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Last Updated: November 1, 2009
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WOMEN'S LIBERATION - FEMINISM

On this page: Susan Hawthorne Jocelynne Scutt; Jean Taylor; Zelda D'Aprano; Molly Hadfield; Yvonne Smith; Eileen Capocchi; Onnie Wilson

SUSAN HAWTHORNE

My first feminist activism was exciting. I joined a student Women’s Liberation group at La Trobe University in 1973. It was the first meeting I had been to and there were two women down to speak. I said “who are these chicks?” and the entire room said “WOMEN”. They yelled it at me. I never said it again!

I suggested we make some posters. After I suggested this someone said “well, whoever suggests things has to do them”. I had no idea what this was and what it was about but another woman in the group said “Look, come over to my place on Saturday afternoon and we will do some posters”. So I did that and we had great fun.

A couple of weeks later there was the Bradfield campaign. This was an advertisement on billboards for a cigarette called Bradfield. It was sexist. It was an Australian version of the Marlborough Man. It had a ditty “from Adam’s rib to Women’s Lib. … Bradfield, not mild”. All around the city there were orange posters saying “Bradfield, not mild”. So, the first activist thing I did was go out and write “but sexist” underneath. We were a small group from Latrobe, but we could only find one poster that hadn’t already been defaced. That meant that there were women all across Melbourne doing the same thing.

The cigarette was removed from the market. It was a really successful campaign.

Then, in 1974, four of us stood for the Student Representative Council (SRC) on a feminist platform “The Future is Feminist”. We were all elected. Out of that we set up a women’s affairs committee and used that as a way of doing things – conferences, events. We got all sorts of things happening. We did a special issue of the student newspaper Rabelais, we lobbied for Women’s Studies courses, we invited speakers, attended conferences and marches and almost all of us were involved in consciousness raising groups. That’s where the real politicisation happened, linking our personal lives to political change.

In 1975, When the Rape Crisis Centre started, I got involved. That was in Johnstone Street, Collingwood, upstairs from the Women’s Health Centre.

I did a TV interview at some stage. I was green, but there we were, we were pushed into doing things we had never done before. I was volunteering at the Women’s Liberation Centre in the city. There were all sorts of things going on at that time. In the first three or four years I was involved in Rape Crisis, Halfway House, the Non-sexist Children’s Book Group. We had endless discussions about politics and alternative health, about astrology and women’s music, about lesbian theatre and activism. I was involved in different things at different times.

I think I have to say that feminism saved my life in some ways. Without feminism I would have been a very unhappy woman. Once I joined the women’s movement and went to dances and events I thought “Ah, I feel really at home” instead of feeling always under tension with the social environment I was in. I was just not feeling comfortable but not knowing why. Becoming a feminist was like coming home.

The next series of things I became involved in was community radio, 3ZZZ, the 3CR Women’s Liberation program, writing, reviewing.

Dr Jocelynne Scutt

Then I went to Cambridge in the United Kingdom. That was a terrible shock. There was a notice up saying there was a women's meeting, so I went to the meeting. There was a boy there, a bloke, sitting in the corner looking all 'soup and salad'. The whole debate revolved around whether this man was going to be allowed or not, but you see, in the United States we had got over all that.

We were way beyond having endless debates about that. If one woman in the group didn't want the men there, then they couldn't be there. Men had lots of spaces to be in. They had lots of spaces to be together with women, and lots of spaces where they could debate fairly with women about women's issues, but if you were having a women's meeting, then that was the only space women had to debate things.

This really put me off and in the end I left. They were going on and on. If that man had really cared about women's issues, he wouldn't have been there in the first place. What those sorts of men do, it appears to me, is blossom in the glow of being the total subject of everyone's conversation and attention. So I just gave up. I went away and I didn't go back to any more of their meetings.

I was thoroughly disheartened by the whole process. I was there, actually, when the sex discrimination legislation was going through, but as far as Cambridge was concerned, it was just not on the map. There were no debates or discussions about that legislation - not that I found, anyway.

