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Clip description
Jean Curthoys, Anne Summers, Edna Ryan and Marjory Thomas talk about feminism and their quests for a better education
Curator’s notes
Advances in women’s education have always been firmly entwined with feminism. This clip links the experiences of four women, across two generations, with feminism.
Edna Ryan and Marjory Thomas were at school and university in the first two decades of the 20th century. Jean Curthoys and Anne Summers were educated almost 50 years later. While feminism in Australia had begun to gain significant momentum by the late 1960s, not all that much had changed in half a century.
In this clip Marjory talks about going to see Adela Pankhurst speak at Sydney University (sometime after she came to Australia in 1914), and Jean talks about a university anti-Vietnam rally where Kate Jennings raised issues of discrimination against women. In both instances the speakers and their audiences encountered excessive and brutal reactions from the men on campus – reactions which no doubt their sons and grandsons would today find appalling
