Pollyanna

In March 2011, I celebrated International Women’s Day (IWD) by posting each day on Facebook about a remarkable woman. Here you’ll find those posts (slightly edited and with one addition). During the month of IWD, it seems appropriate to acknowledge all of the wonderful women who have been, and are, struggling for a better world. I especially wish to recognise the women who’ve taught me, those with whom I’ve organised, campaigned, marched and demonstrated, those who cannot be named, and those who are unknown to me. I called the blog Pollyanna because I’m often criticised for being ‘Pollyannaish’ – too optimistic. Pollyanna is the heroine of a novel, Pollyanna, written by Elanor Porter in 1913. Her book has also been made into a number of movies. Pollyanna’s philosophy of life centres on what she calls ‘the glad game’. The game consists of finding something to be glad about in every situation. In some parts of the world  ‘pollyanna’ also means a gift exchange. When I originally created these posts, I received a couple of criticisms regarding the women I’d chosen. So, I wish to make it clear that, whatever my own differences with these amazing women, this blog is written in the spirit of Pollyanna.

Nick Southall

Angela Davis

One of the first campaigns I can remember my mother being deeply involved in was the campaign to free Angela Davis from prison. I still have the Free Angela Davis campaign badge in my collection. Leading up to her arrest, Angela was one of the ‘Ten Most Wanted Criminals’ in the US.

Angela Davis was born in 1944 in Birmingham, Alabama, the daughter of an automobile mechanic and a school teacher. The area where the family lived became known as ‘Dynamite Hill’ because of the large number of African American homes bombed by the Ku Klux Klan. Her mother was a civil rights campaigner and had been active in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) before the organisation was outlawed in Birmingham. Angela attended a black elementary school and a local high school. By her junior year she was accepted into a program that placed black students from the South in integrated schools in the North. Angela chose a school in New York City. There she joined a communist youth group, Advance.

Angela was awarded a scholarship to Brandeis University in Massachusetts, where she was one of only three black students in her first year class. She initially felt alienated by the isolation of the campus, but soon made friends with foreign students. In 1962, she encountered the philosopher Herbert Marcuse at a rally during the Cuban Missile Crisis and then became his student. In a television interview, she said; “Herbert Marcuse taught me that it was possible to be an academic, an activist, a scholar, and a revolutionary”. She worked part time to earn enough money to travel to France, spent a year studying at the Sorbonne in Paris, before attending the eighth World Festival of Youth and Students in Finland. She returned home in 1963 to an FBI interview about her attendance at the communist-sponsored festival.

Soon after arriving back in the US, Angela received news of the Birmingham church bombing, committed by members of the Ku Klux Klan, an occasion that deeply affected her because she knew the eight young victims. In 1965, she graduated and in 1967 joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Panther Party. She joined the Communist Party in 1968 after Martin Luther King was assassinated. She followed Marcuse to the University of California and earned her master’s degree from the San Diego campus and then her doctorate in philosophy from Humboldt University in East Berlin (GDR). By the beginning of 1969, Angela was an acting assistant professor in the philosophy department at the University of California. She was by now widely known as a radical feminist and an associate of the Black Panther Party. In 1970, when the FBI  informed her employers that Angela was a member of the Communist Party, they terminated her contract.

Due to Angela’s activism in the support campaign for imprisoned Black Panthers member George Jackson and two of his fellow inmates (known as the Soledad Brothers) she became a serious target of state authorities. On August 7, 1970, George Jackson’s seventeen year old brother burst into a courthouse with a machine gun and took a judge hostage demanding George’s release. Jonathan Jackson was shot and killed driving away from the courthouse. On 21st August, 1971, George Jackson was gunned down in the prison yard at San Quentin. He was carrying a pistol and officials argued he was trying to escape from prison. The police claimed Angela had purchased the guns used in the hostage taking and smuggled into prison the gun being carried by George. Angela went underground and was named as one of the ‘Ten Most Wanted Criminals’ in the US. She was captured soon after, but an international campaign came to her support. John Lennon and Yoko Ono wrote the song Angela and Mick Jagger wrote the song Sweet Black Angel in solidarity with her. In 1972, Angela was acquitted. She wrote; “Our very survival has frequently been a direct function of our skill in forging effective channels of resistance. In resisting we have been compelled to openly violate those laws which directly or indirectly buttress our oppression. But even containing our resistance within the orbit of legality, we have been labelled criminals and have been methodically persecuted by a racist legal apparatus . . . “

After her release, Angela moved to Cuba, but soon returned to the US. She managed to achieve tenure at the University of California, even though the state’s Governor, Ronald Reagan, swore she would never teach again in the California system. Angela left the Communist Party to help found the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. She has continued to write ground breaking work on women, racism, and prisons, and to take part in numerous movements for change. Prisoner rights have been among her continuing interests; she is the founder of Critical Resistance, an organisation working to abolish the prison-industrial complex. She is presently a retired professor with the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, is the former director of the University’s Feminist Studies department and a Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at Syracuse University. Her research interests are in feminism, African American studies, critical theory, Marxism, popular music and social consciousness, and the philosophy and history of punishment and prisons.

Angela by John & Yoko/ Plastic Ono Band

Sweet Black Angel by The Rolling Stones

Au Pairs

During my youth there were quite a few important and groundbreaking women in the music industry, such as Nina Hagen, Siouxsie Sioux, Pauline Black, Chrissie Hind, Poly Styrene and Marianne Faithful. But at the time, for me, none were as exciting and important as Lesley Woods (vocals and guitars) and Jane Munro (bass) of the Au Pairs.

The Au Pairs were a ‘new wave’ or ‘second wave punk’ band. They formed in Birmingham and exploded onto the music scene in 1979 with their self-financed single ‘You’ released on a small independent label. The same label also released their follow-up, the fantastic double A-sided ‘Diet / It’s Obvious’ a year later. The song ‘Diet’ has been described as a “masterpiece of feminist rock (and rock full stop)”. The song is one long verse that follows a housewife through her routine and works its way to a vicious, barbed finale where Lesley repeatedly howls “She needs to be tranquilised”. Within a year the band had played lots of gigs across the U.K., including some sessions for the BBC (tracks from those sessions are available on the anthology ‘Stepping Out of Line’, which was released a couple of years ago). Their debut album, Playing with a Different Sex, was released in 1981 on Human Records, and made it to number 10 in the UK album charts.

The band was fronted by Lesley, who was an outspoken advocate of feminism and at the time one of very few lesbians in the music scene who had actually ‘come out’. Music historian Gillian Gaar notes in her history of women in rock that the band mingled male and female musicians in a revolutionary collaborative way as part of its outspoken explorations of sexual politics. The music was danceable, backed up with confrontational lyrics celebrating sexuality from a woman’s perspective. Playing with a Different Sex is considered a ‘post-punk classic’ with strong songs like ‘It’s Obvious’ and ‘Come Again’.

The band’s second album, Sense and Sensuality, was less well received, but contains more great songs like ‘Stepping Out of Line’ and ‘America’. The band broke up in 1983, just before going into the studio to record another album. Lesley went on to form an all woman band called the Darlings, but then left the music industry, as did Jane. The Au Pairs are one of those bands that found their own sound, something that shifts between forms, from reggae to punk and funk. As they explained; “The main criteria was not to use any kind of cliché in the sense we never had a guitar solo as such, that was deemed too masturbatory. And anytime we did have a break it was a rhythm break.” One reason the Au Pairs sound is so distinctive is that Lesley had a unique and astonishing voice. Writing in 1980, Paul Morley said Lesley’s voice “can be everything – solemn, intense, shattered, exuberant, vulnerable”. It’s her voice, he writes, that lifts the Au Pairs “into greatness.”

The politics of the Au Pairs were informed and they passionately spoke out about the treatment of women prisoners in Ireland, domestic violence, American imperialism, heroin, gender and feminism.The Au Pairs period of 1979 to 1982 is the time of The Specials, The Clash’s London Calling, Rock Against Racism, Rock Against Sexism, the women’s peace camp at Greenham Common, the first Gay Pride march in London, and the birth of hip-hop. Au Pair gigs were a flashpoint for information and meaning, there were leaflets given out and the band kept an open backstage in order to meet people. For the band this was part of a movement – “At the time the stuff that we were doing didn’t seem that out of the ordinary, because most of the bands we were gigging with or who were influential at that time also had political and/or feminist lyrics – the Gang of Four, the Slits, the Clash.” The audience was political and they were looking for bands to reflect and amplify their energies. “We’d play to thousands of people, mainly students and all in anger, all wanting to do something”.

Diet

It’s Obvious

Come Again

Stepping Out of Line

bell hooks

Over the past few years, I have been greatly influenced by the work of bell hooks, especially her books Feminism is for Everybody, All About Love, Communion: The Female Search for Love and The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. An outspoken cultural critic, educational theorist, professor of English, and advocate of revolutionary feminist politics, bell is famous for her analyses of the politics of race, gender, class and culture, and for her attacks on “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy”.

bell was born in 1952 and named Gloria Jean Watkins. Her father worked as a janitor, and her mother, Rosa, worked as a maid in the homes of white families. bell’s pseudonym, her great-grandmother’s name, celebrates female legacies and is in lower case because “it is the substance of my books, not who is writing them, that is important.” As a student at segregated public schools she was taught by a dedicated group of teachers, mostly single black women, who helped to shape the self-esteem of children of colour. Although Gloria was supposed to become a quiet, well-behaved young woman, she became instead a woman who “talked back.” In her essay Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black, she notes: “I was always saying the wrong thing, asking the wrong questions. I could not confine my speech to the necessary corners and concerns of life.” Further she explains; “Moving from silence into speech is for the oppressed, the colonised, the exploited, and those who stand and struggle side by side a gesture of defiance that heals, that makes new life and new growth possible. It is that act of speech, of ‘talking back’,’ that is no mere gesture of empty words, that is the expression of our movement from object to subject – the liberated voice.”

bell gained a scholarship to Stanford University and during her student days encountered many obstacles. Several professors were determined to stop bell from earning the graduate degree she needed to become a university professor. Persisting against the racism, she completed her PhD in 1983. Although, by 1981, she already had a major publication to her credit, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. At the age of nineteen, despite the full-time studies she was pursuing at Stanford when she began Ain’t I a Woman, bell took a job as a telephone operator. Finding time for her writing was a challenge, but she also found that the job offered her something she didn’t have at the time, a community of working-class black women. “They provided support and affirmation of the project,” she wrote, “the kind of support I had not found in a university setting. They were not concerned about my credentials, about my writing skills, about degrees. They, like me, wanted someone to say the kinds of things about our lives that would bring change or further understanding.”

With a PhD. in English literature, bell embarked on her teaching career. Along with her teaching, she continued to write and publish. Much of bell’s recent work has investigated the importance of love. She explores how love can be elaborated politically as the primary way to end capitalism, domination and oppression, and explains that love is a form of work which patriarchy and capital sees as women’s responsibility, and therefore as degraded and devalued labour. bell states that if “women and men want to know love, we have to yearn for feminism. For without feminist thinking and practice we lack the foundation to create loving bonds”.

In the chapter To Love Again: The Heart of Feminism, from her book Feminism is for Everybody, bell declares that “genuine feminist politics always brings us from bondage to freedom, from lovelessness to loving”. She calls on women and men to “return to love” to reap the benefits of previous progressive and revolutionary struggles. She also makes clear that love is a choice and that for love to flourish “requires an ongoing commitment to constructive struggle and change” as the “heartbeat of true love is the willingness to reflect on one’s actions, and to process and communicate this reflection”. Choosing to love involves working with others to embrace “a global vision wherein we see our lives and our fate as intimately connected to those of everyone else on the planet”. bell speaks to all in search of true liberation, asking us to look at feminism in a new light, to see that it touches all lives. She shows that feminism, far from being an outdated concept, or one limited to an intellectual elite, is indeed for everybody.

Cali Pusell

I find it quite amazing that I can now refer to both of my daughters as women. It doesn’t seem that long ago that they were both little girls. My youngest daughter, Cali, like her older sister, has brought me so much joy and love that it’s impossible to encapsulate here. So, I will just touch upon how amazing she is.

Because I love my eldest daughter Ella so much, when I found out that Sharon and I would have another child it was difficult for me to comprehend how I would be able to love our new baby as much. The arrival of Cali into the world quickly impressed upon me the infinite possibilities of love. Not only do I love her as much as her sister, but I now love both of them more, because they have taught me so much about how to love. Cali’s middle name, Jillamee, was suggested to us by a close friend and local Aboriginal elder. Jillamee means women’s place and as a confident, assertive girl Cali has made many places hers. Cali has always had a wonderful imagination and from an early age has regaled us with intricate stories of her past life and alternative family, how she lived and died, her many brothers and sisters, and as she put it, “all of the things I used to be able to do because my previous family were rich, had a nice house, with a pool and lived in America”.

From the moment she began pre-school, at Hospital Hill, Cali was a star. During her first week she took part in a demonstration for more government funding and appeared on the TV news waving a placard and chanting. A little while later, when the pre-school had a dress-up day, her mum, Sharon, made Cali a fantastic hand-made Xena Warrior Princess costume. Xena was Cali’s favourite character and with the costume and a long auburn wig she was a sensation. Xena was not the only strong and powerful woman to influence Cali as a child. Her family has more than its fair share and her teachers at pre-school were lovely. Cali has always been mature beyond her years and as soon as she was able would visit neighbourhood kids, often going from door to door socialising. She also loved to play with her sister. When she was little Cali used to follow Ella, whom she adored, around the house cleaning up after her. Although often quite serious and earnest, Cali is also very funny and has a great sense of humour. She loves music and is a great dancer.

