Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Part I Women's Liberation
- 1 The sexual revolution as big flop: Women's Liberation Lesson One
- 2 Sisterhood and Women's Liberation in Australia
- 3 ‘Holding the Horrors of the World at Bay’: ‘The Feminist Food Guide’, 1972-75
- 4 And now we are six: a plea for Women's Liberation
- 5 Feminism as cultural renaissance
- 6 Does the family have a future?
- 7 Women and technological change
- 8 Dreams and desires: four 1970s feminist visions of utopia
- 9 The tampon
- Part II Women's Studies: Introduction
- Part III Around the World
- References
2 - Sisterhood and Women's Liberation in Australia
from Part I - Women's Liberation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Part I Women's Liberation
- 1 The sexual revolution as big flop: Women's Liberation Lesson One
- 2 Sisterhood and Women's Liberation in Australia
- 3 ‘Holding the Horrors of the World at Bay’: ‘The Feminist Food Guide’, 1972-75
- 4 And now we are six: a plea for Women's Liberation
- 5 Feminism as cultural renaissance
- 6 Does the family have a future?
- 7 Women and technological change
- 8 Dreams and desires: four 1970s feminist visions of utopia
- 9 The tampon
- Part II Women's Studies: Introduction
- Part III Around the World
- References
Summary
This paper was presented to the Australian Women's History Symposium at the University of Adelaide in 2012, and then published in Outskirts online journal, vol. 28, 2013, coedited by Catherine Kevin and Zora Simic. I am grateful to those editors for their encouragement, and to Alison Bartlett, editor of Outskirts, who assured me that copyright for anything published in Outskirts remains with the author.
Made in America: two moments of origin
In 1969, Martha Ansara, an American, was in her early twenties, living in Boston with her three-year-old son, and splitting up with her husband. 1969 was a big year for Ansara. She moved first to California with her new Australian boyfriend, and then, with the same boyfriend, to Australia. In Sydney, she made left-wing friends through Bob Gould's Third World Bookshop, in particular with Sandra Hawker and with two Australians who had recently returned from the United States: Margaret Elliot and Coonie Sandford. Together they formed a group and discussed the pamphlets that Ansara had brought with her and their own experiences. Towards the end of that year they decided to hold an open meeting about Women's Liberation. The official story is that those three women composed a leaflet headed Only the Chains Have Changed to distribute during a protest march against the war in Vietnam on 14 December 1969, calling a meeting about Women's Liberation for January 1970. Many years later, Ansara confessed that, being a young mother, she had been exhausted and had fallen asleep, so the leaflet was the work of Hawker and Sandford and Ansara's film-making journalist boyfriend.
The meeting should have been a failure, Ansara was to recall: ‘Nobody in their right mind holds meetings in January. I knew nothing, you know’. But even though it was January — when everyone goes to the beach — the meeting was packed. This was, Ansara remembered, a ‘new phenomenon’: ‘we were swept up, I guess, in the sort of new wave of interest in this imported phenomenon’.
Early in 1969, Warren Osmond, a tutor in Politics at the University of Adelaide, had been reading anti-war publications which made a great fuss over the Miss America Protest of 7 September 1968.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Dangerous IdeasWomen's Liberation, Women's Studies, Around the World, pp. 25 - 42Publisher: The University of Adelaide PressPrint publication year: 2015