I joined the Fabians instead and then I went to Germany. There the women's movement was very active. They were marching about the right to abortion because their constitutional court had just brought down a decision supporting women's right to abortion and there was some backlash - so women were marching. I felt revved back up again - not as disarmed as I had felt, so became more outwardly active (I was always inwardly active).

Then I came back to Australia (1976). I was at the Law Reform Commission and myself and a colleague, Sandra McCallum, decided that what we had to do was to get active about in the organized women's movement. So we took ourselves off to the Rape Crisis Centre to see what was going on there, and had good discussions with them.

Then we took ourselves off to the Women's Electoral Lobby (WEL) to see what they were doing, and I felt WEL was more my thing, in a way, because they were more politically orientated towards activism and political lobbying. Activism of that sort really works. I had been doing all the work on rape law reform, and they were talking about rape law reform, so that was when we did the WEL draft bill on rape and other sexual offences law reform.

That became the basis of law reform all around Australia, in New Zealand, even in Canada. It is not acknowledged, but it was the foundation for the idea, the first time in the Western world, that we should define what consent is not. That was in 1976.

Then I went off to Michigan to do a doctorate. I kept up the connection with WEL all the way through. There were a lot of supportive women in government at that time, Carmen Niland and Kerry Heubel, and we got that bill in the supplement to reform of rape law as the Attorney General had been putting forward.

What was really good about the activism at that time was that there was a report about rape law reform and we just disagreed with it. There were a whole lot of things there that we didn't think were any good at all and we said so. Carmen Niland and Kerry Heubel, who were in the Women's Unit of the Premier's Department at the time, lobbied the Premier and said "This is not good enough".

So the division had to put out a supplementary report, in which they put the Women's Electoral Lobby Draft Bill. Then they thought that they had better draft some legislation, too. But we precipitated all that. It was actually really very powerful and very strong.

I say to women today that if they are concerned about something they think is wrong about the law, that what you have to do is get your draft bill up. Once you put on paper, in draft form, what you think it should be, you have the inside running.

You can take the leadership role in terms of what you think the law should be. It is not foolish to think you can do that - we did it. That basis became the proposal for rape law reform around Australia and in other countries as well.

Jean Taylor

There was a whole social upheaval. Women were starting to realize we needed to do something and I took advantage of this. Going into the 1970's I was hearing about the Women's Action Committee and the radical actions they were taking, like only paying a percentage of the fare on trams to highlight the need for equal pay for women and protesting at the Miss Teenage Quests. I was excited to hear about all of that, but I was not at that stage prepared to do anything about it.

... Over these past fifteen years, I have continued writing and have enjoyed attending lesbian events such as the National Lesbian Festivals and Conferences round Australia. I joined the Women's Circus in 1991, started the Performing Older Women's Circus in 1995 and continued to attend events for lesbians over 40.

Despite the recent challenge from the MTF tranny who dobbed us into the Equal Opportunity Commission for daring to advertise our exclusively lesbian events we still manage to privately get together on occasions to affirm our lesbian culture and identity.

I am 61 now, and I think those womyn of my generation who have been fortunate enough to have been an adult through the 1970's and were able to take an active part in the Women's Liberation Movement, have not only had our lives enriched immeasurably but the feminist revolution undoubtedly saved us.

By the time that Zelda D'Aprano, Thelma Solomon and Alva Geike chained themselves to, firstly, the Commonwealth Building then the Arbitration Court, in 1969, I'd already started studying. Not only were women deciding to take radical action like those women did, but there was also news coming from the United States about political actions there.

There was a whole social upheaval. Women were starting to realize we needed to do something and I took advantage of this. Going into the 1970's I was hearing about the Women's Action Committee and the radical actions they were taking, like only paying a percentage of the fare on trams to highlight the need for equal pay for women and protesting at the Miss Teenage Quests.

... At the end of 1972 I joined a Women's Liberation Consciousness Raising Group in Brunswick and that was the start of my involvement in the Women's Liberation Movement.

