Stirring up the status quo

Edna Ryan’s life spanned most of the 20^th century. As a small child her father was unemployed and her mother, as a cleaner, was the family breadwinner at a time when women could never earn the same minimum wage as men. From when she entered the workforce in the 1920s, as a skilled office worker earning only two-thirds of the wage of her fellow male workers, she argued tirelessly for equal pay for women until 1974 when she successfully presented the Women’s Electoral Lobby case before the National Wage Case hearing for an equal minimum wage for both women and men.

The event reflected the many aspects of Edna’s life, with awards, presented by her daughters and granddaughters, for the consistent promotion of feminist perspectives in the media, for sharing knowledge and ideas generously with other women, for leading feminist changes in the public sphere, for improving conditions for women workers, for promoting the engagement and recognition of women in sport, for creative feminism and for feminist community activism.

Eva Cox, who won the inaugural Grand Stirrer award in 1998, presented the 2014 Grand Stirrer award for inciting others to challenge the status quo to Dorothy McRae-McMahon in recognition of her work since the 1970s as a feminist advocate for human rights and for challenging conservative society in religious and spiritual matters.

Dorothy remembered: “If I was involved in a lot of different causes it was because I lived in my middle years in a period where we had the movement against the White Australia policy, the Ban the Bomb movement, the Peace movement, the anti-Vietnam war movement, the Anti-Apartheid movement and then, of course, we came into the Women’s movement. But a lot of us already were finding ways to influence and change the ways our nation and our churches reacted in relation to these issues of justice and compassion, so in some ways I was just fortunate to live in that period where hundreds of thousands of people would turn out. Very different from today.”