When Ella began to be crippled by her arthritis, Cali helped to look after her. When the pain became too much for Ella, she was unable to open doors, turn taps, dress herself or brush her own hair. So, she had a bell which she’d ring and Cali would immediately go to her aid. Cali never complained about doing this, as she was devoted to her sister. Her care during these difficult times improved all of our lives and demonstrated the loving resilience we all needed to help overcome hardship.

When we moved into our present home the girls had to share a room for the first time and we worried about the impact such a cramped space would have on their relationship. But we needn’t have fretted, as they both adapted brilliantly, using the opportunity to bond more firmly and to further develop their relationship. To this day, it is one of my greatest delights to watch Cali and Ella walking together hand-in-hand when we go out. While being a good friend to many, a wonderful daughter, loving sister, and a conscientious scholar, Cali has also made time to learn Irish dancing and circus performance. Cali broke her arm on a uni-cycle, became an excellent hula hooper and didn’t let a visit to the hospital for neck scans deter her from the aerial tissue. She performed with Half High Circus and at school events, delighting and sometimes scaring her parents and numerous other people. She is also a talented photographer and many of her beautiful photographs decorate our home.

Cali did well at school and has a folder full of school awards, including a couple of special awards for topping her school year in child studies. This was not a major surprise for us as she is very good with young children. She is also very interested in media, literature and films. From the early years of primary school Cali has been a writer of wonderful stories. One of my favourites is a story she wrote in year nine about a Japanese/American girl living in Hawaii who is interned after the bombing of Pearl Harbour. Cali had a fascination with Japan and Japanese culture and in 2010 she was lucky enough to visit Hiroshima, Hakone and Tokyo on a school excursion. She has also travelled to various parts of Australia with different family members, to Bali with her grandmother and most recently to France and England with Sharon and I. After finishing high school last year, Cali started a full-time job and decided to enroll in an event management course. I’m sure she can accomplish anything she puts her mind to. She is sensible, smart and hard working. She is deeply interested in important social issues and financially supports Doctors Without Borders and the UNHCR. She also publishes her own blog. Cali is an exceptional young woman and is very much loved.

Doreen Borrow

In this post I’m lucky enough to be able to use edited versions of Doreen Borrow’s own writing on her exceptional life. I have known Doreen for many years and as she details below, her life has involved many struggles, which she has faced with courage and tenacity.

Doreen Borrow – “The greater part of my childhood was spent in Captains Flat, a small mining town in the Monaro District of NSW. The prosperity of the town was short-lived and like so many other communities its inhabitants became victims of the Great Depression in 1929. Despondency and hopelessness settled into the hearts of the unemployed, and anyone with the means to do so left the town in search of work. Those who remained behind shared a common, soul-destroying poverty that would persist for many years. Lacking the means to leave, our family remained waiting for the good times to return. I was young and immune to the anxiety bred from financial insecurity. I never felt the deprivation that blighted the lives of so many, and, although poorly clad, I never went hungry. The old iron bed shared with my two older sisters was warm and comforting. Mum’s eternal optimism sustained us all throughout the hardship years and kept alive a hope of better times ahead. Dad sang ballads, recited poetry and told wondrous stories as we sat before the glowing coals of open fire during the bitter cold winters”.

“The first part of my life was one that echoed the pattern of most women of my era. I received a rudimentary education, left school, got a job, married, had children and, as a wife and mother, became economically dependent on the pay packet of a male breadwinner. Where I lived politics was a male domain and unions were not for women. This did not sit easy with me and, during the many struggles the miners engaged in, the seeds of my future life as a communist were planted. Much of this changed towards the end of the fifties. My husband David was killed in a mining accident and at the age of 32 I became a single parent with four small children. My future prospects were very bleak where I lived and where the town’s people were economically dependent on hard rock mining and the raising of sheep. The prospect of remarriage held no appeal and the chances of obtaining paid employment extremely limited. So after a period of hard reality I packed up our few belongings and made plans to leave behind all that was familiar to us. With the new man in my life, my children and our dog Pongo we crammed into an old borrowed and battered car, and like the Joads in the Steinbeck novel The Grapes of Wrath, we headed for the promised land. Except that our destination was not California – it was Wollongong. That is when my life began to diverge from the trajectory once reserved for working-class women. I became a political activist when I re-entered the paid workforce and came under the scrutiny of ASIO, a body I didn’t know existed when they began compiling notes on my comings and goings”.

“I had come to their attention for joining a legitimate organisation – The Communist Party of Australia and on rejoining the paid workforce I had become active in my union, the Postal Workers Union, the peace movement and the political scene in Wollongong. By the time 1968 came around I had been upgraded to a “Category A” suspect and hundreds of files had been compiled about my activities, many of which were later to be found erroneous. At some point in the nineties I became aware that I could obtain some of these files and made application to do so. In time I purchased records of my activities up to 1975 – 3 volumes in all, nine folders exempted. I was amazed to see the number of errors these files contained. There were photos of me in May Day marches, funerals, meetings of the CPA, Hiroshima Day commemorations, peace marches and so on. The photos were of very poor quality and failed to capture my best side. My description underwent many variations regarding my age, height, nationality, how I looked, dressed and what sort of a mother I was. But there were two constants: 1. That I lived in a de facto relationship with Mike Clunne, also a well-known communist, and 2. The subject of my hair. Now all my life I have been cursed with having very fine hair and I could not count the times when I presented at hairdressers to have them say: “My! You do have fine hair, dear. We will have to see what we can do with it.” I never thought I would have this information recorded in a secret police file. I had not begun my extensive visits to attend conferences held in various countries and my political activities were very ordinary. And what would I now be categorised as after visiting Cuba, the old USSR many times and Iraq during the Cold War, and being awarded The Eureka Medal of Australia by the Anarchists? When NSW Special Branch was abolished in 1997 those who had been spied on were allowed to obtain their files. I made application to get mine. In due course they arrived and I was rather disappointed by the amount of material I received. So I rang the Police Service and registered my complaint about the paucity of the files”.

“If there is any upside to the years spent by ASIO and Special Branch recording my political and personal activities it is this: as a family historian I have a record of where I was and what I was doing during those years. Very handy to have your back pages so accessible, especially for someone in their eighties! There is a record of letters I had written and that had been printed in the Illawarra Mercury and long lists of comrades and other people, many of which I have long forgotten. These people came under notice of the secret police, not because they were terrorists or spies for a foreign government. What was it that distinguished them? It was because they had a connection with those who wanted to put an end to war and who struggled for justice and a fair go for all who live on this beautiful planet”.

Ella Baker

Ella Baker was perhaps the most important woman in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Her activity spanned fifty years and touched thousands of lives. Although her name may be unknown to many, she was one of the most influential people in the fight for justice in America. Ella traveled the breadth of the U.S. organising, protesting and advocating for social justice. Her main concern was the troubles of black people, but she was also greatly interested in the cause of workers, the poor and women.

Although Ella was the first director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), she argued with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. because she did not believe in his “one great leader” model of social change. Instead she worked to empower thousands of ordinary people to speak out. Ella believed in grass-roots organising and local leadership. Her own humble style is part of the reason why her contributions and accomplishments are less well known than those of many of her male counterparts.

In the 1930s, while living in Harlem, Ella was a leader of the cooperative movement and participated in demonstrations against lynching and fascism. In the 1940s, she fought against the Ku Klux Klan, recruiting members for the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP), putting her life at risk. In the 1950s, she struggled against police brutality and school segregation and for basic civil and human rights. In the 1960s she was mentor to a new generation of young freedom fighters in an organisation that she helped found in the spring of 1960, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. SNCC grew out of the 1960 lunch-counter desegregation sit-ins and organised the 1961 freedom rides. It was also behind the Freedom Summer in 1964, which shuttled hundreds of college students into the South to work on voter registration and education. Many of SNCC’s members were jailed and beaten, some lost their lives.

Ella opposed the war in Vietnam and lobbied against South African apartheid. She was a relentless fighter on the side of the oppressed and downtrodden for more than a half century. In her later years, she never thought of herself as old. ”Being young is a state of mind,” she once told a friend, “and young people are the people who want change.” Ella Baker was one of the great unsung heroes of the U.S. Civil Rights movement. She never sought the spotlight, but worked behind the scenes to increase the power of black people, young people and poor people.

Ella Pusell

Although I received a great feminist education from a number of exceptional women, having two daughters has concentrated my mind, more than anything else, on the plight of women. My eldest daughter Ella, her love, joy, strength, courage and determination, has enriched my life beyond my wildest dreams.

Ella Pusell was born in 1988 during the bicentennial of Australia’s invasion. Her middle name, Kalara, was suggested to us by a close friend and local Aboriginal elder. Ella was a happy, playful and fearless child. Very early one morning, when she was just eighteen months old, she climbed out of our home in Stewart Street Wollongong through a window and walked to South beach. Here she was found by a couple and returned home to her still sleeping, but soon freaking out parents, who proceeded to nail all of the windows shut. Ella was full of energy and loved to climb anything. By the time she was one year old she had learnt to talk and could soon engage people in conversation. We used to joke that since then she had never shut up. She was a bright, inquisitive and strong willed girl. When Ella was six, a senior school teacher told us that she was the most stubborn child she had ever met. That same year Ella’s class teacher announced to us that she and six year old Ella were having a “battle of wills”. The teacher assured us that we needn’t worry because she was going to win. She didn’t. But she did hurt Ella by trying, eventually resorting to hitting her. Sadly Ella had to deal with too many teachers who wanted to break her will.

Despite the impact of abusive teachers, Ella had a generally happy childhood, playing with her many friends, being dotted on by grandparents and taking part in many adventures. Having politically active parents introduced Ella to aspects of life that often remain hidden to other children. When she was very little we were on a demo in Wollongong when a cop grabbed me and I had to struggle free. From then on she had a fear of police. As explained in an article I wrote some time ago, “I don’t want my kids to grow up in fear. Why should they have the threat of violence hanging over their heads whenever the powerful decide to teach them a lesson about who is the boss. I’m sick of school principals and teachers complaining about my daughter’s defiance, when she questions their authority. They don’t like the fact that she has a sense of power and self confidence, which we have tried to help her build, to protect her from abuse. They try to break her spirit, because she has an independent mind and will talk back when she feels the situation deserves it. They don’t like it. But I am proud that she fails to obey instructions when she feels they are wrong”.

“One day, I was called in to see the principal of her school. It was the same old question; ‘Why is your child so defiant?’ After listening to what had happened, I pointed out to the principal that it was her teacher who had done the wrong thing and that Ella was standing up for herself because no-one else at the school was. “Look,” I said, “last week she came with me up to the pickets at Port Botany. When the cops said move, we said no. She saw that when people in authority tell you to do something you have a choice, you can do what they tell you, or you can defy them”.

When Ella was nine she was diagnosed with Juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. The condition worsened as she got older. By the age of thirteen it was affecting her wrists, knees, toes and fingers. She was in a lot of pain and taking powerful medication with serious side effects. In 1999 the Illawarra Mercury ran a story under the headline “Brave Ella” detailing her fight with the pain. To combat the arthritis Ella had physiotherapy, hydrotherapy and was put on methotrexate, a drug used in the treatment of cancer, to slow the conditions spread. Because this treatment suppressed her immune system she got regular infections and was susceptible to illness.

Although arthritis involves chronic pain it ebbs and flows, depending on a variety of factors. It took many years of struggling with teachers, schools and the education department before we could get any real recognition of Ella’s needs. She was at times humiliated and punished for not completing work or being unable to perform certain tasks. We had to remove her from her primary school and her high school due to their lack of care and gross incompetence. Living such a difficult life took a physical and emotional toll on Ella. During these years Ella felt increasingly alienated from her peers. She put up with a lot of pain and often tried not to draw attention to herself. None-the-less, Ella had some very close friends and when she was able and willing she did well at school. She was also a good actor, was selected to attend Wollongong High due to her acting abilities, and appeared in school plays and theatrical appearances with a local drama group.

One of the best experiences for Ella during these difficult years was the annual Camp Footloose arthritis camp for young sufferers. These camps were held every year at different locations around the state and brought kids with arthritis together, to take part in a whole range of activities, learn skills in dealing with their condition and to help them understand they were not alone. When she became too old to attend the camps as a participant, Ella volunteered as a camp leader, providing physical and emotional support and assistance to the kids attending. Ella was a fantastic role model, friend and support to many of the young arthritis sufferers who attended Camp Footloose. She demonstrated that with courage, strength and determination you can have a valuable, worthwhile and enjoyable life despite the pain and restrictions of this condition.

In the late 1990s a new drug became available which had a dramatic impact on many young arthritis sufferers. However, the drug cost many thousands of dollars a month. Through the Arthritis Foundation we successfully lobbied to have the drug put on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme. But in order to get the drug prescribed we had to wait for Ella’s health to deteriorate, with the majority of her joints affected, in order to qualify. Since then Ella’s health has improved and she is much more mobile. Ella wants to look after children, has studied childcare at TAFE, and is very keen to have children of her own. She is a loving sister to Cali and they’re great friends. She also shares her love, joy, strength, courage and determination with many others. Ella is not one to be ignored; she turns heads and lights up a room, she is clever, kind, gregarious and has a great sense of humour. Ella is a wonderful daughter and I love her very much.

Emma Goldman

From a seamstress in a clothing factory to internationally recognised radical speaker, writer, editor, courageous agitator and organiser, Emma Goldman was known across the globe for her revolutionary views and opposition to governments, capitalists and war.

Born in Russia in 1869 Emma immigrated to America in 1886. There she found work in a clothing factory and began to attend public meetings on the growing revolt of working people against their horrific work conditions. She supported various labour struggles, helped to organise mass meetings and hunger demonstrations and began to participate as a German and Yiddish speaker at anarchist meetings. Her talk of insurrection, of doing without government, of encouraging the unemployed to take matters into their own hands was terrifying to the authorities. She was arrested, charged with “inciting to riot”, found guilty and sentenced to a year’s imprisonment.

