‘How Much Longer Will We Allow This Country's Affairs to be Run by Radical Feminists?’ Anti-Feminist Activism in Late 1970s Australia

Abstract

The historiography of Australia's feminist and sexual revolutions has focused on activists who articulated new claims for rights and protections on the basis of gender and sexuality. Very few scholars have investigated anti-feminist women's groups as part of this history. This article focuses on two anti-feminist women's groups in late 1970s Australia: Women's Action Alliance, and Women Who Want to Be Women. It argues that they adapted the women's movement's slogan ‘the personal is political’, using their identities as wives and mothers to authorise their political campaigns and contesting structures designed to facilitate women's access to policy-making. Finally, the article argues that while these groups were small, they did influence Federal politics. The rapidly changing economic orthodoxies of the late 1970s exerted particular pressures on women. Feminists and anti-feminists both offered a similar analysis of these economic pressures, even though the solutions they advanced were very different.