Gendered Enterprise:
A History of Australian Women in Business Since 1880
Following on from her book Minding Her Own Business: Colonial Businesswomen in Sydney, Catherine is developing a new project - a broader history of women in Australian business. This project will cover the long twentieth century from 1880. She has received an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award for this project, and will be based at the Centre for Workforce Futures at Macquarie University in Sydney for six years from 2019.
​
Collecting stories about these women is a big part of this project. Please contact Catherine if you would like to share the story of your grandmother's, mother's or aunt's business life. This project extends beyond Sydney and Catherine is keen to hear about women in business from across Australia.
​
Making, Spending and Saving: Women and Money in Australasia
Symposium: in person & online
18-19 July 2024
Macquarie University City Campus, Pitt Street, Sydney
Banking, capital, credit, investing and earning – how have women accessed and controlled money in Australasia in the last 200 years? This symposium includes a wide range of papers from historians and business academics, including on women and Superannuation, Chinese businesswomen, Aboriginal property owners, and the ways women have invested money, learned money management through charity, dealt with divorce, and created side hustles across Australia and New Zealand.
​
Come and join the conversation in person or online. Free and open to all. Limited in-person spaces.
Registrations close 10 July 2024
Articles, Publications and Interviews
‘Women in the Australian Economy: Reconceptualising women’s place in the public sphere’, Gendered Excellence in the Social Sciences, 2018
​
Interview ABC: Minnie Berrington Opal Miner Jan 2020
​
Jennifer Aston and Catherine Bishop (eds) Female Entrepreneurs in the Long 19th Century: A Global Perspective March 2020
Catherine Bishop, Jennifer Aston, & Carry Van Leishout, ‘Bringing Businesswomen to a Count: A Transnational Experiment Researching Nineteenth-Century Businesswomen’, Australian Historical Studies 52:2, 2021, 227-246
​
'A Woman's Understanding: Australian female undertakers', Traces Magazine, 2021 26-28
​
‘Minahan, Mona Augustine (1897-1996)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, ANU
World-Minded Women
The International Federation of Business and Professional Women
In 2017 Catherine was a Research Fellow with the ARC Laureate Program in International History at the University of Sydney.
Her project in this program investigated the International Federation of Business and Professional Women, to understand how and why business and professional women positioned themselves as international political and economic players in the twentieth century world.
This project used biographical and social history lenses and built on her previous PhD research into businesswomen in colonial cities in Australia and New Zealand.
Article
‘“Better Business Women for a Better Business World”’ in Australia and beyond: The “world minded” women of the International Federation of Business and Professional Women’, Women’s History Review online 13 July 2017