Elsie Locke was a writer, environmentalist, historian, peace activist, one-time communist, and a battler for women’s rights. She is best known as a writer for children, though her writing encompassed adult non-fiction, journalism, pamphlets and poetry. Her writing and campaigning made a major contribution to New Zealand’s social, cultural and political life over many decades.
She wanted economic independence for married women, equal pay, and sex instruction and education for parenthood. She fought for the reform of the marriage and divorce laws, and maintained that prostitution would always exist as long as women lacked equal opportunity in employment. She objected to the stigma of the word ‘illegitimate’. Sievwright worked for disarmament during the South African war (1899–1902), and condemned any project ‘likely to involve Australasia in the participation of warfare’.
Cherry Raymond was a broadcaster, journalist and opinion-leader, and a household name during the 1960s and 1970s when few women achieved such prominence in the media. Although she particularly campaigned on women’s issues, and often on topics which were controversial or taboo, her interests were broad, and she played an important role in raising the profile of mental illness in New Zealand.
Mary Colclough was a highly controversial public figure for a few years only, but she jolted the people of Auckland by fundamentally challenging contemporary assumptions and values about woman’s place in New Zealand society.
Born in 1923, Dame Beryl Beaurepaire was a leading figure in the late twentieth century feminist movement in Australia.
Labor activist Della Elliott was a strong supporter of causes outside the union movement. She was involved in the wartime Sheepskins for Russia campaign during the war, The League for Democracy in Greece and the Union of Australian Women. She helped historians of the union movement in Australia and, with a collective of women that included Quentin Bryce, worked to establish the Jessie Street National Women’s Library in Sydney. Towards the end of her life, she gifted a scholarship to the University of Sydney Women’s College to assist female Indigenous students.
In the first two decades of the twentieth century, Goldstein became the face of Australian feminism.
Aileen Moreton-Robinson is a Goenpul woman from Minjerribah (Stradbroke Island), Quandamooka First Nation (Moreton Bay) in Queensland, and Professor of Indigenous Studies at Queensland University of Technology (QUT).
Margaret Ogg was a journalist and a leader in the suffrage campaign in Queensland, where she also aligned herself with temperance reform.
It was ‘while working at Jurisprudence and Constitutional History’, she said, ‘that the idea first occurred to me of taking a law degree.…I did not know then that the profession was not open to women.’ In the 1890s Stella Henderson began to study law.