Papers by Carla Pascoe Leahy
Feminist Studies, 2019
Men didn't do anything.. .. The mother did for the child. The father went out to work.. .. I was ... more Men didn't do anything.. .. The mother did for the child. The father went out to work.. .. I was a very determined, modern woman, but I didn't mind being the little wife.-Marjorie, 1950s mother 1 1. All interviewees are referred to by pseudonyms. Where permission is granted by the interviewee, interview material is preserved at Museums Victoria in Melbourne, Australia.
Environment and History, 2022
Environment and History Environment and History is an interdisciplinary journal which aims to bri... more Environment and History Environment and History is an interdisciplinary journal which aims to bring scholars in the humanities and natural sciences closer together, with the deliberate intention of constructing long and well-founded perspectives on present day environmental problems.
When conducting interviews about sensitive subject matter such as family life, powerful emotions ... more When conducting interviews about sensitive subject matter such as family life, powerful emotions may arise. The kinds of unexpected distress that can surface in interviews concerning topics laden with personal significance are different to the readily anticipated trauma that accompanies interviews in post-crisis or post-conflict situation. This article analyses the ethical considerations that accompany such research, drawing upon literature from oral history and qualitative sociology. The article traces ethical issues during the temporal phases of qualitative research-before, during and after an interview-before proposing three strategies that interviewers can adopt to help protect narrators from ongoing harm or distress after an interview. Such ethical safeguards include the self-interview, the post-interview follow-up with the narrator, and adopting an ethics of reciprocity that allows the narrator to feel that they are contributing to a larger purpose through involvement in research.
Lilith: A Feminist History Journal, 2014
International Journal of Heritage Studies, 2021
New motherhood is mediated through the material world. In this liminal, vulnerable period of matr... more New motherhood is mediated through the material world. In this liminal, vulnerable period of matrescence, consumption of and interaction with objects co-constitutes the mother and her child. Material culture is central to motherhood, as mothers negotiate preparation, mastery and memorialisation of their maternal role through objects. While some objects are used once then discarded, other objects are saved for longer periods, either by individuals within private collections or by curators in cultural institutions. In preserving certain aspects of the material culture with which mothers interact, a form of maternal heritage is created which is inescapably partial. This article examines the ways in which mothers, mothering and motherhood are preserved and memorialised in public and private collections. It analyses maternal material culture in cultural institutions alongside personal archives, drawing out the synchronies and divergences between them as well as the ways in which material culture has changed since the mid-twentieth century. It concludes by discussing the ways in which the maternal heritage constituted through institutional and private archiving makes possible certain aspects of the history of mothers while obscuring others.
Past & Present , 2020
Female descendants within biological families are connected on multiple levels. While the female ... more Female descendants within biological families are connected on multiple levels. While the female foetus floats in the liquid of her mother’s womb, her body silently manufactures the eggs that may one day create her own daughter. In this sense, the granddaughter is formed within the grandmother: she shares her cellular material and has inhabited the same body. In societies where children have a singular maternal figure providing care — such as industrialized countries in the twentieth and twentieth-first centuries — female generations also share an emotional matrilineal inheritance. When a woman becomes a mother for the first time, she undergoes a psychological transformation that American psychiatrist and psychoanalytic theorist Daniel Stern calls ‘the birth of the mother’.1 The emotional negotiation of new motherhood includes several layers of inter-subjective dialogue for the new mother: with herself, her child, her partner if present, her friends and her family. In the process of fashioning her own sense of herself as a mother — her maternality2 — a woman’s own infancy and childhood is emotionally revisited and re-evaluated. Sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously, she is drawn into a re-evaluation of her relationship with her own mother and her mother’s parenting style. Whether willingly or reluctantly, the process of becoming a mother necessarily invokes the spectre of one’s own experience of being mothered.
Oral History Association of Australia Journal, 2007
Qualitative Research, 2021
When conducting interviews about sensitive subject matter such as family life, powerful emotions ... more When conducting interviews about sensitive subject matter such as family life, powerful emotions may arise. The kinds of unexpected distress that can surface in interviews concerning topics laden with personal significance are different to the readily anticipated trauma that accompanies interviews in post-crisis or post-conflict situation. This article analyses the ethical considerations that accompany such research, drawing upon literature from oral history and qualitative sociology. The article traces ethical issues during the temporal phases of qualitative research-before, during and after an interview-before proposing three strategies that interviewers can adopt to help protect narrators from ongoing harm or distress after an interview. Such ethical safeguards include the self-interview, the post-interview follow-up with the narrator, and adopting an ethics of reciprocity that allows the narrator to feel that they are contributing to a larger purpose through involvement in research.
