Made in America: two moments of origin

In 1969, Martha Ansara, an American, was in her early twenties, living in Boston with her three-year-old son, and splitting up with her husband. 1969 was a big year for Ansara. She moved first to California with her new Australian boyfriend, and then, with the same boyfriend, to Australia. In Sydney, she made left-wing friends through Bob Gould's Third World Bookshop, in particular with Sandra Hawker and with two Australians who had recently returned from the United States: Margaret Elliot and Coonie Sandford. Together they formed a group and discussed the pamphlets that Ansara had brought with her and their own experiences. Towards the end of that year they decided to hold an open meeting about Women's Liberation. The official story is that those three women composed a leaflet headed Only the Chains Have Changed to distribute during a protest march against the war in Vietnam on 14 December 1969, calling a meeting about Women's Liberation for January 1970. Many years later, Ansara confessed that, being a young mother, she had been exhausted and had fallen asleep, so the leaflet was the work of Hawker and Sandford and Ansara's film-making journalist boyfriend.

The meeting should have been a failure, Ansara was to recall: ‘Nobody in their right mind holds meetings in January. I knew nothing, you know’. But even though it was January — when everyone goes to the beach — the meeting was packed. This was, Ansara remembered, a ‘new phenomenon’: ‘we were swept up, I guess, in the sort of new wave of interest in this imported phenomenon’.

Early in 1969, Warren Osmond, a tutor in Politics at the University of Adelaide, had been reading anti-war publications which made a great fuss over the Miss America Protest of 7 September 1968.