Patricia Crawford and Philippa Maddern (eds.) Women as Australian Citizens: Underlying Histories.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Roberts, Winsome
• Date: 01 January 2000

Melbourne University Press Melbourne 2001 284 pp $32.95 (pbk) ISBN 0 522 84908 3

Federation is the starting point for this collection of papers that look at the position of women as Australian citizens. Although the book claims to be interdisciplinary, it is essentially an historical project, as the subtitle suggests. Its most welcome and original contribution is to provide a sustained historical focus that reaches back to British antecedents and colonial ones before looking at women as Australian citizens in the twentieth century. The papers are reflective of contemporary trends in scholarship. Firstly, a de-constructionist perspective is adopted that seeks to relativise. Thus the claim is made that `Citizenship is not a fixed concept...