Journal of Family Studies, 2015
Mothers of today have available to them an unprecedented quantity and variety of information conc... more Mothers of today have available to them an unprecedented quantity and variety of information concerning the process of conceiving, bearing, birthing and raising a child. Yet it is only a little more than half a century ago that mothers were firmly convinced of the authority of maternal instinct. From experiential knowledge shared verbally amongst female relatives and friends, to a profusion of 'expert' information accessible virtually and instantaneously, the ways women learn about mothering have shifted dramatically over the past 70 years. Drawing upon oral history interviews and historical child-rearing material, this article illuminates shifts in the source, content and transmission of advice to Australian mothers since 1945.
Families, Relationships, Societies, 2022
In this article, we explore the emotionally reflexive processes by which some women build materna... more In this article, we explore the emotionally reflexive processes by which some women build maternal futures in the unsettling context of climate change, aiming to contribute to a better understanding of reproductive (and other) future building as aided by emotions. We analyse the online testimonies of an organisation that raises awareness about the interrelationship between climate change and reproductive decision making. The findings illustrate how women's consideration of possible futures is relational, guided by their feelings and what they know or imagine to be the feelings of their families, the wider society and future generations. This is important for interrogating how climate change might unsettle dominant maternal and familial practices but extend understandings of connection. We position cohabitability as a possible foundation for reproductive decision making but find this possibility unfulfilled. Rather, maternal future building more commonly reinforces individualised and gendered responsibility for the planet's future.
History Compass, 2010
Children have long been shadowy or forgotten figures within historical narratives. It was not unt... more Children have long been shadowy or forgotten figures within historical narratives. It was not until the second half of the twentieth century that a critical historiography of children and childhood emerged. In the Australian context, histories of young people were not published until the 1980s. Whilst the historiography of the child is now a burgeoning field, it has been haunted by two major challenges: a lack of sources authored by children themselves; and a tendency amongst adult scholars to romanticise children. This article situates the Australian historiography of children within an international context. Given the difficulties of reconstructing the lives of children in the past, it argues for an interdisciplinary approach, drawing upon the insights of folklore, material culture, geography and oral history.
Australian Historical Studies, 2009
... 12Interview with Livio Belia on 3 August 2007. Born in Italy in 1946, Livio's family mig... more ... 12Interview with Livio Belia on 3 August 2007. Born in Italy in 1946, Livio's family migrated to Australia in 1950 and moved to Carlton not long after. ... It was a time, Doug Beattie remembers, when it seemed that nothing dramatically changed: The fifties, there was no change. ...
International Journal of Play
Http Dx Doi Org 10 1080 09612025 2014 948274, Sep 10, 2014
Across the twentieth century, the technologies available to Australian women for managing menstru... more Across the twentieth century, the technologies available to Australian women for managing menstruation were transformed. Products for staunching blood flow changed from bulky, re-usable rags to ‘invisible’, disposable pads and tampons. Disposal facilities changed from the humble waste bin, through to incinerators, and eventually to specialised, antibacterial ‘sanitary disposal units’. The greatest impact of these shifts was felt in public toilets: places where women must deal with private bodily functions in semi-public, communal environments. Promotional materials for menstrual products and disposal facilities promised that use of their technologies would obviate age-old menstrual taboos, emancipating women from the anxiety and mortification long associated with menstruation. This paper draws upon oral histories to argue that by the close of the twentieth century the reverse was true. Increasingly efficacious and convenient menstrual products meant that Australian women could more convincingly maintain ‘menstrual etiquette’ by keeping their monthly bleeding almost completely concealed.
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Papers by Carla Pascoe Leahy
The essays in this book span the experiences of children from classical Rome to the present moment, and examine the diverse social and historical contexts underlying the public representations of childhood in Britain, Europe, North America, Australia, North Africa and Japan. Case studies examine the heritage of schools and domestic spaces; the objects and games of play; the commemoration of child Holocaust survivors; memorials to Indigenous child-removal under colonial regimes; children as collectors of objects and as authors of juvenilia; curatorial practices at museums of childhood; and the role of children as visitors to historical sites.
Until now, the cultural heritage of children and the representations of childhood have been largely absent from scholarly discussions of museology, heritage places and material culture. This volume rectifies that gap, bringing together international experts in children’s histories and heritage. Aimed at a wide readership of students, academics, and museum and heritage professionals, Children, Childhood and Cultural Heritage authoritatively defines the key issues in this exciting new field.