On her release, Emma was met by a crowd of thousands. She told those greeting her that she’d been imprisoned for talking. Soon she was talking again, this time about psychological repression, marriage, female emancipation, and sex. One of the most accomplished, magnetic speakers in American history, she crisscrossed the country lecturing on anarchism, the new woman, birth control, crime and punishment. She also went to Europe where she conducted a lecture tour and trained as a nurse and midwife. Subject to stubborn and sometimes brutal police and vigilante attempts to silence her, Emma joyfully waged countless free-speech struggles and was jailed many times for her speeches.

Emma didn’t want to be equal with unfree men. She wanted freedom for all. As she explained; “Emancipation should make it possible for woman to be human in the truest sense. Everything within her that craves assertion and activity should reach its fullest expression; all artificial barriers should be broken, and the road towards greater freedom cleared of every trace of centuries of submission and slavery”. A militant campaigner for “free love” she rejected and criticised marriage, while enjoying a number of passionate affairs. She believed that true love existed only between equals. She publicly advocated gay rights as well as voluntary motherhood and contraception, which earned her another prison sentence. For Emma it was clear that – “Love, is the strongest and deepest element in all life, the harbringer of hope, of joy, of ecstasy; the defier of all laws, of all conventions; the freest the most powerful moulder of human destiny”.

Emma’s most famous lover, Alexander Berkman, was imprisoned for twenty two years for attempting to kill a steelworks manager who had viciously repressed a strike. The police exerted every effort to involve Emma in the attempt. For her association with Berkman she spent another year behind bars, was shunned, even by many of her anarchist comrades, and became homeless and ill. After this episode she rejected violence as a means of effective action.

In 1901, President McKinley was shot by a man who told the police that Emma had ‘set him on fire’ when he went to hear her speak. This immediately led to her widespread condemnation throughout the country and subsequent arrest. The best efforts of the authorities to implicate her in the assassination proved futile. However, on release from prison Emma published an article in which she tried to explain the assassination in its social and individual aspects, explaining that violence was a product of the vicious capitalist system. “Violence never has and never will bring constructive results,” she wrote. “But my mind and my knowledge of life tell me that change will always be violent”. For this explanation she was once again subjected to terrible persecution.

In 1906, Emma helped to launch and became editor of a monthly anarchist magazine, Mother Earth, which published articles on women’s liberation, sexual freedom, workers’ struggles, education, literature and the arts, state and government control, and was an early supporter of birth control. In 1916, she was jailed for distributing birth control information. In response to World War One she helped to launch the No-Conscription League. It opposed “all wars waged by capitalist governments”. In 1917, she was sentenced to two years in prison for her activities against conscription.

 Following the Russian Revolution and the end of the war, the U.S. government wanted Emma out of the country because they feared she would be a catalyst for a re-invigorated labour movement. She was briefly released from prison, then imprisoned again, and deported to Soviet Russia. It seemed like a great period of freedom, liberation and hope in Russia, but the destruction of the war and the economic conditions were devastating. There was widespread famine and disease. Faced with growing unrest, the Bolsheviks cracked down hard on dissent. Emma was in Petrograd at the time of the Kronstadt rebellion which was put down by the newly formed Red Army. Denouncing this and other attacks on the rank-and-file of the communist movement, in 1921 she left Russia. For years she lived with old friends in England, Canada and France. During two decades of exile, she returned to the United States only once. Denied entry for so many years, she was finally permitted, in death, to cross the border to be buried in 1940.

Emma defined anarchism as “a new social order based on liberty and unrestricted by man-made law.” She loved life and wanted everything, including revolution, to be invested with beauty. At her sedition trial in 1917 she concluded her address to the jury with a tale of “two great Americans”. One was in jail and being visited by his friend. The visiting friend asked the prisoner “what are you doing in jail? And the prisoner replied “what are you doing outside, when honest people are in jail for their ideals?”

Frida Kahlo

Frida Kahlo was a revolutionary artist. Born on the eve of the Mexican Revolution she grew up in a land and a world swept by historic social revolts. Despite many hardships Frida not only supported and participated in struggles for liberation, but gave beautiful expression to the depth of individual and collective desires for a better world.

Frida was born in Mexico City in 1907 in the ‘Blue House’ (opened as a museum in 1958). The Mexican Revolution began in 1910, when she was three years old. Later in life Frida claimed she was really born during 1910. In her writings, she recalled the people who would leap over the walls into her family’s backyard to escape the authorities, and that sometimes her mother would prepare a meal for hungry revolutionaries on the run. When she was six Frida developed polio, which caused her right leg to appear much thinner than the other. It was to remain that way permanently.

In 1922 she entered the National Preparatory School, the most prestigious educational institution in Mexico, which had only just begun to admit girls. It was there she met her husband-to-be, artist Diego Rivera, who’d recently returned home from France, and had been commissioned to paint a mural for the school. In 1925, Frida suffered a serious accident which was to set the pattern for much of the rest of her life. She was travelling in a bus which collided with a tramcar, seriously injuring her right leg and pelvis. She had as many as thirty-five operations due to the accident, mainly on her back, her right leg, and her right foot. The injuries also prevented her from having a child and meant she faced a life-long battle against pain.

Following the accident, Frida gave up her study of medicine to begin a painting career. Initially she painted to occupy time during her immobilisation. Her mother had a special easel made so Frida could paint in bed, and her father lent her his box of oil paints and some brushes. Here she began a long series of self-portraits in which she charted the events of her life and her emotional reactions to them. Later she explained, “I paint myself because I am so often alone and because I am the subject I know best.” “Since my subjects have always been my sensations, my states of mind and the profound reactions that life has been producing in me, I have frequently objectified all this in figures of myself, which were the most sincere and real thing that I could do in order to express what I felt inside and outside of myself.”

Despite her pain and suffering Frida embodied a lust for life. She loved dancing and crowds. She was very witty and had a ferocious and often black sense of humour. She delighted in pets and adored children, who she treated as equals. After the accident, Frida became more politically active and joined the Young Communist League and in 1928 the Mexican Communist Party. She and Diego Rivera were married in 1929. However Frida had a number of affairs with both men and women. In the 1930s, she worked on behalf of Spanish republicans fighting fascism and raised money for Mexicans joining the Spanish civil war’s international brigades. As the struggles against fascism at home and abroad intensified, Frida became an increasingly fervent and impassioned communist. She befriended Leon Trotsky after he gained political asylum in Mexico. For a time Trotsky lived at Frida’s home, and they had an affair before he was assassinated.

In 1937, Frida’s work was exhibited at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the first public showing of her work in Mexico. In 1938, her first solo exhibition opened, in New York. She went to France during 1939 and was featured at an exhibition in Paris. The Louvre bought one of her paintings, The Frame. In 1943, Frida began a decade long career as a painting instructor at the Mexican Education Ministry’s School of Painting. In 1946, she received a Mexican government fellowship, and in the same year an official prize on the occasion of the Annual National Exhibition. For a time Frida lived in the U.S. and Paris.

In 1953, she was offered her first solo show in Mexico, which was to be the only such show held in her lifetime. At the time, Frida was bedridden and her doctors told her that she was too sick to attend. In defiance of their advice she had her bed shipped to the exhibition and was carried inside to greet her friends and supporters. A local critic wrote at the time; “It is impossible to separate the life and work of this extraordinary person. Her paintings are her biography.” In the same year, Frida, threatened by gangrene, had her right leg amputated below the knee. The following year, she made her last public appearance, participating in a demonstration against the overthrow of the left-wing Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz.

Frida died in 1954 at the age of 47. There has been much speculation regarding the nature of her death. It was reported to be caused by a pulmonary embolism, but there have also been stories about a possible suicide. Since her death, Frida’s fame has only grown. The women’s movement of the 1970s led to renewed interest in her life and work, and this is also the subject of the 2002 feature film Frida.

Helen Keller

When I was a youngster my parents taught me about Helen Keller, the deaf and blind girl who became a famous writer and revolutionary. When my daughter, Ella, developed rheumatoid arthritis I sought out information on Helen in the hope of inspiring Ella in her struggle with this condition.

Helen Keller was born in 1880 in Tuscumbia, Alabama. A severe fever at age 19 months left Helen blind and deaf and barely able to communicate. At age six her parents arranged for her to be tutored by an exceptional woman, Anne Sullivan, who taught Helen the alphabet and thereby opened up the world to her. Anne taught Helen to communicate by spelling out words into her hand, beginning with “d-o-l-l” for the doll that she’d brought Helen as a present. Helen’s big breakthrough in communication came when she realised that the motions Anne was making on the palm of her hand, while running cool water over her other hand, symbolised the idea of “water”; she then nearly exhausted Anne demanding the names of all the other familiar objects in her world.

In this video clip Anne and Helen demonstrate how she learned to speak

With Anne repeating the lectures into her hand, Keller studied at schools for the deaf in Boston and New York City. Helen became an excellent student and eventually attended Radcliffe College, where she graduated with honours in 1904. While at Radcliffe she wrote an autobiography, The Story of My Life, still in print in over fifty languages, which made her famous. She published four other books of personal experiences, as well as on contemporary social problems, and a biography of Anne Sullivan.

As a young woman, Helen became determined to learn about the world, and to improve the lives of others. With insight, energy, and a deep devotion to humanity, she lectured throughout the world, while lobbying and writing thousands of letters asking for contributions to finance efforts to improve the welfare of the blind. She visited hospitals and helped blind soldiers. She taught the blind to be courageous and to make their lives rich, productive, and beautiful for others and for themselves. She also founded and promoted the American Foundation for the Blind and in 1920 helped to found the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

Helen campaigned for women’s suffrage, birth control, workers’ rights, and many other causes. She was a member of the Socialist Party of America and joined the Industrial Workers of the World in 1912, saying that parliamentary socialism was “sinking in the political bog.” Newspaper columnists who had praised her courage and intelligence before she expressed her radical views now called attention to her disabilities. The editor of the Brooklyn Eagle wrote that her “mistakes sprung out of the manifest limitations of her development.” Helen responded, referring to having met the editor before he knew of her political views:

“At that time the compliments he paid me were so generous that I blush to remember them. But now that I have come out for socialism he reminds me and the public that I am blind and deaf and especially liable to error. I must have shrunk in intelligence during the years since I met him…Oh, ridiculous Brooklyn Eagle! Socially blind and deaf, it defends an intolerable system, a system that is the cause of much of the physical blindness and deafness which we are trying to prevent.”

Helen’s was one of the most important and earliest voices in the United States to speak out against World War One. In her famous speech ‘Strike Against War’ delivered in 1916 she implored:

“Strike against all ordinances and laws and institutions that continue the slaughter of peace and the butcheries of war. Strike against war, for without you no battles can be fought. Strike against manufacturing shrapnel and gas bombs and all tools of murder. Strike against preparedness that means death and misery to millions of human beings. Be not dumb, obedient slaves in an army of destruction.”

As she explained elsewhere “the best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched – they must be felt with the heart.”

“Once I knew only darkness and stillness… my life was without past or future… but a little word from the fingers of another fell into my hand that clutched at emptiness and my heart leaped to the rapture of living.”

International Women’s Day

IWD is celebrated across the world each year on March 8 to acknowledge the gains made by women over the years and to draw attention to the issues that still impact negatively on women’s lives. The year 2011, when these posts were originally written, was the one hundredth anniversary of IWD. The first official celebration of Women’s Day, on March 19 1911, was marked by over a million people in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland. The decision to observe an International Women’s Day was made the previous year at the Second International conference of working women held in Copenhagen. At the conference, Clara Zetkin, from the Women’s Office for the Social Democratic Party in Germany, proposed that every year, in every country, on the same day, there should be a celebration of Women’s Day, to press for various demands made by women. Her suggestion was unanimously approved.

Towards the end of the 19th century, women rose up, demonstrating against oppressive working conditions, poor pay and inequality and demanding voting rights. In 1908, 15,000 women marched through New York City calling for shorter hours, better pay and the vote. In 1909, the Socialist Party of America declared that February 28 would be celebrated as the first National Women’s Day across the country. Women in Russia campaigning for peace on the eve of World War One observed their first IWD on the last Sunday of February in 1913. That year a common agreement was reached and IWD was transferred to March 8. The celebration of International Women’s Day on the South Coast was initiated by the Miners’ Women’s Auxiliary in 1938.

However, it wasn’t until 1979 that an IWD march was held in Wollongong. Again, it was the Miners’ Women’s Auxiliary that invited a number of local women’s groups to participate in preparations for the IWD march. The resulting organising committee included the Wollongong Women’s Collective, the Wollongong Working Women’s Charter, trade unions, the Unemployed People’s Movement, the Pro-Abortion Lobby, the Illawarra Non-Sexist Resources Centre and the Miners’ Women’s Auxiliary. The 1979 march took place along Crown Street with two hundred women and some men voicing the first chants of the women’s movement in the streets of Wollongong. Issues aired at the march included improvements for women workers, repealing abortion laws, women’s health needs, Aboriginal women’s rights, migrant women’s rights, childcare, rape, and sexism within schools.

