2020 NLA Fellowship Presentation: Memory Keepers: Women activists’ strategies to preserve history.

Throughout modernity, women have led movements for reform. Often these have been spectacularly visible, as evidenced, for example, by the long history and colourful pageantry of the Women’s Marches—from the 40,000 suffragists marching in London’s 1911 Women’s Coronation Procession to 2017 when five-million people participated in 673 Women’s Marches globally to protest misogyny. Yet, women activists are less well remembered than their male counterparts in the historical record and collective memory.

2020 National Library of Australia Fellow, Associate Professor Sharon Crozier-de Rosa, examines the rationale, strategies and tactics that Australian women and women’s organisations employed to preserve their own histories, analysing how they acted as gatekeepers of their own memory until wider social shifts allowed that memory public visibility.