Long before Germaine Greer and Anne Summers, Australia's women writers were pouring their intense political beliefs into their work. Mary Gilmore was a trailblazing feminist journalist and labour movement organiser; Katharine Susannah Prichard wrote about the emotional conflicts inherent in European and Indigenous relationships and was a co-founder and lifelong member of the Communist Party; Eleanor Dark explored Australian colonisation and the First Nations peoples it displaced; Dymphna Cusack advocated for social reform and had strong links to labour politics; Ruth Park's The Harp in the South inspired the NSW government's slum clearance programs; Dorothy Hewett's novel Bobbin Up was one of the few western works translated into Russian during the Soviet era, and prominent First Nations poet, activist and educator Oodgeroo Noonuccal campaigned for Indigenous rights, including successful constitutional reform.

In Inconvenient Women, acclaimed biographer Jacqueline Kent traces the social and political issues that inspired and often hampered these determined women and their desire to change the world.