Brazen Hussies
Documentary film available to stream or on DVD at https://www.brazenhussies.com.au/

Written and directed by Catherine Dwyer and edited by Rose Jones, this Australian documentary gives insight into the complexities of the Women’s Liberations movement as it re-emerged as a social movement in 1965.

Combining archive footage and contemporary interviews with women activists from the period, the movie manages to be engaging for all viewers; it expands on some of the well-known stories of the period and presents some less famous facts that took place over its 10 year-time span.

The award-winning soundtrack is brilliant and greatly assists the documentary’s pace and mood. Long term feminists know that humour is a must in Women’s liberation organising and the music and sound editing here work perfectly with the images, communicating the urgency of the movement while delivering some good laughs.

The women interviewed talk about the need for change after the repressive 1950s and how being seen as outspoken women, unlady-like Brazen Hussies, was part of becoming free through the movement. From highly personal experiences to contact with the women’s movement in the US, these women started to realise they needed to organise to achieve change.

The movie first covers the famous story of Merle Thornton and Rosalie Bogner chaining themselves to the bar of the Regatta hotel in Brisbane to protest for women’s rights to drink in pubs. It also features an even more consequential chaining, the communist Zelda D’aprano chaining herself to the Commonwealth Bank building in Melbourne to protest for equal pay. While both actions were supported by male comrades, it is the campaign for equal pay (instead of 80% of men’s pay) that takes women and their male supporters to the streets and eventually to a win in the Arbitration Commission.

As the movement took to the streets in major Australian capitals, the women expanded their agenda. There was the first feminist speech in a rally against the Vietnam war in 1970 at the University of Sydney, protests for legal abortion and sexual liberation, and the connection between many movement leaders and the organised left, including socialist groups.

The movie highlights numerous experiences of sexism, and it is also upfront about the influence of anarchism on the women’s movement. The anarchist trend resulted in several experimental women’s-only spaces such as women’s theatre and film groups, magazines and journals (Hecate in Brisbane in still operational). It also achieved the opening of grassroots, unfunded services such as the first refuges for women and children escaping family violence (First Elsie’s in Sydney in 1973, then Women’s House in Brisbane in 1975), followed by the first Rape Crisis centres.

The women talk about their anger and the collective construction of consciousness-raising and solidarity spaces to give creative power to that anger.

Among the less prominent aspects of the movement, the movie covers the single mothers’ organising for the right to receive a pension and keep their children, and campaigns for lesbians’ rights. So much social agitation warranted ASIO surveillance. The movement countered by borrowing the name of Vera Figner, originally a Russian revolutionary, whose name serves as code to hide organising activities.

In the middle of all the excitement and creativity circulating in the movement, there was also considerable disagreement, something expected in such a diverse space that also did not collectively hold a class analysis to understand women’s oppression. There was perceived resistance to embracing lesbian demands as core to the movement, migrant workers striking for their rights would be perceived as marginal and despite the women’s liberation support to the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, First Nation women would routinely express they did not see themselves in the women’s liberation movement.

The Amazon Acres episode is illustrative of some of these divisions. This arose when a lesbian author won a literary cash prize and used it to buy land to build a women’s haven. But women were diverse in their interests and needs. Some women wanted to keep sleeping with men and others had older male children they were not about to leave behind. So, paradise was not possible for all. Women would have to change the material conditions in the society they lived in to win liberation.

The movie takes a detached approach to the events unfolding on the screen. It does not argue a point, nor does it bring up potential solutions.

That chosen perspective becomes problematic in the second half of the movie when the audience is introduced to the ‘Whitlam’s Supergirl’ story. The Whitlam ALP government decided to appoint a Women’s Advisor and after a highly publicised selection process chose Elizabeth Reid (who famously wore women’s liberation underpants for courage).

The documentary covers the story all the way until the Government-organised Women and Politics Conference at the end of the Whitlam government. Here, the documentary fails to differentiate itself from the media of the time that, according to one of the interviewees, ‘would cover only the catfight’.

The movie introduces the term ‘supergirl’ with little criticism, and it does the same to the the pageant nature of the selection process. Worse of all, the women’s conference is only displayed in its disagreements, resembling little more than ‘catfight’. By the end, it is hard to remember that all women’s liberation achievements under that government (childcare, single women’s pension, anti-discrimination laws) were the result of a movement and not one ‘super’ individual.

The Marxist feminists of the time were opposed to the movement entering government and they were right. That experience removed the movement from the streets and was the beginning of ‘femocrats’ and ‘professional feminists’ that are even more removed from any class analysis and have no interest in building mass movements despite the ongoing need for women’s liberation.

This movie can inspire new generations of activists, but it is also an involuntary cautionary tale on what happens to social movements and their leaders when co-opted by the state.