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Last Updated: November 1, 2009
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Jean Taylor

3,000 words

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.

I was born in Melbourne in 1944 and raised in Mildura. My father got a soldier settlement block growing and drying sultanas when he returned from the war. I was in seventh heaven when I returned to Melbourne because I was out of a small country town environment and back in the city.

I was pregnant at 17 and married at 18 and moved to Melbourne then. It was a struggle in the 1960's, we had nothing. The 1960's were very harsh in terms of working class people struggling with kids. I had three children but the third child died - extremely sad at the time.

It wasn't until the late 1960's, when my children started school that I went back to school myself. I studied for my Matriculation at the Council of Adult Education (CAE) with a view to going to university and perhaps getting a better job. I was waitressing at that stage. It suited me, as the kids were at school and I could waitress in the evenings when my husband (who has since died) was home and could look after the kids. There was no childcare or anything like that in those days.

In 1969, by the time that Zelda D'Aprano chained herself to Commonwealth Building and then three weeks later when Zelda D'Aprano, Thelma Solomon and Alva Geike chained themselves to the Arbitration Court 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. I was excited to hear about all of that, but I was not at that stage prepared to do anything about it.

I was absolutely rapt when I was accepted into La Trobe University in 1972. It was marvelous - even though I was really aiming to go to Melbourne University, as it it just down the road. I had no idea where La Trobe University was!

I loved it. It was a new university and thereforemuch more radical and there was a lot of political stuff happening and I got caught up in all of that. 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.

I found it all extremely exciting. I wasn't one of the so-called 'heavies' there, I was a woman from the suburbs, Brunswick, who was learning at a rate of knots. I loved being at university. I loved being at the Women's Centre, finding out things, even though I wasn't one of those who spoke out very much.

At that stage I wasn't a lesbian but I was aware many women there were and I admired the lesbians who seemed at the radical cutting-edge of feminism with groups like the Radicalesbians who organised the first Lesbian Conference in Sorrento and the first women-only dance in 1973. I went to the meetings and was blown out by everything that was going on. 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.

Our whole lives were changing. I went back to using my birth name and I left my husband. We had grown apart, I was a different woman from the person he'd married, stepping out and being myself, and I think he felt a bit threatened. It was an O.K. separation - there was no hostility. I had my tubes tied at this stage.

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.

By the end of 1979, I decided to put my sexuality where my politics were and came out as a dyke. I was absolutely delighted to find I was sexually attracted to women, so it wasn't just a political choice. I had raised my kids and they were independent, so I divided my time between being a lesbian feminist political activist and being a writer. I still am, although I've slowed down a bit.

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.

Unpaid work as an activist freed me up to do what I wanted to do. But when I was paid, for 12 months as a full-time worker on WL Switchboard at the Women's Liberation Building in Victoria Street, that was exciting too.

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.

The other major area I was involved in was the Aboriginal Rights Solidarity Group that started up in 1986. I was a founding member and we did a lot of actions under the direction of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community here in Victoria. I am also a member of the Koorie Heritage Trust and have continued this as a way to look at and challenge the racism inherent in Australian society.

I am appalled at the treatment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island people in this country and I feel I need to do something. By the way, even though I think Howard ought to have said sorry about the Stolen Generations, perhaps one of the positive aspects about his cowardice is that the rest of us had to do something. Not only did we individually sign 'sorry' books but local councils, churches and the whole of Australia had to get up and say sorry about the children being taken from their families and communities, about the massacres, the land being stolen and a whole host of brutal and demoralising policies!

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 WLM, have not only had our lives enriched immeasurably but the feminist revolution undoubtedly saved us.