'Because we are all women': the relationship between the ideas of women's liberation and the development of the New Zealand feminist movement, 1970-1979

Abstract

The feminist movement of the 1970s changed many New Zealand women's lives, and the society in which they lived. This thesis explores this movement from the perspective of the ideas that inspired it - the ideas of women's liberation. It examines the feminist movement from 1970, the year that New Zealand women first started to discuss the ideas of women's liberation, to 1979, when the movement was too big to be contained within one framework The key ideas of women's liberation were, 'the personal is political', women as a political class, and sisterhood, and this thesis studies the effect they had on the feminist movement. It draws significant events of the period such as International Women's Year, the Contraception Sterilisation and Abortion Act and feminist gatherings, particularly the United Women's Conventions. The key sources for this thesis were, newsletters, collections of papers, and oral histories, including some done during the Dunedin Collective for Woman Reunion in 2001. This thesis argues that the ideas of women's liberation were the catalyst for New Zealand women taking action to address the dissatisfaction in their lives, and were critical to the development of the New Zealand feminist movement. However, feminists did not operate in an environment of their own choosing, and as the decade progressed, the opposition they faced came to play a vital role in shaping the movement. At the same time that opposition was driving the movement in new directions, the contradictions of the ideas of women's liberation started to limit the movement, Just as their truths had once given the movement strength.