Emeritus Professor Meredith Edwards, a pioneering economist dedicated to women's issues and social justice has written a moving tribute to the work of WEL over the decades and her experiences as an active WEL member.

‘For many of the women who joined WEL it was their first engagement with the women’s movement and it changed their lives: new friends, new confidence and sense of purpose, new understandings of who they were and who they might become, along with the realisation that they were not alone’.  (Judith Brett, Fearless Beatrice Faust, 2025, 116)

I owe so much to WEL. Being a member of WEL changed my life both personally and professionally, as indeed it did for many other women. Before I am too old, I wanted to pay a tribute to WEL and to its members past and present. I also write this with possible future WEL members in mind, knowing how empowered they might become, if they join with other women in pursuing a feminist agenda. 

I awoke to a feminist perspective once I had my first child in 1968. It seemed so unfair that having roomed next door to my husband in the economics building at ANU for five years, and treated as his equal that, once I had a child, I would be stuck in the suburbs without automatic access to a car and having only a baby for company all day. The sense of injustice was reinforced when reading Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique about this time.

In 1972, the year WEL was founded, my second child was born.  While heavily pregnant, I was offered a university job lecturing at the University of Canberra – the relevant professor was desperate to find an economist to teach Managerial Economics in the next semester.  I asked my doctor whether I should take this job, and she said that normally she would not recommend it but, in my case, it probably was a good move – she knew how hard I had found looking after my first born after a serious post birth bipolar episode.

I didn’t join WEL at its inception.  I went to one WEL meeting in 1972, but felt too unimportant to join in, let alone join WEL.  I recall Gail Radford talking articulately and inspirationally with much commitment – I presume about equal employment opportunity. I was in awe of her and other wonderful women there with their commitment, competence and passion.  I wanted to be one of them but didn’t feel that was possible.

My first active association with WEL was in 1973 through its ACT Childcare Action Group led by Elizabeth Bilney and Sue Flutter, both founding members of WEL.  My one-year-old son had good care then, but I felt the need to help others who were struggling to have their kids well cared for. This was my salvation!  What a turning point in my life this was to be, although I was not fully conscious of that then, and certainly not realising that this move would then lead me onto my future career.

I could not believe how inclusive the women in the childcare group were as well as how much passion they brought to the cause to get more community childcare going in Canberra, and more broadly, across Australia. After attending a few meetings, the person who took the minutes was not available, so Sue asked me to take them.  I did not think I could – I lacked so much confidence.  No doubt I said to Sue, maybe you could help me if I miss something, which of course she would have done.  I soon felt very much at home in this group and from there many things grew.

Elizabeth, sadly, no longer with us, quietly but effectively made her contribution over several years, to ensure that the government saw as its role to provide affordable, accessible and appropriate care.   The Australian Women’s Register in its entry on Elizabeth notes that Susan Ryan, before Elizabeth died, wrote to her and described her as ‘a heroine of childcare – the near universal acceptance of the right of children to good care and the responsibility of government to support this, constitutes a real revolution. Your work was crucial in bringing this revolution about’. In 1973 Elizabeth, with other WEL members, approached Marie Colemen, then head of the Social Welfare Commission (SWC), about how best to pursue expanded childcare, an action which contributed to a significant impact on the policy process. 

I think it was Rosa Waldron who was then working in the Women’s Affairs section in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM and C) in 1974, who encouraged me to join mainstream WEL.  At a meeting at Rosa’s house, WEL’s approach to the forthcoming federal budget was discussed.  I found it not only empowering to be in the company of women with similar attitudes to life as my own, but they seemed to appreciate my background in economics.  I had found a comfortable place in which to learn how to lobby and was opened to another way of viewing the world.  Rosa Waldon is someone I often remember who, in her intensive but selfless way, helped me climb ladders. And she subtly but effectively helped weave together inside feminists with WEL members on the outside, if not encouraging some of us out there to become ‘femocrats’!

