Like many others whose budding feminist consciousnesses altered our perceptions and our teaching, I assumed that Australian women could be spoken of as a homogeneous group, whose relationship to Australian society changed with different historical circumstances, but who shared values and attitudes and experiences and above all a common social, psychological and economic oppression. This assumption now looks naïve. Rewriting, rethinking, gap-filling research has gradually produced a body of work on Australian women that has both given a sense of depth, continuity and growth to that decade-or-more old awareness of the absence of women as a topic from Australian scholarship and made impossible the idea that ‘Australian women’ is an uncomplicated, unsegmented category.

This new collection of essays, Australian Women: New feminist perspectives, is part of that historical process of cumulative research, and acknowledges that changed intellectual climate. An earlier collection, Australian Women: Feminist perspectives, edited by Norma Grieve and Patricia Grimshaw, was published in 1981. A topic, Australian women, and a body of feminist knowledge gathered in that first publication is now added to, revised and reworked. Five years ago, according to Norma Grieve and Ailsa Burns, editors of the new volume, compilation of that earlier companion volume was demanding: ‘in 1981 … the editors had to be diligent in seeking out the Australian material.’ By 1986, however, those edits found ‘an embarrassment of riches’, not only in sophistication and quantity of material, but also in a proliferation of topics.

These changes are signalled in the way the essays of New Feminist Perspectives, while they may derive from a disciplinary base, often refuse to be limited by traditionally appropriate topics or methodologies, and range outside these disciplinary restrictions. Beverly Kingston writes on nationalism and class in ‘The Lady and the Australian Girl’, Darryn Kruse and Charles Sowerwine on ‘Feminism and Pacifism’, Ailsa Burns asks, ‘Why Do Women Continue to Marry?’ and Ann Game and Rosemary Pringle go ‘Beyond Gender at Work’ to ‘Secretaries’. No longer is ‘woman’ as a topic added into disciplinary structures; feminist scholarship has generated and continues to generate its own issues as well as its perspectives and methodologies.

Thus, while the essays in New Feminist Perspectives are not generally radical in their theorising or topic areas, they are challenging and intensely relevant to the current questions surrounding women and the question of gender. All the essays are lively statements on, responses to, or reactions against research that by now has a past and an anticipated future. Its Introduction describes it tellingly as a ‘state of the art’ volume. This sense of dynamic yet stably based contemporaneity is reflected in the by now traditional feminist structure the editors have used to organise the essays. ‘We have chosen,’ they say ‘to concentrate on the omnipresent basic issues emanating from feminist thinking and practices.’ And these are still encapsulated for them by Juliet Mitchell’s ‘formulation of the “structures” that comprise “women’s estate”: production, reproduction, sexuality and the socialisation of children.’

Within these divisions there is a great deal of diversity (and some unevenness) between the essays. It seems invidious to single out individual essays for mention, when all are demanding of it, but that linked diversity makes for interesting internal relationships. For instance, Burns’s ‘Why Do Women Continue to Marry?’ begins with a summary of the feminist critique of the family. Connections between this and other essays in the section in which it is placed, ‘Women, Reproduction and The Family’, are clear by no less fruitful. However, it also connects with writing in other sections. For instance, in Ann Curthoy’s dazzlingly clear and provocative piece, ‘The Sexual Division of Labour: Theoretical Arguments’, she elucidates a network of social relations, women as domestic care-givers and the family among them, as a complex of factors influencing the sexual division of labour. So the volume creates a series of interrelated foci, sometimes surprisingly, onto its central concerns.

Based as it is firmly in history and the social sciences, this volume indicates the strong grip these knowledges have on women’s studies, if not feminist theorising, in Australia. It was disappointing to me not to find included work like that being done on representations of women in popular culture, in the visual arts, in film and in a range of writings from poetry and fictional narrative to diaries, letters and.so on. Aspects of material culture such as these are powerful carriers and sometimes subverters of dominant ideologies, and a great deal of important research is currently in progress in these and related areas. But the role that biology plays in sexual differentiation, for so long disallowed by many feminist theorists, is investigated. In ‘Male and Female Body and Brain’ contemporary rethinking and re-conceptualising · of the significance of bodily and physiological differences in the construction and maintenance of gender differences and divisions is surveyed and analysed. A flexible conclusion urges tire view that it is unnecessary to force a crude choice between a purely cultural and a biological view of human sexuality.

Australian Women: New Feminist Perspectives will be an invaluable text for use on a number of courses, both within and outside women’s studies. It will provide additional material in research areas: the essays have extensive end notes, and this volume, like the earlier one, has an index – extremely useful in an edited collection – which allows quick reference to the multiplicity of issues and theories referred to over the essays. And it is eminently readable, complementing the first publication and fulfilling its stated aim to contribute to ‘the continuing debate on women’s studies in the wider community’.

Bob Connell has the last word. In a densely argued piece given the final section ‘Feminist Theory or Feminist Thought?’ to itself, he theorises gender. Connell begins by comparing the impact of contemporary feminism on the social sciences and social thought in the 1980s with the impact of the beginnings of socialist class analysis in the mid-nineteenth century. Each is equally significant, he argues, with the capacity to revolutionise social analysis. Moving through an attempt to define the scope of a social theory of gender, a summary of key positions in sex role theory, of theories of power analysis, as well as of the politics of feminism, he concludes that the social, which is ‘radically un-natural’, is a process that ‘deals with the biological patterns given to it’. A neat solution to the often tortuously argued relations between sex and gender. Connell’s exploration of the kind of social theory of gender most adequate for contemporary analysis and critique is complex, inclusive and insistently intellectual. Theory matters, he says, and ‘the subversion of oppressive gender relations in part is intellectual work.’ No essay in this collection denies this, and most belong to the transforming process offered by feminist theory and practice.