Feminism in Sydney’s Suburbs: ‘Speaking Out’, Listening and ‘Sisterhood’ at the 1975 Women’s Commissions

ABSTRACT

In 1975, Sydney women’s liberation activists received an International Women’s Year grant to organise a series of suburban ‘women’s commissions’. Close to 500 women attended events in Liverpool, Chatswood, Hurstville and Bankstown, many of whom came forward to reveal personal experiences of discrimination and violence. Modelled on previous events that had been based in the city’s centre, including the well-known Sydney Women’s Commission (1973) and the Women Against the Violent Society Forum (1974), the suburban commissions exemplify 1970s feminists’ use of personal testimony as a strategy to connect the ‘personal’ to the ‘political’. Yet the commissions also illuminate tensions that emerged in the process of both ‘speaking out’ and listening to other women’s experiences and the limits of this format as a vehicle for building ‘sisterhood’. In revisiting this surprisingly little studied episode in the history of Sydney women’s liberation, this article provides new evidence of the movement’s presence in the suburbs, at the same time as it illuminates wider feminist debates about diversity, the politics of participation and the ideals of ‘sisterhood’.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to the journal editors and guest editors for the opportunity to be part of this special issue, and to the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments. I also thank the State Library of New South Wales for facilitating access to the First Ten Years of Sydney Women’s Liberation Collection.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Isobelle Barrett Meyering is a Macquarie University Research Fellow. Her PhD, completed at UNSW in 2017, examined children’s liberation as a component of Australian feminist politics in the 1970s. Her work on the Australian women’s liberation movement has previously appeared in Australian Feminist Studies, Lilith: A Feminist History Journal and Outskirts: Feminisms Along the Edge, as well as numerous edited collections. She is currently working on a new project tracing the history of children’s rights in Australia since 1959.

Notes

1. The First Ten Years of Sydney Women’s Liberation Collection was produced by activists, starting in 1978 and completed in 1999. Joyce Stevens was part of the collective that oversaw the development of the collection (Wills 2007c).

2. Distance calculations are taken from Pollon and Healy (1988).

3. The Levine ruling, a decision of the District Court, made abortion legal in New South Wales where it was deemed that there was ‘any economic, social or medical ground or reason’ to grant an abortion so as to avoid a ‘serious danger to the pregnant woman’s life or to her physical or mental health’ (cited in Cica 1998).

4. Isbister, a paediatrician, was a leading force behind opposition to women’s health centres within the Australian Medical Association at the time (Stevens 1995, 109).