2013 is the centenary of some of the most prominent events in the name of the women’s suffrage movement. One of the most famous took place on 4 June 1913, when Emily Wilding Davison threw herself in front of King George V’s horse at The Derby in protest at the lack of women’s rights. We have some amazing documents held at The National Archives on Emily Wilding Davison, which were recently filmed for the Channel 4 documentary Clare Balding’s Secrets of a Suffragette (shown in Britain on Sunday 26 May 2013).

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Courtesy of See Red Women’s Workshop

Capturing the voices of a generation of feminist activists, ‘Sisterhood & After’ is a new oral history archive and website which launched at the British Library on 8th March on International Women’s Day, and provides a free and relevant major resource to anyone interested in the history of feminism. The oral history project was also partnered with The Women’s Library, which advised it, and directed by Margaretta Jolly at the University of Sussex. It was funded by The Leverhulme Trust.

Each of the 60 women activists recorded for this project campaigned for equality and freedom in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. These women demanded that struggles for gender rights be won at home as well as in the public sphere. They describe their own experiences as girls, socialised to expect less than their brothers. They also describe a rich range of political heritages that informed British feminism, from Black Power to Gay Liberation to socialism and disability rights.

Wages for Housework c.1975 Designed by B. Warrior

Given that the Women’s Liberation Movement in Britain was a mass movement involving thousands of women from all over the country and from all walks of life, selecting just 60 to record was a challenge. Some of our interviewees are well known – Susie Orbach, feminist psychotherapist and author of Fat is a Feminist Issue and Jenni Murray, the voice of Radio 4’sWomen’s Hour for example. But we also wanted to capture the stories of women who dedicated much of their lives to fighting for gender equality but were not in the public eye. Karen McMinn, Director of Northern Ireland Women’s Aid from 1981–1996, for instance, described the risks involved in protecting women from domestic violence during ‘the troubles’, while Rowena Arshad, Equal Opportunities Commissioner for Scotland 2001-2007, talked about co-organising a pioneering black women’s refuge in Scotland. We also recorded interviews with Barbara Jones about working as a builder and being a member of ‘Women in Manual Trades’, with Una Kroll, a one-time surgeon who played a key part in the Movement for the Ordination of Women and with Sue Lopez, one of the most prominent women football players in the 1970s who campaigned for women to be allowed to use Football Association pitches. The oral histories with these women last, on average, 7 hours and set the circumstances and consequences of a person’s activism in a biographical and social context.

You can access the full life story recordings at the British Library but for a snap-shot of the archive log onto the Sisterhood & After website (bl.uk/sisterhood). The website has over 120 audio-clips taken from the oral history recordings, 10 bespoke films reflecting key campaigns and an Interviewees Page which includes a biographical sketch and portrait for each narrator.

Polly Russell, Lead Curator, Social Science and

Margaretta Jolly, Project Director, University of Sussex (c) May 2013

Dr Margaretta Jolly
Margaretta Jolly is the project’s award holder and the project director. She is Reader in Cultural Studies in the School of Media, Film and Music at the University of Sussex. Margaretta’s main interests are the art and use of life narrative and feminist cultures and histories. Her book In Love and Struggle: Letters in Contemporary Feminism, was joint winner of the Feminist and Women’s Studies Association UK book prize, 2008, and she co-directs the Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research.

Dr Polly Russell
Polly Russell is a Lead Curator in the Social Science department at the British Library. Polly is responsible for collections relating to Human Geography and Anthropology and her research interests include feminism, oral history and food. She was the main British Library link for the project, working closely with the project team and library colleagues.

Project Team

More about the whole team behind the project is available in the ‘About’ section on the website: http://www.bl.uk/learning/histcitizen/sisterhood/about.html (accessed 13 May 2013)

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Globally, things are better, but not much.

Howard University’s Professor Caroline Byerly used a sample of almost 2000 editorial and administrative to conclude that in 2011 36.1 per cent of the world’s journalists are women. Her figures reveal that women’s participation in management roles might be creeping upward, now to 26 per cent of governing roles and 27 per cent of top management jobs around the globe in 2011, but that is still just one quarter of the whole.

Dr Louise North’s published research – and my rather unacademic Facebook foray – also show that the news industry in Australia continues to embody what she described in her academic paper as a “blokey and ego-driven” culture that’s for the most part ignored – and systemic and ongoing gender (and race) inequity permeates the workforce.

This was probably best illustrated several months ago when one of Australia’s best known female TV journalists and presenters wrote an excoriating speech which she titled ‘Dear Mr Sexist’. Driven to fury and what she described as an inferno in her belly, Tracey Spicer recounted the male excutive that shouted across the newsroom at her: “I want two inches off your hair and two inches off your arse.” And the radio executive, who, during a job interview said: “There’s a reason why you don’t hear women on commercial talkback radio. No-one wants to hear the whiney sound of a female voice. Us blokes get enough nagging at home!” And then there was  the station manager who came down after her first night news reading, saying: “You need to stick your tits out more.” On and on it went,  the executive who pointed at her forehead wrinkles and said it was time to give the youngsters a  go, the sacking by email just after she had given birth to her second child (fought in court and won) and a litany of other stories so awful, you would be hard pressed to make them up.

Tracey Spicer’s experience reminded me of the editor who, on hearing I had been appointed Europe correspondent, pointed at my eyes and said: ” …‘a spell in the northern hemisphere out of the Australian sun will do your face wrinkles a world of good.” I hate to tell you but this one came from a woman.

During her 2012 research on women and newsroom culture, Dr North interviewed 600 female journalists in Australia  – the biggest study of its kind. Her findings revealed that a staggering 57.3 per cent had been sexually harassed in the workplace, with the majority reporting that this had happened within the last five years. North found  the problem infected all newsrooms although the commercial TV sector seemed to have higher rates than newspaper newsrooms or the national broadcaster.

Ironically, all this research has emerged around the time that Australia’s first woman Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, rebelled with such spirit against the mysoginistic culture she perceives both in the Parliament and among the media that report politics. I’m sure few of you would have missed that speech but you might not know that it went viral on Youtube globally, sparking headlines in Europe, America and the developing world but was virtually ignored by the Parliamentary reporters until they realised their blunder.

Which brings me back, sadly, to where I began – my informal ask-around for anecdotes about being a woman in a modern newsroom.

