Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

Photograph by Mick Bradley
Susan Magarey AM, FASSA, PhD, was made a member of the Order of Australia
for pioneering Women’s Studies as a field of academic endeavour.
Her publications include four books: the prize-winning biography of Catherine
Helen Spence, Unbridling the tongues of women (1986) now being re-published;
Passions of the first-wave feminists (2001); Looking Back: Looking Forward. A Century
of the Queen Adelaide Club 1909-2009 (2009); and, with Kerrie Round, Roma the
First: a Biography of Dame Roma Mitchell (2007, second, revised, imprint 2009). She
has edited eight collections of articles – including Women in a Restructuring Australia:
Work and Welfare (1995) with Anne Edwards, and Debutante Nation: Feminism
Contests the 1890s (1993) with Sue Rowley and Susan Sheridan – and was for twenty
years (1985-1995) the Founding Editor of the triannual journal Australian Feminist
Studies.
She is the Founder of the Magarey Medal for Biography and a member of
the Board of History SA. She is writing a history of the Women’s Liberation Movement
in Australia. For fun, she swims, gardens, cooks and listens to classical music.
She describes her life in the words of Australian poet Jennifer Maiden: ‘Ambivalent,
ambidextrous, ambiguous, androgynous, amorous, ironic’. In her next life she will
be a trapeze artist.