Changemakers—Australia’s long and proud history of female mobilisation 

Posted on 21 July, 2022

Preeminent Australian historian and women’s studies scholar Professor Marilyn Lake was a consultant for the Museum of Australian Democracy’s Changemakers exhibition. She reflects on more than 150 years of political mobilisation by Australian women to achieve fundamental political, civil, economic, educational, legal, social, bodily and sexual rights.

History teaches us that women have the power to achieve radical change and that our political action has profoundly shaped our distinctive Australian democracy. And that such action continues to do so.

Women’s rights were won through the efforts of generations of women activists, but are now largely taken for granted: the right to vote, to sit on juries, to equal pay, to enrol in university degrees, to remain in employment on marriage, to have a career of one’s choice, to marry a partner of one’s choosing, to use contraception and access abortion, to not be discriminated against on the basis of race, religion, disability, gender or sexuality. Women have demanded their rights as sexual subjects, but refused to be treated as ‘sex objects’, demanding that rape, sexual harassment and sexual exploitation be recognised as illegal.

In the 19^th century, the women’s movement successfully demanded that the ‘age of consent’ be raised to protect girls and young women; now in the 21^st century young feminists have campaigned for the meaning of ‘consent’ be taught in schools.

Throughout the 20^th century, feminists emphasised the key importance of the ‘economic independence of women’ so that women need never, as they said, mould themselves to men’s desire. Victorian trade unionist, Jean Daley stressed the importance of raising girls to be self-supporting. A single mother herself, Daley and fellow Labor activists were successful in winning government economic support and other ‘maternal rights’ for citizen mothers.

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Because citizenship in early 20^th century Australia was a race-based condition, a white privilege, many Aboriginal women were initially denied associated rights, though Vida Goldstein famously declared in defiance that ‘motherhood is motherhood whatever the race’.

In 1934, Aboriginal women, supported by radical activist Mary Bennett, appeared before a Western Australian Royal Commission to argue for their rights. ‘I want to know the reason for my children being taken from me’, said Emily Nannup. Two decades later, Jessie Street joined Faith Bandler and Pearl Gibbs—members of the Aboriginal-Australian Fellowship—to campaign for the 1967 referendum on Aboriginal citizenship.

The fact that diverse women have come together, despite their differences, across different eras, with focus and determination, to bring about fundamental change is itself a noteworthy achievement worthy of celebration. Diverse women have also had specific goals. First Nations women, for example, have mobilised for land rights and to keep their children, culture and language. Pearl Gibbs and Margaret Tucker were actively involved in organising the Day of Mourning on the 150^th anniversary of white settlement in New South Wales.

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There are so many individual women whose activism and achievements one could celebrate.

Here I might point to those feminists of the 20^th century who worked to achieve fundamental reforms:

Vida Goldstein

Vida Goldstein, whose work in Victoria, as an Independent candidate for the Senate and the House of Representatives and internationally, as a representative of ‘Australasian women’ at the First International Suffrage Conference in Washington, DC in 1902, helped to achieve fundamental political rights: the right to vote and stand for parliament. Goldstein’s stand as an Independent candidate and her advocacy of ‘non-party politics’ attracted American suffrage leaders, Maud Wood Park and Myra Willard, to visit in 1909, keen to learn about women’s post-suffrage organising—and Goldstein’s Independent stance anticipated the success of the Teal candidates in the last election, including Zoe Daniel, the successful candidate in the seat named Goldstein.

Muriel Heagney

Muriel Heagney—Labor activist and equal pay campaigner—was a committed believer in the necessity of women’s economic independence. Together with trade unionists, Sarah Lewis, Clara Weekes, Nelle Rickie and Jean Daley, Heagney campaigned in the 1920s for the three-plank platform of Equal Pay, Motherhood Endowment and Childhood Endowment to achieve economic independence for all working women—those who worked in the home and in the paid workforce. Faced with a concerted campaign against working women in the Depression, Heagney wrote a book called Are Women Taking Men’s Jobs? to point out that women and men worked in different jobs and if they competed in the same field women would no longer be a threat if they were awarded equal pay. In 1937 she joined with colleagues to form the Council of Action for Equal Pay.

