Conference Paper

Author

Alvarez, Amaya

Title

Invisible Workers and the Archives of the History of Science

In

Recovering Science: Strategies and Models for the Past, Present and Future: Proceedings of a Conference Held at the University of Melbourne, October 1992

Editors

Tim Sherratt, Lisa Jooste and Rosanne Clayton

Imprint

Australian Science Archives Project, Canberra, 1995, pp. 71-78

Url

https://www.asap.unimelb.edu.au/confs/recovering/alvarez.htm

Subject

History of Australian Science - General

Format

Print

Description

And HTML

Abstract

As an historian I am interested in the way in which the dominant narratives of Australian science are constructed and the issue of what kind of records are accessed to help to develop such accounts. This interest stems, in part, from my research involving women in science in Australia, more specifically women workers at the CSIR during the 1930s and 40s; but also from a concern about the way in which certain workers are excluded from historical accounts, the reasons for their exclusion and the possible ways of writing about them which highlight their particular experience in science.

This paper is concerned with two main questions which I think are central to an understanding of the history of Australian science and to the relationship between archives and such history. Firstly, what are the ways of writing history which render invisible certain scientific workers; and secondly, does this exclusion derive from the approaches which dominate the history of Australian science, or does it lie with the records of Australian science, or both? This paper is not going to attempt to answer these questions; rather, it will highlight, through a brief survey of my research on women at the CSIR, some of the possible interests and conflicts that can arise in the construction of the history of Australian science.

[on marriage and motherhood]

For a number of women it was only when their pregnancies became too apparent to conceal that they actually made the move to inform the Council that they were married. A number indicated that they would in fact like to return to work after having children; the Council did not respond favourably to such requests. Some women went to desperate measures to try to hold onto work; there is correspondence from one woman, before she is dispensed with, offering to work for free if only she could be kept on; another [Mary Fuller] suicided shortly after being notified that her position was being advertised. She had also kept her marriage concealed for a year until the imminent birth of a child made this impossible; the sad irony in this instance was that the Council was expecting to retain her, as she was needed - the advertising of the position was done to appease the Public Service Board, but of course she was unaware of this strategy.

Source

Carlson 1996

Related entries

Corporate Bodies

• Australian Science Archives Project, The University of Melbourne (1985 - 1999)
• Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), Commonwealth of Australia (1926 - 1949)

People

• Fuller, Mary Ellen (1905 - 1938)

  page 77 [not named as such]

Related Published resources

isPartOf

• Recovering Science: Strategies and Models for the Past, Present and Future: Proceedings of a Conference Held at the University of Melbourne, October 1992 edited by Sherratt, Tim; Jooste, Lisa; Clayton, Rosanne (Canberra: Australian Science Archives Project, 1995), 124 pp, https://www.asap.unimelb.edu.au/confs/recovering/contents.htm. Details