I remember the first meeting. I was sitting in a room with women I didn't know. I was explaining something, as we all took turns around the circle to speak, and women were nodding - agreeing with what I was saying. That was a very different experience, because I was normally seen as a bit of a radical, a woman going to university, which was still unusual for a woman to be doing at my age.

There were middle-aged women, whose kids had grown up, going back to education, but I was going back earlier than that - at age 27 - but later than the teenagers straight from school. It was a very vibrant, exciting, dynamic time for me personally as well as politically.

From the moment I joined the Brunswick CR Group I was completely involved. The Women's Liberation Centre was set up then, with a telephone for information and support and also as a meeting place for the unfunded activist groups. I started doing roster there. The Centre was basically a large meeting space at 16 Little La Trobe Street.

So women could either drop in, if they were in the city, and pick up the latest position paper for 20¢ or so, or subsribe to the Women's Liberation Newsletter or they could ring up and find out information.

Vashti's Voice, another Victorian WL publication, started then as well and there were interstate and international magazines such as Ms from the United States, Broadsheet from Aotearoa (NZ), and Spare Rib from the UK. So much was being published and written about and women were ringing in about all sorts of things. Domestic violence was rife and by the mid-1970s referrals to refuges became crucially important. Some women wanted a sympathetic lawyer.

Many women were looking for a sympathetic doctor so they could have an abortion and the Women's Abortion Action Campaign (WAAC) was set up in 1972 to campaign for the repeal of the anti-abortion laws and freely available contraception. Because Dr Wainer had opened his Fertility Control Clinic in Melbourne, and because of the Menhennitt ruling, at that stage women were able to get abortions at a reasonably affordable price and without fear of being arrested, but abortions were and still are illegal under the law.

We encouraged women to let us know what their experience had been when we referred them, so we could have a resource file of doctors who could do abortions or other medical procedures or consultations in a sympathetic way. In the same way we also had a file on doctors who were less than sympathetic or downright incompetent and dangerous.

We were challenging sexist attitudes and ways of looking at the world. Doctors and other professionals were often quite sexist and wouldn't give women information, so we were encouraging women to ask their doctor questions to find out what was happening about treatment.

From this women started to be involved in their own health care, in ways we hadn't previously. This led, for example, to the Women's Health Centre which opened in in Johnston Street, Collingwood in 1974 and after that closed down in 1976, Bon Hull's book, IN OUR OWN HANDS - A Women's Health Manual, was published by Hyland House in 1980.

... Then there were the refuges. The Women's Liberation Halfway House started in 1974 and I became involved in roster work when it was at Ormond. That was amazing too. I had no idea, really, what I was doing. I went along because some of in the Brunswick C-R Group volunteered at a public meeting to become members of a committee to set up a women's refuge in our area and we needed to know how to go about doing that.

But it was very difficult to get funding because the Government wasn't funding refuges at that stage. We just kept putting in submissions.

I also joined the WL Group at La Trobe Uni in 1973. That was quite exciting and I met Thelma Solomon, Susan Hawthorne and others there. It was good group. We put on forums and dances, especially at Orientation Week and held regular weekly meetings at lunchtime.

The 1970's were a vibrant, exciting and dynamic time. Our consciousnesses were being raised all the time about a whole heap of things. In a sense nothing was sacred. Everything was questioned and challenged. It was not as if we just went to meeting, did our work then went home again.

... I went overseas with money I'd saved from working at La Trobe Uni, and when I came back in 1978, money was available for refuges. All those years of trying to get money from the government suddenly came to fruition.

Oddly enough, it was Fraser's Liberal Government who set up a national refuge program. Any refuge that was up and running was included and we were funded on the basis of our submissions and I applied for and got one of the Coordinator jobs. I was being paid to be a political activist! It was only part time pay but being paid for what we had been doing for years was quite an added thing. We did much more than we were paid to do, of course.

Within two years there were 16 fully funded refuges for women in Victoria. The Women's Liberation Centre closed at the end of 1978 and in 1979 the Women's Cultural Palace started.

