Using the Life Histories of Women in Midlife to Explore Aristotle’s Polis and Eudamonia in the Gendered Sociopolitical Economies of Postmodern Australia

This presentation takes its shape around the affective experiences entangled with (gendered) transformations in social structure/s for Australian women now aged 50-70 years. I bring together findings from in-home ethnographies (n=13) and interpretive work with two longitudinal thought collectives (n=18) that focused on explicating shifts in patterns and meanings of drinking alcohol amidst social change over the lifecourses for and with women in different social classes (1960s-present).

Interspersed in these life histories were descriptions from women in midlife about how hope was present, realised, or lost at different times in their lives and for different reasons. These women had childhoods, careers and families which unfolded alongside iterative women’s liberation movements, and located their life experiences within these shifting sociopolitical climates. Frustration with experiences of uneven emotional and caring labours were set amidst disillusionment that women could ‘have it all’ and that the progress towards a gender-equal or gender-equitable future had been slow, haphazard and disappointing.

I synthesise these data to generate reflection about Aristotle’s writings about ‘polis’ and eudamonia: where individuals are located in a world constituted by mutual benefit and care; thereby enabling them to live with virtue, ethics, situated agency, and a deep sense of happiness. Suggestions of how to develop a more hopeful and caring society can be identified from this analysis, including how to address current challenges in governance by strengthening opportunities for community connection depleted by the modern emphasis on the individual and nuclear family as sites of agency. Further, I engage with the need for a neo-Aristotlean polis that incorporates more than only humans, through the voices and hopes of women who participated in my research.