I was in transit at Brisbane Airport, browsing in the airport bookshop, when I spotted the book that would change my life: Sisterhood Is Powerful: An anthology of writings from the women’s liberation movement, edited by Robin Morgan.
A red clenched fist inside the female symbol was on the cover. I began reading it as soon as I got to Auckland, where I was staying with Sharyn Cederman in her Newmarket flat.
Sharyn had graduated from Victoria with a BA in commerce and administration, and was one of the first women to work in the short-term money market. She was incredibly well-organised, energetic and efficient, and had already been promoted to the position of assistant manager at a merchant bank, where she had discovered that, at age 24, she couldn’t progress any further in her job because women were not allowed to become managers in a bank.
We spent hours poring over , discussing its ideas and relating it to our everyday lives. As I was reading through it I had an epiphany, or what is called a “feminist click”, a light-bulb moment when it suddenly struck me that everything in our society revolved around men, and that women were simply expected to be a sort of servant class to the male population. It was a bit like a slave who suddenly wakes up and asks, “Why am
