Women's Movement in Australia

In many ways, the women's movement in Australia might be understood as a diffusion of women's movements elsewhere in the West. Both the so-called “first wave” of the movement, with its focus on the struggle for the franchise, and the “second wave” of mobilization in the 1970s, bore close resemblance to similar waves of mobilization in the UK and the US. Even the more recent phenomenon of a “generation war” among feminists centered on the contested notion of an emerging “third wave” of feminist activists seemed to have its genesis in struggles far away (Maddison 2008). Such a comparison, however, misses the unique contribution that the Australian women's movement has made to both feminist repertoire generally, and, more specifically, to research and reflection on the relationship between women, feminist movements, and the state. Keywords: feminism; state; women; Australasia