In Praise of Ageing by Patricia Edgar

Author:Patricia Edgar
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SEL005000, POL029000
ISBN: 9781922148605
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2013-09-25T00:00:00+00:00

This independence of mind is characteristic. She once told an interviewer: ‘The more radical elements of the women’s movement have often considered me to be fairly wet. But the conservatives think I’m radical. So, in a way, I don’t please anyone.’

At the end of the initial year, Mary had managed to cajole money from the unions to continue the work of the WWC, and then from governments: she remained joint coordinator for 10 years. This was the decade when Mary did her most important work on behalf of women.

At the Working Women’s Centre women would come to us with a problem for us to solve and that’s exactly what we did. We got to know people and where to go to deal with a problem. Sometimes you could solve it; sometimes you couldn’t. Women used to go to the union but of course the unions weren’t very good at helping at that early stage; so in 1979 Sylvie Shaw and I produced a resource—a book of papers, mostly written by Sylvie, on women’s issues—called Working Women: Discussion Papers from the Working Women’s Centre Melbourne.

Another thing we did was set up a register of women in non-traditional occupations. We had a speakers’ list, and we used to choose women who worked in non-traditional roles to go out to schools and give talks, so the girls could consider becoming apprentices in trades. The Trades Hall eventually took it over and didn’t know what to do with it and let it lapse.

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