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.
Unlike her few other female contemporaries, such as Bridget Riley, Boty refused to to negate her feminine side and was not overly concerned with seeming serious, intellectual or dispassionate at the expense of her true self. Boty instead celebrated these supposedly “feminine” traits. Her work came unabashedly from a woman’s perspective and it was emotionally engaged and celebratory towards women’s sexual desires.
Anna Stout’s philosophy was that women should have equal rights with men and be free to develop their intellectual ability to its highest capacity.
Although she had joined the New Zealand Women’s Christian Temperance Union in 1885, it was not until the 1890s that she began to play a tentative, independent public role. In April 1892 she was elected president of the Women’s Franchise League in Dunedin; the active leadership was provided by Marion Hatton. Early in 1895 Eva McLaren, corresponding secretary of the International Council of Women, approached Stout to preside over a New Zealand branch.