Around this time, I became aware of WEL’s commitment to have an individually based tax system and all the feminist reasons for that. I realised, through WEL’s perspective, my own myopic approach to issues: as a student I had sucked hook, line and sinker, everything I had been taught in public finance at university, which was about the family as the appropriate tax unit. Now, having lived through economic dependency on my husband, I saw the light, so to speak, but realised the non-economic feminist reasons given as to the value of treating women as individuals in the tax system would never convince my economic colleagues. I saw a role I could play by recasting feminist principles into mainstream economic language. I knew economic arguments could be used with force around work disincentive effects of family taxation.  I realised I had a contribution to make to WEL. I started to gain confidence.

Around this time Sara Dowse, head of the then Office of Women’s Affairs in PM and C, sought my advice on a paper she had drafted on the same topic.

I owe a big debt to Marie Coleman.  Marie, as head of the Social Welfare Commission (SWC) in the early 1970s under the Whitlam government, was asked to do work on childcare – partly spurred on by WEL lobbying for it as distinct from free pre-school, the latter falling short in meeting the needs of working women.  At this time a letter I sent about childcare policy to The Canberra Times came to the attention of Rosemary Nairn, who was employed by Marie at the SWC.  She must have known I was an economist interested in childcare and asked if I would work part time with the SWC on issues around financing of childcare versus preschool.  Marie was brave enough to employ me as a relatively unknown researcher on the financing side of childcare.  This was the connection that started me on my path to focus on social policy rather than mainstream economics.

The first real article I ever wrote was for the Australian Quarterly in 1975 arguing against a policy push at the time for a mother’s wage for women who were not in paid work. I pointed out the inefficiency as well as vertical inequity of such an approach and provided, instead, arguments for family allowances irrespective of whether the mother was in paid employment.  This was followed a little later with articles on childcare allowances and a proposal for a young family allowance which originated from the work I undertook in Marie’s unit.

My interest in childcare reform through WEL continued: I made a valuable and lasting friendship with Kay Johnston who ran the ACT childcare group for many years. I remember a fun (mostly) time near the end of the 1970’s when I with Kay, Rosa, Lyndsay Connors and Robin Walmsley (and others) gathered around my dining room table and produced a succinct and persuasive pamphlet on why we needed a rebate for childcare costs and why family taxation was neither good economic sense nor equitable. Social Security department men I knew later told me how impressed they were by the power of our logical arguments! We flooded childcare centres with this pamphlet aided by WEL’s network with its telephone tree being central to this. It was not only a pamphlet with good argument but benefited immensely from the savvy journalistic skills of Lyndsay Connors. Childcare was one of many issues at the time that seemed so important and urgent.

In the mid-years of the 1970s, WEL confronted several ministers in pre-budget cabinet meetings on taxation and other issues.  As WEL representatives, we presented at these pre- budget meetings for several years in a row – two or three of us would represent WEL alongside similar numbers from other women’s organisations. We became quite polished in our approach, including arranging meetings afterwards for national TV coverage.  They were exciting days of influence.  Sara Dowse who was then head of the Office of Women’s Affairs, remarked (in an interview with me for the National Library of Australia) how important it was to have us on the outside, especially after the Whitlam government had been dismissed.

One of the contributions I look back on with pride was the effort that I and other WEL members put into publicly opposing the introduction of family taxation (sometimes known as income splitting that allows married couples to submit joint returns) which would give an advantage to couples with wives not in paid employment as well as penalise single earners. Included in this was opposing the anachronistic dependent spouse rebate (provided to husbands whose wife did not earn even if there were no dependent children), unfortunately, not abolished until the 1993!

By 1977 I was an active WEL member and felt valued; WEL was trusting me particularly on tax, childcare and social security issues and gave me the confidence to write about those things. WEL was already having a significant impact on my career.