This was the forerunner of the Women's Liberation Buildings - they served a similar function as the WL Centre by providing a meeting space for collectives, but when women got together for meetings they didn't act as the central authority for the Women's Liberation Movement anymore. The days of the old General Meetings where you worked out, for example, what to do on International Women's Day or a policy on Wages for Housework, for example, were gone. If you wanted to organise the International Women's Day activities now, you just got a collective together and did it.

Before, the Women's Liberation Movement would take that on and say what could and what could not be done. For example, under the old WL Centre there was a huge debate about whether catering for May Day to raise money for Women's Liberation was an ideologically sound thing to do or not. There were many acrimonious arguments about various ideological stand points.

It was felt that if you were doing something in the name of Women's Liberation it had to be debated and agreed upon. There was never any card carrying or platform like the Communist Party and to all intents and purposes the new building ran the same as the WL Centre, but there was an unspoken understanding at the Centre that there were things you could or could not do in the name of the WLM. Not everybody agreed, of course, so when the new building opened that central policy making stopped.

There was a fundamental shift in the way things were done. Collectives like:
Vashti's Voice;
the WL Newsletter;
Lesbian Newsletter;
Women Against Rape;
the Lesbian Action Group;
WAAC;
Women Against Nuclear Energy; and
Women Against Rape
were now completely autonomous.

I was a founding member of the Women's Liberation Switchboard in the new building. Having a telephone for referral, information and support and a building in which to meet were always two of main ingredients for the feminist revolution.

Gradually groups like the Women's Refuge Referrals Service became funded, so operated independently. A lot of the womyn's services we now take for granted started with Women's Liberation energy and unfunded groups. They started with unpaid work and the energy of many, many women who set up refuges and referral services, legal and medical services, rape crisis centres and activist collectives around a whole range of issues.

Collectives like Women Against Rape (WAR), for example, were extremely important in the 1970's. Collective members would go with women to hospitals and courts and doctors for support when they wanted us to. Women were supported whatever decision they made - whether to report it to the cops or not.

It wasn't until the 1980's that these services became consolidated and, often, funded. Or took off independently, such as:
Women's Refuge Referrals Service;
Women's Health Resource Collective and
Healthsharing Women which amalgamated and later became
Women's Health Victoria;
Domestic Violence and Incest Resource Centre;
Women's Information Support and Housing in the North (WISHIN);
Women's Legal Resource Group (WLRG);
Centre Against Sexual Assault (CASA) House; and
Women's Information and Referral Exchange (WIRE)

Even though some collectives folded, there were still unfunded activist collectives such as Women for Survival and the Queen Victoria Women's Centre Campaign. And other women's groups such as the Union of Australian Women (UAW), Women's Electoral Lobby (WEL) and Council for Single Mothers and Their Children (CSMC) were still going.

...Through the 1980's I was involved in the Women's Liberation Archives, I went back to Matilda Refuge as an unpaid worker, rejoined the Women's Liberation Switchboard collective, started the Purple Parrots, a lesbian feminist performing group, self-published my writing as Dykebooks and then there were various actions such as International Women's Day, Reclaim the Night, the National 10/40 Conferences (for feminists over 40) to attend.

... Women for Survival was around then, organising actions at Pine Gap, NT, Cockburn Sound, WA, the refuges were challenging the government about more funding, the socialist feminists were holding conferences and starting groups such as the Women's Social and Political Coalition (WSPC) and the Council of Action for Equal Pay (CAEP). A lot was going on.

It was really not until, in my reckoning, the late 1980's that the Women's Liberation Movement - as started in the 1970's and continued into the 1980's, started to die down. By that time more and more feminists were working as paid workers in refuges and in CASA Houses, women's health centres were being funded, and there were a lot of other womyn's services funded, and a lot of women were in paid work in the bureaucracy, as femocrats and in the universities as academics.

Because a lot of women were in the paid workforce and there weren't as many unpaid activists around, it was quite a different era. By the late 1980's there were very few activist collectives, as we had known them in the 1970's. Most services were funded.

