{"id":21152,"date":"2024-03-20T10:11:28","date_gmt":"2024-03-19T23:11:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.anneskyvington.com.au\/?p=21152"},"modified":"2024-04-04T12:59:41","modified_gmt":"2024-04-04T01:59:41","slug":"womens-liberation-in-the-seventies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.anneskyvington.com.au\/womens-liberation-in-the-seventies\/","title":{"rendered":"Women’s Liberation in the Seventies"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
The 1970s were a time of great change in Australia. This post is based on my memories of that time and the beginning of the Women’s Movement in Sydney, Australia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By 1972, the fledgling beginnings of a feminist movement were evident in Australia. It had started, like many such reform movements, by intellectuals and radicals within university campuses; it was triggered, also, by media accounts at that time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And then there was “The Female Eunuch” and Germaine Greer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I was 27 when the book came out and she, Germaine, won me over totally. Up until then, my only contact with radical women’s libbers, had been at university, where often loud and raucous voices raised against the status quo and men in general filled the air.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Here was this unbelievably beautiful young woman with intelligence and wit, who was talking openly about sex. How could I not be influenced?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I knew about the earlier First Wave feminists, the brave suffragettes who faced the ire of their husbands and of the establishment, often facing prison sentences and social ostracism for their views. Great Aunt Louie , my dear Grandfather, “Pop” Skyvington’s maiden aunt brought him up in Islington after his mother died. Being part of a petit bourgeois<\/em> family, she wrote letters to Australia after he migrated here at seventeen in which she berated the earliest feminists: Such were the times. <\/p>\n\n\n\n