Oral History and Australia’s First Women Law Professors

The first Australian women law professors’ reflections and experiences help us better understand their own contributions to the academy. This chapter uses some of these women’s own voices, largely collected as part of a larger scale oral history project run in Australia on Trailblazing Women Lawyers, to enlarge the record, by giving some (limited) access to their own description and reflections. Drawing upon a feminist methodological motivation to own and affirm the life experiences of women it adds an additional ethnographic perspective to understanding the experiences of women entering the legal academy and making progress in it. The chapter begins by providing a brief outline of the motivation of the broader oral history project followed by short biographies of the women chosen for this chapter. It then draws out some specific aspects of those interviews to highlight how their personal experiences, as women, and through their overseas periods of study, influenced their professional lives as academics, before identifying some of their specific contributions in the academy.