Women have made great strides in their struggles over the years. But much remains to be done. In 1975, during International Women’s Year, the United Nations (UN) began celebrating International Women’s Day. Two years later the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution proclaiming a United Nations Day for Women’s Rights. In adopting its resolution, the General Assembly recognised the role of women in peace efforts and development and urged an end to discrimination and an increase of support for women’s full and equal participation. In 1979 the UN adopted a Convention on the Elimination of All forms of Discrimination Against Women. However, every Secretary General of the United Nations has been a man. There has never been a female head of state in China, France, Japan, Russia, South Africa, Mexico and many more nations. Around 85% of the world’s parliamentarians are men. Every head of the World Bank has been a man. Worldwide men make up 98% of all company CEOs. The vast majority of mosques, churches and religions are run by men. Women continue to carry the major burden of work. Nowhere in the world are women’s wages equal to men’s. In Australia women earn on average hundreds of dollars per week less than men. Women own less than 2% of the world’s land. Two thirds of the world’s illiterates are women. Women make up 70% of the world’s poor. One in every three women experience sexual abuse by the age of 18. Domestic violence is still a leading cause of injury to women worldwide. These are some of the reasons that today local and global women’s movements are organising and mobilising for change.

Lisa Simpson

There are at least two problems with my choice for today’s remarkable woman. Firstly, she is a fictional character and secondly, she is mostly the creation of men. However, I thought it was time for some humour and I believe many Simpsons fans would agree that Lisa Simpson is a perfectly cromulent choice. She is perhaps the most visible, mainstream contemporary advocate of feminism and she has embiggened the lives of many.

Lisa Marie Simpson is one of the main characters in the animated television series The Simpsons. She is the middle child of the Simpson family, voiced by French born American actress Yeardley Smith. For the past 26 years Lisa has been appearing on TV screens as an 8 year old girl, generally the smartest and most socially aware person in her home town of Springfield. Lisa has been described as “the aching heart of the Simpson’s existentialist angst and keeper of its worldly knowledge.” She is usually the most mature and sensible member of her family, the one to most likely to offer caring consideration and reassurance. As she explains to her brother Bart, “having never received any words of encouragement myself, I’m not sure how they’re supposed to sound. But here goes: I believe in you.” Her family often turn to Lisa in times of crisis and she regularly warns those around her of impending danger.

Lisa: Dad! I think a hurricane’s coming!
Homer: Oh, Lisa! There’s no record of a hurricane ever hitting Springfield.
Lisa: Yes, but the records only go back to 1975, when the Hall of Records was mysteriously blown away!

Lisa has many intellectual, cultural and political interests. She is a gifted musician, jazz loving saxophone ace and guitar player. My favourite song of Lisa’s, which she sang on the picket line with striking workers at the nuclear plant where her father works, is They have the plant, but we have the power.

Lisa also has a love for free form poetry and the blues. She has many future plans and dreams, ranging from being the first female US President to becoming a famous jazz musician. As she tells her family one night over dinner; “I’ve got it all figured out. I’ll be unappreciated in my own country, but my gutsy blues stylings will electrify the French. I’ll avoid the horrors of drug abuse, but I do plan to have several torrid love affairs, and I may or may not die young. I haven’t decided.”

Lisa is far from perfect and often reflects the contradictions and complexities of contemporary existence. She has an unhealthy obsession for Malibu Stacey dolls and also at one stage a Hollywood heartthrob named Corey. However, when the talking version of Malibu Stacey has nothing more to say than “I wish they taught shopping in school “, “Let’s make some cookies for the boys” and the final straw “Don’t ask me, I’m just a girl”, Lisa has had enough. She joins with Stacey Lovell, the original creator of Malibu Stacey (who used to funnel her profits from the doll to fund the Viet Cong) to create a better doll – Lisa Lionheart. The Lisa doll instead says things like; “Trust in yourself and you can achieve anything”.

In another episode, Lisa makes a home for Malibu Stacey out of a shoe box including a work space where she produces a monthly feminist newsletter. In another episode, Lisa’s version of Snow White goes like this; “So Snow White slept and waited for her prince to come, but he never did…because a woman shouldn’t have to depend on a man. Snow White was brought back to life…by a lady doctor.” Lisa told Ms. Magazine her role models, like Simone de Beauvoir and George Eliot, fueled her feminism, as did; “The off chance that my father, Homer, and my brother, Bart – much as I love them – represent a fair cross-section of American men.”

Lisa has compassion even for those she dislikes, as she says; “It’s amazing how I can feel sorry for you and hate you at the same time. I’m sure there’s a German word for it.” At times she can be cynical, at one point arguing with her mum that; “Romance is dead – it was acquired in a hostile takeover by Hallmark and Disney, homogenised, and sold off piece by piece.” And her weary sigh is one that I know all too well. At times it all gets too much for Lisa and she descends into despair. Exasperated she asks; “Is your remarkably sexist drivel intentional, or just some horrible mistake?” More than once she has been sent off for analysis and has at times been medicated. She explains in one episode; “Because of the Xanax, I’m not over-anxious about being a Simpson anymore. I am a little anxious about being on Xanax, but the Zoloft covers that nicely.”

With an unquenchable thirst for knowledge, Lisa is a debunker of false patriotic myths, a champion of the value of books and libraries, and is the academic star of Springfield Elementary School. But, although she is highly regarded by the teachers and principal, she is also the student most likely to trigger her school’s “Independent Thought Alarm”. She has received detention a number of times due to her rebellious attitude and anti-authoritarian behaviour. When she visits Washington D.C., to give a speech, she cries out that the city “was built on a stagnant swamp some two hundred years ago and very little has changed; it stank then and it stinks now. Only today, it is the fetid stench of corruption that hangs in the air.” Yet, at times, she displays her naivety, such as in her argument with Adil, a foreign exchange student, who asks; “How can you defend a country where five per cent of the people control ninety five per cent of the wealth? Too which she replies; “I’m defending a country where people can think and act and worship as they want.” In order to break up this fight, her dad Homer intervenes with a compromise position; “Maybe Lisa’s right about America being the land of opportunity, and maybe Adil’s got a point about the machinery of capitalism being oiled with the blood of the workers.”

Politically active, a vegetarian, culture jammer and committed environmentalist, Lisa is the antithesis of corporate greed. Her personal is intensely political. She is an advocate of kid’s power and demands equal pay for equal work during household chores. She has fought against privatisation, xenophobia, racism, sexism, homophobia and ignorance. Lisa’s yearning for a life of meaning, a world free from sleek sterile corporate surfaces and injustice, fuels her rage. She lives with her eyes and mind wide open, rejects the idols of acquisition and consumption, sees beyond existential self-absorption and is capable of exposing, embarrassing and challenging authority figures.

I hesitated about including Lisa as a remarkable woman, but finally decided to go ahead because her character helped me get through some very dark times during the early 1990s and continues to bring me joy. Confronted by the creeping dread, rising apathy, and cynicism of the so-called ‘end of history’, Lisa was an affirmation (on prime time TV) that progressive praxis was not dead. She pre-figured and helped to inspire a powerful alter-globalisation movement and continues to struggle against patriarchy and for liberation. As Lisa tells her dad; “Did you know the Chinese use the same word for ‘crisis’ as they do for ‘opportunity’”?

Maria Dalla Costa

Maria Dalla Costa has produced ground-breaking political/sociological theory and has been active in a wide variety of feminist struggles. Her analysis of women’s labour and re/production has helped to inform my own writing on feminism and love. I initially became interested in Maria because she was a member of the renowned Italian autonomist group Potere Operaio (Workers’ Power) in the late sixties and early seventies. In Italy during this time there were many intense workplace struggles and Workers’ Power were very influential. In 1969, many Italian workers refused to work, factories were picketed or occupied and workers’ assemblies took control of the struggle. In 1971, Maria left Workers’ Power to form Lotta Feminista (Feminist Struggle). She was a key theorist of feminist movements in Italy during the 1970s, when many autonomist groups were established and women’s, students’, and other social movements continued to grow. While autonomists still considered industrial workers to be crucial in revolutionary struggles, they also stressed the growing power of other sections of the working class and the importance of class struggle throughout society. During this time relations between left organisations and feminist movements were tense and many women’s collectives were critical of discredited forms of political practice, particularly the macho predisposition to the use of violence.

In 1972, Maria produced her best known work The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, co-authored with Selma James. This was an influential pamphlet that used a feminist reading of Marx to challenge traditional Left thinking on the role of women, their labour, and their struggles. In this work Maria affirms the importance of women’s unwaged labour as an essential part of capitalist re/production, rather than merely an oppression imposed on women by men. The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community was adopted as a feminist classic and Maria became an important historical figure of the women’s movement at the international level.

During the 1970s, Maria took part in many housing, education, workplace and other struggles, including struggles in obstetric wards, against industrial pollution and around abortion, lesbianism and prostitution. In 1972, she helped found the International Feminist Collective to promote debate and activity in different countries and to organise an international feminism network. Since then she has traveled the world speaking out, assisting international conferences and organising globally coordinated feminist action. In 1974, in Padua she helped to establish a self-organised women’s health’ centre, the first of many in Italy. That same year, Maria addressed a celebration of International Women’s Day saying; “Today the feminist movement in Italy is opening the campaign for Wages for Housework. The questions we are raising today are many: the barbarous conditions in which we have to face abortion, the sadism we are subjected to in obstetric and gynaecological clinics, our working conditions – in jobs outside the home our conditions are always worse than men’s, and at home we work without wages – the fact that social services either don’t exist or are so bad that we are afraid to let our children use them. For us the demand for wages for housework is a direct demand for power, because housework is what millions of women have in common. If we can organise ourselves in our millions on this demand we can get so much power that we need no longer be in a position of weakness when we go out of the home. Today in this square, with the opening of our mobilisation for Wages for Housework, we put on the agenda our working hours, our holidays, our strikes and our money.”

In 1977, massive social struggles again erupted throughout Italy in response to capitalist restructuring and state austerity programs. Women, young people, students, and the unemployed were in revolt, frustrated by the lack of jobs and the refusal of the government to enact significant economic and social reforms. By mid-year the demonstrations had an ‘insurrectional character’ and the Government responded with tanks in the streets. The Government also introduced special laws and emergency measures, special police, special prisons, special courts and trials. Sixty five thousand left-wing activists were investigated, twenty five thousand were arrested and many others fled the country.

Following the implementation of this ‘state of emergency’ Maria continued her academic work and contributed to struggles around women’s labour, reproduction and sexual liberation. She has continued to focus on the issues of women’s unpaid labour while expanding her scope to include analyses of women’s bodies, transnational agricultural corporations and struggles over land, food and community, genetic engineering, the over-prescription of hysterectomys, the patriarchy of the medical establishment and much more. Since the 1990s, she has devoted her study to questions of the Earth/land and to the movements struggling to safeguard cycles of reproduction, of life, as basic commons. Maria has contributed to and edited books on housework, the feminist movement in Italy, women and the politics of international economic strategy, welfare and development strategies and the power of multinational capital. She is currently professor of Political Sociology at the Faculty of Political Sciences, University of Padua.

My grandmothers

In this post I honour my grandmothers, Olive and Gladys. I owe so much to their sacrifices and carry both of them in my heart. None of my other contributions have been so hard to write, a mixture of melancholy, anger, pride and reverence.

I never knew my father’s mum as she died in 1953. Olive Wood was born in Small Heath, Birmingham, England in 1908 and attended the local school. Small Heath was a poor area in an industrial region and Olive’s family struggled to get by. After leaving school Olive married George Southall and they set up house in Small Heath. Olive had three children, my dad Raymond (in 1932) and his two younger brothers, Brian (in 1937) and Allen (in 1946). In 1935 Olive, George and young Raymond moved to another house in Small Heath where my grandparents lived until their deaths.

In 1939, at the outbreak of the Second World War, George joined the British Army Coldstream Guards and shortly after was posted to the Middle East. As the men went off to fight, women were encouraged to move into occupations previously denied them. Olive took the opportunity to support her young family by working the night shift as a capstan lathe operator at the Birmingham Small Arms (BSA) factory. At the outbreak of the war, BSA at Small Heath was the only factory in the UK producing rifles. The factory also produced machine guns. This of course made the BSA a major strategic target for Nazi bombers and the factory was attacked a number of times by the Luftwaffe.

Despite the extreme danger, Olive and her workmates continued working through the raids, boosting production in the hope of assisting the men at the front. On November 19 1940, the bombing of BSA killed fifty three workers, injured another eighty nine, thirty of them seriously, and trapped hundreds. On that night, stuck beside her lathe, the factory a chaos of fire, shattered machines, the dead, dying and injured, Olive was found and saved by a fellow worker. He smothered her burning hair and clothing with his coat and dragged her out of the inferno. Nearby another woman was trapped beneath her machine, crying out for help, begging to be saved for her children’s sake. Sadly, the machine was too big for them to move, and they had to leave her there to die.

After recovering from her physical injuries, Olive returned to work, this time as a brass grinder in another factory, across the road from her old school. Due to the bombing raids, my dad and his brother Brian were sent away, although not far enough that they couldn’t see Birmingham burning at night. In 1941, a bomb destroyed Olive’s mum’s house and in 1942 George was reported missing in action, after the fall of Tobruk. Following weeks of anxiety, Olive was informed that George had been wounded and was in a military hospital in Egypt. He didn’t return home until 1945. Their third son Allen was born in 1946.

After the war, Olive and George increasingly quarreled and Olive became more and more depressed. Although suffering from post-traumatic stresses and despite the constant threat posed by the bombing raids during the war, her work in the factories had given Olive a social worth, social life, social power and social mobility that post-war was again denied to most women. Olive was now back at home as a housewife, with no labour saving devices, little money, a baby, two other boys, ill health and a war weary husband. She spent most of her days as a hardworking, but poorly rewarded, housewife. Her only paid work was as a low waged domestic cleaner for a more well-off family. In March 1953, she committed suicide by drinking a bottle of cleaning fluid.

Of all the things I pined for when my family moved from England to Australia, I missed my maternal grandmother the most. Many of my most cherished childhood memories revolve around my Gran – Gladys. Gladys Grainger was born in 1918. She grew up in an extremely impoverished area and overcame many obstacles to win a scholarship to a selective school. However, her parents couldn’t afford to buy her shoes, so she was given some boy’s boots by a charity to attend school in. When she appeared in the school’s play wearing her boots people in the audience laughed at her.