In a moment of odd serendipity, about 24 hours after I posted a request for my colleagues’ observations, a debate exploded about The Sydney Morning Herald‘s rebrand and renaming of what was previously called the ‘Daily Life’ section into ‘Women’s Perspective’ while the more masculine sections were rebadged ‘Executive Style’ – as if women can’t be executives. This move outraged not just the paper’s readers but the section’s editor herself who risked her job and broke ranks to blog about her own internal arguments against the name change with the all male editorial team. Hundreds of women tweeted and wrote comments along these lines: “Do you think it could have even been possible for you to decide on a more patronising tactic to show exactly which sections of the newspaper you think matter and which don’t?”

In this case, the men were forced to capitulate and the sections returned to its less offensive name.

While all this was going on, my colleagues started to email me: the first one arrived from an Australian colleague I worked with in Sydney, who spent a decade in the Middle East in Jerusalem and is now a well known TV face in Europe. She is also married to a reporter and described her conversation with an editor, requesting a payrise: “The editor looked at me outraged and said, what?! I have just given your husband a rise.”

Another told of internal 2012 research quietly testing  suspicions that a new section editor was commissioning only men to write cover stories and this was then checked against by lines. “In a year or so of his editing that section there were zero cover stories from women, 100% from men,” my colleague wrote. “When we confronted him, he seemed genuinely shocked and seemed not to realize he had done this. We figured that perhaps it was personality related – he was not comfortable talking to women. . .net result was the same though. Zero result for us women”.

Another, currently stationed in the Middle East, described the first words of a new chief of staff as she reported back about a story: “ So luv, is it a ball-tearer or a blue-veiner?” She was quck to add that despite this, he turned out to be a “good bloke”. Another described a particular editor’s penchant for coming up to her and the younger women on staff and massaging shoulders while looking over copy. One remembers, as a young cadet, being warned by the trainee counselor that part of working in a newsroom was playing “the game” after she raised feeling uncomfortable with this behaviour.

The worst anecdotes, just as Dr North reported, came from colleagues in commercial TV newsrooms, with some truly shocking me. In one case, a 30 something reporter, winner of a recent prize in investigative reporting, told me how she asked privately not to work with a particular producer due to his insistent lewd comments and behaviour. She asked her superiors that her name not be mentioned as she did not want to make a formal complaint. The man was not only told of her complaint but he then turned the tables on her warning colleagues and cameramen against her and making her work life impossible. She has now moved and is working at the public broadcaster. Another described standing open mouthed as an executive, in his late fifties, stood beside her working his way through a list of pretty much every older woman in Australian TV journalism. With some, he asked rhetorically why they hadn’t just stepped aside, others he observed he felt sorry for them, still others he said blatantly that they were too old and shouldn’t be on TV. It was her second day on the job and she chose, like so many of us, to say nothing.

The stories keep coming in.

I haven’t painted a particularly pretty picture although all of us – young and older – agree that it’s much, much better than even ten years ago. In Australia, Julia Gillard’s feisty diatribe against sexism appears to have touched a nerve and many of you might have read about the extraordinary social media campaign #destroythejoint that harnessed collective female anger against a particularly mysoginistic radio host – and the subsequent loss of millions in advertising as commercial sponsors realised the dollar effect of women scorned.

And so, I leave the last words to one of my youngest colleagues – a TV reporter – and a colleague at the other end of the totem pole, one of the few very senior women media executives in Australia. The youngest put it this way: “My perception of ‘this day and age’ is that it is better, much better. Less overt stuff goes on and most men are much, much better in the workplace than they were.” But, as we all know – and researcher Dr Louise North has confirmed – when it does go on, unfortunately, too many women are finding that it still doesn’t pay to rock the boat.

My executive colleague was succinct in her verdict and I quote her email directly: “I asked all my most senior colleagues what a pair of testicles would mean to them in this industry. They all answered, without bitterness or rancour that being male would mean a minimum of $50,000 a year to them. And these women included a Sunday newspaper editor, an investigative editor, a chief sub editor, a magazine editor, Most were on well above the 140,000 range – so this was a significant proportion of salary.”

“The sad thing,” reported my friend, “is that nobody was ANGRY. They all answered with a kind of quiet, tired acceptance of fact.”

Paola Totaro (c) March 2013

Paola Totaro is a journalist who lives in London and worked with the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age in Melbourne, Australia, before coming to the United Kingdom as European Correspondent. She studied at the University of Sydney and the University of New England in Australia, and is presently enrolled in an MA (Culture & Criticism) at the University of the Arts, London. She includes French and Italian amongst her languages, and lists her hometown as Naples, Italy.

References:

Caroline Byerly, 2011, pp. 9, 219

Hyland, 2010

Louise North, 2009

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At the Herald, I’m told, it wasn’t until World War II that the very first woman was even used as a general reporter. Her name was Neil Bedford (no, you didn’t hear wrong, it was Neil!). She emerged from the women’s section, home to most of the female staff, after so many men left to go to war, including about two dozen Herald men sent off as war correspondents. For similar wartime reasons, a second woman, Molly Luke became the first staff female photographer. Neither stayed very long after the war ended: who knows if they were given the choice to stay or were pushed back into the home by the returning men?

During the ’60s and ’70s, there was a trickle of women doing general news and features, but it wasn’t until the late 1970s that the first woman general news subeditor was appointed. My wonderfully helpful former editor told me that the men’s reluctance to appoint a female was that male sub editors tended to – and I quote – swear quite colorfully – as edition deadlines approached. Hilarious when I think how my team, lots of them women, used to turn the air blue at edition time. And it wouldn’t be until the late 1970s that a woman staff photographer was appointed – and management at the time had reservations even then because of “possible problems” – and I quote again “created by men and women sharing a darkroom”!

Funnily enough, the first woman chief of staff ever appointed to the paper was on deck when I was a rookie. I remember she was the one who sent me home to change clothing when I arrived at work in jeans. “You must dress always ready for the possibility that you could meet the queen,” she said.

Yep that was said, in Sydney, Australia in 1982. This was the same boss who refused to deploy me to the teams covering bushfires not long after saying ‘not appropriate, you’re a young woman’.

Extraordinary as it may seem, the Herald‘s first female Chief Sub-editor was not appointed until the late 1990s and a woman Managing Chief Sub-editor (in charge of all editorial production) was appointed in the 2000s. I won’t even bother going into the continuing rows over women reporters who in some places are still fighting to enter male territory such as football dressing rooms. How do you cover sport if you are not allowed to report the traditional end-of-game press conferences?!

Fast forward a century and the world of news is unrecognizable and I, like so many correspondents of this era have had to revolutionize the way I work – from an often barely daily deadline and workload to a virtual 24/7, stand alone operation. As Vice President of the Foreign Press Association in London, 125 years old this year, I have been intrigued thinking back to the old guard, the newspaper correspondents, pretty much all of them male, who filed once every couple of weeks from the outposts of the empire, including often horrendous theatres of war, to newspapers back home.

