As the fight for equal pay has risen up the agenda both in Australia and abroad, indicating women’s growing impatience for change, the veteran Australian journalist Tracey Spicer asked whether it was time to go back to the barricades, and for women to start chaining themselves to things again?
Spicer’s rallying cry and the thought of thousands of women taking bold direct action to protest unequal pay would have, no doubt, been music to the ears of Zelda D’Aprano, the legendary equal pay campaigner who in 1969 famously chained herself to the doors of the Commonwealth Building in Melbourne to protest the dismissal in the arbitration court of an equal pay case, in which she was a party, along with other women who worked with her at the Australasian Meat Industry Employee’s Union.
“No more male & female rates, only one rate”, her sign said. It beggars belief, but this was quite a revolutionary idea at a time when it was perfectly legal to pay men and women different rates for doing the exact same job.
Though D’Aprano was eventually cut free by police, ten days later she was back, this time joined by Alva Geikie and Thelma Solomon. They chained themselves to the doors of the Arbitration Court, the one which had dismissed their equal pay case. For her efforts, D’Aprano was promptly dismissed from the AMIEU.
This past Wednesday Zelda D’Aprano passed peacefully in her sleep at the age of 90. Her legacy: the example of her actions and tireless commitment, demonstrated through a lifetime of activism to fight for a fairer future for women and girls.
Born in 1928 in Melbourne to European immigrants, D’Aprano left school at 14 to work in a variety of factory jobs before gaining qualifications as a dental nurse. She later worked as a clerk for the Australasian Meat Industry Employee’s Union and also as a mail sorter. It’s fair to say that D’Aprano’s tendency to speak truth to power and challenge injustice saw her fired from more than one job, including the Meat Industry Employer’s Union.
The personal consequences, however, never seemed to deter her.
A year after D’Aprano chained herself to the doors of the Commonwealth Building, she, along with Geikie and Solomon, founded the Women’s Action Committee and the Women’s Liberation Centre, from which the Women’s Liberation Movement in Melbourne was born.
The Committee sought to get women more involved in activism, shedding the metaphorical chains of a culture requiring them to be “ladylike” and “polite” in their quest for change, a strategy D’Aprano quickly recognised would never result in a revolution.
D’Aprano and her fellow activists travelled around Melbourne paying only 75% of the fares, because women were only given 75% of the wage of men at the time. They did pub crawls across Melbourne, because women weren’t allowed to drink in bars, only in lounges. And they helped arrange the first pro-choice rally in 1975.
For many of us, that picture of Zelda chained to the Commonwealth Building is now iconic. But that photo, as powerful and memorable as it is, only documents one moment in a life-time spent fighting for change.
To truly honor Zelda’s legacy, we must not only go “back to the barricades” and “chain ourselves to things” the one time.
We must pluck up the dogged determination to keep going back to the barricades time and time again, until the job is done. Just like Zelda did.