To return to the abstract index press the back button on your browser
Ann Curthoys
History, Australian National University
'From Freedom Ride to Women's Liberation: How Long a Journey?'
In the Freedom Ride of 1965, young men and women, both Aboriginal and white, campaigned together very effectively for Aboriginal rights. By 1970, this political formation had largely disappeared, with Women's Liberation distinguishing women's activism from men's, and a new Black autonomous politics separating black activism from white. In this lecture, I want to trace what had changed, looking in particular at the emergence of a women's movement that spoke of the sisterhood of all women across racial, class, and other boundaries. In the process, I'll trace some of the intellectual and philosophical antecedents to 1970s feminism, including not only those from feminism's own history, but also a range of thinkers and campaigners in other movements, such as Gandhi and Martin Luther King. My hope is to demonstrate that if we have a sufficiently complex and nuanced understanding of feminism's past, we can better debate the options for political action and critical intellectual engagement in the future.
Bio: Ann Curthoys is Manning Clark Professor of History at the Australian National University. She writes about Australian history, feminist theory, historical writing, and national identity. Her most recent book is Freedom Ride: A Freedom Rider Remembers (Allen and Unwin, 2002); one of her current projects is, with Susan Magarey, a history of Women's Liberation in Australia.
<Ann.Curthoys@anu.edu.au>