No, they did not have Google, sat phones, laptops or the safety that comes from immediacy, and a part of me remains open mouthed at the hardship they encountered. But the other part of me believes honestly that the modern correspondent – and the new demands of a 24 hour news cycle as well as the inhuman amount of information we have to scan and filter every hour – means our professional lives, in some ways, are tougher. For women correspondents, it was the legendary 20th century author and journalist Martha Gellhorn who broke the gender barrier nearly 80 years ago. And today, unfortunately as we saw with Marie Colvin – women are losing their lives alongside the male reporters as they document the wor;d’s conflict zones. Some of the greatest chroniclers of war in our generation are women — among them CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, the BBC’s formidable Kate Adie, Alex Crawford from Sky, Lara Logan from CBS News – and many, many others.

Last year, Logan – who survived a horrendous attack at the hands of what she described as “300 baying men” reporting in Cairo joined 40 other media women in a book which graphically described the special additional risks they’ve faced over the years — and offer their advice on how to prepare for these dangers and best do our jobs.

Their words and experiences provide a powerful reminder that female journalists often offer a different take on war and conflict and unlike many of their male counterparts, remain utterly unimpressed by the whiz bang of the boys toys, knowing only too well that “collateral damage” means people: men, women and so often, little children. Like them, I believe that understanding makes them better journalists.

In all this, there is one fundamental that has changed very little and that is the presence of women at the pointy end of news, the place where the decisions are made – in executive offices, in the publishers’ suite, in the boardrooms of big media companies.

Returning to Dr Louise North’s work published in August 2012 in Australia, we learned that not one woman was entrusted with the editing role in a daily edition of the nation’s 21 metropolitan newspapers although three currently edit weekend editions – as I did before being posted to London.

Similarly, in broadcasting, women’s exclusion from leadership roles is evident although public broadcasters fared slightly better. But even at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), equivalent of the BBC, it wasn’t until 2009 that they appointed the first female director of news, Kate Torney. On morning and drive time radio shifts, commercial and public radio is dominated by male voices.

At CEO level, 23 of 24 of the big mainstream media companies in Oz are men – the only woman runs a regional network outside Sydney. Back at my old paper, of the 13 member executive team, 11 are men. The only women at that level are the chief legal counsel and human resources CEO.

And this is in the new world, a nation just 200 years old that prides itself on being open minded, easy going, classless!

Paola Totaro (c) March 2013

Paola Totaro is a journalist who lives in London and worked with the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age in Melbourne, Australia, before coming to the United Kingdom as European Correspondent. She studied at the University of Sydney and the University of New England in Australia, and is presently enrolled in an MA (Culture & Criticism) at the University of the Arts, London. She includes French and Italian amongst her languages, and lists her hometown as Naples, Italy.

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Asked to speak at the WWAFE House of Lords seminar, as I first began to muse about the issue a few weeks ago, I decided to put a call out on Facebook to elicit some observations from the many female colleagues I left behind in Australian media – and the many more I have met since my posting as a foreign correspondent to London in 2008. How did they see their profession when they began? Have things changed for those of us who are well into our careers?

And what about the youngest cohort, those who have entered the fray as the digital revolution continues to shake the industry to its core?

While many of us have busted barriers to report from war zones the world over, how many women have managed to infiltrate media boardrooms or editor’s offices and publisher’s top floor suites?

That first call out for anecdotes was an incredible eye opener. I thought I might glean a few good stories, even a few jokes. But what I heard, often messaged almost with a sense of apology to me in private, saddened and shocked me.

Before I head down that path, let me tell you a little of my own professional trajectory. I began as a young, trainee journalist on Australia’s oldest and most august broadsheet daily in the middle of 1981 – the last undergraduate, Italian born and the only non Australian rookie. Six months later, a colleague of Hungarian Jewish background joined as a trainee and she – a trailblazing feminist – and I laughed the other night about being The Sydney Morning Herald‘s ‘token ethnics’ of the time. When I started at the paper, stories were written on manual typewriters, every page of the eight-ply carbon paper allowed to contain just two paragraphs to ease the sub-editing and production process. Every day, we bloodied our thumbs pushing pins through the great wads of paper that made a whole article. The paper’s printing presses thrummed to life three or four times throughout the night but once the last edition was in bed that was it, another day was over. I will always remember the excitement of the facsimile machine and what we called gram machines, great big heavy drums that transmitted photographs via a telephone line at the speed of a snail on tranquillizers.

Now, as a correspondent covering Europe for Australian newspapers just two decades later, news can break and I will be able to get it out, into the ether or on our websites, sometimes in seconds. These days, the news cycle runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week and have filed stories from the strangest places: Congo River, the remotest foothills of the Himalayas, an earthquake torn mountain village in Italy and from 40,000 feet above the earth in a plane carrying Pope Benedict and a cabal – I’m not sure that is the collective noun for Cardinals!

In an effort to quantify change specifically for women in media, I hunted down a former editor of the time, one of Australia’s finest – and, it turns out, something of a newspaper historian. He told me that in the year I joined The Sydney Morning Herald, there were 180 journalist writing the paper – of which 39 or 22 per cent – were women.

Thirty years later, work done by Australian academic, Dr Louise North, and published last year reveals that there has been a slight improvement – but women still occupy only 30 per cent of the editorial positions at the Herald. There has been a technological – but not a gender – revolution.

I’m fairly sure that the year I began in what I still feel is the best job in the world was also the year the paper celebrated its 150^th birthday. Three decades – 30 years! – would pass before the first female editor was appointed – and she lasted less than two years, removed in a purge in 2012 which saw her replaced with two men!

Chatting to colleagues and editors who also began their careers in the 1980s, I realized that my generation was at the pointy end of huge changes for women in news and yet most of us were pretty much oblivious that what we were doing was trying to change the world. One reminded me with great gusto of the daily battle in news conference – the place where editors, mostly male, meet twice a day to create the newslist and place stories. The fight was never ending to get placement for stories about equal pay and equal opportunity, welfare, reproductive rights, balancing family life, stories about childbirth, about breast feeding into the paper, let alone onto page one alongside the nation’s male dominated political affairs. One year, this same colleague reminded me, childcare fees rocketed by 25 per cent in one go – none of us even had kids then but she remembers it took a full week of lobbying to get an editor (whose wife happened to be a feminist and mum of two young children) – to agree to running the story, let alone putting it on page one where it belonged.

