Our events manager Chris Gordon reflects on the echoes that linger between the feminist texts she read growing up, and the feminists texts being released today.

It feels important I state that I’m a white, educated, middle-aged, middle class woman living in inner-North Melbourne together with two healthy and wonderful children, and a bloke that loves and supports me. I’m aware that I’m privileged in these ways, and many others. I was lucky to have access to feminist texts and practice growing up. I was also able to work in women’s health for several years. I am the essence of second-wave feminism.

Feminism changes all the time due to the work of the movement itself. These days, I find myself adapting my behaviour to better support third-wave feminism. There are lessons to be learned through their practice; I am particularly excited to see many new opportunities for more voices to be heard. This does not mean however, that all the texts I read when I was younger are now obsolete. Nor does it mean that my formative ‘brand’ of feminism is over, or that these older books – the guiding lights of my youth – should be disregarded. Because in the end, past movements in history matter to future plans and these older texts inform the new texts in crucial, powerful ways. Because feminism still has work to do.

Anne Summers’s Damned Whores and God’s Police (1975) continues to be a landmark text. I may have first read her book as a teenager but this book’s long-ago publication continues to shares the same landscape as Clare Wright’s The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (2014), and Clare Land’s Decolonizing Solidarity (2015). Reading Land’s book gave me a greater appreciation of what we need to consider when we talk about the story of women in Australia.

History remains a feminist issue.

Years ago, I rejoiced in the humour and humanity of the Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City series (book 1 was published in 1978). Recently, I felt the same wondrous sentiment when I read More Than This by Patrick Ness. Both these writers have allowed voices from outside the mainstream to be heard and not passed over.

Queer politics remain a feminist issue.

I wept when I read Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982) all that time ago. And I wept again when I read Maxine Beneba Clarke’s memoir The Hate Race (2016). In 2017 Australian, racism has not been eradicated, no matter what you’d like to believe.

Racism remains a feminist issue.

At university in the 80s, I read Susie Orbach’s Fat is A Feminist Issue, Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room, Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook and Nancy Friday’s _My Mother/My Self. These books were my mentors, speaking out and fighting for women to have access to work pathways, health care, safe sex and freedom of speech. Today, Lindy West’s _, Clementine Ford’s Fight Like a Girl and Jessa Crispin’s Why I am Not a Feminist enact the same call-to-arms, despite their different approaches.

Language itself is a feminist issue. Lift as you read.