Teachers’ union activism for gender equity: Social movements and policy processes

Abstract

This article documents the contribution of teacher union activists in their campaigns to put gender issues on government policy agendas in the 1970s and 1980s in Australia. The collective accounts document the way the activists forged new relationships and alliances, based on common goals and shared feminist values, and worked strategically with femocrats in state bureaucracies. But the effectiveness of the activists depended also on a particular set of political and cultural factors which were present in Australia at the time. Such contextual factors were also significant in the later marginalisation of gender equity issues in education in the 1990s.