A fine analysis of Australian women’s lives, as revealed in the diaries they kept during the 1920s and 1930s.

Katie Holmes uses diaries to understand how women created lives of order and made their own spaces. The conceptual tools she creates are ones that could be useful to anyone analyzing women anywhere in any time period. Women’s life cycles form the major organization of the book. Within each period, Holmes focuses on a small handful of diaries allowing readers to get to know each woman and her situation and to see her concepts active in actual practice. The diaries Holmes chooses are from a wide variety of women, each with her own distinctive style and interests.

I highly recommend this book as a pleasure reading experience and as a model for how to analyze women’s lives.