the expression of “idealised feminine leadership” in glory Australian media, 1972-1999’ has been promulgated open access by Australian Feminist Studies. You can find it here. Boss about can also find out about free other work at