This dissertation offers a global history of the Australian women’s liberation movement. It begins in the 1950s and concludes in the mid-1980s, with most attention being given to the period 1968-1985. Throughout this period the Australian women’s liberation movement changed the fabric of Australian society, successfully agitating for gender justice and transforming both the nation and the lives of individuals. The research focusses on two key cities of Australian feminist organising; Sydney and Melbourne but it also considers the women’s peace camp at Pine Gap, near Mpartnwe/Alice Springs and a global feminist conference which took place in Australia’s capital, Canberra. Its findings are drawn through close attention to periodicals from across Australia, the US, Britain and the Pacific. It combines twenty-two oral history interviews with archival research to reveal the dynamic and extensive ways that the Australian women’s liberation movement was globally influenced.

Historians have recognised that feminist movements have been globally informed, but the global turn in the history of feminism has largely focussed on the late 19th and 20th century up until the 1950s, neglecting the women’s liberation movements of the 1970s. A global approach is conducive to understanding the Australian women’s liberation movement. This global frame reveals the work of those who have been marginalised in histories of feminism, such as communist women, migrants, women of colour including those from the Global South, and First Nations women. Through employing a global perspective, this dissertation foregrounds their direct involvement in women’s movements, and their transformative contributions at the level of political thought. It dislodges white women as the central change makers in feminism and the Global North as the central site of feminist thought and action.

This dissertation examines the significant impact of communist women on Australian women’s liberation. It reveals the importance of global communist networks on the movement for women’s health from the 1950s. It also suggests that the Australian women’s liberation movement was significantly informed by Vietnamese and Chinese communism. It traces this influence at the level of ideas and considers face-to-face visits. It contends that the lack of scholarship on communist women in the women’s liberation movement is due to paradigms established during the Cold War, which suggested that communist women were not authentic feminists. These paradigms continue to influence how the history of women’s liberation is written today.

A further strand of research investigates the project of Australian state feminism. Australian women’s liberation is unusual for its willingness to work with the state after the election of the Whitlam government in 1972. A global perspective makes visible the shared realities faced by state feminists in both liberal democratic Australia and communist China and Vietnam; in all cases women’s agency was limited by pressures of state participation. Through close scrutiny of a global feminist conference held in Canberra in 1975, state feminism in Australia emerges as entangled with nationalism. This thesis takes seriously the jokes and humour present at this conference as they reveal the emancipatory limits and exclusions of Australian state feminism.

This dissertation explores the Australian campaigns for reproductive justice, both for abortion rights and against forced sterilisation, and finds that the tools of global law were essential to these campaigns. Campaigners for abortion rights drew on official legal precedent from Britain and the United States to change Australian abortion law. Feminists also drew on the Bobigny Trial, which was key to the decriminalisation of abortion in France. Australian feminists translated the Bobigny Trial into English and invited the trial lawyer French-Tunisian Gisèle Halimi to visit. Australian feminists, including Aboriginal women, also drew on unofficial legal instruments. International people’s tribunals offered a global forum where women could testify about reproductive injustices and where the meaning of crime was transformed beyond the states definition. While the core business of global history has been to trace successful connections and exchanges, this investigation of global law makes it clear that failures and divergences must also be traced.

The thesis turns to the network of global women’s peace camps of the 1980s, including Pine Gap, which took place in November 1983 near Mpartnwe/Alice Springs. Placing these camps into conversation with Pacific and Indigenous women’s anti-nuclear networks reveals how both space and time were remade at these feminist encampments. Space was remade through ideas of spiritual feminism which highlighted the shared experience of women across the world and the possibilities of global, cosmic transformation. Time too played a role at these peace camps. Here, women in the Global North understood First Nations women as ‘traditional’ and ‘spiritual’, as representing the past. Yet, this sense of time was explicitly upended by visits to Europe from First Nations women who who had experienced nuclear testing. They were understood to speak not from the past, but from the nuclear future.

In sum, the thesis rejects a national framing for the Australian women’s liberation movement and demonstrates the significant influence of transnational border crossings of all kinds, including exchanges of texts, visits, travels and migration patterns, as well as global political events, particularly the Cold War, on this movement for gender justice.