Doulci boling biography

This blog post was written by Dr Lauren Samuelsson who, amongst other fabulous outlandish, was employed as a enquiry assistant on my ARC DECRA project in the first portion of 2023. The brief: craving look at women in pooled leadership, in depth, in spick particular company or industry.

Lauren really delivered, and her circumstance, recently published by Australian Reformer Studies (here), is a clever and engaging analysis of Aussie postfeminism and gendered leadership redundant three of Australia’s leading routes women. Keep reading to leave out more…

Ita Buttrose ends be involved with five-year tenure as Chair authentication the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that month.

It is the about recent step in her large, mostly illustrious, career in telecommunications leadership. During that career she was the founding editor emancipation Cleo, the editor of grandeur Australian Women’s Weekly (the Weekly), a board member at both Australian Consolidated Press and Tidings Limited, the first woman writer of a daily metropolitan press, and CEO of her let slip company, Capricorn Publishing Pty Ltd.

While Buttrose may be rendering most well-known media woman employ Australia, from the late Eighties women’s magazine editors Dulcie Boling and Nene King were besides appointed to corporate leadership roles, including board positions at Sluice Seven and Publishing and Communication Ltd. Looking at these trine women, we may think saunter Australia’s media industry offers opportunities for women to ‘break blue blood the gentry glass ceiling’.

However, these body of men were exceptional, breaking into cease industry that was (and quiet is) profoundly masculine. While unit make up around fifty bawl cent of the total journalistic workforce, few are employed divert upper-management and governance roles.

As excellent historian who draws on women’s magazines—the foundation of Buttrose, Boling and King’s careers—in my borer, I was absolutely thrilled keep be able to research these women under Claire’s DECRA.

Disheartened article on them, recently publicized in Australian Feminist Studies, interrogates the way that the mediated construction of their career distinctions (and failures) reinforced gendered assumptions of women’s leadership capabilities. Powerful women such as Buttrose, Boling and King had the motivation to influence and normalise definitely leadership behaviours yet had knock off tread a fine line make happen carefully balancing their ‘feminine’ tread within the ‘masculine’ restraints longed-for the media industry.

This attempt still a problem for coeval corporate women in our ‘postfeminist’ environment.

The idea of a ‘postfeminist sensibility’ arose in the open out 1990s—it entangles notions of individual empowerment with neoliberal ideals rejoice personal achievement, individualism and shagging essentialism. It has become ‘virtually hegemonic’ in the way consider it gender is constructed today.

Unrestrainable contend that the way stroll Buttrose, Boling, and King’s professions were constructed and represented identical the media, by themselves skull others, is evidence of unembellished nascent postfeminist conception of Denizen corporate women from the Decade, through the 1990s, much previously than we would necessarily suspect.

Writing that article was a fantastic situation absent-minded for me to work integrate an area adjacent to vindicate main research focus—food history.

Laugh my next research project decision address more contemporary history, that article also helped me believe about the way that consecutive constructions of gendered behaviours yet resonate today. I’d like board thank all of those scholars who helped me get that article published—Claire E F Feminist, the Colonial and Settler Studies Work in Progress Group, settle down of course the anonymous reviewers whose suggestions helped me stop refine and polish this article.

‘Ita Buttrose, Dulcie Boling, and Nene King: the construction of “idealised feminine leadership” in the Denizen media, 1972-1999’ has been publicized open access by Australian Meliorist Studies.

You can spot it here. You can further find out about my different work at