We ran the Women's Balls for the next 4 years to raise the money to keep the WL Building in Gertrude Street open, but by the middle of the 1992 it was obvious that the WL Building, as it had been going since 1979 as an extension of the Women's Liberation Centre since 1972, had to close.

After 20 years there were no more women-only spaces anymore. The Victorian Women's Liberation and Lesbian Feminist Archives came to my house for the next eight years then was eventually housed in the University of Melbourne Archives. The material is available to everyone for research and other purposes through the Baillieu Library.

Zelda D'Aprano

- The strength and courage of women was becoming more and more apparent to me. (Bon Hull was the first Victorian woman to enter prison because of the Vietnam war and had been just two or three years prior to becoming involved in the women's movement a liberal party voter.)

We had no one on our side, no political parties, no governments, no armies, no police, no trade unions and no religions. All we had were ourselves - women - and we had our backs to the wall for there was nowhere we could go. We were forced by sheer need to combine with each other for what we wanted and the only way forward was the possible unity of sisterhood among women.

I now knew that the personal is political, and all human suffering, whether it be at work, in the home, in human relationships or through lack of money can only be tackled in totality. To attempt to solve one-dimensional problems is to fragment humans and this will achieve nothing because the person is one being, and all these problems are interrelated and interconnected.

... Taken from ZELDA The becoming of a woman - Zelda D'Aprano, VISA 1977 (reprinted Spinifex Press). Permission pending
1,000 words

CHAPTER 16
The Women's Action Committee was five months old when late one Saturday afternoon I picked up the phone to hear Bon (Hull)'s voice saying
"Oh Zelda, I hope you won't be ashamed of me."
"Why should I be ashamed of you?" I asked.
"I was arrested this morning and I've just arrived home from Russell St. Police Headquarters" she replied.
"What on earth for?" I gasped and she proceeded to relate the events.

Molly Hadfield

- I often think the Women's Movement was great, not only for me, but also for hundreds and hundreds of women. It has got to come up again, to rise up again. My auntie used to say that we have always had a women's movement. 'Don't ever think they have stopped', she said, 'they will rise up again when issues arise which affect them'. I think she is right.

Although I think it might be a bit easier now because some of our men have grown up with feminist mothers, or so my granddaughters tell me. I don't really know if the men you see pushing the pram or caring the babies are just showing off or if they have really changed. Do they do the nappies at home? Still, they wouldn't have even pushed the pram before.

Yvonne Smith

- Don came home one day and told me about a meeting to establish a Union of Australian Women (UAW) – he thought I might be interested. I went to the railway housing estate in Sunshine and heard Alison Dickie speaking. I was very impressed with her, such a gentle, honest person.

She spoke on peace and the danger of the US dropping the atom bomb. We also identified local issues for women at that meeting such as a gas levy, which had been imposed on the area. At that first meeting I was elected secretary.

I thought the women were absolutely wonderful. I really felt with this position that there was something positive I could do.

- ... Although I hadn't been able to do much in the UAW since Don died, Win Graham, an ex school teacher, had kept the group going. She had always been the driving force in getting the Sunshine group set up and she was a very capable and experienced campaigner for child care, kindergartens, International Women's Day and women's rights – a great role model.

We used to have Saturday meetings and we would have all sorts of activities for the kids – including a picnic once a year at Williamstown. It was very much a sisterhood. We supported each other.

- ... During this period Bette Olle and I went out and handed out leaflets of support for Zelda D'Aprano who had chained herself to the Commonwealth Building to protest about the lack of equal pay.

It was in 1969 after the first equal pay case - the Meat Employees Union test case – which had been so disappointing – came down. Joan Curlewis had presented the UAW submission to the Court – the same case we had been arguing for years.

We were very supportive of her action and other initiatives of the women's liberation movement, which had followed on from the Women's Action Committee initiated by Zelda, Bon Hull and Alma Geike.

