On 10 October 2012, Australia’s then Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, addressed the Australian Parliament in response to a motion put by Opposition Leader Tony Abbott. While the motion concerned the future of disgraced Speaker, Peter Slipper, Gillard’s speech was a call to, and invocation of, feminist leadership. Gillard used the occasion to draw attention to a concerted campaign of misogynistic, sexist attacks from the Opposition and some of their associates, not just towards herself but also towards Australian women in general.

Julia Gillard’s speech followed earlier concerns expressed by prominent feminists—for example, Moira Rayner and Anne Summers—about the...

This chapter explores the extraordinary growth in political leadership over the past 30 years among Indigenous women from a remote community. It is representative of a wider Australian phenomenon: the intense participation in democratic affairs by Indigenous women. These are two women from among many more: there are others who are participating at a similar level in this and other communities in the Northern Territory and elsewhere within Australia.

Guthadjaka and Garŋgulkpuy are two Yolngu women leaders from Elcho Island in the Northern Territory, a small island 500 km north-east of Darwin. Geographically isolated, they occupy a difficult space in...

This chapter explores the work of Pearl Gibbs throughout her exemplary career as an activist and tireless campaigner for Aboriginal rights and democracy in Australia from the 1930s until her death in 1983. Pearl’s activism on a national level is well documented in the historiography of Aboriginal politics and campaigns for Aboriginal rights, because of her role as a member of the 1930s Aboriginal campaigns for rights and as a member of the Aborigines Progressive Association and their ‘Day of Mourning’ campaign for Aboriginal citizenship in 1938,³ as well as her later roles within women’s organisations and working with other...

Internationalism as both ideal and practice exerted a powerful appeal for Australian women activists in the twentieth century even as they moved to the forefront of world history in winning full political rights at the national and State levels at home. These developments were interrelated. Australian women initially presented themselves to international audiences—and were received—as leaders of the world’s women, as pioneers of democratic rights, able to report on their unique experience as politically empowered women and show the way forward.²

In 1893, Catherine Spence and Margaret Windeyer joined hundreds of American and European women gathered at the...

The founding mother of the Australian feminist internationalist movement must be Jessie Street (1889–1970). Street was a role model for all those who came after her, due to the way she saw the possibilities of using the international system in the fight against discrimination. A founder of the UN Commission for the Status of Women, amongst many other achievements, she had infinite energy as a campaigner.

This chapter assesses some of the contributions of Australian women who have been successful in promoting social change using international forums in the 30 years after Jessie Street’s work, particularly at the United...

In the foyer of Trades Hall, Sydney, there is a brass plaque with an image of a woman. The inscription on it reads:

Bertha McNamara

kindly and gracious in her splendid way

She knew no nationhood

And her religion each and every day

Was that of doing good.

Jammed up against it when I last visited was a fire hose reel.

Who was Bertha McNamara? A memorial notice printed after her death in 1931 called her ‘The Mother of the Australian Labor Movement’ and Labor’s ‘Grand Old Lady’, mentioned that she was the mother-in-law of Jack Lang and Henry Lawson,...

A major step in the development of women’s activism and civic awareness in Australia was the formation of National Councils of Women in all States between 1896 and 1910, culminating in the emergence of the Federated Councils in 1924–25 and the National Council of Women of Australia (NCWA) in 1931.³ Linked to the International Council of Women (ICW), and through it first to the League of Nations and later the United Nations, the council movement provided, in the words of one of its early leaders, a conduit for mainstream Australian women’s organisations and their members to ‘accomplish good, useful,...

People with disabilities form the largest minority in Australia and are amongst the nation’s most disadvantaged people, with substandard outcomes on most indicators of community participation andwellbeing.² Despite this, most people tend not to think of disability rights as a political issue, as they do feminism or the struggle for Aboriginal self-determination. Instead, they tend to perceive disability as a personal problem to be overcome. Does this oversight stem from a collective fear of disability since everyone is a candidate for it? As Doris Fleischer and Frieda Zames observe, ‘“[h]andicapism” … is the only “ism” to which all human...