Jessie Street

Jessie Street was a leading feminist organiser in New South Wales over many decades, author of pamphlets calling for women’s economic independence, founder of the United Associations of Women in 1929 and Australian representative at the founding conference of the United Nations in 1945. Street was a key figure along with Bertha Lutz of Brazil in having the UN Charter written in gender neutral language and establishing the Commission on the Status of Women, which she served as Vice-President. She was also a key organiser of the Women’s Charter conferences in Australia in 1943 and 1946, that among other goals called for rights for Aboriginal women, including custody rights and the payment of wages to all Aboriginal workers. The Charter affirmed ‘the need for the immediate application of the principle of equality as between men and women in all laws, regulations and usage’.

Pearl Gibbs

Pearl Gibbs was a leading campaigner for Aboriginal rights in New South Wales and as correspondent of the League of Nations on behalf of the Aborigines’ Progressive Association. As a member of the APA she also helped organise the Day of Mourning in 1938. Gibbs was a member of the Aboriginal Welfare Board, but outraged at its paternalist ‘protectionism’ called for its abolition. In 1956 she joined Faith Bandler in forming the Aboriginal-Australian Fellowship that launched a campaign to hold the referendum on constitutional reform that was eventually held and won in 1967. Gibbs also served as a member of the Management Committee of the leftwing Union of Australian Women.

Faith Bandler

Faith Bandler was a Pacific Islander activist, who as a Black woman prominent in the media played a key role in breaking down racial prejudice from the 1950s, when she co-founded the Aboriginal-Australian Fellowship in Sydney and alongside Jessie Street, Pearl Gibbs and Oodgeroo Noonuccal (the poet Kath Walker) advocated for the 1967 referendum on Aboriginal citizenship. Faith had grown up on the NSW North Coast and knew first-hand the stigma of racial discrimination—in the school yard, in the shops and local picture theatre. Her father’s people had been deported under the Pacific Islanders Labourers Act passed in 1901. She was an eloquent and passionate orator in the cause of racial equality in Australia.

Zelda D’Aprano

Zelda D’Aprano was a trade unionist, Communist and feminist. She played a key role in the equal pay campaign and famously chained herself to the Commonwealth Building in Melbourne in protest at the limitations of the 1969 Equal Pay decision that granted equal pay for equal work. A member of the Meatworkers’ Union, she attended the Arbitration Court hearings and was appalled that they were dominated by men. The daughter of migrants from Palestine, D’Aprano grew up in the Jewish community of Carlton and worked in a number of factory jobs, as a seamstress and dental assistant. In Melbourne, in 1970, she helped form the Women’s Action Committee. Fired up by the energy of an international movement, they called on their sisters to “join the women of England and America to protest against exploitation and discrimination [against] women” but decided on their own distinctively local actions. In the Melbourne CBD, they took a tram ride and insisted on paying just 75 per cent of the fare, to highlight the unfairness of women’s lesser pay rates; they protested against ‘Miss Teenage’ contests (to protest against women being treated as sex objects) and joined a national conference on women and work and ‘female conditioning’ organised by students at the University of Melbourne.

Susan Ryan

Susan Ryan was a founding member of the Women’s Electoral Lobby and Labor Senator for the ACT. Ryan was elected to the federal parliament in 1975 and became a Minister and member of Cabinet in the Hawke Labor Government elected in 1983. As Minister Assisting the Prime Minister on the Status of Women, Ryan presided over the passage of the first federal Anti-Discrimination Act in 1984 and the Affirmative  Action (Equal Employment Opportunity for Women) Act in 1986. The legislation in many ways marked a turning point, but it was also the culmination of the campaign initiated by Muriel Heagney with the publication of her book Are Women Taking Men’s Jobs in 1935. But it was now more clearly recognised that the barriers to women’s equality ran deep. In 1987 the government funded a three-year National Education Campaign to raise awareness of violence against women and in 1992 established the National Committee on Violence against Women. But challenging understandings seemed easier—and still seems easier—than changing patterns of violence.

The collective action of Australian changemakers has achieved much for Australian women, but the limits to that achievement are also clear, in the continuing gap between women’s and men’s payrates and continuing economic inequality in areas such as superannuation; in the unacceptably low incomes for care workers in childcare, aged care and NDIS; and in men’s continuing violence against women in their homes and across the broader society. New generations of changemakers are stepping forward to take on these major challenges.

Professor Marilyn Lake DLitt, FAHA, FASSA, AO is Professorial Fellow in History at the University of Melbourne and former President of the Australian Historical Association. 

She is the author of several books including Getting Equal: The History of Australian feminism; FAITH: Faith Bandler Gentle Activist; Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality and Progressive New World: How Settler Colonialism and Transpacific Exchange Shaped American reform. 

Main image of Professor Marilyn Lake taken by PewPew Studio at the opening of Changemakers.