As soon as she could, at the age of 14, Gladys left school and went to work in a factory. She met and married my grandad Ron, a bricklayer, and when she was 18 she had my mum. Three years later, with the outbreak of World War Two, Ron enlisted in the British Army and went off to fight. Meanwhile, Gran got a job working for British Rail for the duration of the war. When my grandad came home in 1945, to ‘the land fit for heroes’, they settled down in a neglected council estate where they would live the rest of their lives together. Ron had returned in one piece, but was a changed man, wounded inside. The things he had seen and done had transformed him forever, and their relationship would always show the strains of the war.

After the war, Gran went to work at the local hospital, in the sewing room. With their two wages, Gran and Grandad could now take my Mum away on holiday. They traveled on a tandem pushbike, sometimes riding for hundreds of miles, with Mum, a tent and their bedding and other supplies in a sidecar. After having two more children, Ken and Debbie, Gladys became a medical orderly, a job she kept until her retirement. During these years, Gran became an active unionist and outspoken campaigner around workplace issues, community campaigns, anti-war struggles and many more. She joined the Communist Party in the early 1960s and as she aged became active in the pensioner’s movement. Into her sixties, until she was forced to retire, Gran would ride her pushbike to work, up hills, through the rain and the snow. On returning home she would do most of the housework, cook the meals, and look after Mum, Ken and Debbie. She was an incredibly strong, determined and loving woman.

Gran was the first woman to hold me; she was an orderly at the hospital where I was born and my mum was anesthetised at the time after a cesarean delivery. Although Gran lived in a very poor neighbourhood, I loved to stay with her and fondly remember the warmth of her community. As well as spending many wonderful days at Gran’s house, she and Grandad would also take me on holidays to the seaside, and camping, although this time by car. While we lived quite far away from her, we would regularly meet up at demonstrations and for special occasions. I can’t remember a Christmas in England without her. I’m unsure if this is because we spent every Christmas together, or because Christmas without Gran wasn’t worth remembering.

I’m very glad that in her later years she visited Australia and spent some time with Sharon and both of her great granddaughters. My Gran died a decade ago and I miss her very much. But, as I said at her memorial, paraphrasing Rage Against the Machine and Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath – wherever there is defiance and courage in the air; wherever there’s a fight for equality, for dignity, for peace; wherever people are battling for a decent job or a helping hand; wherever they are struggling to be free; wherever people are showing that they care; I look in their eyes and I see her.

Narelle Clay

These posts were originally written in 2011 and this one was posted to help promote that year’s International Women’s Day rally in my home city of Wollongong. The theme of the rally was ‘Equal Pay Now’ and speakers included local community and union activist, Narelle Clay, who has played an important part in the long struggle for equal pay.

Narelle Clay has been a friend of mine for many years. We usually meet up at meetings, demonstrations and picket lines. In the 1970s I used to do volunteer work at the Wollongong Youth Refuge. Back then the refuge had little to offer homeless youth apart from a couple of beds in a rundown house on the edge of McCabe Park. As a result of the hard work of Narelle and many others, mainly local women, today there is much more support available to homeless young people, their families and others facing crisis and hardship.

In 2011, Narelle was selected as a finalist for the International Women’s Day New South Wales Woman of the Year Award. The Award acknowledges the achievements of women and their contributions to communities across NSW. Described as one of New South Wale’s most inspirational women, Narelle is known to many people as loving, strong and determined. She has been a tireless fighter for better community services and for more funding to assist those struggling to survive. Narelle was selected for the Award because she has demonstrated a talent and enthusiasm for improving the lives of those around her, especially women. Narelle’s nominator stated that she is “a passionate and committed advocate for youth and families. She is dedicated and relentless in pursuit of community welfare.”

For more than twenty five years Narelle has assisted those in need, the homeless, women and children escaping domestic violence, the unemployed and workers in struggle. Narelle is CEO of Southern Youth and Family Services, providing employment, education, training, housing, family support, domestic violence, and suicide prevention services in the Illawarra, Shoalhaven and Southern Tablelands areas. In 2005, she received an Order of Australia Award for “distinguished service to the community through social justice advocacy and the provision of accommodation, housing and support for homeless people especially young people.” As well as serving as a Commissioner for the National Youth Commission and on the Independent National Inquiry into Youth Homelessness in 2007 and 2008, Narelle has been a vital member of many committees and boards related to her areas of interest. She has also been a TAFE teacher for over twenty years in various courses related to human services as well as a trainer specialising in the areas of advocacy, community management, policy development and industrial relations. Narelle is also the President of the Australian Services Union NSW and ACT Branches and Secretary of the Australian Services Union NSW, Social and Community Services Industry Division. She has played an important part in the long struggle for equal pay.

The Australian Services Union’s equal pay case has been described as “the most important case for the rights of women in the last 20 years.” In recent years, the pay gap between men and women has been widening and women are over-represented in lower paid work. On average women are still paid 17% less than men. The ASU’s campaign aims to go some way to addressing the gender wage gap. About 85% of community sector workers are women and over 60% of them have tertiary qualifications. Yet, they earn less than average weekly earnings. If they did the same job in the public service the pay rates would be 30% to 50% higher. In 2012, community workers won long awaited pay rises in a historic decision in the equal pay case. However, the struggle continues, as Narelle and many others seek to have this decision and further improvements implemented.

Nina Southall

My mum, Nina Southall, feminist agitator, communist, school teacher, university lecturer, dancer. There is really no way to adequately sum up my Mum or her life. So I will only be touching on what have so far been a full, rich and creative 77 years.

This is the speech I gave at Mum’s 70th Birthday Party.

Irene Mary Grainger was born in Walsall in 1936. For those of you who haven’t had the opportunity to visit Walsall, it is a deprived English working class town in the heart of the ‘black country’, so called because of the effects of industrial pollution. In 1936, the people of Walsall were still suffering from the effects of the Great Depression and a few years later the community would be devastated by World War Two. This was a rough place to grow up, during hard times. For the war years Mum’s father Ron was away from the family fighting in the Army. Luckily for Mum, her mother, Gladys, was tough, determined and loving. These were traits Gladys helped her daughter develop, enabling Mum to overcome the obstacles in her path and to excel at school, university and in her career as an educator.

I’ve known Mum for many years. Since the day I was swapped for her real child by Gladys, who worked at the hospital where I was born. While this swapped at birth story may only be a tale my Grandmother told me, to reassure me I wasn’t related to my parents, in reality I’ve been extremely fortunate to be my mother’s son.

One week before I was born, the United States went to DEFCON2 during the Cuban Missile Crisis. For those not familiar with the cold war, this is as close to nuclear war as the world has ever been. Now for many people this was a tense time. But for an anti-nuclear peace activist about to have their first child, the tension must have been extreme. Not surprisingly, I was reluctant to emerge into this apocalyptic world and was determined to remain inside my warm and comfortable home until dragged out. But I needn’t have worried, because although Mum helped educate me about many of the horrors of the world, like the fact that people actually have and use nuclear weapons, she also exposed me to all that makes life wonderful and worth living.

Jean Paul Sartre once wrote “hell is other people”. Now, unlike my friend Henri, I didn’t know Jean Paul, but it’s obvious from this statement that Sartre didn’t know my Mum. Thanks to Mum my childhood is full of wonderful memories of travel, theatre, music, demonstrations, parties, socialising and adventure. Mum not only tried to make life as fun as possible, she helped to build and foster independence, community, freedom and love.

Of course, while Mum is loved by her family, by her students and by her friends, she isn’t loved by all. Mum has often had enemies. She is a strong woman who opposes, defies and has frequently confronted those who abuse their power and exploit and oppress other people. Mum stands up for what she believes in and has tried to stop the rich and powerful from fucking up our lives. Some of the ways she’s done this is through being involved in the peace, women’s liberation and anti-racism movements, workplace struggles and as a Communist Party activist. For Mum being a communist has meant both fighting against oppression and struggling to create as much freedom, love, fun and happiness as possible, not in some future utopia, but here, now, among the people she’s with and cares about.

For Mum, being a teacher, has not just been a job at schools and universities. She could always be relied upon to challenge ignorance and to try and raise awareness. I remember one parent-teacher night when she came to speak to a few of my teachers at Wollongong High School, whose classes I was having trouble with. My maths teacher at the time was pretty useless and Mum explained to him how bad his teaching method was and what he could do to improve it. At the end of the night, this teacher bumped into one of Mum’s friends, Neil Whitfield, who was also teaching at Wollongong High. Looking exasperated he told Neil he had just met “the most awful woman”. “Oh”, Neil replied, “you must mean Nina Southall. She’s a good friend of mine.” I’m not sure what my maths teacher learned from this experience. He certainly didn’t take up mum’s offer to attend her lectures on the philosophy of education. But there’s no doubt that Mum has educated many people in plenty of ways and throughout her life she has transformed herself, us and the world.

Having such a colourful and exuberant Mum can often be quite embarrassing. When I was young I remember one summer when we traveled to East Germany and Mum and Dad would dance, 1950’s rock’n’roll style, with Mum being thrown in the air, between Dad’s legs and pretty much taking over the whole dance floor with their flamboyant display. Over the years, Mum has traveled much of the world – dancing as she goes. Another time I remember well was when we went to Greece soon after the fall of the military dictatorship. During the dictatorship, much of Greece’s folk and popular music was banned. One night we went to eat at a restaurant in Athens and the band was playing some of the previously forbidden music. So mum not only got up and danced, but danced on the restaurant’s tables.

Mum’s partner Trevor once tried to explain to a mutual friend of ours exactly how exciting life with Mum is. Trevor told him about the most exciting day in his life before he met Mum. This was when he was in the British army and visited Aden in the Middle East. The troops had been alcohol free for a long time and were very excited to find on their arrival that grog had been laid on. The troops set about getting as pissed as possible, causing a near riot and jumping in the sea, defying their commanding officers and postponing their departure. After describing how exciting and wonderful this day was, Trevor explained that for him every day with Nina was like that day.

Mum has strived to live life to the fullest and has accomplished many of her dreams and wishes. But, I know she feels she’s yet to fulfill one dream, that of joining those at the barricades during the revolution. Yet, for me, she’s been at the barricades for much of her life, and having her as my mother has helped to make me feel like we’re part of the revolution every day. With Mum, life at the barricades is not all tension, potential violence and difficult struggle. In fact, Nina’s revolution has been exciting, loving and fun. I don’t tell Mum often enough how much I love her and how clever, courageous, generous and wonderful she is. Maybe it’s because so many other people have told her already. Or maybe it’s because she already seems to know. Whatever the reason, she should be aware that I, and many others, appreciate that it’s true.

Nuclear free world

In 2010, my youngest daughter visited Hiroshima. She brought me back a t-shirt from the Peace Memorial Park which reads ‘Love, Peace, Hiroshima’. On March 11 2011, as I was writing these IWD posts, the Fukushima nuclear disaster began. So, I thought I should honour the women who’ve been campaigning for a nuclear free world. As the people of Japan are again confronted by the dangers of nuclear power, lest we forget the previous nuclear victims and those who’ve been struggling for decades to prevent more nuclear disasters.

In August 2010, in Japan and around the world, the 65th anniversary of the first use of atomic power against human beings was remembered. In Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Park, close to ground zero of the blast, participants held a minutes silence at 8.05 local time when the B-29 Enola Gay bomber dropped the atomic bomb on August 6th, 1945. On that day 140,000 people were killed. Only three days later another American plane launched a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki killing a further 80,000 people. Most of those killed or injured were women and children. The bombs were dropped, as J. Robert Oppenheimer, scientific director of the Manhattan Project, said in November 1945, on “an essentially defeated enemy.”

In August 2010, long-time anti-nuclear activist Dr Helen Caldicott spoke here in Wollongong as a guest of Students Against War about the nuclear cycle, the health and environmental effects of nuclear energy, the proposed international nuclear waste dump in Australia and the use of depleted uranium ammunition in Iraq and Afghanistan.(http://studentsagainstwar.wordpress.com/ )

When it comes to opposing nuclear power, the toughest, most active and conspicuous resistance has been from women. The harmful impacts of nuclear power, nuclear weapons and nuclear wastes disproportionally effect women. The brunt of nuclear-caused cancer is suffered by women and children, as is the brunt of nuclear war, and of depleted uranium. Opinion polls over many years, and in many countries, consistently show that women are opposed to nuclear power and nuclear weapons. Women across the globe are concerned about the health and environmental effects of the nuclear industry. Yet we are consistently reassured by the industry, politicians, narrowly educated nuclear physicists, and other technocrats, that nuclear power is safe, and we have nothing to worry about in regard to radiation.

Today women around the world continue to oppose the construction of nuclear reactors, uranium mining, nuclear proliferation and campaign for nuclear disarmament. Women have played a vital role in fighting the Australian government’s plan to put a nuclear waste dump on Aboriginal land in the Northern Territory.

Here is a video – “Testimonies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Women Speak Out for Peace” – a testament of hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors) who experienced the bombings of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945, and their cries for peace.

In December 2012 I traveled to Tokyo and later wrote about my stay and the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Live by the River: some thoughts on a brief trip to Japan

Rosa Luxemburg

Rosa Luxemburg has had a profound influence on my understanding of democracy, Marxism, capitalism and revolution.

Rosa Luxemburg was born in Poland in 1871. At the time, Poland was part of the Russian empire and was ruled by the Tsarist autocracy. In this period, Europe was being transformed by the growing power and influence of worker’s movements, trade unions, social democratic parties and revolutionary organisations. Rosa was born into a Jewish family who were sympathetic to the national-revolutionary movement. At the age of five, Rosa developed a disease of the hip and was bedridden for a year. During this time, she demonstrated her strength and determination by fighting the disease and teaching herself to read and write.

