A Woman’s Place is at the Chalk-face: An ADHD Autoethnography Storying the Writing of a Historical Fiction Novel

This PhD artefact contains a historical novel titled ‘A woman’s place is at the chalk face’ and a companion exegesis titled ‘Operation woman’s place: a critical reflection’. The novel centres on a cohort of women volunteering at a Women’s Emergency Corps (WEC) depot to care for their community during Queensland’s Spanish Influenza outbreak in 1919. Each chapter is embedded with a fictionalised, recollected event the author experienced while teaching at a Queensland secondary school during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020; aligning these two historical events in allegorical parallel. By structuring the plot according to Tsvetan Todorov’s literary theory; his five propositions—‘equilibrium, force, disequilibrium, force, equilibrium’ (Selden, Widdowson & Brooker 2005, p. 70)—extended metaphors draw together the respective governmental and female-gendered individual responses to each global health disaster. Themes of workplace culture and a societal tendency to revert to gendered nurturing roles excoriate a tension between desire to assist and fear of risk to personal health. The exegesis critically reflects on the creative practice through an autoethnography paradigm, gauging its effectiveness as a literary tool for personal wellbeing management during and immediately after a wide-spread crisis. As two calls sound in unison for more research into retaining teachers and how attention-deficit-hyperactivity-disorder (ADHD) impacts the lives of women, the PhD artefact simultaneously interrogates the author’s own adult ADHD diagnosis received during the inquiry, and its impact on her writing.<p></p>