By Susan Hawthorne. This article was adapted from the speech Susan gave at #FiLiA2021 during the Not Dead Yet: Feminism, Passion and Women’s Liberation Panel.

I was four months too young to contribute a piece to Not Dead Yet. I am still some weeks off that, but I am going to pretend that I have reached 70 years of age.

At age nine, I said out loud that I would not marry until I was 23, an ancient age to a nine-year-old. The Women’s Liberation Movement saved me from a life I was not enjoying at age 22. I joined the Women’s Liberation Group at La Trobe University in 1973, became involved in activism and in late 1974, I left my male partner and moved into my lesbian life. I have never looked back. It was the best decision of my life. 

The early days were heady from the first Women’s Dance to my debut as a graffiti artist. A cigarette brand, Bradfield, had the jingle “from Adam’s Rib to Women’s Lib” and later the words “Not mild” suggesting it was a real man’s cigarette. We were adding “But sexist” after the “not mild’ tagline. Driving around in the dark we went looking for the billboards. We found one to graffiti in a northern suburb of Melbourne and chased down the others we knew about. Every single one had already been sprayed. There was a great sense of satisfaction knowing that we were part of a movement and that other women were out there doing the same as us.

In 1975, I joined Melbourne’s Rape Crisis Centre, volunteering to answer the phone, accompany women to court and to inform myself about rape. In my relatively short heterosexual phase, I had experienced two attempted rapes and one rape, so I had good reason to join this collective.

With three years of wild times behind me, I was ready to really enjoy my life at university. 1973 was the same year when, after the election of Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam and universities were free. At the end of my third year in Philosophy, I was offered a place in Honours. I decided that I wanted to look at the theory of separatism and I wrote a thesis called In Defence of Separatism. It was finally published in 2019.

As most Australians do, I travelled overseas for three months, living in a squat in Lambeth followed by travel through Europe mixing hitchhiking and overnight train travel. Crete was a huge eye-opener to me, and I relished the archaeological riches, the mythic history, and the language.

A long period of unemployment kick-started me into publishing though that was still some years away. As part of a government-funded programme, I became the Writing Theatre and Music Co-ordinator of the Women 150 New Moods Festival. I decided to challenge the celebration aspect of 150 years of colonisation by highlighting writing by Aboriginal women as well as by migrant, working-class women and lesbians. The festival ran for nine days and keynote speakers were Audre Lorde and Keri Hulme.

My entry to publishing came in 1987 with a job as an editor at Penguin Books Australia. The opening occurred because they were looking for an editor with knowledge of women’s writing. Dale Spender had proposed a series of books that became the Penguin Australian Women’s Library. This led in 1991 to Renate Klein and I setting up Spinifex Press and also in 1994 organising the 6th International Feminist Book Fair.

In late 1994, I joined first the Women’s Circus and secondly, the Performing Older Women’s Circus (you had to be over 40 to join this). I trained as an aerialist and loved every minute of it. There is nothing like being on a trapeze or a tissue to focus the mind. You simply can’t think about all your worries. Eventually I began to combine poetry and aerials in solo performances.

My radical feminist and lesbian journey has often been surprising. It is a mix of political and literary activism. My joys have been sharing a life with Renate and our dogs, travelling in Australia to lots of out of the way places, having the chance to travel overseas, and meeting so many wonderful women who have enriched my life many times over. I love to work with women, to read women’s stories and to participate in feminist activism with women. Finally, I want to keep talking about lesbians because many terrible things have happened to lesbians not because of what we have done but because of who we are. But it is still the best decision of my life.

Susan Hawthorne’s most recent books are Dark Matters: A Novel (2017), The Sacking of the Muses (poetry, 2019) and Vortex: The Crisis of Patriarchy (2020) and as co-editor of Not Dead Yet. With Renate Klein, she is the publisher at Spinifex Press.