Rosa went to school in Warsaw, where she came into contact with dissident student circles. During her formative years, Poland witnessed a wave of industrial action and major struggles between the authorities and Proletariat, a radical workers’ party. After Proletariat was smashed and some of its leaders executed, remnants set up small clandestine groups. In her final years at school, Rosa became politically active and joined one of these groups, the Polish Social Democrats, a small group of intellectual activists who provided Rosa with an extended family, free ranging debate and a group of like-minded people she could rely on. After becoming involved in the group, Rosa was threatened with arrest. She graduated in 1887, but was denied the gold medal she’d earned for academic achievement, because of her rebellious attitude.

Her family encouraged Rosa to move to Switzerland to avoid arrest and to attend university. She was smuggled across the Polish border under a pile of straw in a peasant’s cart. Switzerland’s universities accepted both male and female students on an equal footing and Rosa knew that there she’d find a freer and more questioning society. She became a Doctor of Law at the University of Zurich in 1897. While studying in Zurich, Rosa explored the ideas of Karl Marx and became convinced that his views about capitalism, the working class and revolution offered solutions to the problems of exploitation, poverty, alienation and war.

After completing her studies, Rosa moved to Germany and began work as a journalist for various publications of the German Social Democratic Party (GSDP). At the time, Germany was seen as the centre of working class struggle, having the largest and most organised trade union movement in the world. Similarly the GSDP was the largest and most powerful worker’s party. While being a Jewish woman from Poland provoked some hostility towards her within the GSDP, Rosa’s intellect, courage and determination soon saw her become a leading spokesperson for the left wing of the Party.

In 1914, in reaction to the rapid rightward lurch of German social democracy, Rosa helped form the Spartacus League – later to become the German Communist Party. She famously criticised the dominant right wing of the GSDP for being nationalist rather than internationalist and predicted they would support the imperialistic war of the ruling class. When she was proved correct, she was imprisoned for denouncing the First World War and spent most of the war in jail.

At the end of the war, Rosa was released from prison, the German monarchy fell and the German proletariat rose up in a powerful revolutionary movement. Rosa and the Spartacus League were at the forefront of many militant workers’ actions during this period. The reaction from the authorities to the activities of the Spartacus League was swift and dramatic. The Social Democratic Party leadership, sections of the armed forces and the main employers, quickly organised a counter movement to ‘restore law and order’.

On January 15, 1919, Rosa and her comrade Karl Liebknecht were arrested by the German ‘Free Corps’ and taken to a luxury hotel, where they were tortured. They were then murdered separately. Karl was delivered to the city morgue while Rosa was shot in the head and dumped into a canal. The ‘counter-revolution’ against German communism would continue for many years, leading to the rise of Hitler and the mass extermination of German communists, radical workers, Jews and millions of other people.

Initially, Rosa’s revolutionary politics were aimed at assisting workers by supporting social democracy against autocracy. But, once autocracy was defeated, she saw the need for further revolutionary changes, because reforming capitalism would not eradicate its worse aspects. Rosa understood the importance of organising women to take part in the revolutionary struggle and she refused to be pushed into traditional ‘women’s roles’ within the workers’ movement. She saw women’s liberation being achieved at the same time as men’s liberation, through a revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. While Rosa was an intellectual, she also participated in the practical activities of revolutionary movements. However, it was consciousness raising that played a central role in Rosa’s ideas and activities. She took part in the education of workers through party and trade union classes, schools and conferences and wrote and helped publish books, agitational and educational pamphlets. She also worked as a journalist and helped produce and distribute political newspapers.

Rosa took part and assisted many struggles, seeing these as the most important educational experiences. She placed great emphasis on the role of people in action, on the things that they could accomplish through a collective struggle against capital. She looked to working people to sweep away conservative leaders, creating new revolutionary ways of organising. She encouraged them to perform the tasks that she felt only they, acting as a class, could accomplish.

Having a deep understanding of the importance of the relationship between revolutionary struggles in Germany and Russia, Rosa challenged Lenin’s view of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, instead insisting on the fullest development of democracy. She saw revolution as involving the extension of public control, freedom of the press and assembly. Following the Russian Revolution in 1917, Rosa pointed out to the Bolsheviks that what Marx had advocated was “the broadest public forum on the basis of the most active, unlimited participation of the mass of the people, of unlimited democracy” and that this “does not come as some sort of Christmas present for the worthy people who, in the interim, have loyally supported a handful of socialist dictators.”

Participation was central to Rosa’s ideas about individual and collective freedom, democracy, revolution and social change. She relied on people’s ability to learn from their experience in struggle, to extend democracy, create revolution and construct a better world. She explained that a post-capitalist society would be “a historical product, born out of the school of its own experiences, born in the course of its realisation, as a result of the developments of living history.” Rosa’s rejection of capitalism and promotion of democratic revolutionary movements still has significant support today. The problems of poverty, exploitation, repression and war continue to plague the vast majority of people and they, like her, hope and struggle for a better world. In Berlin, the local government has built a monument to Rosa in Rosa Luxemburg square. Every year, on the anniversary of her murder, tens of thousands of people march through the streets of Berlin to Rosa’s grave, commemorating her life and demonstrating their support for the ideas that she lived and died for.

Rosa Parks

As a child of the sixties, and having communist parents, I grew up listening to Pete Seeger records. My favourite songs of his were those about the civil rights movement in the United States, such as ‘If You Miss Me at the Back of the Bus’. It was from the liner notes of one of Pete’s albums that I first learnt about Rosa Parks.

If You Miss Me at the Back of the Bus

On December 1, 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks refused to obey bus driver James Blake’s order to give up her seat to make room for a white passenger. For this she was arrested. In Montgomery, the first four rows of bus seats were reserved for white people. Buses had ‘coloured’ sections for black people, who made up more than 75% of the bus system’s riders, generally in the rear of the bus. These sections were not fixed in size but were determined by the placement of a movable sign. Black people could sit in the middle rows, until the white section was full. Then they had to move to seats in the rear, stand, or, if there was no room, leave the bus. Black people weren’t allowed to sit across the aisle from white people. The driver could also move the ‘coloured’ section sign, or remove it altogether. If white people were already sitting in the front, black people could board to pay the fare, but then had to disembark and re-enter through the rear door. There were times when the bus departed before the black customers who had paid made it to the back entrance.

At the time of her defiant action, Rosa was secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and had recently attended the Highlander Folk School, a centre for workers’ rights and racial equality. In 1955, many people were moved by the brutal murder of a 14 year old boy, Emmett Till, after he was accused of flirting with a white woman. Only four days before she refused to give up her seat, Rosa attended a mass meeting in Montgomery which focused on Emmett’s death. Rosa detailed the motivation for her defiance in her autobiography, My Story: “People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”

Her action was not the first of its kind. Irene Morgan in 1946, and Sarah Louise Keys in 1955, had won rulings before the U.S. Supreme Court, and the Interstate Commerce Commission, respectively, in the area of interstate bus travel. Nine months before Rosa refused to give up her seat, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin refused to move from her seat on the same bus system. In New York City, in 1854, Lizzie Jennings engaged in similar activity, leading to the desegregation of the horse cars and horse-drawn omnibuses of that city. None-the-less, Rosa’s act of defiance sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott and she became an important symbol of the modern civil rights movement, as well as an international icon of resistance to racial segregation. Rosa also organised and collaborated with civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King, Jr., helping to launch him to national prominence.

On the night of Rosa’s arrest, Jo Ann Robinson, head of the Women’s Political Council, printed and circulated a flyer throughout Montgomery’s black community which read: “If we do not do something to stop these arrests, they will continue. The next time it may be you, or your daughter, or mother. This woman’s case will come up on Monday. We are, therefore, asking every Negro to stay off the buses Monday in protest of the arrest and trial. Don’t ride the buses to work, to town, to school, or anywhere on Monday. You can afford to stay out of school for one day if you have no other way to go except by bus. You can also afford to stay out of town for one day. If you work, take a cab, or walk. But please, children and grown-ups, don’t ride the bus at all on Monday.”

A few nights later a mass meeting was held to determine if the protest would continue, and attendees enthusiastically agreed. Instead of riding buses, many boycotters walked. A system of carpools was also organised, with car owners volunteering their vehicles or themselves driving people to various destinations. In the end, the black community’s boycott lasted for 381 days. Dozens of buses stood idle for months, severely damaging the bus company’s finances. The boycott ended when the Alabama and Montgomery laws requiring segregated buses were declared unconstitutional by the United States Supreme Court. The bus boycott marked one of the largest and most successful mass movements against racial segregation. It sparked many other protests and would eventually inspire the bus boycott in the township of Alexandria, South Africa, which was one of the key events in the radicalisation of the black majority in that country.

Although widely honoured in later years for her action, Rosa also suffered for it, losing her job as a seamstress in a local department store. Rosa took the opportunity to travel and spoke extensively. She founded and raised funds for many civil rights and educational organisations. She co-founded the Rosa L. Parks Scholarship Foundation for college-bound high school seniors, to which she donated most of her speaker fees. In 1987 she co-founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development, an institute that runs the “Pathways to Freedom” bus tours which introduce young people to important civil rights and Underground Railroad sites throughout the United States. When she died in 2005, tens of thousands of people viewed her casket and her memorial was broadcast on television.

Sally Bowen

When I started posting about outstanding women, to mark International Women’s Day in 2011, I began with one of the most amazing women I have ever met – my dear friend and comrade Sally Bowen.

Born in Gunnedah, NSW, in 1918, Sally was the fourth child and only daughter in the share-farming Phipps family. Share farming was hard work and meant the family had to move around. From an early age Sally was involved in farm labour; sewing bags, stacking wheat, and helping with the cooking. During her teenage years she also took on domestic work for neighbouring property holders. Sally had sporadic schooling, including only nine months of high school, and her first job was droving sheep. After her family moved to the Illawarra in 1941, she was one of the few women to obtain a job at the Lysaght’s factory at Port Kembla. Here she worked on the production of the Owen machine gun, became a shop steward for the Federated Ironworker’s Association (FIA) and a member of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA). At the end of World War Two, the men returning home took back their jobs in the steel industry, so Sally went to work at the Berlei clothing company from 1944 until 1947, leaving work to look after her elderly parents. To supplement the carer’s pension she became a dressmaker and in her spare time participated in CPA activities. During the 1949 coal strike, she helped to organise activities for the children of striking miners and was entrusted to hide large sums of money in her kitchen when the Chifley Labor Government passed legislation to freeze all trade union funds intended to assist the strike.

In 1950, Sally was elected the secretary of the South Coast District Committee of the CPA. She was involved in organising the Party’s activities in the heavy industries which dominated the Wollongong region. She met her future husband, coal miner Dave Bowen, when she spoke at a meeting in Balgownie against Menzies’ referendum to ban the Communist Party. Dave was a war veteran, active in the miner’s union, and a powerful public speaker. Sally decided to recruit him to the CPA. She succeeded and they married in 1954 and had two children, Margaret and David. For fellow CPA member, Pete Cockcroft; “Sally and Dave were the most beautifully complete couple I have ever known. To see them together was to understand more about the nature of love. We were fortunate to be able to honour them both with a public dinner in 1980 and to celebrate each of them individually and both of them together. Dave’s speech, in which he described following Sally around for days trying to get an opportunity to propose marriage while she organised meetings, sold newspapers, and wrote reports was something I will never forget.”

Sally resigned as district secretary of the CPA in 1955, but remained on the district committee, later to become president. In the mid-50s, she joined the Miners’ Women’s Auxiliary and later became its Secretary. Importantly, it was the Miner’s Women’s Auxiliaries that initiated the celebration of International Women’s Day (IWD) on the South Coast in 1938, as well as the first Wollongong IWD march in 1979. Sally was committed to IWD and her contribution to the women’s movement during the 1970s and 1980s was inspirational. In 1980, she helped establish the Wollongong Women’s Centre, which was named after her. 

Sally was also a committed peace activist. As a member of the Save Our Sons movement, during the Vietnam War, she was one of the protestors who chained themselves to the gallery railing in Federal Parliament protesting national armed service and the war. She also demonstrated against Australian Iron and Steel, a subsidiary of BHP, for the ‘Jobs for Women’ campaigns. As well, Sally was a keen environmentalist and was prominent in promoting aged care issues. She was President of the Healthy Cities Taskforce for the Aged and involved in numerous campaigns for better aged services. She could always be found in the frontlines of demonstrations, seizing any opportunity to speak out against injustice, but also doing the hard and often unnoticed work to help bring people together and win their struggles. In 1990, she was awarded life membership of the South Coast Labour Council and in 1994 she recorded her life experiences in the publication A Garland of Poetry. Sally also features in the film Kemira: Diary of A strike – where she’s shown organising practical support for the workers who occupied the Kemira mine for 16 days and their families.

Aged 81, Sally died at Lawrence Hargrave Hospital, Thirroul, on 25 February, 1999. The massive turn-out at her funeral was a fitting tribute to a ‘working class hero’. The proceedings included contributions by friends and comrades, members of her community in Fairy Meadow, and her family. Two of Sally’s poem’s were read, the song ‘Sally Wants a Revolution’ was sung, and the event concluded with the Trade Union and Gay and Lesbian Solidarity Choirs joining together for ‘The Internationale’. A public tribute event was also held shortly after, featuring a screening of the Kemira film and a number of speakers.