Over the next decade, we fought and won a battle for purpose built childcare at work, we watched the election of a trickle of women to the nation’s parliaments, seethed with fury as the first female Deputy Opposition Leader in a Lower House was literally driven out of politics by the mysoginist language and political attacks by a Premier who is remembered also as one of Australia’s most erudite, eloquent and reforming QCs.

And national research shows still that in Australia today, women even now manage to get just 30 per cent of newspaper bylines on page one – and it’s the same percentage if you look at the main focus of news stories. As my trailblazer colleague says it’s still ‘news about blokes, by blokes.’

And yet, eight years ago, when I was appointed Editor of the Saturday edition of the Herald – the one with the biggest circulation and fattest income – the last thing I thought of myself was being a pioneer. I remember feeling that somehow, I had not earned it, was a fraud soon to be found out, felt amazingly thankful when my salary was given an unexpectedly big hoik. I suspect a male colleague would have asked for even more, out of principle. It’s funny because looking back, I now see that I was – and still am – one of a mere handful of women appointed to executive, decision making positions in Australian media – but somehow I didn’t feel I deserved it. I don’t think I am alone in these secret misgivings and thoughts.

Paola Totaro (c) March 2013

Paola Totaro is a journalist who lives in London and worked with the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age in Melbourne, Australia, before coming to the United Kingdom as European Correspondent. She studied at the University of Sydney and the University of New England in Australia, and is presently enrolled in an MA (Culture & Criticism) at the University of the Arts, London. She includes French and Italian amongst her languages, and lists her hometown as Naples, Italy.

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My intention was to write an article on the contribution of  West African Nurses on a particular anniversary of the International Council of Nurses.

However, wherever I went seeking primary source material on West African Nurses, I found the same names of members of the same family: Elizabeth, Hannah, Emma, Adelaide and Annette (Nettie) Smith.  These five mixed race Victorian Sisters, born in Freetown and living and dying between 1860 and 1960, were the articulate, cultured and genteel daughters of  the half English and half Fante civil servant William Smith Jnr. Their mother was heiress Anne Spilsbury Smith who hailed from a wealthy Freetown family.

On their mother’s side the Smith sisters descended from a famous Mandingo/Bambara re-captive woman, the feisty, flamboyant, wealthy, illiterate merchant Betsy Carew, rescued from a westbound slave ship and set free in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Her husband, Thomas Carew, the Smith’s great grandfather, was a Maroon whose ancestors had been exiled to Nova Scotia from Jamaica and then shipped to Sierra Leone. The marriage caused much controversy in an emerging bourgeoisie settler community made up of African-American Nova Scotians (who fought on the British side during the American War of Independence) and Maroon Nova Scotians who did not take kindly to illiterate re-captives (liberated slaves) marrying into their community. However, four generations along the female line from Betsy Carew to Hannah Carew Spilsbury to Anne Spilsbury Smith and the five Smith sisters. There is a shift from traditional African mercantilism and apparel to European schooling, knowledge and prowess and a firm foot in established elite Creole society. While Betsy Carew was not readily accepted into settler society, three generations of women later her great granddaughters were being entertained by European nobility.

Annette (Nettie) Smith

In a book on her life Adelaide Smith describes her childhood in London and on the Isle of Jersey, brought up by nannies and their widower father, educated at home by governesses before being sent to some of the pioneering ladies colleges of the day, at a time when most black women in the Western hemisphere were workingclass or servants.

As a British born historian of West African descent having been tutored on the English Literature classics in West Africa and the UK and absorbed with relish (no political correctness here), I had to pinch myself when I read the accounts of how, when the Smith Sister’s mother died and they lost the trust fund set up for her, they had to cut back financially and wear each other’s hand me downs. I had to confirm I was not reading Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, albeit none of the Smith Sisters was forced into domestic service like Josephine March. At any given time the Smith family had at least two domestic servants.  Furthermore their anxious father, retired civil servant and lay Methodist preacher, was anxious they marry well, knowing there was no great inheritance to sustain them. Yet again I had to make the comparison with  Pride and Prejudice. Marry well they did as four of them wed leading professional men from the West Coast of Africa.

Emma Smith, the middle sister, was to become the strict maiden aunt of the family, helping raise her numerous nephews and nieces. My research, however, reveals all the sisters deserve an account of their own lives and the role they played in Adelaide’s life needs to be highlighted.

The Smith sisters, brought up with a high sense of civic and religious duty by their father, at post secondary education had a choice of attending finishing schools, art school and music conservatoires and a tour of Europe where they improved on their languages, especially French and German.

When the Smith sisters returned to their city of birth, Freetown, they caused a sensation with their musical talents and charm, and founded two schools. But that era also witnessed them and others forming a stronger African cultural identity amidst growing racial discrimination in West Africa. The beginning of the century also witnessed some Smith sisters identify themselves with organisations in West Africa and Britain that would preserve the identity and dignity of the black race.

Amongst their  friends were Queen Victoria’s African Goddaughter  Victoria Davies and her family friend Samuel Coleridge Taylor. Together with the Smith Sisters they were frequent visitors to theatres and concerts in Edwardian London, where the Smith sisters returned. The music for some of those concerts was composed by Samuel Coleridge Taylor himself.

I have been approached by members of my own community who have said they want our own period drama on the Smith sisters and, yes, one of them did live in a stately home as she was taken under the wings of a German aristocrat’s wife.

I have lectured On The Smith Sisters Of Sierra Leone During Black History months of 2004 and 2005. This is the 150^th Anniversary of the freeing of Slaves in the United States of America and now is the time for people to know the story of these remarkable sisters.

Adenike Ogunkoya (c) March 2013

Adenike Ogunkoya read Modern European and African History at Birkbeck College and the School of Oriental and African Studies  University of London (SOAS). This was followed by a course in British Women’s History at London Metropolitan University. Having to halt her research due to illness and now responding well to treatment, in the future she would like the opportunity to re-submit her dissertation on the same subject. After a break from administration and research in  public service she anticipates a role in an archive or library.

ARCHIVES USED INCLUDE

London Metropolitan Archives, Black Cultural Archives, The National Archives, Kew, British Newspaper Library Colindale, British Library St Pancras, Kensington, Lambeth, Lewisham, Local Studies Libraries and liaising with research centres around the UK and in the USA.

