Intermission: Pay and Personalities I

For some women it is now commonplace, on gaining an exulted position in public life, to proclaim she ‘stands on the shoulders’ of women preceding her. Yet does she even know their names? What of the women unconscious of the thousands who committed their lives to ensuring they could be up there, on the stage, at the podium, before an audience applauding? Artist and historian Suzanne (Sue) Bellamy and political scientist Sabina Erika represent a cohort who worked on a 1970s commitment to bring women’s names back onto the record, or put whose names had never been on it into the public realm. Yet enormous gaps remain to be filled by naming the forgotten women of the past. We cannot understand our present, much less leap toward a future fit for our great granddaughters and great great granddaughters and into the next century, without the struggles and gains, the campaigns and strategies of our great grandmothers and great great grandmothers made known to us, as well as all those women in between. The leaders and the foot-soldiers, the followers and the frontwomen, are equally important. Without them all, collaborating, cooperating, disagreeing and dissenting, parting and coming back together, the highs and the lows borne with strength and fortitude, and abiding good humour, women’s rights would not advance, women’s wrongs would not be acknowledged to be undone. Equal pay history is incomplete without naming the names comprising our herstory, who took the struggle into the mainstream. We are here, with rights, because those women lived.