Passages To and From Women's Liberation

Feminism was suggested to women by incidents as major as the shame of rape or an unwanted pregnancy, as pressing as equal wages, or as apparently superficial as unequal access to leisure facilities. As people act they change, if but slowly, the structures in which we are embedded. We create and recreate our own identities, as working-class women, as Greek–Australian women, as urban Indigenous Australian women. But in the process and by our own practices, we add to society's repertoire of ways of ‘doing’ those identities. From their encounters with feminism, the ‘mothers’ in my sample went on to divorces, secondary study, asking husbands to share housework more equally, demanding better conditions at work, or going to the movies alone.