1970s Ingenuity and Intellectual Rigour—Brazen Hussies Arguing Back

1970s women’s activism began at the end of the 1960s. Women met in consciousness raising groups, claiming the radical foreground as members of the Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) or Women’s Liberation (WL), as Women’s Liberationists. By the early 1970s, consciousness raising groups abounded, whether meeting in cities or towns or small country enclaves, speaking intimately and openly, or hesitantly with wonder, bearing their souls in a way they imagined no women had ever been able to do before. Some women took to wearing seersucker or cheesecloth, whilst others donned Doc Martens and denim overalls, all foregoing makeup and bras. Media reporting depicted women not as during the 1950s and early 1960s, as serious women to be taken seriously, but as rabble rousers determinedly igniting unrest. On the industrial front, Zelda D’Aprano chained herself to the public service building known as the ‘green latrine’ protesting against entrenched male bias in pay rate calculations. The 1969 ‘equal pay for equal work’ decision was expanded by the ‘equal pay for work of equal value’ principle when the Whitlam Labor government came to power. Mary Gaudron was briefed to appear in the reopened pay hearing which became the Equal Pay Case 1972, with women’s organisations intervening. This was followed by the Minimum Wage Case 1974, extending the minimum wage to women—although the win was almost immediately undermined by the minimum wage being abandoned altogether. In 1975 the Australian Charter of Women Workers’ Rights was pressed upon the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), which contrarily produced its own Charter of Women Workers’ Rights. Women trade unionists agitated through their unions. Some joined the WLM or WL which transmogrified into the Women’s Movement. Some women rejected trade union activism, seeing unions as bastions of male ascendancy, sexism, and patriarchal might. At the end of the decade, women had begun to make inroads into gaining relative positions of power in the bureaucracy, governments around the country had or were on the cusp of establishing women’s advisors, women’s units and women’s advisory councils. Pay relativities improved. But equal pay remained elusive.