FURTHER READING

A Hundred Years of Freedom:The Smith Sisters of Sierra Leone 1860-1960

By Adenike Ogunkoya

A Hundred Years of Freedom: The Smith Sisters of Sierra Leone: 1860-1960 is a book about the five mixed race, middle class Smith sisters of Sierra Leone. British women’s studies lack an African perspective and this book, detailing the lives of the five Smith sisters 1860-1960, will appeal widely as they had strong associations with the USA, Nova Scotia, Jamaica, Ghana, Sierra Leone (where they were born), Nigeria as well as Britain (where they were educated and settled). The book is unique because for the first time it gives an account of the lives of black middle class ladies in Victorian Britain and also   the central role played by women amongst the black literati in Edwardian Britain. Several autobiographies and biographies of people like that of the half-Egyptian and half Sudanese writer, playwright, actor and journalist Duse Mohamed Ali, a friend of Samuel Coleridge Taylor and a member of the black literati in Edwardian London and a great friend of the Smith sisters, have excluded the Smith sisters. The Smith sisters were also friends with the musician Samuel Coleridge Taylor having been introduced to him by Queen Victoria’s African Goddaughter, Victoria Davies;  again very little is mentioned in the books on Samuel Coleridge Taylor who was a great friend of the Smith sisters and Godfather to one of their daughters, whilst composing music with another daughter of one of the Smith sisters. The Smith sisters other friends were Dr John Alcindor mentioned in Jeffrey Green’s book on Black Edwardians, and John Eldred Taylor a Co—Founder of the African Times & Oriental Review. Duse Mohamed Ali later edited the African Times & Oriental Review and Gold Coast nationalist JE Casely Hayford financed it – but not before asking for Adelaide’s Smith’s hand in marriage. Despite the Smith sisters’ providing lots of information to the African Times and Oriental Review, they were never mentioned in it.  The title of the book is an emphasis on their slave and re-captive (liberated slave) ancestors and their own privileged status as well as how easily they moved from one continent to another at a time when most black women in the western hemisphere were working class. The title also emphasises the year the first Smith sister was born and the year the longest living Smith sister died. This book more than any other will highlight the growing number of women from West Africa and the West Indies who were part of the history of black Edwardians in Britain, which includes some now well known, including Victoria Davies.

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My school days were the horror of my life. Big blanks hide memories too painful to recall.

I

can remember

when I

went to school

who had come

from afar

I can remember

when I

went to school

I used to race

to the cafe place

to be first

at the counter

to be served first

was the prize

in the end

I gave up

the chase

for no matter

how many times

I won

that race

I was always

served last

in that

cafe place.

In the mid 1960s and early 1970s it seemed the world was in revolt – the French student demonstrations in Paris, the American blacks in revolt with Watts ‘Burn, baby, burn’, the anti-Viet Nam war moratorium marches, demonstrations overseas and here in Australia. I was part of it all. I wanted a change in my life too.

It took me half my lifetime to realise I was entitled to my mother’s mother’s mother’s country, I was entitled to my mother’s mother’s mother’s language, my mother’s mother’s mother’s history, and the laws that belong to that country. The greatest sadness in my life is the realisation that I will never have any of those things. Those things are rightfully mine, I am entitled to them, but I will never have them. Both my father’s father’s fathers’ country and my mother’s mother’s mother’s country have some of the richest coalfields in the world, and I know I will never have any title to that land, I or my brothers or sisters will never own (in white terms of reference) any of the land rightfully belonging to us.

If you are born black in this country, from the instant of birth you are invoved in the black struggle whether you wish to acknowledge it or not. So I have been involved all my life in struggle. During the 1970s I became more involved, more active in the black movement.

Tribal council happened in Brisbane, on a national scale, in those days of the early 1970s. Lots of anger, lots of energy, lots of movement. I went to countless meetings, all the conferences, all the protest marches. Aboriginal people knew (know) what’s wrong with the world, and I was going to help change it overnight. I even thought I could do it by myself, and tried very hard, but I didn’t have enough strength, enough energy, enough time.

I can remember a group pf us breaking into an office, regularly, to print our leaflets, notices, newsletters simply because we had no money and no other way to get our stuff printed. I was the ‘cockatoo’; also I was the only one with a car.

I had to listen more, to other voices, other struggles. When the anti-Springbock protest took off in this country, I was right in there, shoulder to shoulder with the whites. This created a bigger struggle for me, because here were whites protesting about the oppression of black people in another country, yet not out in the streets protesting about the oppression of black peopole in their own country. Small groups gathered all over Brisbane discussing tactics to impede the games. I went to a small group meeting with my red-haired, blue-eyed friend, who jumped up and said ‘Let’s throw broken bottles and bent nails on the field.’ The horrified silence following this suggestion was broken by a shocked whisper, ‘But that’s violence!’ I was stunned. Looking around at the room full of white people I hated them all. How could they sit up there in their white skins and be shocked by the suggestion of use of violence, when it is they, white people, the colonisers who have brought violence into the lives of Aboriginal people in this country?

I didn’t want to go on scrubbing floors, cooking, cleaning, and when Aboriginal study grants became available in the early 1970s, I went back to school to educate myself to play a better part for the black movement.

While I was studying for matriculation in 1972, the Aboriginal Embassy in Canberra was brought down by the McMahon Liberal government. The day it happened my sister, my brothers, my cousins and myself saw it on the 6 o’clock television news. We cried. By 7 o’clock we had collected enough petrol money to take us to Canberra. There were five – my brother Len, our cousin Tiga and his then wife Laurel, and a friend Donna, and myself. We stopped at Newcastle airforce base to speak with my brohter Charlie, who was then a member of the force, to learn he had gone on a one-man strike in protest at the government’s action. His superior officers didn’t know how to handle the situation, so when he said he was leaving the base to carry his protest to Canberra, I think they were glad to see him go. The Embassy was part of our history. Today I am pleased and humble to have been a part of it.

Women’s Liberation voices grew louder, they were heard more clearly, their messages straighter. I listened, got it straight in my head but not my heart;  there was something wrong. A good woman wrote a book about women in Australia. I thought it was great until I bought the book, and looked and looked for something on Aboriginal women, and found about two lines mentioning us. Then it began finally to dawn on me that when white women speak of women’s liberation, they speak only of white women’s liberation, and rightly so. But they don’t make it clear. They talk and write as if they are speaking for all women. Maybe eventually we will reach that stage. We haven’t got there yet. We shouldn’t act as if we have.