Sally’s home in Fairy Meadow, especially her kitchen, was the focal point for many struggles over the years and ‘an hour round Sally’s kitchen table was the best therapy for all life’s ills’. She played a crucial role in the history of this region and the lives of all of those struggling here, and further afield, for a better world. Sally was a tough and determined fighter when required, as well as sensitive and affectionate. She was never afraid to speak up, or to take action. She was caring and committed.  ‘Her politics were an extension of the boundless love which made her ‘Auntie Sally’ to a whole community.’ She encouraged, educated, and supported countless people and remains loved by many.

Every now and then, I pass-by the local children’s playground in my home suburb of Fairy Meadow, which is located in the park just across the road from where Sally lived for 49 years. This place exists because Sally helped to form a local community action group to have the neighbourhood field turned into a park. As the memorial information at the park explains; Sally was a much loved identity within her neighbourhood and this space became known as ‘Sally’s place’. It now includes the Sally Bowen Playground. Here, in a place of joy, across the city of Wollongong, and far beyond, Sally Bowen lives on.

Sharon Pusell

My partner, Sharon Pusell, artist, activist, carer, mother, lover, organiser, friend. There is not enough space to say what I think, no words that can express the way I feel, about Sharon, no comments that can do justice to such a wonderful woman and no way to clearly articulate how much I love her.

Sharon was born in Wollongong Hospital. Her mother Elsie worked at home and her father Jack worked at the steelworks. Sharon grew up in Fairy Meadow and went to school at Fairy Meadow Demonstration School. She then went to Wollongong High School where she was a gifted student and excelled at art. When Sharon left school she wanted to be an artist but needed to earn a living. There were no jobs available in Wollongong, so she got a job as a tracer at the Water Board in Sydney. Years later, in the mid-1990s, Sharon was interviewed by Wendy Lowenstein for her book Weevils at Work: What’s Happening to Work in Australia. Sharon explained some of the problems she had with her Water Board job. “I was commuting every day. The line wasn’t electrified and it took hours to get to work and back”. The job was tedious and “the people were so straight: ‘When are you buying a block of land?’, ‘When are you getting married?’ I didn’t fit in! Then the Wollongong Out of Workers’ Union (WOW) started up, they were having all these demonstrations, involved in politics, and I’m working at this boring job. So I chucked it”. After a brief stint as a trainee nurse, Sharon joined her friends in fighting for the unemployed, becoming a member, convenor and Treasurer of WOW.

In 1982, Sharon took part in the Right to Work March from Wollongong to Sydney, to highlight rising unemployment in Wollongong. She described it as “four days of torture” but also exciting and uplifting. She explained her involvement in WOW when she was interviewed for my honours thesis Working for the Class: The Praxis of the Wollongong Out of Workers’ Union. For Sharon, “while we called for the right to work and real jobs with real wages, so not just part-time or casual work, permanent jobs, while we wanted that for other people, I think that the core group of people in WOW really weren’t after that for themselves“. Instead Sharon, and some of WOW’s other members, considered what they were doing in WOW as a socially worthwhile ‘job’.

In 1984, Sharon was placed in a Community Employment Program position at Redback Graphix. As she explained to Wendy Lowenstein; “This was the only job I’d ever wanted. They ran as a collective. They’d do posters for community groups for a nominal price, but they needed commercial work to keep going”. Redback were initially supported by Wollongong City Council who gave them a building in Stuart Park to work out of. The artworks that Sharon produced at Redback are now in the collections of many art galleries around the world and in the last few years we’ve visited exhibitions of her work at the Museum for Contemporary Art in Sydney and the National Gallery in Canberra. Sadly Wollongong City Council decided to push Redback out of their premises and they were forced to move to Sydney. Sharon decided to stay in Wollongong.

Sharon’s mum Elsie was forty when she had Sharon and Sharon’s dad Jack had a serious heart attack when she was six years old. Having fairly elderly parents, and with Jack’s continuing illness, Sharon always wanted to stay as close to them as possible. In the past few years, she became their primary carer. In September 2010, Sharon’s ex-boyfriend, and our continuing dear friend, Adam Bennett, died in a plane crash in New Zealand. Adam’s death hit Sharon hard. But she didn’t let her sorrow engulf her, instead she helped to organise a celebration of Adam’s life and a memorial skydive in which she participated. At the same time, Sharon was also dealing with the hospitalisation of her father, his transfer to a nursing home and just days after Adam’s memorial, Jack’s death. During this time, Sharon provided tremendous support for her family, especially her mother, helping to organise what needed to be done and delivering her second eulogy to a man she loved in a fortnight.

In the late 80’s, Sharon worked for the Socialist Party and in 1988 was a member of a youth delegation to the Soviet Union. Sharon also worked with disadvantaged youth in Port Kembla and local indigenous youth at the local Aboriginal Centre. She has continued to work as an artist, producing many banners for trade unions, peace groups, protests and campaigns. Her paintings and mosaics can be found in homes, cafes and other locations around town. She has also produced many t-shirts, articles of clothing, dolls, decorations and plenty of other arts and crafts.

Sharon has been involved in a wide variety of struggles over the years. She’s been a member of the South Coast International Women’s Day Committee and many other committees and collectives. Much of her adult life has been spent in struggle, on demos, pickets and at meetings. She has accomplished all of this at the same time as raising a family. Our daughters are a testament to her. She’s provided them with all they could wish for; love, support and encouragement, nursing them through illness, protecting them from harm, defending them against abuse, building their confidence and self-esteem and providing a role-model to aspire to.

Both of our girls went to the same primary school as Sharon, Fairy Meadow Demonstration School. In order to do what she could to support their education and our local school, as well as to keep an eye on the teachers and principals, Sharon has been deeply involved in the school’s activities. She’s been a classroom helper, assisting with reading and computer studies, worked with the school craft group to produce a range of works for fundraising, coordinated the school clothing pool, been a member of the School Council and President of the Parents and Citizens’ Association for a number of years. She continues to work as the school’s canteen co-ordinator and the school is adorned with some of her most beautiful artwork.

Sharon is a wonderful, strong, determined, caring and exceptional woman. It is her love more than anything else that inspires me. Sharon is the crucial source of emotional and intellectual support for all that I do. I have been great friends with Sharon for over thirty years and this year is our thirtieth year together as a couple. To celebrate our twenty fifth anniversary we organised a party, where Sharon gave a short speech. She explained that we called our anniversary party ‘a celebration of love’ “because we wanted to not only celebrate our years together, but also celebrate and say thank you to all of you, our family and friends, for the love, support and friendship that we’ve received over those years. When we started thinking about what to do, to mark this date, some people suggested that we really should do something romantic as a couple, rather than have a big party. But we understand and appreciate, that it’s your love that has made our love possible. So this celebration is a celebration of all of our love”.

Simone de Beauvoir

Among the most prominent intellectuals of the twentieth century, Simone de Beauvoir is widely recognised as a pioneer of feminism and a leading proponent of existentialist philosophy. Her book The Second Sex is a feminist classic. Simone explained; “One’s life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation and compassion”. My mum introduced me to Simone’s work and she has had a profound impact on my life and work.

Born in Paris in 1908, Simone de Beauvoir would grow up to become one of the most influential writers in the twentieth century. According to her autobiographies, she was reading by the age of three and attempting to write almost as soon as she could read. A precocious student and zealous reader of forbidden books, she received a strict, limited education at a Catholic school for girls. As an adolescent, she struggled against the strictures of religion and social expectations that discouraged intellectual pursuits among women. Defying her parents’ wishes, Simone began taking University of Paris courses at the age of 15. She completed her ‘certificate of letters’ in 1927 and a few years later qualified as a teacher. While studying she met Jean-Paul Sartre, with whom she would, from then on, have a life-long relationship. Their relationship was based on freedom and openness. They maintained their independence in financial, personal, and sexual matters. Simone scorned marriage and she and Jean-Paul lived apart, and never had children. Although in later years, Simone adopted a daughter.

Simone received a post at a school in Marseille in 1931, to the disappointment of Jean-Paul who received a post in Le Harve. Sartre proposed to Simone, which would have resulted in them being placed together under French policies mandating that married couples be granted state positions near each other. To his dismay, Simone declined the proposal. According to her; “The most sympathetic of men never fully comprehend woman’s concrete situation”. In 1943, Simone’s first novel was published. She Came to Stay was a fictionalised account of her relationships with Olga Kosakiewicz and Sartre.

While living under Nazi Occupation in Paris during the Second World War, Simone was involved in the French Resistance. Published in 1945, The Blood of Others was her exploration of the dilemmas confronting a Resistance leader during the war. After World War II, she joined Les Tempes Modernes, a left journal named after the Charlie Chaplin film, Modern Times. She would remain on the editorial staff until her death.

First published in 1949, The Second Sex is Simone’s most famous work. “You are not born a woman, you become one” is the key phrase of the book, introducing what has come to be called the sex-gender distinction. This work formed a basis for contemporary feminism. In it Simone explains that while men and women may have different tendencies, each person is unique, and it is culture which has enforced a uniform set of expectations of what is ‘feminine’, as contrasted to what is ‘human’, which is equated with what is male. Simone argued that women don’t have to obey what is supposedly dictated to them by nature and convention and they can free themselves, through individual decisions and collective action. The Second Sex was initially greeted with “a festival of obscenities” and was regarded more as an affront to sexual decency than a political indictment of patriarchy. However, the book became a catalyst for challenging the situation of women, as it highlighted injustice, focused on struggles for social, political, and personal change and alerted women to the connections between ‘the private’ and ‘the public’.

During the 1950s, Simone campaigned against nuclear testing and for the next three decades would take part in various social movements and tour many parts of the world championing the struggles of the oppressed. In 1954, she won the Prix Goncourt, France’s highest literary award, for The Mandarins. This novel is about left-wing intellectuals in post-war France. It’s seen as a follow-up to The Blood of Others, and in a similar fashion contained a great deal of autobiographical detail. Simone was active in the French intellectual scene all of her adult life, and a central player in the philosophical debates and the struggles of the times as an author of essays, novels, plays, memoirs, travel diaries and newspaper articles, and as an editor of Les Tempes Modernes. She was elected as president of the League of Women’s Rights and founded the journal Questions feminists. In later life she dealt with the challenges of the aged, in The Coming of Age and other works. In 1986, she died at the age of seventy eight. She is buried beside Jean-Paul in the Montparnasse cemetery in Paris.

The mothers of the disappeared

In some of my work I have explored the vulnerability of love and the loving interconnection of those confronting oppression. In this writing I’ve highlighted a group of women who joined together and risked their lives to fight against fascism – ‘the mothers of the disappeared’.

Between 1976 and 1983, the Argentinean military dictatorship carried out what came to be known as the ‘Dirty War’. This ‘war against subversion’ included the arrest, detention, torture, murder, and disappearance of 10,000 to 30,000 people, most of whom were active in left/progressive social struggles, unionists, students and journalists. In 1977, mothers and grandmothers, who had met in government offices where they begged for answers as to the whereabouts of their children, formed a support group and began to organise weekly marches in Buenos Aires’s Plaza de Mayo, in front of government buildings. They marched in silence, carrying photos of their missing children and wearing white kerchiefs on their heads. Although they faced persecution, and three of the founders of the group were also ‘disappeared’, the mothers continued to protest every week for a decade. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo helped bring about the end of the dictatorship, and they continue to fight today to bring to justice those responsible for the atrocities committed during the ‘Dirty War’.

In 1973, a fascist military coup brought down the Allende government in Chile. Thousands of government supporters were murdered; rounded up, executed without trial, ‘disappeared’ or were tortured to death, in order to eliminate ‘communists’ and to foster mass terror and demoralisation. Thousands more were herded into concentration camps and gaols. After being tortured, some were released to spread fear, but many were never seen again. At a time when challenging the Pinochet regime was not only dangerous but almost suicidal, groups of women in Chile also organised to oppose dictatorship. These ‘mothers of the disappeared’ wanted answers about their missing children; the nearly 10,000 people who were taken and never seen again. ‘The mothers of the disappeared’ in Chile organised sewing workshops to create arpilleras, traditional Chilean tapestries that told their stories. The arpilleras often depicted their lost children, or scenes of government violence. The creation of arpilleras served as a method of collective grieving, as women gathered to sew and share their stories. The arpilleras also served as a call for justice and as testimony to the violence and repression imposed by the regime. As well, the mothers protested by dancing the national dance, the Cueca, in the streets. A woman and a man traditionally danced the Cueca together, but the mothers danced it alone.

In their long-term resistance to dictatorship, in Argentina and Chile, these courageous women discovered that the common pain they shared; the pain of survival, toil, and struggle, can be a positive basis for social relationships. Their loving resistance was based on ‘common suffering’ and on a collective concern for the plight of others. As these women came together, they moved their role as mothers and grandmothers into the public eye. They took responsibility for dealing with their grief by taking any action they could and gained experience in organising and political processes. In joining together, “the Mothers were creating a new form of political participation, outside the traditional party structures and based on the values of love and caring”. Fully aware that they faced torture and murder by the regimes they opposed, these women shared their fears, made connections with others who shared these fears, and took collective action in affinity groups, publicly bringing “their bodies to bear against the state”. By resisting fascist aggression, ‘the mothers of the disappeared’ politicised their caring relationships as their bodies became “instruments of non-violent power” expressing “the necessity of love even amid terror”.

UOW Feminist Society

 The best thing to happen at the University of Wollongong for some time has been the establishment of the UOW Feminist Society (FemSoc) and the creation of its ‘Free School’. At the start of 2013 the University axed its Gender Studies Major, declaring it was not “cost effective”, due to a lack of interest. Yet despite the supposed unpopularity of the course, students were upset with the decision, and as soon became obvious, were actually interested, engaged and eager to learn about gender and feminism. In response to the cutting of gender studies, some students undertaking Philosophy of Feminism decided to form a gender inclusive Feminist Society. The group has since been run by students and academics, giving many people a chance to participate in feminist activism, to raise awareness of feminism and to create safer social spaces to talk about feminist issues.

