This study examines the meanings of the kitchen to women who were wives, mothers, housewives and homemakers in the 1950s in Western Australia. It uses qualitative data collected from oral history interviews with migrant and Australian born women. The book provides insight to women's everyday lives and analyses practices, such as cooking, ironing, budgeting, shopping, dishwashing and decorating which provide women with power. Central themes of this study explore the meaning of home and kitchen design and analyses how practices of the kitchen inform women's multiple identities. It also shows how dominant discourses, such as domesticity, femininity and efficiency reinforce gendered notions of women's work in the kitchen. Moreover, the book examines points of resistance, it shows that women perform their everyday practices, design their kitchens and decorate them in ways that perhaps were not always intended by domestic science experts, designers, architects and manufacturers.

Stuart Macintyre was an eminent figure within the world of Australian history scholarship for 45 years. This collection of essays and responses revisits and extends this extraordinary life of achievement and engagement. Leading scholars write here of Macintyre's contribution to understanding radicalism and communism, postwar reconstruction, education and civics, universities, liberalism, historiography and the history wars. They also tell us about collegiality and friendship. The practice of history writing and telling has long been central to the narrative of the nation in Australia. The Work of History connects us to that past. It raises the question of what comes next, and re-values Macintyre's contribution, serving both as a snapshot of the state of the historian's art, and an introduction to those who come more recently to this highly contested field.