I do not say the 1960s and 1970s increased activities of the women’s liberation movement had no effect on me. They did. I had to look at the position of women in society – that is, the position of Aboriginal women and white women. Arguments between black women and white women about women’s oppression did not always have a meeting place. At times a great deal of hostility was expressed by black women towards white women in the women’s liberation movement. This told me just how much black women have been conditioned by white society. Colonialism in Australia was brought about by violence. It introduced into the minds of Aboriginal people the concept of the native. Before the colonisers, there were no natives;  later Aboriginal people were defined only in relation to white people, Aboriginal women were defined as against white women – they were compared and contrasted with them, dividing them. Aboriginal society and its values were so foreign to white settlers that many myths and misconceptions developed. Through the writings of Aboriginal people themselves, a clearer picture will emerge to project Aboriginal women’s order of priorities and values, which will play an important part in our own liberation, whether we be black or white.

Lilla Watson (c) 1987

Lilla Watson is an activist and intellectual, an artist and academic, a writer and a poet.Born in Queensland, Australia, she lived in various country towns and in the capital, Brisbane, thenceforth. In 1979 she was appointed tutor in the Department of Social Work in the University of Queensland, the first Aboriginal to be appointed by that university. She conducted research and fieldwork  in relation to problems faced by Aboriginal people in Queensland, and became the first Australian academic to be appointed to a tenured position in the university system, based upon her skills, expertise and knowledge acquired through her lived experience and her research and fieldwork, rather than formal university qualifications. One recognition of her significance in the Australian polity was the invitation in 1980 as an ‘Australian leader’ to attend the Australia’s Future conference hosted in Melbourne by Australian Frontiers.

This is an extract from ‘Sister, Black is the Colour of My Soul’ published in Different Lives – Reflections of the Women’s Movement and Visions of Its Future published by Penguin Books Australia, Melbourne, Australia, in 1987, Jocelynne A. Scutt, ed.

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I was born in spring in 1940, given my mother’s name ‘Lilla’. My grandmother died before we met, but I know her through my mother. As a small child I grew up secure in my family. I knew my father, I knew my mother, I knew my sisters and brothers. It wasn’t until I began school that I was brought to a rude awakening. There was a black world and a white world. In the black world I was safe;  in the white world I was unsafe.

It was obvious to me from my first school days that white people were unpredictable. This understanding of unpredictability came when my big sister took me to school for the first time and introduced me to her girlfriend’s little sister (who was starting school that day too). I thought I had made a friend for life. However that was not to be. Most white kids I met at school did not or would not play with me. Sometimes (rarely) they did. This is where the unpredictability came in. I was never sure when or if they would play with me. Eventually I worked out that they only ever spoke or played with me if there were no other (white) kids around.

Once, my middle brother was invited by a white boy in his class to a birthday party. When he came home and told us, we were excited for him. It was the very first time any of us had been invited to a birthday party. Mum washed his best shirt, pressed his best serge (short) pants, and sent him off all shining clean. Years later my brother told us that when he turned up at the party he wasn’t allowed in the door: the child’s mother had come to the door and, seeing who it was, demanded ‘What do you want?’ When he said he had come for the birthday party she sent her child out to say to my brother, ‘Sorry but you can’t come to my party because you’re black.’ That same brother was made to stand up in front of his class and empty his pockets whenever any money or a rubber or pencil was reported missing.

When

I think

of

my childhood

it’s

like

a bad dream

filled with nightmares

but

I never screamed

it’s frozen inside

 locked up

in me

hidden

deep down

where

white folks

can’t see …

I actually went  to school wanting to learn, wanting  to get to know other kids and to be part of everything at school.

I did most of my growing up in a small country town. One vivid memory is of going to school one morning when the whole school was buzzing with talk about how a family had been forced to move from their house into a disused dairy shed. The white children said it was dreadful that the family had to live in such terrible conditions. I couldn’t understand why they thought a disused dairy was a terrible place. We lived in a bag hut with a dirt floor and scraps of ironbark from trees straightened out by my dad for a roof. The diary was a well-constructed building with good solid walls and concrete floor. No one had offered us a dairy to live in.

I

can remember

when I

went to school

how

I’d approach

the gate

to my awaited fate

how my head

felt tight

like being squeezed

in a vice

with hate

and always, always

I was late

dragging my feet

in the dust

head bowed low

trying to think

of some excuse

to allow me

to go home

to try

and escape

the misery

and hate.

How I hated

this thing

‘schooling’

they said

‘education’s the thing’

I ‘d sit at my desk

and not learn a thing

and wish to hell

it had never

begun.

In my first year of primary school, I remember walking home one day with a group of white children ahead of me. They were calling a well-known Aboriginal couple awful names, throwing stones at them as they sat in the gutter in the street. I was shocked that children could be so disrespectful of grown-ups. As I walked past the couple sitting at the kerbside, their backs were towards me, so they could not see me. I walked about 50 yards down the road when I had a strong compulsion to go back, to acknowledge them.

My parents had taught us to respect elders. I could not ignore the Aboriginal couple in the gutter. I so I returned, walked out onto the road, and stood in front of them: ‘Hello Mrs Fuller!’  Hello, Mr Fuller!‘ They looked at me smiling. The man said: ‘Hello, little girl. You run along home now before it gets too late.’

I remember mum taking my two older sisters down to the local dances. She and I would stand on the verandah, looking through the doorway at my sisters dancing inside.  They never danced with men;  only with each other;  except there was one fellow who they danced with occasionally and he was considered an outcast because he had been born out of wedlock. But he was the only man I ever saw them dance with in that small country town, and of course they were the only black people who ever went to those dances. 

We lived in the bush during my middle primary school years. On Sundays my dad taught us to box. We drew a square in the dirt with a stick. That was the boxing ring. Those nearest each other in weight would be opponents. It did not matter that the boys boxed with the girls. Even weight was fairly unimportant;  the serious matter was that we learned how to fight and how to defend ourselves.

My dad was a learned man. He taught us much, never differentiating between males or females in our family. When a job required doing, whoever was there did it regardless of whether they were female or male: tractor driving, truck driving, droving cattle, sewing bags of wheat, ring-barking trees, cotton picking, and on, and on.

My mum was an educated person in our terms. She had gone to third grade in primary school, but there wasn’t a word she  couldn’t spell, not always correctly, but she never failed to spell a word. She knew the meaning of so many words. She was my dictionary in my growing years. Mum encouraged us to read as widely as possible and never once attempted to censor our reading. Our white counterparts at school were never, never allowed to read the newspaper the Truth . Of course it was old hat to us, the sex scandals, the murders, robbery with violence and so on. Our mum let us read it all. We were made to feel ashamed that our parents were so lax in allowing us to read anything, so we were never game to tell the white kids at school that we read that ‘awful’ paper. 