The tram rides particularly captured my interest. At an earlier International Women's Day Committee I had suggested hiring a tram and using it to highlight equal pay during IWD. It wasn't a bad idea but wasn't taken up at the time.

The Tram ride initiated by the Women's Action Committee was a better idea and a great publicity raiser in which I and many UAW women participated.

- ... The broad campaign by the women's movement (on equal pay) was an illustration of the power of liberated thinking – a new approach. That was one very good thing about it.

The UAW hadn't been used to deciding and applying freer forms of activity. Our credibility was restricted, I believe, by the cold war pressures and fears, which saw the public opposing ideas that were challenging.

Our ideas and actions were credible and challenging but only were seen to be credible when those new movements, not seen to be aligned to any established political ideology – who could not be accused of party political motive – like Women's Liberation, got up and did things in a spontaneous way.

Such is the power of some people - ASIO and public opinion.

- ... Unfortunately, at a UAW national level, (and some states) women's liberation was received with a certain antipathy. This should have been more strongly challenged, but it wasn't easy to do. Betty Olle was the Victorian representative on the national committee and was outvoted.

I attended a couple of conferences but stopped thinking they were worthwhile. I though they were too tied to a political agenda, to rather doctrinaire union views which did not allow for feminism.

Women's Liberation were tackling issues in new and exciting ways but there was a perception by some of the left that feminism was associated with the early suffragette movement and was a middle class phenomenon. They didn't redefine feminism in a modern context, and I think they should have.

In practice, though, the UAW at both national and state level, continued to give practical support to the new women's issues. In Victoria, we worked with and supported women 's liberation.

Women from Women's Liberation did redefine feminism, but got trapped in lesbian separatism. I think the result was that the 'Corporate Woman' stepped in and became role model and representative, at least as far as the press was concerned.

During some earlier readjustment of personal values, I had decided that I would never not say what I think just because it goes against some doctrinaire point of view. So I have tried to say whatever I feel about events and things even though they may not be the popular view.

Eileen Capocchi

...There was a letter in the Woman's Weekly to Alan Marshall's Dorothy Dix's column. It talked about a woman who had been having affairs and what a shocking, selfish woman she was. There was a big fuss about how shocking this was but no-one worried about her husband's affairs. I wrote a response, saying something like "what is good for the goose is good for the gander". Anyway, they printed it.

A neighbour, who used to collect his Guardian - the communist paper - from me, came to the door and said, "was that you who wrote that letter?" His wife must have read it. When I said it was, he replied "Christ you're 'ard!" I always remember that.

... I was very interested in the women's movement. I remember Kathy Gleeson asking me why I didn't organize a branch at Aspendale, - she asked why I came into the city for everything. But I couldn't do it. I knew that my whole life would change and I was terrified of that. I also worried about my marriage.

I had a heart attack then and I went to Daylesford for a week to recuperate and think about things.

One day there was an article in the local paper. A woman wrote in and asked why there wasn't a Women's Liberation group in Aspendale. So a group of us set up a group in Aspendale.

Onnie Wilson

... So as well as my concern for all on the planet (not only the human species) I now had this overlay of feminism as well. Feminism became my passion, one manifestation along the continuation of the same thing -consideration for others and the whole species. But feminism is the most luminous spot on this continuum for me.

My feminism is that which promises to move all humankind in a different and more positive direction. I think women have the potential to change how the globe functions, how we respect each other and how we respect the planet.

'Liberal' feminism has had the most influence over the last 30 or so years and this has been great in giving women more independence and individual choice but has done little for communities as a whole, specifically the global community.

I think we have to create new ways of doing instead of perpetuating the male paradigm. We can't put women into the male structure and expect that they can change things from within. I think we have to take a different direction. The male structured institutions are so strong they socialize everybody who gets into them.

So, if you are a woman who goes into politics, the male political system, or the military system, for example, there is no way you can change what you have been trained to perpetuate.

The institutions within the male systems are well established, they use an extensive process of socialization for all who come in and women learn that if they don't take up the expected behaviours and attitudes, they will be forced to drop out just like the males.And women learn to act male, extremely well, often better than the males themselves. Maggie Thatcher was a champion.

