‘The hand that pours the gin’, Gone Tomorrow: Australia in the 80s, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1982, chapter 8 (pdfs of out-of-copyright material made available by the author)
The chapter uses the medium of women’s magazines to show how corporations appeal to women customers and how they use them as part-time employees. At the same time this employment is threatened by ‘microprocessors’.
The chapter looks at changes in female employment patterns over decades, the threat to female employment from the rise of office automation, the messages put out to women by the Australian Women’s Weekly, then later publications such as Pol, Cleo and Nova, the rise of Ita Buttrose, the rivalry between Packer’s Weekly and Murdoch’s New Idea, the lives of some progressive women who did not feature in these publications, and the careers of some pioneering public women of the era.
The pdfs are here: part A, part B, part C, part D. It may be necessary to rotate pages.
Honest History records its appreciation to Humphrey McQueen for making his private archive available to Honest History.
.