In her memoirs published in 1921, the British factory inspector Adelaide Anderson recalled what drew her to the ‘calling’ of inspection. The ‘idealizing powers of youth … embarking on a calling that involved conduct of legal proceedings and much other technical knowledge of an entirely novel kind for women of that day, counted for much’, she recalled. There were also the ‘authority and powers to enquire into and enforce remedies for wrong conditions, or to persuade sympathetic employers to provide amenities that the law could not enforce’, which were other appealing aspects of the role. It was unusual for a...

If leadership, as Amanda Sinclair argues in this volume, is to be defined in terms of the ability to influence and change the public agenda and improve the life experiences of people both in the present and in the future then philanthropy provides an excellent field in which to explore its application to women. Philanthropy, in its nineteenth-century usage, encompassed both the giving of money and the giving of time in the service of others. While women seldom commanded large fortunes, they were able to give of their time both to the administration of charitable institutions and to the provision...

While the focus of analysis of leadership in tertiary institutions is most commonly the capacities of the most senior academic administrators, many academics at less elevated levels in the hierarchy also can exert major influence in their disciplinary areas that has significant impact nationally and internationally. This chapter offers an insight into Australian women’s leadership in the academic profession in the twentieth century through the careers of outstanding scholars who from the mid 1950s were elected fellows of the Australian learned academies. Women faced considerable barriers to employment in universities before the expansion of secondary and tertiary education in the...

In October 1992 a female federal Australian senator made headlines after she displayed a poster that depicted a woman with a smoking gun over the caption ‘so many men, so few bullets’ in her Parliament House office window. In one newspaper article, titled ‘Make My Day’, it was reported that Parliament House authorities had received complaints that the poster in question was offensive, and asked for it to be removed.² The senator in question, Jocelyn Newman, was a senior parliamentarian from the conservative side of politics who was making a strong statement in favour of women’s representation in an overwhelmingly...

Mrs John Jones, president of the Victorian Women’s Citizen Movement, presented the above evidence to the Royal Commission on the Moving Picture Industry in Australia in 1927.² Jones compared the exploited children with exploited ‘natives’—both presumably requiring protection in the form of benevolent control. And it was a particular type and class of woman who could provide such control and guidance. For the women reformers, and also men, who appeared before the commission, the cinema was understood as a public arena in which a novel visual language was spoken. The relative accessibility of the cinema to all classes of...

In thinking about women, leadership and literature, I have passed up the opportunity to celebrate writers like Henry Handel Richardson, Christina Stead and Judith Wright, whose creative achievements call for the discourse of heroic individualism. Rather, in accord with the feminist challenges to conventional concepts of leadership outlined by Amanda Sinclair’s leading chapter in this book, I looked for women who have sought to influence public opinion about literary matters and advocate in various ways for writers. In Australia women’s literary activism of this kind includes furthering the cause of Australian literature, as Miles Franklin did throughout her life, or...

In the 1970s, ‘leadership’ was a dirty word for many in the women’s movement. Journalists trying to find a ‘spokesman’ complained of how upset women became if they were labelled as leaders. Leadership was associated with hierarchy and hierarchy was seen as inextricably linked with the patriarchal domination of women. To liberate themselves from patriarchy, women were trying to organise without hierarchy, through collectives and networks. Instead of there being leaders and followers, women would empower themselves through taking responsibility for decisions, which would be reached by consensus.

At first there were attempts not only to resist the idea of...

The environment movement, like many other social change movements, is not easy to define or delineate. Individuals within a movement may hold extremely diverse views on goals, strategies and even philosophies, but ‘a shared sense of moral outrage’³ builds alliances within and between the different organisations that form part of the environment movement.

Women have been active in seeking protection of the environment since Federation and even before 1900. Those in the historical record include Georgiana Molloy (1805–43) and Elizabeth Gould (1804–41), both of whom played a significant role in supporting the scientific endeavours of their male colleagues,...

Political consumerism is on the rise. It is a form of activism in which women have played significant roles at least since the eighteenth century. They continue to do so today.

This chapter describes female leadership in the emergence and growth of the modern consumer movement, and in particular the health consumer movement. It is a sector in which women play many leading roles in different ways, according to their own preferences and values and to the circumstances in which leadership is needed. It is a sector that amply demonstrates the need for a broader understanding and reconceptualisation of leadership,...