Health and nature in the 19th century Australian women's popular press

This paper asks how health and nature are represented in the Australian women's press during the late nineteenth century. A time of significant social change during which women, and sympathetic male colleagues, challenged traditional roles as pathological creatures of the domestic sphere, this period is explored through the writing of women working for popular magazines. As women captured, transformed and redeployed stereotypical views of them as essentially and naturally ill, they consolidated their push into the public realm, while also convincing themselves and others of their vital place in the private sphere, but as capable, well and fit creators of people and of a nation.