 The major initiative of FemSoc has been its Free School lecture/workshop series. As Claire Johnston explains; “The process of establishing the Free School was pretty straight forward: a room on campus was booked for 12.30 each Wednesday, academics doing research on issues related to gender were asked if they would like to give a half-an-hour lecture followed by discussion, posters were designed and Facebook events were created. There were deliberately few guidelines given to academics wishing to present or run a lecture or workshop”. Soon lectures and workshops were also being run by students.

 Free School was initially developed as a creative way of protesting against the gender studies cuts. It was hoped that if the university saw students putting aside an hour of their lunch every Wednesday it would clearly demonstrate they had an interest in learning about gender and feminism. However, as the free school took off, it soon established itself as an alternative academic project, replacing and reshaping gender studies. According to Jane Aubourg, the University’s response is no longer the Free School’s highest priority. “Initially, we wanted to show the University’s administration that there definitely is student interest, as well as a societal need for the study of gender. But now we know that even if the major was reinstated students wouldn’t stop coming to our workshops and academics wouldn’t stop giving talks – simply because the Free School covers areas of feminism the University of Wollongong would simply never offer.”

 For Claire Johnston; “What was clear to us in FemSoc was that the investigation and study of gender was crucial to abolishing patriarchy on our campus and in the society we lived in. On the one hand, we were genuinely upset that the Faculty of Arts was dissolving the Gender Studies major – after all, women’s studies and gender studies were born out of struggle. Removing these courses would reverse years of campaigning to have the study of gender acknowledged as an important area for both research and teaching. However, after some consideration and discussion with academic staff, we knew that there were significant problems with the way the Gender Studies course had been run, such as the dominance and influence of the Centre for Research on Men and Masculinities. We concluded that fighting for the course to be reintroduced in its previous form wasn’t especially appealing”.

 As one observer of the Free School setup explains; “It’s not even a lecture, or a workshop, or seminar, or any other teaching format that universities are promoting to disguise thinning staff numbers, bulging class sizes, and steady disenfranchisement.  It’s a protest – all these students are learning from qualified academics and they ain’t paying a buck.” And as Erin Prior describes; “You can sense the passion in the air, you can almost hear peoples’ brains processing the ideas being discussed, and it’s amazingly, ridiculously engaging. It is learning without obligation”.

Claire Johnston also explains how; “FemSoc is a diverse group with diverse politics, and although some of us had experience in campaigns on campus, we decided that running a series of free, weekly public lectures and workshops was a relatively simple and accessible project that would give us a platform to not only publicly condemn the university’s decision to cut Gender Studies but also to open a space for discussion of issues to do with gender. We have been astonished by its consistent popularity with students and staff. More importantly, we have been impressed by the space it has provided for developing and testing our ideas, not just about issues revolving around gender, but on the problems of the university and tactics of resistance”.

 UOW FemSoc has now successfully run a year’s worth of diverse lectures and workshops, spanning topics such as the history of feminism, the ‘white wedding’ narrative, ecofeminism, sexual ethics, consent and deceit, trans 101, women in comedy, the representation of Muslim women in the media, men and feminism, sexual violence in Tahrir Square, gender, democracy and ethics in political theory, white women, indigenous women and feminism, anti-rape protests and media activism in India, sex, consent and the media, and much more. As well, collaboration with academic staff has led to the creation of the Feminist Research Network – a network of teaching and research staff, who share and collaborate on research into gender and sexuality in areas as diverse as law, philosophy, literature, creative arts, sociology, cultural studies, and more.

  In May, FemSoc also ran Consent Week – a campus-wide week of anti-victim blaming, sex-positive, anti-sexual assault campaigning, with a range of events to raise awareness about the pervasiveness of sexual assault, both on campus and in the community. Law student and one of the Consent Week/FemSoc organisers, Olivia Todhunter, was eager to use the event to develop more widespread understandings of the ways in which consent is defined by the law. “There is something fundamentally wrong with how we are educated to think about consent, healthy sexual relationships and sexual assault…” Olivia said. “I would really like to make sure people know how consent is defined – not only before the law, but in the context of everyday sexual interactions”. Consent Week promoted ‘safe sex’— where ‘safe’ means not just protecting against sexually transmitted infections, but also involves making sure all participants feel safe in sexual encounters. “The issue of consent came up at our first-ever meeting,” explains Jessie Hunt, another Consent Week/FemSoc organiser. “We started talking about the fact that around one in five women will be sexually assaulted in her lifetime, and how alarming that statistic is . . . as we talked, we realised that consent is just left out of so many discussions about sex — consent doesn’t rate a mention in pornography, or in our high school health curriculums”. Consent Week featured free workshops and included a Consent Day Carnival, with show bags containing information about consent, condoms, dams and lubrication, as well as bands and booths with information on global consent campaigns.

 FemSoc has also held many planning meetings, informal discussions, skill shares, stalls, and other events. At the end of 2013 FemSoc marked its first year with an end-of-year festival – a night of film, music and discussion.

 As Claire Johnston details in an article she wrote about FemSoc; “The level of popularity and engagement we have experienced with free school says several interesting things about feminism, students, the university and education more broadly. Firstly, the re-emergence of a feminist movement in recent years in both Australia, mostly in the form of the Slut Walks and Reclaim the Night demonstrations, but also across the world, particularly in India, has had a local impact on campus. FemSoc is certainly a product of such a renewed focus on feminist activism and themes from this movement such as rape culture, victim blaming and consent have been consistently brought up in Free School lectures or workshops. The enthusiasm and numbers of students participating perhaps suggests a change in how young people (although it should be noted that it is not just young people attending) are viewing feminism in the face of years of anti-feminist backlash.”

 “Secondly, the popularity of Free School says something about ‘the student’. Constantly I am being told that most students are uninterested in politics, activism and education outside the realm of learning their degrees.” Yet, the “level of support and engagement we have received from students and staff within the university has suggested that people are engaged, willing to learn and to participate. Even more exciting is that they are willing to dissent.” And; “The most exciting potential Free School has is to transform a small part of the deeply alienating and stressful institution that is the university, into a fun, engaging and caring space. Although we began this project to discuss and take action on gender, it has become a project where we can challenge the dominant forms of pedagogy and spread dissent to how our education is structured.”

 Congratulations to all of the wonderful women and men who have created and sustained UOW FemSoc, you are an inspiration.

You can find out more about UOW FemSoc and its activities via Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/UOWFemSoc

Vandana Shiva

Like many people I’ve been touched by the work of Vandana Shiva on issues such as peace, biopolitics and the gender divisions of labour. Vandana is one of the world’s most prominent radical scientists and environmental campaigners. She has devoted her life to fighting for the rights of the oppressed and the protection of ‘mother earth’. Her fierce intellect and her friendly, accessible approach have made her a powerful advocate for women, the poor, biodiversity and for making peace.

Born in India in 1952, Vandana trained as a physicist at the University of Western Ontario in Canada. At the Indian Institute of Science and the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore, India, she researched science, technology and environmental policy. During the 1970s, she was involved in the Chipko movement whose main participants were women. The movement adopted the approach of forming human circles around trees to prevent their felling. In 1982, she set up the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology in her home town of Dehra Dun in the foothills of the Himalaya in order to connect to communities and treat them as experts. The foundation is an informal network of researchers, working in support of people’s environmental struggles. She explains that it is often the local women who really know about what is going on in their environment. “Chipko taught me that those of us who have PhDs don’t necessarily know everything. There is so much knowledge in our communities and with our grandmothers”.

In 1991, Vandana founded Navdanya, which has grown over the past decade into a hands-on movement for seed saving and organic farming. She has also launched the Seed University, at the Navdanya farm near Dehradun, India, where courses are held to disseminate knowledge and initiate dialogue about holistic living. Vandana has been an active participant in the alter-globalisation movement and has been heavily involved in many local, national and global struggles. For instance, she campaigned against a Coca-Cola plant that was built in the Indian state of Kerala in 2000. The company was extracting water illegally and contaminating local water sources. A group of women, assisted by Vandana, ultimately succeeded in shutting the plant down in 2004. Presently she is working with the government of Bhutan on a project to make its food production entirely organic. Her ability to combine intellectual study with grassroots activism has won her many international awards. She has published widely and is a much sought after speaker on eco-feminism, non-violence and sustainability.

Discussing the challenge of the reproduction of nature and society, Vandana calls for a “more holistic approach to the contemporary crisis of survival” through an understanding that nature “is us” and that “what we do to nature we do to ourselves”. This approach is part of a response to the violence against people and nature that makes “the production and sustenance of life the organising principle of society and economic activity”. As she says in the Lecture below; “If commerce starts to undermine life support, then commerce must stop, because life has to carry on”. For Vandana, survival is “the juncture connecting different movements and women in different locations”. She challenges the “patriarchal analogy of woman and nature”, which views both as “passive and inert”, subverting this view “through a redefinition of the human body, the earth body and the body politic” that stresses the interconnectedness of humanity and nature, production and reproduction, and the productive role of women and nature.

In 2010, Vandana was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize for her “courageous leadership of movements for justice, the empowerment of women, the protection of farms and farmers in small communities and for her scientific analysis of environmental sustainability. Here is a link to her Peace Prize speech Making Peace with the Earth’. Her speech begins 5.00 minutes into the video and goes for 40 minutes. If you can spare the time it’s well worth it.

http://vimeo.com/17376439

Wendy Lowenstein

I had the pleasure of meeting and befriending Wendy Lowenstein while she was touring Australia during the 1990s. At the time Wendy was conducting interviews for her book Weevils at Work a companion volume to her best-selling oral history of the Great Depression, Weevils in the Flour. That book was described by the Melbourne Age as “so good that it is impossible to praise it sufficiently without sounding absurd . . . “

Wendy Lowenstein was born in 1927 and started school in 1932, the worst year of the Great Depression. She was a print and radio journalist, a factory worker, a full-time mother, a history teacher, and a school librarian. She was founder editor of the journal Australian Tradition, wrote a number of the most celebrated oral histories in Australia, and is one of Australia’s best known historians of folklore. Her first book, Shocking, Shocking, Shocking: improper play rhymes of Australian children, was self-published on a roneo machine. She self-published other books, including Under the Hook: Melbourne Waterside Workers Remember, Self-Publishing Without Pain, and Weevils at Work: What’s Happening to Work in Australia.

As a prominent oral historian and author, Wendy was driven by her belief in the power and importance of the story of the individual and their direct experiences. Passionate about her politics, worker’s rights and working class history, she was a fierce campaigner against the capitalist class, bureaucracies and governments of all persuasions. “I know I’m not impartial”, she would retort, “impartiality is crap”. For Wendy, oral history was a way of tilting the balance, a way of ensuring people don’t slip through the cracks of history. “It offers an opportunity to democratise history”, she said. “Most history is written by winners about winners, so I suppose ninety per cent of written history is written about famous men. If we’re talking about labour history, it’s the labour elites and trade union leaders. It’s very, very seldom about workers”.

I met Wendy when she was in the process of interviewing hundreds of people from various walks of life for Weevils at Work – What’s Happening to Work in Australia. In Weevils in the Flour and Weevils at Work each person interviewed tells their own story in their own words. Weevils at Work details how workers are increasingly stressed as they struggle to endure longer hours, the pressure of job insecurity, sackings and unemployment. Wendy was deeply concerned about the increasing despair and dissatisfaction of workers with the rapidly changing workplace, the loss of any personal autonomy and job satisfaction under neo-liberalism. As she explained; “Work is not just what we do for a living, it is what we do with our life”.

Launching Weevils at Work here in Wollongong in 1997, Wendy told the Illawarra Mercury; “There are social workers who spend more time typing statistics than dealing with people and they feel the human content is being taken out of their work. They feel they are being reduced to production lines”. She explained that the people she interviewed said they were required to constantly find cheaper and quicker ways of doing things in the workplace. “It’s an attack on workers by capitalists who are now determined to exploit maximum profit and I think people are being conned into being the architects of their own destruction”. The point of the book, according to Wendy, was to highlight the need for the working class to get better organised to defend itself. She said new forms of organisations, in addition to trade unions, would soon evolve to enable people to fight back.

A member of many activist organisations since the age of fifteen, Wendy contributed to both social justice and aspects of Australian history which had, until she tackled them, been largely ignored. See saw hope as existing in people’s ability and determination to organise resistance at the grassroots. Her son, film director Richard Lowenstein, describes his childhood as “a blur of marches, meetings and picket lines; May Day, Hiroshima Day, Vietnam Moratoriums, Save Our Sons, People For Nuclear Disarmament, International Year of Peace, Arts Action For Peace, Palm Sunday, Miscellaneous Workers Union marches, Save Our Schools, Save Albert Park, Hands Off Our Libraries, wharf strikes, miner’s strikes and teachers strikes. We drowned in buttons, banners, stickers, pamphlets and posters”.

The prodigious amount of work, books, letters, papers, ventures, activism, relationships, ideas and achievements throughout her life was simply astounding. At the same time as raising a family, she was involved with The New Theatre, The Eureka Youth League, The Victorian Folk Music Society, The Palm Sunday Committee, Victorian Secondary Teachers Association and the National Oral History Association, amongst others. She was a writer-in-residence at Victorian and interstate universities, conducted workshops and was a guest speaker at numerous conferences and events. Her motto was ‘Never let the bastards grind you down’. What she achieved is an incredible legacy, bringing a truth to history in giving voice to those who live it. Wendy also wrote a number of screenplays including a version of Weevils in the Flour and the film, Strikebound, directed by her son Richard. Wendy died in 2006.

Here’s a a short clip from Strikebound