Don’t Take It For Granted: A Look at Feminism in the 1970’s

I look around our society in 2021 and rejoice that young women have so many choices.

We can choose to marry, go to university, have a career, have a family, travel or a mixture of all of those things.

However, it wasn’t always that way.

Not so long ago women didn’t have those choices.

In fact my generation was the first to have these choices. My generation that benefited from this new way of life aren’t yet at retirement age, that’s how new it is.

My mother’s generation was not as fortunate as I, and this is where the real story begins…

During the late 1960’s and 1970’s there was huge social change for women.  

My mother left school at 14 and became a secretary as was the norm in the 1950’s. A woman’s career choice in the 50’s, 60’s and even the 70’s in Sydney, Australia, was to be a secretary, teacher or nurse. The other expectation was that women married young and had children soon after.

Like so many other women of her generation, mum married and had children. However, like so many women of her generation she was smart, smarter than a lot of her male counterparts, and wanted more than being a wife and mother.

So in the late 60’s she enrolled at university. This was so unusual for a woman that she was known as ‘the crazy woman up the road’. Can you imagine in 2021 such a label being put on a woman for wanting to be educated? 

It’s unthinkable now, thankfully.

So, because of the huge inequality between men and women, in the late 60’s and 70’s thousands of women came together and were known as the Women’s Liberation Movement and Feminists. They fought for women’s rights, not only for themselves, but for the generations to come.

Those ‘crazy women up the road’ fought for the rights and choices we now have.

I remember my mother and thousands of other women marching through the streets of Sydney, demanding the rights we now enjoy. I remember because my sister and I were there.

We were there because my father disagreed with mum marching so to stop her, he refused to look after my sister and I, as did many other husbands and fathers. 

Mum was not deterred, so she took my sister and I with her.

My 12 year old sister had a cast from hip to toe on one leg and was put a float. I was about 6 and walked with mum who had promised me an ice cream at the end of the march.

Many other women marched with their children, seeking equality. 

The most poignant part of the day for me was when I asked mum when I was getting the ice cream. She bent down and said to me “we are here marching so you and your children have choices.” 

And choices I had! 

I had the choice to be educated, the choice to marry or not, the choice to have children or not, the choice to have a career or not. With these choices it also gave me the ability to buy a property in my name, to get a loan, to travel and to get divorced and not live in poverty. It also gave me freedom and most of all it gave me a voice and the ability to be heard.

These remarkable women, proudly my mother was one of them, knew they were changing women’s lives for generations to come.

As a result, we were raised quite differently to our friends. We were raised to believe that we could go to university, that we could dream big, that we didn’t have to settle.

I once said to mum that I wanted to be a nurse she said, “dream bigger, don’t settle, you can be a doctor!”

So whilst I was dreaming of a career, believing I had no limits, my friends were focused on being wives and mothers. At about 10 years old I asked my friends what they wanted to be when they grew up and they said, “a wife and mother, like my mother.” 

I was perplexed that they didn’t want more, but that was the difference in our up bringing.

In the early 70’s when I was in primary school my mother was the only mother with a career. By the time I went to high school in the late 70’s, it was no longer unusual to have a mother with a career. That’s how quickly things changed for women. Although there still wasn’t equality and a career was still much harder for women, the shift had well and truly begun.

And because of that shift, in the 1980s, when I was finishing school it was acceptable for women to go to university.

I remember one of my teachers saying to the class “You aren’t going to university to find a husband, but to have a career!”

Those women fought society, fought their husbands, siblings, neighbours, parents and grandparents. Many of those women went on to become the first in their fields, the first politician, the first senior police officer, continuing to pave the way for us.

My mother became one of the first female Magistrates to be appointed to the Bench (Magistrates are like junior Judges and is a prestigious appointment).

It must be amazing for these women to walk in a society that they dreamed, seeing the women of younger generations having the life they fought so hard to give them.

As a Lawyer, I respected these women for giving me the opportunity to have such a career. Now as a mindset coach, I have a knew respect for these women.  Their mindset for change and determination must have been incredible when you consider the obstacles they overcame and the new society they initiated. 

Many decades later, my father told me he was proud of me and my achievements. He conceded that mum had been right after all.

So when you wake up in the morning and you have a choice, remember that the women around the world, who are now in their 80’s, fought so you could have that choice and those rights!

Join Bronwyn’s Facebook group Mindset Revamp with Bron or check out her website: www.transformational-therapist.com