Travelling to Tomorrow: Australian Women in the United States, 1910-1960

Abstract

‘I always find a visit to the United States exhilarating,’ wrote Dorothy Jenner in her autobiography. ‘They are light years ahead of us, sometimes on the wrong foot, but more often on the right one.’ For this Sydney-born actress and journalist, who visited America on five occasions between 1915 and 1967, venturing across the Pacific was not just a physical journey but an exercise in time travel, an opportunity to launch herself into a new and better world to come. An unorthodox but far from unique figure, Jenner was one of thousands of twentieth-century Australian women who headed abroad in search of wider horizons but chose to deviate from the well-worn path to London. Travelling instead to the United States, they pursued study, work and adventure in a nation that many, like Jenner, saw as charging ahead along an imagined highway into the future.

This thesis tells the story of these transnational Australians and positions them as actors in the development of Australian-US relations. Drawing upon correspondence, diaries, oral history, periodicals, travel writing and institutional archives, it argues that such travellers were among the greatest beneficiaries and most zealous agents of Australian engagement with the United States throughout the first half of the twentieth century. During an era in which few Australians moved outside the British world, America’s modernity—and, in particular, its modern gender relations—drew career-minded women to its shores and offered them persuasive evidence that the American model was worthy of emulation. Part of a growing body of scholarship concerned with Australia’s engagements with the Asia-Pacific region, these findings illuminate the density of transpacific ties during an era of sustained imperial sentiment, and point to a significant but little recognised gendered dimension to the turn towards the United States. At the same time, this research speaks to the emergent reorientation of transnational American history towards the Pacific world, demonstrating that the US-Asian connections highlighted in recent scholarship were accompanied by myriad interactions with the Antipodes.