Lilla Watson (c) 1987

Lilla Watson  was born in Queensland, Australia, and lived in various country towns and in the capital, Brisbane, thenceforth. In 1979 she was appointed tutor in the Department of Social Work in the University of Queensland, the first Aboriginal to be appointed by that university. She conducted research and fieldwork  in relation to problems faced by Aboriginal people in Queensland, and in 1980 was invited as an ‘Australian leader’ to attend the Australia’s Future conference hosted in Melbourne by Australian Frontiers.

 This is an extract from ‘Sister, Black is the Colour of My Soul’ published in Different Lives – Reflections of the Women’s Movement and Visions of Its Future published by Penguin Books Australia, Melbourne, Australia, in 1987, Jocelynne A. Scutt, ed.

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During the 1972 Australian federal election, the publicity of the Women’s Electoral Lobby on the campaign to assess prospective parliamentary candidates’ awareness of feminist issues coincided with my conviction that only positive action would overcome male dominance and female subservience. I read the published results of the survey of candidates with a growing conviction that this was what was  needed to expose the biases of those ruling the country. I joined WEL in July 1973. My first meeting was in the Sydney Bradfield electorate. One topic was death duty laws. In those days, since most family assets, if there were any, were held in the husband’s name, when her husband died a widow often had to sell the family home to pay heavy death duties. If the wife predeceased her husband, because few assets were in a wife’s name, a widower usually paid a negligible amount of death duty, or none at all. The meeting asked me to convene a probate action group to research the problem and present lobbying tactics for WEL to follow.

My life took on new meaning. The need to change unjust laws that had no negative effect on men, just women, fired me. I sent out letters to numerous consulates for information on death duty laws operating over seas, and followed up the lettters with as numerous phone calls. The group and I researched the position in Australia  and drew up documentaion for WEL. In Western Australia Senator Negus had earlier been elected on the sole issue of abolition of death duties;  his New South Wales’ representative accepted an invitation to speak at the inaugural meeting of the WEL probate action group. At a later meeting we decided not to support Senator Negus’ proposal to abolish all death duties;  instead, we lobbied for abolition of death duties on estates passing between spouses only, because the law was discriminatory against women. This decision became WEL policy throughout Australia as a result of resolutions passed at the 1974 WEL National Conference in Melbourne.

Throughout 1974 all members of federal and state parliaments were lobbied and responses and queries individually answered. Toward the end of that year, a federal parliamentarian asked for a WEL submission on probate reform, offering to circulate it throughout federal parliament. The submission was drafted in January 1975 and a follow-up was produced in March 1976. Most of the work of the probate campaign (except in Queensland, where Gold Coast WEL took on the load) fell to me, but would have been impossible without the total support of WEL during the three to four years it ran. For a woman who had felt she was alone in a fight against inequality and put-downs of women, it was like ‘coming home’ for me to find in WEL so many women who understood the nature of the problem I had railed against for years.

Early in 1977 the campaign succeeded. Governments around Australia had abolished or promised to abolish in the near future, death duties levied on estates passing between wives and husbands. Soon after, state and federal governments abolished all death duties. (The Premier of Queensland, Joh Bjelke Petersen, led the way.) This had never been WEL’s policy, which was aimed directly at sex-based discrimination.

As the probate campaign neared its end, the research that had been done on the law showed up other areas of injustice. As result, the group drafted submissions to the New South Wales Law Reform Commission’s inquiry into the legal profession. Complaints were received by WEL about inadequate and inaccurate legal advice to widows by solicitors regarding probate.

Because WEL took this up, other injustices were reported to WEL. One was the reluctance of victims of rape to report the crime, due to the trauma of police and court procedures. At a WEL general meeting, a drafting party was established to produce the WEL draft bill on sexual offences. I was in the group, taking the reins as convenor when the permanent convenor was absent overseas looking at the law in Michigan. In May 1980 WEL was represented by Kerry Heubel, another memberof the group, and myself as delegates to the First National Conference on Rape Law Reform, held in Hobart by the Australian Institute of Criminology, the Tasmanian Law Reform Commission and the University of Tasmania law school. The conference endorsed the principles of the WEL draft bill, and later they formed the basis for law reforms in New South Wales, the Northern Territory, Western Australia and South Australia, and proposed in Tasmania.

Meanwhile, throughout 1977 and 1978 the WEL (Sydney) office had been receiving an increasing number of complaints about family law and Family Court practices. The WEL Family Law Action Group was formed to investigate these complaints, to research problems arising and if necessary to propose reforms and lobby government. The vast majority of complaints were about property division on divorce. The broad discretion vested in judges under the Family Law Act and the flow-on effect of their decisions, affecting settlements before registrars and out of court, was causing problems, particularly for women.

The group set down to looking at the sexism inherent in judicial decisions and registrars’ and lawyers’ advice. Our work showed that despite marriage being called an ‘equal partnership’, economic equality for women and men does not exist under present marriage and divorce laws and arrangements. Each marital partner can legally claim ownership of assets each financially contributed during the marriage, with money contributions in fact being more ‘recognised’ than non-financial contributions, because judges schooled under the old Matrimonial Causes Act1959 (Cth) remained committed to a position that did not recognise women’s work in the home as having any real legitimacy or economic value.

Because pregnancy, childbirth and child-care responsibilities usually fall on women and interrupt women’s career and income prospects, the value of a wife’s financial contribution is ordinarily much less than her husband’s. On divorce, assets are divided according to the judge’s individual opinions about respective contributions. Women are frequently disadvantaged in the process. That a few men may sometimes be financially disadvantaged on divorce is often used in debate as evidence of the court’s ‘even-handed’ approach. Yet the way the law was implemented did not accord with the hopes of the Attorney-General who put the new Family Law Act before the Parliament. Lionel Murphy had sought recognition of women’s economic contribution as equal to that of men, through unpaid work and psychological support in the home as well as any paidwork they might undertake being fairly recognised.

The WEL Family Law Action Group set out to remedy this wrong, making numerous submissions to federal members of parliament, appearing before parliamentary inquiries, and drafting provisions to reinstitute equality into family law, divorce and custody of children, for women’s responsibility for children had  a huge impact on property settlement and outcomes.

WEL proposed a new regime of ‘equal rights to marital assets’ to ensure that non-financial and financial contributions were equally recognised as having economic value and contributing to the accumulation of family assets. A book arising out of our work – For Richer, For Poorer – Money, Marriage and Property Rights – was published in 1984, co-authored by my fellow co-convenor of the WEL Family Law Action Group and me. It had a huge impact on Family Court outcomes, and generated discussion, academic articles and conferences. Much, however, remained to be done.