My lobbying work with WEL overlapped my academic research interests and led me onto my doctoral thesis on The Income Unit for Tax and Social Security, analysed by the standard public finance criteria of efficiency, equity and simplicity.  At that time in the late 1970s and early 1980s I did not divulge to any of my economic colleagues (all male) that it was also a feminist thesis. Eva Cox was a valued WEL friend who helped me with some lateral ideas in it.

Three feminist principles underpinned my  thesis and published papers: the importance of (a) paying attention to effective marginal tax rates and their impact on women and their paid work effort; (b) the value of unpaid as well as paid activities as a contribution to household and national income; and (c) not assuming that, within the household, income is pooled or shared and hence not proposing policies which rely on family as distinct from individual income.  These three principles lead to the conclusion that the individual as the tax unit is more efficient, equitable and simpler to administer than is the marital or family unit.

How silly I was to accept throughout my studying economics the assumption that twenty-four hours in the day was either for work or for leisure, when in fact for some, like mothers, the choice was mostly between paid or unpaid work/activities- that was a framework I used in my thesis.

While writing my thesis, I published as I went, and the questioning of the assumption that husbands and wives pooled their incomes gained some public attention. I think this motivated the National Women’s Advisory Council, chaired by Dame Beryl Beaurepaire, and with the wonderful Quentin Bryce and Wendy McCarthy as members, to fund a study I undertook on Financial Arrangements within Families.  They published my study in 1981, and its results became an important part of my PhD thesis.

Writing about these feminist issues made me realise I wanted to be in the public service working on social policy issues.  The door opened in early 1983 when I was seconded to the Office of the Status of Women in PM and C to work on issues relating to women and employment for the Economic Summit to be held in April by the new Labor government. That led me onto a fourteen-year career in the public service where I advised on many social policy issues and, thanks to my WEL experience, I was able to bring a feminist lens to them.

I want to put on record my immense admiration for the work of WEL people not in the limelight.  There were so many I can’t recall them all, but I particularly remember in the 1990s the selfless contribution of Marian Sawer, Pamela Denoon, Louise Lake and my dear sister Clare Burton.  Clare died in 1998, the year after WEL turned twenty-five.  She was an active and long-time member of WEL, especially on pay equity issues and she worked on many WEL submissions around this topic.  WEL valued the rigorous research base she brought to her arguments.

Virginia Haussegger has just published a book on The Unfinished Revolution: the feminist fight back.   It’s such an easy and engaging read that brings back many memories for us older feminists about the fights we had to have to get to where we are. Virginia shows just how much more needs to be done, not just to gain gender equality but also to change societal attitudes. One salutory lesson I have learnt and which Virginia emphasises, is that the very fact of achieving major policy change, can lead to significant backlash.  Virginia focuses on the long and strenuous struggles of women in the Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM). They were self-proclaimed revolutionaries; we in WEL were more reformers.  What we were doing was necessary, if not sufficient, to achieve the revolution in attitudes and behaviours sought by WLM. The well-known feminist Elizabeth Reid, as the women’s advisor to the Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, worked both inside and outside of government.   Virginia quotes her saying (p. 223): ‘It was not the case of reform versus revolution, but of working out how we could create a revolution that would unfold alongside our reforms’.

Another celebrated early member of WLM was Biff Ward who has described the relationship between the two main women’s organisations of the Whitlam era as ‘like two sisters agreeing in old age that they were always headed in the same direction, but just chose to take different paths’ (Women and Whitlam: revisiting the revolution, 2023, p.51).

I am hoping that WEL continues its great work.  Many gender-policy women’s organisations have emerged since WEL and the WLM founded the Australian women’s movement in the 1970s.  It’s heartening today to see so many young women taking up the baton and building, not only on past feminist attempts to achieve gender equality but going  beyond that to fight for the urgent need for change in current societal attitudes. However, we must guard against our feminist efforts becoming too fragmented. Sisterhood is powerful when we fight together. Forever vigilant we must be.