Not Dead Yet Feminism, Passion and Women's Liberation

What was it like to participate in the Women’s Liberation Movement? What made millions of women step forward from the 1960s onwards and join it in different ways? Many of the fifty women in this book were there. They describe how they have contributed in multitudinous ways across politics, the arts, health, education, environmentalism, economics and science and created wonderfully subversive activism. And how they continue this activism today with determined grittiness. Here are women – all over 70 years of age – still railing against the patriarchal systemic oppression of women, still fighting back. The contributors to Not Dead Yet have created new analyses with new language and new kinds of organisations always aware of the ways in which the system is stacked against them, particularly against radical lesbian feminists. But they persist. They share the revolutionary zest they have carried with them over many decades. There is history, there is subversion and there are many extraordinary acts of courage. The language is full of irony and wit – as well as deadly serious.

Susan Hawthorne joined the Women’s Liberation Movement in 1973. She quickly volunteered at Melbourne’s Rape Crisis Centre. She has organised writers’ festivals, been an aerialist in two women’s circuses, taught English to Arabic-speaking women and worked in Aboriginal education. She is the author of 17 books of fiction, poetry and non-fiction but is 6-months too young to be a contributor to Not Dead Yet. Renate Klein has studied biology, Women’s Studies and social theory in Switzerland, the USA, the UK and finally found her forever-home in Australia. She feels very lucky to have been involved in radical (lesbian) feminist communities around the world for the last 40 years with all the pleasures, hard work and obstacles this entails. Not Dead Yet is her 17th book and a delightful change from her other heavy-duty texts on reproductive and genetic engineering including surrogacy. Luckily she is old enough to be a contributor.