This interdisciplinary 2-day symposium is the ANU Gender Institute Signature Event for 2017 and will celebrate both International Women’s Day and the Institute’s 6th anniversary. See below for full program.

This symposium explores events, transformations, policy changes and watershed developments in gender and sexuality in Australia in the 1970s. These changes were interconnected and profound. The pill became widely available and sexuality was both celebrated and flaunted. Homosexuality was gradually decriminalised state by state. The legality of abortion began to change. Gay liberation and Women’s Liberation movements erupted, and debate raged over provocative books from Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, Dennis Altman’s Homosexual, and Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics to Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will. Activists set up women’s refuges, rape crisis centres, and counselling services. Some governments responded to these changes, appointing women’s and equal opportunity advisors, expanding the role of the state in the provision of childcare and other services. It was a decade of contestation and transformation.

But how and why did matters previously considered private and personal, become public and political? What were the key policy shifts? How were protests in the streets connected to legislative reforms? Who were the critical players and what were the dramatic moments? How was resistance to change manifested, and what fears were articulated? How did differences of race, class, religion, age and locality matter? How did Australia fit into the broader transnational movements for change? What have been the legacies?