The turnout of over 500 women at the 7th annual gathering of the Network of Women Students in Australia (NOWSA), held at the University of Queensland last month, was the biggest attendance ever for this national gathering of campus-based feminists. The vast majority of both organisers and participants were young feminists, many born in the early 1970s and now aged 20 or younger, new to campus, new to feminism and bristling with enthusiasm, anger and eagerness to learn.
Like many of the NOWSA '93 attendees, Refractory Girl — the first women's movement publication to be more than a newsletter — was born during the very early stages of feminism. This year the publication's 20th birthday has been marked by the production of a double issue in the form of a commemmorative book, Refracting Voices.
Refracting Voices contains both reprints of historical articles and new pieces in which the original Refractory Girl contributors reflect on the past and ruminate on the future. It is a stimulating read, a window on the birth of a project sparked by both anger and hope at a time when differences, of opinion and experience, had not yet hardened into divisions in the movement.
A similarly fresh and unjaded tone pervaded NOWSA '93. But these was also an underlying collective understanding of some of the lessons of the past 20 years, gleaned by conference-goers from their reading, their studies, their mothers, sisters and friends.
Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of Refracting Voices is that it sets out the issues upon which Refractory Girl has been most silent during its first 20 years. Only four articles, for example, were ever published on issues facing Aboriginal women. Similarly migrant and third world women, lesbians and women with disabilities rarely appeared on the pages of Refractory Girl.
These ommissions were not made by the organisers of NOWSA '93. Indeed, the means by which campus women's groups can involve and represent the interests of the broadest cross-section of women possible was the primary focus of the conference.
NOWSA, like the Refractory Girl of the 1970s, is composed of students and academics, a group which under the current educational and economic system is predominantly white, middle-class and English speaking. Such a group is bound to have difficulty practicing a feminism which benefits all women, not just their own privileged layer, but this is what the women of NOWSA '93 challenged themselves to do.
For over 20 years the women's liberation movement in developed countries has grappled with this same challenge. Perhaps one would have hoped that, by now, more headway would have been made and that the nucleusof the movement would have moved off campus. But the temic, complex and massive. Now women who are the same age as the movement itself continue the battle armed with knowledge gleaned from the past.
Refracting Voices and Refractory Girl subscriptions may be obtained by writing to PO Box 648, Glebe, NSW 2037 or phoning 02-557 1955.
By Karen Fredericks