BMHS Annual McLaughlin Lecture – “Fish without Bicycles” by Dr Catherine Bishop

Australian feminist Irina Dunn coined the phrase ‘a woman needs a man like a fish
needs a bicycle’ in 1970. Hers was a rallying cry that rings true today, although
women are still fighting for true equality. But what of women before the 1970s? The Blue Mountains’ own Beryl McLaughlin was one woman who proved it was possible to survive without a male breadwinner.

This lecture focuses on local women who earned their own money, independent of
men, either through choice or circumstance. Some ran businesses in the Mountains,
others retreated or retired here, like Beryl herself, living life between Darlinghurst and Wentworth Falls.using my current research on Australian businesswomen in the 20 th century, I will explore how acceptable it was to be a fish without a bicycle, in a society which continued to publicly value separate but complementary gendered spheres.

Dr Catherine Bishop is an Honorary Research Fellow at Macquarie University
researching Australian businesswomen, and CI on the ARC Discovery project Shop
Talk, writing about female department store buyers. She is the author of the prize-
winning Minding Her Own Business: Colonial Businesswomen in Sydney
(NewSouth, 2015), Women Mean Business: Colonial Businesswomen in New
Zealand (Otago UP, 2019), Female Entrepreneurs in the Long Nineteenth Century: A Global Perspective (Palgrave, 2020) (co-edited with Jennifer Aston), Too Much
Cabbage and Jesus Christ: Australia’s ‘Mission Girl’ Annie Lock (Wakefield, 2021),
and The World We Want: The New York Herald Tribune Forum and the Cold War
Teenager (ASP, 2024)