Abstract
Elizabeth Kleinhenz, A Brimming Cup: The life of Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Melbourne University Press: Melbourne, 2013; 340 pp. ISBN-9780522864885 (paperback), ISBN-9780522864892 (ebook)
Reviewed by: Alison Mackinnon, University of South Australia
Could an intelligent, highly educated woman find a place in academic life in mid-20th century Australia? And if so, on whose terms, and at what cost? This is a question Jill Ker Conway reflected on in her well-known book The Road from Coorain (1990). Was she ‘bound to live out the script of a man’s life’ she pondered (p. 193)? Two decades earlier, another woman historian struggled with finding a place in her society. In this very readable and richly researched biography of historian, teacher and writer Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Elizabeth Kleinhenz set out to understand the life and times of another brilliant Australian woman. Kleinhenz aimed to do four things: to tell the story of Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s life in its rich context; to discover the person ‘behind the mask’; to determine the influence of three themes, namely social class, religion and gender; and to assess Fitzpatrick’s legacy as a teacher, writer, scholar and ‘woman of her times’. These are ambitious claims and Kleinhenz has delivered on her promise. In order to do so, she has drawn upon a wide range of sources, archival, literary and oral. As well, Kleinhenz has mined much of Fitzpatrick’s own writing both public and private, notably her very successful autobiography Solid Bluestone Foundations (1983) and the revealing collection of letters Dear Kathleen, Dear Manning (1996) edited by Susan Davies.
Kleinhenz illuminates the many ways in which Kathleen Fitzpatrick was both an outsider and an insider. As someone with three Irish Catholic grandparents, she occupied an ambiguous place in early 20th century Melbourne society. Her schooling began in convents but ended with two years in a well-known Protestant girls’ school, Lauriston. Her life was in many ways one of privilege with wealthy grandparents who lived in a large and imposing house and a father who became the Under Secretary of the Treasury in Victoria and a friend of Robert Menzies. Her parents assumed she would go to university and smoothed the way for both their daughters to do so. At the University of Melbourne, Kathleen achieved academic success, was involved with left progressive politics and met her future husband Brian Fitzpatrick. Unlike many of her male contemporaries, she did not then go to England with a scholarship in hand but was supported at Oxford by her parents. There was little encouragement or mentoring for bright women in the 1920s. In England, Fitzpatrick, like Jill Ker Conway decades later, was shocked to find herself treated as a colonial on her first encounter with English society. After taking her degree, Fitzpatrick returned to Australia and eventually was offered the position she held for so long and with such acclaim in the History Department of the University of Melbourne.
A major strength of this engaging biography is Kleinhenz’s exploration ‘behind the mask’ of this elegant and inspiring teacher of generations of students as Fitzpatrick’s ‘brimming cup’ contained some bitter dregs. For reasons Kleinhenz sympathetically explores Fitzpatrick returned from Oxford with a Second-Class Honours degree, imbuing her with a lifelong sense of failure in her own terms. Her brief marriage to Brian Fitzpatrick also left bitter wounds, as did the inability to find a publisher for the book Fitzpatrick considered to be her life’s work. While social class and religion shaped much of Kathleen’s early decades, it was gender which dogged her career in academia in the male-dominated world of universities in the 1940s to 1960s. For much of her time in the University of Melbourne History Department, Fitzpatrick was in effect handmaiden to the charismatic but flawed Max Crawford. Yet, in the end, it was Fitzpatrick’s own low estimation of her worth that led to her turning down the possibility of a chair in history. Her letter of refusal reveals the ‘hidden injuries’ of gender, as did her lifelong belief that women could not combine a professional life with marriage. Kleinhenz claims that Fitzpatrick ‘seems to have been unaware that the difference in the relative position of herself and Crawford in 1937 was the result not of any inferiority on her part, but of unrelenting gender and social discrimination’ (p. 120). Similarly, in her old age, and even at the height of second-wave feminism, ‘she was unable to see that she had been a victim not of her own inadequacy but of the attitudes and practices of her times and her own inability to comprehend their effects on her life’ (p. 120).
This is a fascinating narrative on many levels: a story of an intelligent woman, a superb educator, finding her way in the world, a tale of academic life throughout the 20th century and a glimpse of Australian society from the perspective of Melbourne Irish Catholic families. Kathleen Fitzpatrick did find her place in that man’s world of the mid century university but at considerable cost. Her biographer Elizabeth Kleinhenz has done her proud, highlighting her manifold achievements, celebrating an outstanding career and revealing, along the way, the woman behind the mask.