Maternal memories: creating an oral history of Australian mothering

Join CHASS President Professor Dan Woodman in conversation with the joint winner of the CHASS 2021 Prize for Distinctive Work, Dr Carla Pascoe Leahy. Dan and Carla will discuss her Australian Research Council-funded study charting the history of Australian mothering from 1945 to the present. Through 60 oral history interviews encompassing pregnancy, birth, childrearing, relationships, work and identity, the project has revealed the ways in which new motherhood impacts every aspect of a woman’s life – and the extent to which this transformation has shifted over the past 75 years.

Carla Pascoe Leahy is a Lecturer in Family History at the University of Tasmania, an Honorary Fellow at the University of Melbourne, Joint Editor of Studies in Oral History journal and an Honorary Associate at Museums Victoria. Her research focuses on motherhood and family; children and youth; place, environment and sustainability; and oral history and qualitative research. Carla has co-edited the volumes Children, Childhood and Cultural Heritage (2013), Children’s Voices from the Past: New Historical and Interdisciplinary Perspectives (2019) and Australian Mothering: Historical and Sociological Perspectives (2019). She is the author of Spaces Imagined, Places Remembered: Childhood in 1950s Australia (2011) and the forthcoming monograph Becoming a Mother: An Australian History (2023).