Female Activists Have Changed History – And We Can Do It Again
This week’s Women’s March 4 Justice felt like a watershed, with tens of thousands of women around Australia taking to the streets. But do protests ever change anything? The answer is a resounding yes according to historian Clare Wright, the author of award-winning books including You Daughters of Freedom and The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka. Here, she explains why.
This week we saw Australian women raise their voices in protest against injustice. Is this unprecedented?
Absolutely not. Women have taken to the streets in droves to protest for the rights of their own sex, and for the rights and liberties of other people, for centuries. We just don’t read a lot about it – and my one-word answer for why that is, is patriarchy. It is part of the patriarchal power system to deny women access to their own history. How much more empowered might women be now if they understood what women have been capable of doing in the past? If you give to women these stories of their heritage, of the times that women rose up and rebelled and broke the rules and blazed trails and dissented from the natural order of things, that might just give them some encouragement to continue to do so. We are collectively denied access to the experiences that might give us more strength and power.
Historically, what causes have motivated Australia’s female activists?
You could take it back to the activism of First Nations women in repelling invaders, fighting for their communities and families and organising the resistance against invasion and for the protection of Country. You would have to say they are our first political activists.
We can also look at some of the events we are more familiar with – say the Eureka Stockade. Every schoolchild learns about it, it has been part of our curriculum now for a century, and it’s taught as if there were only male miners and male military battling it out for democratic rights and freedoms on the goldfields of Ballarat. My 10 years of research for my book, The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka, clearly demonstrated that women were not just part of those mass democratic movements but were the among the leaders. They mightn’t have held the nominal positions, and they might have been denied membership of the Ballarat Reform League, but women like Ellen Young and Anastasia Hayes and Sarah Hanmer were fundraisers and campaign mobilisers, strategists and intellectual leaders of the movement.
A woman died in the Eureka Stockade, a fact that was hidden in plain sight for 150 years. I’d love to say I had to undertake a huge excavation to discover it but it was actually smack bang in the middle of a document many historians before me have used. They just overlooked it in their storytelling, whether it was an inconvenient truth or it didn’t jump off the page for them. We are slowly starting to change that narrative. Now girls studying at school can see themselves as part of the story.
You Daughters of Freedom focuses on the campaign for female suffrage 100 years ago. What did you learn while researching that?
I wrote this book because I’m interested in Australian democracy. I don’t write women’s history; I write Australian political history with the women put back in. At the end of 19th century, Australia was the first country to provide a full answer to what was called ‘the woman question’ or ‘the woman problem’ – the problem being that they were demanding the right to vote and to stand for parliament. Australia’s solution was part of what put us on the map. Australia’s first act as a new nation after Federation was passing the Immigration Restriction Act, and the second was the Franchise Act that gave women these rights. All the other countries wanted to find out what the results of Australia’s grand social and political experiment would be. I’m fascinated by the fact that we’ve forgotten that part of history – [and also] the role they played in the Federation movement bringing colonies together. Vida Goldstein, Catherine Helen Spence, these women should be known as our founding mothers, just as [Henry] Parkes and [Alfred] Deakin and Edmund Barton and Andrew Inglis Clarke are known as our founding fathers.
What are you hoping happens next?
There were so many great banners at the march I was at in Melbourne, but the one I liked most was the one that said, “My arm is tired from holding this sign up since 1970”. That tells the tale. What is so wonderful about this moment is the number of young women involved, the great sense of ownership they have over this issue, that enough is enough. On the one hand, you have this great youthful energy propelling this movement; on the other hand, you have the women who have been doing this for 50 years. They were part of the women’s lib movement in 1970 protesting for equal pay – and we still don’t have it; campaigning for safety in home and workplaces, which we clearly still don’t have; and campaigning for bodily autonomy, which in the ’70s was mainly abortion rights but now is consent rights. These women who keep turning up and turning up are inspiring, too. They still have hope.
My overarching feeling as a woman, as a feminist and as an historian is that things change but things change slowly, and you have to just keep turning up, keep using your voice, forcing the powers that be to listen to your voice. Power will fight any demands on its limitation – ultimately what we’re talking about is the power of men to live their lives on their terms, on how they feel entitled to behave in spaces they still consider to be theirs. Marches are one thing, but there has to be structural reform and systemic change, and it has to be for all women – Indigenous, trans, disabled, women of colour. The greatest way to achieve that is at the ballot box. If you don’t like what the politicians on offer are giving you, demand something else.
Professor Clare Wright OAM, is the author of four books, including the Stella Prize-winning The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka. She is professor of history at La Trobe University, hosts the ABC Radio National history series, Shooting the Past and co-hosts the LTU podcast Archive Fever.
Interview_Ute Junker
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