The Real Matilda: Woman and Identity in Australia, 1788-1975 by Miriam Dixson

Book Description.

Secondhand. Good condition. Wear to book corners and edges. Pages and inside covers are sunned.

Miriam Dixson turns to Australia's colonial beginnings and finds a past steeped in negative feelings about women.

She argues that we must in the first instance, look at the males who were our founding fathers - the puritanical and self-doubting elite, the convicts, the working class and the depressed Irish. To make up for their feelings of emptiness, these men largely tried to ensure that their women felt even less complete as human beings than they did.

The Real Matilda invites us to ask new questions about our history, and in doing so, it illustrates some of the special features that mark the relationship between men and women in Australia.

"The principal historical investigation of women in Australian history" Patricia Grimshaw