Books
Virginia Haussegger
Unfinished Revolution: The feminist fightback
In 1975, declared International Women’s Year by the United Nations, the Australian media were having a field day with feminism. Evan Williams, then press secretary to prime minister Gough Whitlam, was called in to address the Women and Politics Conference in Canberra, held just a few weeks after the UN’s gigantic Mexico City conference, which was dubbed “the greatest consciousness-raising event in history” that year.
Williams pointed to the media’s reflex reaction to the stereotypical women’s activist: “She’s an intellectual, she’s unfeminine ... she’s probably morally lax. She’s shrill, intolerant, slovenly, noisy and of course she hates men.” The media did see the cause of women as “something of a joke”, he admitted.
Meanwhile, Williams’ colleague Elizabeth Reid, working for Whitlam in the newly invented role of adviser to the prime minister, was living it. Brisbane’s The Courier-Mail famously quoted her: “Ms Liz, 33, wearing no bra, said in Canberra today…” A United States delegate to the conference – Flo Kennedy, lawyer, civil rights activist and feminist – was called “that foul-mouthed harridan” in the Queensland parliament. Reid was pleased to hear the PM’s wife, Margaret Whitlam, inform journalists looking for sensation that Kennedy was “intelligent, charming, (and) wonderful”.
Fast-forward to 2011 and it’s difficult to quell a nauseating sense of inevitability at the images of then opposition leader Tony Abbott speaking in front of placards screaming “Ditch the Witch” and “Bob Brown’s Bitch” – referring to the then prime minister, Australia’s first woman in the role – during the federal election campaign. Add to that the 2013 Liberal National Party fundraiser for Queensland candidate Mal Brough – at which shadow treasurer Joe Hockey was guest of honour – touting the “Julia Gillard Kentucky fried quail” with its “small breasts, huge thighs and a big red box” on the menu. Abbott called it “tacky” at the time.
All this makes Virginia Haussegger’s optimism in Unfinished Revolution: The feminist fightback come as a surprise. She begins with a motto – “Our New Now” – for the shift she discerns. “The situation today feels urgent,” she writes, “as the tectonic plates of gender equity are splitting apart, shaking the very ground we walk on.”
She establishes 2021 as the starting point for her assurance, and that was certainly a year for cautious optimism. A lot was happening. Women were taking unprecedented legal actions against even high-powered men they accused of rape. Women appeared at Senate estimates hearings and corporate investigations into unfair dismissals. And the rise in gender-based violence was generating headlines. Eleven more women died at the hands of a domestic or ex-domestic partner in the first months of 2023 than had in the same period in 2022. Australia had dropped to 44th place on the Global Gender Equality Index.
Grace Tame was made Australian of the Year in January, having led advocacy for rape survivors to be able to make their experiences public. Her campaign went global: in 2021, she was named one of Time’s Next Generation Leaders. In February, Brittany Higgins went public with the allegation she had been raped by a fellow political staffer in Parliament House, Canberra, and she too became an emblem for courage in the face of gendered violence. Also in February, anonymous allegations of rape against a federal minister arose and stewed in the media until then federal attorney-general Christian Porter outed himself as the man in question and sued the ABC for defamation.
Haussegger begins her book with the March4Justice on March 15, 2021, the largest protest ever held by Australian women: some 150,000 people turned out across 55 cities. Then opposition leader Anthony Albanese and his entire shadow cabinet attended, alongside independent and Greens MPs. “Enough is enough” was being chanted. One placard read: “Boys will be boys” with the second “boys” crossed out and substituted with “held accountable”. A banner read: “SAME SHIT – DIFFERENT CENTURY. ENOUGH!”
It was certainly a moment. Haussegger brings clarity to the narrative surrounding names continuously repeated in shocking news at the time. Her history of the women’s movement is also condensed, for clarity presumably, beginning for her with the second wave of the 1970s. She makes only passing references to earlier gains, which might have marked moments of optimism that petered out.
Australians were almost the first women to get the vote, in South Australia in 1894, and yet that didn’t translate into representation until Edith Cowan was elected in Western Australia in 1921. Women MPs remained rare until the 1970s. Haussegger explains the warring masculinity that colours every settler society, as the Wild West does in America. “The mythology around Australian mateship and the larrikin bloke has given cover to a culture grounded in sexism and inequality,” she writes, “a culture in which women have had to fight for the most basic human rights, including the right to vote.”
Political theory is not the purpose of the book, but the need for a little more hovers on its edges. Her focus on the Marxist critique popular in 1970s radicalism leaves the historical subordination of gender to class in radical circles unanswered, even though analyses can be found in earlier writings, from Olympe de Gouges’s 1791 “Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen” to the English liberal John Stuart Mill’s “The Subjection of Women”, published in 1869.
Haussegger herself sends out a warning, quoting her hero Elizabeth Reid’s comparison with the 1970s as the book’s epigraph: “Why does such a movement seem so anachronistic today? Have we moved away from the radical feminist discourse of ‘liberation’ and ‘revolution’ to a more ‘acceptable’ language of ‘diversity’ and ‘equality’? What happened to this social movement?
“Don’t women need liberating anymore?”
NewSouth, 400pp, $36.99
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on October 11, 2025 as "Unfinished Revolution: The feminist fightback".
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