Women's and gender studies in Australia today

Women's Studies began in Australia in the early 1970s with the first crossdisciplinary subjects at Queensland and Flinders (Adelaide). Through the 1970s and early '80s they spread to almost every campus, associated (sometimes uneasily) with an activist and socialist-inflected second wave Women's Liberation movement. They articulated new perspectives that came into the universities from the end of the 1960s that addressed - and sought to bring centrally into play in critical reading - along with issues of gender, those of class, race and ethnicity, and sexuality. In 1996 a conference at the University of Sydney entitled 'The Return of the Repressed', revisited the successful 1973 strike over ..