Australian women travelers in early twentieth-century New York often recoiled from the frenetic pace of the city, which surpassed anything encountered in either Britain or Australia. This article employs their travel accounts to lend support to the growing recognition that modernity took different forms throughout the world and to contribute to the project of mapping those differences. I argue that “hustle” was a defining feature of the New York modern, comparatively little evident in Australia, and I propose that the southern continent had developed a model of modern life that privileged pleasure-seeking above productivity. At a deeper level, this line of thinking suggests that modernization should not be conflated with the relentless acceleration of daily life; it thus complicates the ingrained assumption that speed and modernity go hand-in-hand.
Skip Nav Destination
Article navigation
November 2017
Research Article|
November 01 2017
“A Season in Hell”: Australian Women, Modernity, and the Hustle of New York, 1910–1960
Anne Rees
Anne Rees
Anne Rees is a David Myers Research Fellow in history at La Trobe University, Melbourne.
Search for other works by this author on:
Pacific Historical Review (2017) 86 (4): 632–660.
Citation
Anne Rees; “A Season in Hell”: Australian Women, Modernity, and the Hustle of New York, 1910–1960. Pacific Historical Review 1 November 2017; 86 (4): 632–660. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/phr.2017.86.4.632
Download citation file:
Sign in
Don't already have an account? Register
Client Account
You could not be signed in. Please check your email address / username and password and try again.
Could not validate captcha. Please try again.