‘White, male and middle class’

Here is Catherine Hall’s collection of work written over a thirteen-year span, a book which both exemplifies and tells the story of her personal engagement with feminist history. As I leaf through it, White, Male and Middle Class seems to me to be from very much the same kind of world that I inhabit, indicating a somewhat similar journey through Marxism, feminism, history, cultural studies, poststructuralism, wrestling with issues of concern to do with class, gender and race. I approach this book with a strange feeling, for I produced a work somewhat similar in intent and structure six years ago, tracing feminist theoretical and historical debates as they occurred in Australia from 1970 (Curthoys, 1988). Here is, perhaps, I think, a very different version of my own endeavours, from the other side of the globe, from the other side of what was once ‘the Empire’. Here is a book which will perhaps tell me what I missed out on, living on the ‘wrong’ side of the post-imperial world. She speaks from the centre, I muse, and I speak from the margin. And so this book is of interest even before I have read past the acknowledgments and the first few pages of the introduction. I bring to it all kinds of expectations, what Australian historians of an earlier generation were fond of calling ‘cultural baggage’. Here is the nineteenth-century British history which for me is a kind of homeland, a place where true history is done, where my own understanding of history was shaped through my undergraduate education at the University of Sydney in the 1960s. Indeed, it was this kind of history which underlay my own doctoral study of the formation of ideas of race, ethnicity and colonial identity in nineteenth-century New South Wales. And here is the British feminist tradition which provided so many of the ideas Australian feminists once debated, while trying to put together our socialist and feminist and haltingly postcolonial traditions and inheritances, trying to create a coherent and unified worldview out of very disparate elements. We have been on the see-through side of a one way mirror, while they, the British feminists, have been on the other side, seeing themselves, but not us seeing them. This situation seems to me to be at last changing, as more international dialogue emerges, helped along by new communication technologies, increased international conferences and visits, and international journals like Cul tural Studies itself. Perhaps my assumptions about centres and margins will need some rethinking.