 We believe that improvements in the lives of women cannot and must not await the outcome of deliberations on the new economic order. We women will no longer be excluded from the sphere of decisions, though we should reject the concomitant dominance and power, for we have experienced the consequences of these. We women will no longer be relegated, either here or in our own countries, to a secondary place when hard politics are being discussed as distinct from soft women's issues. We reject this distinction. It is the distinction between the personal and the political. It is a part of our present oppression. We women will no longer be manipulated, for political ends, either national forum, for this deprives us of our dignity. We women will know otherwise, for it deprives us of our selfhood. And this is our conference. Thank you. Thank you. Let me begin by acknowledging our ancestors, and particularly the women ancestors who are the custodians of this land, and also thinking very much Caroline, who actually made this brilliant suggestion as being a guide and mentor over the months. All right, for us in the 70s, feminism was a collective transformative practice. It was a time of creative imagining when women tried to think through how the world could and should be changed for the good of all women, and what such a change might mean for the good of all. Were we trying to bring about a feminist utopia? That was not our language. We talked of utopias, but they were often the literary utopias of Sally Gierha, Marge Piercy, Doris Lessing, Adrian Rich, Rita May Brown, Monica Fittig, and others. We can be said to have been utopian feminists to the extent that all utopian thinking presupposes a belief in some degree of human influence over social and political organization. We were critical utopians. We were determined to change our present rather than some future unconnected with our present, nor were we interested in abstract fantasies, but rather in concrete possibilities that emerge as material conditions and consciousness of a society change. We were calling into question the assumptions, norms, and values of everyday life and expressing the desire for a better way of living in our present through an understanding of a different kind of society in which that way of life would be possible. The 1975 United Nations World Conference of the International Women's Year has been described as the greatest consciousness-raising event in history. For us, the Australian delegation, it was an opportunity to take our analysis into a global arena. We were struggling for change. We were pretty clear what the form of that change would be. The clearest analysis, which has been developed, and one which cuts across cultural and social differences within and between countries, is that which describes inferior position of women as arising from sexism. Thus, we staked out, excuse me, a claim to universality of the analysis, whilst also introducing a new language into the proceedings of the UN, the term sexism. We define sexism analogously with racism as follows. I'm not sure whether my reading improves. Can you just read that rather than my reading out? We were social constructivists. We felt that society and culture construct and create sex-specific gender roles and behaviors. We held that everything except our sex and even the meaning of our bodies is socially constructed. We argued that the feminine had been constructed as domestic, caring, relational, and maternal. And further, these were not highly valued attributes. And I quote, these are all excerpts from speech. It is evident to all of us that we live in societies that are ruled by men. In other words, our society is a patriarchal. And so our women in virtues are not valued. Time and time again, we argued together with the three Marias from Portugal, women had fought alongside men for dignity and national liberation only to find their brothers, quote, their brothers in struggle, carry within them the roots of treason, the myths and prejudices which keep women in their place. Addressing up our problems, we argued, requires as much a revolution in the head of people as it does, excuse me, the modification of the structures which reinforce those destructive values. This revolution in the head of people began, perhaps, with the feminist practices of conscious-facing, of solidarity, and of a sensitivity to language. What gave us the authority to speak as women? It was the process of introspection that not only connected us with our bodies, but made our bodies the center of our world. This gave us the authority to speak as women, as Adrian Rich said, not to transcend this body but to reclaim it, to reconnect our thinking and speaking with the body of this particular living in human individual, a woman. And, as she continues, it must not be the body, but rather my body, for this plunges me into my lived experience. I see scars, disfigurements, discolorations, damages, losses, as well as what pleases me. We advance, tentatively, as we were unsure about the theoretical relation between our social constructivism and our knowledge of our bodies and bodies of epistemology. But not to have done this would have been to deny what we found when we turned our gaze upon our bodies. It would have been to leave our lives out of our knowledge. But we knew that our lives, our bodies, were central to our knowledge. It was the lived experience of our bodies, our lives that led us to assert for the first time in the setting of the UN that until such time as violence against women is recognized and understood and ceaseless, peace will remain unattainable. We argued that sexism is enforced through pervasive violence, including rape, emulation, et cetera, as is there. Each of these and more is an indignity committed on women's bodies. And so we argue the contingent precedent of women implies the maintenance of power over women, et cetera. Did we have the authority to speak for women, assessing for mass women? No. We were very careful not to use phrases such as the common oppression of women, unquote. We felt that to emphasize either commonalities amongst women or the differences was to fall into an either or trap. Neither could be denied, both were true. Our position was that even if we, each of us, were dedicated, sensitive, and understanding, we can only hope to touch the outer most limits of the experience of most women. This realization commits us to enabling women to determine the shape of their own lives, not just because it's our favorite political theory, but because it's the only way that the decisions made will be the right ones. But there were commonalities amongst women that we accepted. The right to dignity and respect, the right to live in a world free of domination and oppression, the right to speak and to be listened to attentively, the right to be angry. Thus we could end the statement with the collective we, we women, et cetera, but we were calling for our rights, the right to respect and dignity, to an end to domination and subordination, to participate in decision making to autonomy. So what lessons can we learn for today? Here's some of what I think we learned then, that there must be the shared beliefs that change is possible. This is the utopian principle of hope, that utopia begins with us, the reality of our lives, our dreams, how we treat one another, and what we do with the resources available. That we need to be working towards a society free from domination and oppression, but this requires something much more profound than the struggle for equality. And that the struggle must be collective. It's not an individual quest, but a collective quest with all the awkwardness and discomfort, the collective quests entail. In this way, our collective consciousness will be raised, which is the glue that binds us and enables change. We felt that we could say with Walter Benjamin quote, is only when we believe that things don't have to continue on the way they are. When we believe in another world as possible, that we can master the energy and determination to try to bring that other world about. Ours was a method, utopia as method, which starts with ourselves, and by process of introspection, lead us to reflect on and analyze our lives together in solidarity. Thank you.