But if we don't replace these institutions, we will be heading for the cliff edge. Too many behaviours are extremely destructive. If it comes to conflict and we use military might, nowadays that doesn't mean just hitting someone over the head with a club. Those hell bent on power and controlling others have become extremely efficient in how they can kill people: how they can annihilate people.

We can't keep going forward as a species perpetuating these legitimized acts violence which are so destructive. Human beings just won't survive. And acting to root out, the ever present 'enemy', compulsory in the male paradigm, is far from being civilised and socially disastrous.

If you look at environmental concerns, the way we are using and abusing our environment - well the environment is finite. We have to take a different direction, one which emphasises positive human interaction and care for the planet as a whole, rather than the present structure, which is one of domination, using and abusing, and environmental destruction.

Plundering the earth for profit can hardly be 'world's best practice'. We can't just go into a male structure and hope to reform it. It doesn't work.

Women straddle two ways of being and have had an 'other' experience, from our species herstory as well as our present history, of being concerned for other people: of nurturing rather than destroying. I think it is vital for us to lead, to take a new path to develop those capacities and shape new ways of living. Certainly the feminism that I adhere to is of that sort.

...People really wanted to get behind what they are doing at RAWA and to be supportive. They could see the great significance of these women's work. And this is what I am hopeful will happen here in Australia as well: that we will have a rejuvenation of women actively following women's wisdom (you can call it that), looking for new directions and building new social alternatives rather than trying to change the male paradigm. That doesn't work .

And we can do better than a mould an ocean of Margaret Thatchers. I think we can learn a lot from RAWA - that women have the capacity; that we can take a different direction which is outside the male model; that we should have the confidence in what we are and who we are; that we matter and that we should be taken notice of. RAWA has arisen out of adversity and whether this always has to be the case to stimulate new thought and action, I don't know.

Perhaps the more comfortable we are, the less likely we are to create something as effective and 'revolutionary' as RAWA, but hopefully we can learn from it.

RAWA strongly acknowledges its herstory, and Meena and her contribution are a constant part of RAWA's present. It concerns me that the tradition that we have as women here and the herstory we have as women is not something that is constantly part of us or passed on or remembered continually.

The male tradition never dies. For example, every Saturday in winter you hear the history of every football club, who kicked what, when, etc. There is non-stop reinforcement of the traditions of the male paradigm. Amongst women, we don't have this.

Even with the Union of Australian Women and all the fantastic work they have done, there is not a stream of young women who are part of the same process - picking up the work and going on with it. We tend to go ahead in fits and starts. People really wanted to get behind what they are doing at RAWA and to be supportive. They could see the great significance of these women's work. And this is what I am hopeful will happen here in Australia as well: that we will have a rejuvenation of women actively following women's wisdom (you can call it that), looking for new directions and building new social alternatives rather than trying to change the male paradigm. That doesn't work .

And we can do better than a mould an ocean of Margaret Thatchers. I think we can learn a lot from RAWA - that women have the capacity; that we can take a different direction which is outside the male model; that we should have the confidence in what we are and who we are; that we matter and that we should be taken notice of. RAWA has arisen out of adversity and whether this always has to be the case to stimulate new thought and action, I don't know.

Perhaps the more comfortable we are, the less likely we are to create something as effective and 'revolutionary' as RAWA, but hopefully we can learn from it.

RAWA strongly acknowledges its herstory, and Meena and her contribution are a constant part of RAWA's present. It concerns me that the tradition that we have as women here and the herstory we have as women is not something that is constantly part of us or passed on or remembered continually.

The male tradition never dies. For example, every Saturday in winter you hear the history of every football club, who kicked what, when, etc. There is non-stop reinforcement of the traditions of the male paradigm. Amongst women, we don't have this.

Even with the Union of Australian Women and all the fantastic work they have done, there is not a stream of young women who are part of the same process - picking up the work and going on with it. We tend to go ahead in fits and starts.

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