Di Graham (c) 1987

Di Graham joined the Women’s Electoral Lobby (WEL) in 1973, becoming a driving force within the organisation and introducing lobbying methods having a profound effect on law reform and building huge respect for WEL amongst federal and state politicians, women’s organisations and the community. Prior to becoming involved in the women’s liberation movement, in the 1950s she joined the Aboriginal-Australian Fellowship and later became a member of the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders (FCAATSI) and a foundation member of the Aboriginal Education Council of New South Wales, of which she was at the time of writing vice-president.

This is an extract from ‘Through Life in Pursuit of Equality’ by Di Graham, published in Different Lives – Reflections on the Women’s Movement and Visions of its Future, Penguin Books Australia, Melbourne, Australia, 1987 (Jocelynne A. Scutt, ed.).

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Before the early 1970s my life, outwardly, was that of a middle-class woman. Inwardly I was burning up, aware of being out of step with acquaintances and friends about the lack of women’s rights contrasted with men’s. In my pre-marriage business career I was reasonably succesful (for those times), quickly rising to secretary to the managing director, then to assuming responsibility for the running of the company – office, stores, and repairs sections – during frequent absences of the managing director overseas and interstate. Of course I received lower wages than the men whose work I oversaw. In response to my protests I was told it was inevitable, as the government made the rules on wages. The firm took this attitude despite often publicising my capacities in trade journals.

In 1935 I took six months’  leave of absence to marry. Yet I did not return to business. My husband, increasingly successful in his own career, thought my return to paid employment would signify his inability to provide for me. This outlook was prevalent then, and I understood it. Instead, I joined several women’s organisations. I found that none constructively challenged sex-discriminatory practices. Then an older friend suggested joining her in working to improve conditions for women prisoners in Long Bay Jail. The prison matron asked me to become the special visitor of a young woman serving a life sentence, who had no visitors. A friendship developed between the young woman and myself. Hers was a crime of passion. She shot her young husband in a fit of jealousy when he continually went out at  night without telling her where he was going, while she stayed home with three young children. Long conversations with her, and shorter discussions with other more experienced women at the prison, introduced me to lives I had not known of. I became aware that some women felt they had to lie and cheat to survive, yet fundamentally they were rather noble people.

At this time the overseas political situation occupied public attention. The Spanish civil war and new regimes in Italy and Germany featured prominently. Wanting to see how lifestyles differ outside Australia, I persuaded my husband to take a year off for travel. We set out  in late 1938 – by ship in those days. We went by cargo vessel, stopping at many cities and towns along the coasts of countries on the route to Europe. We left an Australia where the majority opinon expressed repugnance toward Nazi Germany, but a sizeable minority thought perhaps Hitler was only trying to right the wrongs inflicted upon the German people in the Treaty of Versailles, and reports of atrocities against Jews may have been anti-Nazi propaganda. In England there was the same division of opinion about Hitler’s Nazi regime among the people we met.  However after Hitler’s troops marched into Prague in March 1939, defiant of the Munich agreement with England and France, we heard no open support again for Hitler, except in Germany.

English newspapers contained similar evidence of male arrogance and insensitivity to women’s rights as  in Australia. One morning newspaper reported findings of a medical committee inquiring into whether or not women should be permitted some form of pain relief at childbirth. By a majority decision the male members of the committee decided women should not have relief, as pain may be necessary to establish a mother’s love for her child. The two women on the committee recorded a minority finding in favour of pain relief during childbirth.

Leaving England, we drove through Europe. In Berlin I visited the Foreigners’ Service Office where I recieved information on the Nazi system and Nazi women’s organisations. We grew wary of the claimed advantages of the procedures. When visiting the British Consul in Frankfurt, the reception room was crowded. As the consul opened his office door to admit us, everyone in the room waved papers in an effort to attract his attention. They were German Jews wanting British visas to escape. We left Germany in June. World War II erupted in September when we were two days out of Colombo en route to Fremantle.

Back home, when I voiced concern about discrimination against women in many areas of everyday life, I was usually greeted with laughter, condescending smiles or anger. An evening spent with other than close friends,during which I expressed views on current affairs invariably ended with a departing male guest patting me on the shoulder and patronisingly advising me not to worry my head about such matters – I had two wonderful children and a devoted husband so should content myself with home affairs. That was in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Toward the end of 1946, our younger child had an undiagnosed serious illness;  we were told he was dying. In an agony of guilt at having sent the child to pre-school at three years old, I dropped all outside interests including women’s organisations, visiting him daily in hospital for nearly twelve months. On recovery he needed attentive home care for many more months.

Then in 1949 some friends and I decided to sit in at English lectures and drama lectures at Sydney University. We asked no one for permission – but sat enthralled through the classes, daring but eager to learn. Following this experiment, we later applied and received official permission to pay fees and continue attending lectures through 1950. During the lectures I was frequently appalled by the unconscious sexism of the statements of some male lecturers, such as ‘Jane Austen’s novels, like those of most women novelists, contain grammar of low quality’. Probably this was because Jane Austen used non-sexist language which was perfectly acceptable at the time of her writing – like ‘everyone has their own books’, rather than ‘Everyone has his own book’, the latter being foisted upon the English language by Fowler.

During the first half of the 1960s, ‘confrontation’ and increasing misundersatnding between Indonesia and Australia motivated me to attend Bahasa Indonesia language classes. Over three years of study of the Indonesian language, history and customs, including study camps and seminars attended with Indonesian university students in Australia, I became aware that some of the misunderstandings between the two countries were exaggerated through not only different background and customs, but also through the ambiguities stemming from lack of understanding of the nuances in the respective languages. Such divisions and misunderstandings seemed to me analogous to the lack of understanding often arising between men and women owing to sex roles imposed from birth onwards, together with our literature and language using male gender for persons of both sexes;  this relegates females, in the eyes of girls and boys and women and men, to a secondary and less important status.

Di Graham (c) 1986

Born in Sydney, Australia, in 1909, Di Graham died at the age of 89, shortly before her ninetieth birthday. She wrote this essay in 1986, reflecting upon her engagement with the Women’s Movement and how she was precipitated, from birth, into women’s rights activism. For her work in advancing the rights of Indigenous Australians, particularly in education, in 1978 she was awarded the Queen’s Jubilee Medal, and in 1980 for her work on women’s rights she was awarded the Order of Australia Medal (OAM).

This is an extract from ‘Through Life in Pursuit of Equality’, published in Different Lives – Reflections on the Women’s Movement and Visions of its Future, Penguin Books Australia, Melbourne, Australia, 1987 (Jocelynne A. Scutt, editor). 

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