A celebrity decorator with blue hair. A single mother who advised JFK in the Oval Office. A Christian nudist with a passion for almond milk. A century ago, ten Australian women did something remarkable. Throwing convention to the wind, they headed across the Pacific to make their fortune. Historian Dr Yves Rees tells their story in a new book called: Travelling to Tomorrow – The modern women who sparked Australia’s romance with America.

In 2008, back when millennials were still young and skinny jeans were fashionable, I was procrastinating in the Melbourne Uni library when I stumbled upon an article that changed my life. On the pages of an old magazine, I discovered the story of modernist artist Mary Cecil Allen. An enfant terrible of the Melbourne art world, in 1927 Mary decamped for the brighter lights of New York, and later introduced abstract expressionism to Australia. Sounds like a good research project, I thought. I was twenty and had just stepped onto a trajectory that would shape the next sixteen years.

Once immersed in Mary’s life and times, I started wondering if there was a bigger story here.

New York was a daring choice for an Australian in 1927—let alone a young and unaccompanied Australian woman. Had any other women done such an audacious thing? Turns out, they had. Hundreds and hundreds of them.

Writers and musicians and economists and actors and librarians and more. Over four years, I did a PhD on the Australian women who, in the early 1900s, set sail to seek their fortune in the United States.

Back then, I still thought I was a woman too. Why wouldn’t I? I’d been born with a vagina, and so everyone concluded: girl. I was a people pleaser, a perfectionist, and I was determined to ace this gender assignment. In 2012, when I started my PhD, I had long hair and short skirts and twenty-four years of female socialisation that kept me making nice.

As a novice women’s historian, I approached my subjects from a position of identification. Like them, I was a white Australian with the privilege and appetite to orient my life around travel and education and career. They felt, in many ways, like a version of me born a century earlier. They were my forebears, direct ancestors in a lineage of feminine resistance to being put in small boxes, women who could model how to navigate womanhood in a world that still positioned men as the default human subject. Through them, I might finally learn how to be.

Over my long years of research, I ran towards these forebears like an orphaned puppy looking for a mother, a hot mess of confusion and gaping need. How do I do this strange thing called womanhood? If I study you hard enough, if I join all the dots of your big and rebellious lives, will I finally crack the code? Teach me, show me the way. Solve my gender trouble, oh ye fellow white ladies who went before.

You can probably guess how this story ends. Spoiler alert: when womanhood feels like a puzzle with a missing rulebook, or a role you never signed up to play, or a scratchy jumper a few sizes too small, you might not actually be a woman at all.

It took me until 2018 to figure this out. By that point, I was thirty and revising my PhD into a book. I had a publishing contract, an academic job. The whole shebang. I was a real women’s historian. Only I wasn’t, and never had been, a woman myself.

Once this realisation landed, I didn’t know how to think about women in the past. Were they still my forebears? Was their history still my history? Women’s history was my inheritance, or so I thought. Now, however, I’d been disinherited—or had disinherited myself. It was too painful to consider, so I didn’t.

Instead of revising the manuscript, I invented other work for myself. For years, I wrote economic history, migration history—anything to avoid my ‘women’s history’ book, that rotting corpse of my old certainties. I didn’t know how to write women’s history anymore because I no longer understood my relationship to that concept. My book remained in the form of Word drafts and manila folders, collecting dust.

Then one day, I remembered that Mary Cecil Allen played fast and loose with her own gender assignment. The painter preferred pants and came to be known by her masculine middle name. If a Cecil in pants was part of ‘women’s history’, was this field really so far removed from my own experience?

Would someone like Mary have understood themselves as nonbinary if they’d had this concept at their disposal? The possibilities of self-definition are always shaped by historical context. With different ideas and words floating around, the same person might think about themselves in an entirely new light.

I had already met countless older people who told me, somewhat wistfully, that they would call themselves nonbinary or trans if only they were 30 or 40 years younger. Had they’d encountered this idea in their youth, their lives might have looked very different. How many other people, dead and buried, might have thought the same way?

When I started looking for it, gender non-conformity was everywhere in my ‘women’s’ history.  There was the nurse Cynthia Reed, who was known by the nickname Bob and had surgery to reduce her breasts. Then there was the author Dorothy Cottrell, who wrote an autobiographical novel with a male protagonist. In that same novel, another character is described as having a mix of male and female energies – a gender expression we’d now call nonbinary. ‘In some natures sex is definitely marked in every fibre of being’, Dorothy wrote. ‘But in rarer cases the blending of the elements masculine and feminine seem almost equal.’

This is not to say that these ‘women’ were not women at all. It is not to say that every person in history who challenged gender norms was nonbinary or trans. It is simply to say that we know less than we think. We can know the gender people were assigned at birth, we can glimpse whether they accepted or challenged that assignment, but beyond that is a whole realm of unknowability and mystery. We can only wonder and imagine.

How marvellous, how beautiful.

• Travelling to Tomorrow is out now. 

 

Picture at top: Yves Rees. Picture: Catherine Black

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