Alison MacKinnon

The reconstruction of higher education in Australia at the end of the 1980s radically reshaped many existing universities. However, in South Australia, Dawkins's educational changes brought into existence an entirely new university, the University of South Australia, formed by the merging of two former institutions from the advanced education sector, the South Australian Institute of Technology and the South Australian College of Advanced Education. This volume first traces the unsuccessful path taken by those institutions to form partnerships with the two existing universities in South Australia. Having been rejected by Flinders and the University of Adelaide respectively the two former colleges joined forces and began life as a new university in a new system of higher education. Lacking research funding and access to higher degree students in its previous life, the new university nevertheless had considerable strengths which suited the new system, particularly in equity and links with business and the community. The story of the University of South Australia is one of the most successful of the Dawkins changes. After a shaky start its rapid rise to prominence in South Australia and beyond allows it to be truly seen as 'a new kid on the block' in Australian higher education.

This important interdisciplinary volume explores what might constitute a feminist approach to institutional design and reshaping. What is the scope, it asks, in contemporary Australian society, for ensuring that institutions acknowledge gender difference and deliver more equitable outcomes? This feminist perspective on institutional design shows how gendered regulatory norms underpin and intersect with all other institutional settings. The leading team of writers includes Deborah Mitchell, Bettina Cass, Chilla Bulbeck, Carol Bacchi and Joan Eveline. Topics discussed include: institutions, embodiment and sexual difference; the welfare state; housing policy; household work; republicanism and citizenship; gender-based discrimination. This book makes a major contribution to debates about the reshaping of our institutions as we move towards the twenty-first century.

At the turn of the century educated women frequently had to choose between ‘love’ and ‘freedom’, but they confidently expected that their daughters and grand-daughters would not. Can the educated women of the 1990s have both autonomy and commitment - the pursuit of a career and a fulfilling personal life? In this book, Alison Mackinnon traces the history of women’s challenges to changes in education, employment, reproductive science and law. She shows the connection between the lives of the first generation of women university graduates and the sudden decline in the national birthrate. So dramatic was this shift that it sparked a Royal Commission into its cause. Alison Mackinnon’s extensive research shows that the declining birthrate was not simply the result of ‘selfish’, educated, young women refusing to bear the burdens of motherhood, but was symptomatic of a larger questioning of the role of women in procreation, the role of women in marriage and the institution of marriage itself. Access to education was the first step in the changing balance of power between men and women. Increased economic power, work opportunities and knowledge of contraception resulted in increased choice about when to marry and have children, and indeed, if to marry and have children at all. This re-evaluation of marriage and motherhood continues today and the same tools of guilt and intimidation are at work. HIV/AIDS, eugenics and claims of ‘race suicide’ are all being used to try to restate monogamy, heterosexuality and marriage and curtail sexual freedom. Utilising social and government history, autobiography and statistical analysis, Alison Mackinnon shows that ‘the Marriage Problem’ exists as much in the 1990s as it did in the 1890s. Men and women today are still challenging the boundaries between work and home, profession and private life, trying to find a way to have it all.