By Tracy Sorensen
SYDNEY — Phyllis Johnson attended her first International Women's Day march in 1936. "Thirteen of us walked down George Street with scarves calling for equal pay and equal rights, and we gave out leaflets which gave the history of IWD", she told Green Left in an interview on February 27.
For her generation of activists, IWD was "always a tremendous day. It was a day when all the struggles of the past year were analysed and we discussed what was next, what should be done the following year."
Now 77 and a resident of Padstow in Sydney's south-west suburbs, Phyllis Johnson is still active in the struggle for women's rights. She was a founder of the Betsy Women's Refuge, which opened its doors in 1974, is an activist in the group Women in the Community and in domestic violence liaison committees. She threw herself into the campaign against the Gulf War early last year.
One of the highlights of her long political life, which includes membership in the Communist Party during its heyday in the 1940s, was the "astonishing" turn-up at the 1971 International Women's Day march in Sydney.
For years, there had been processions, luncheons and public meetings. "Sometimes we had 20, sometimes we had 50 or 60 women. But in 1971, 6000 women marched through the streets. We looked at it with beating hearts. These were the young women making history. The older women had kept the torch of IWD alight, and now this was it."
As a young crusader (she was dubbed "the girl in the green hat" by newspaper columnists), Johnson was inspired by the passionate, articulate women who had campaigned against conscription during World War I.
"All my life I have been influenced by tremendous, volatile, definite, interesting women who never accepted the inequality of status, they were never silent."
One of these women was Jessie Street, a major figure in the history of women's rights in Australia.
"In 1930, the NSW government introduced the Married Teachers and Married Women Lecturers Act, which meant that if a woman married she had to leave the teaching service. Married women were considered unsuitable."
There followed over 15 years of campaigning against the act, led by Jessie Street, before the it was repealed in 1947.
Johnson considers her life in politics was inevitable, considering her background. Her political activity began at seven years of age, when she handed out election leaflets for her father, who was standing as an ALP candidate. Johnson's grandfather, John Stewart, stood as a Labor candidate in WA in 1898. "He was defeated by four votes. The West Australian said that he was not a gentleman because he did not see that his daughters rode in the ladylike stance of sidesaddle. My mother and her two sisters strode the horse."
Phyllis Johnson's stories are a reminder of how far women have come in a matter of decades.
"I have a book that was read by young ladies of my grandmother's era. The book advised these young women never to sell their virtue, no matter what happened. If they let themselves go, then they would be guilty and miserable for the rest of their lives.
"This book advised them, if they were interested in a young man, that the best thing they could do was get an elderly aunt to suss out this character and inform her if he was the right man for her. All this rubbish was brainwashed into the women of my grandmother's era."
She pointed out that while issues such as abortion and contraception are now central to the women's movement, in the middle decades of this century these things were never publicly spoken of.
"In 1963 I attended a conference in Brisbane where the pill was openly discussed. It's only quite recently that women have been able to do that. Contraception has given women the opportunity to continue the work that they wish to do and have children according to their decision and not by chance.
"Abortion was not talked about by the women's movement; we never talked about it in the '30s, '40s and '50s. I think feminism would have galloped along its path if we had. But we didn't talk about these things because we didn't know how to deal with them, we were products of our society. It was the younger women who unleashed these new ideas."
She said she has "great love and admiration" for the younger women now involved in the movement. "The younger women have a right to know the history of the struggles that took place. The gains that the young women enjoy today were never given, they were fought for."