Inconvenient Women

Australia's crusaders for women's voting rights and the radical feminists of the 1970s changed lives across the country and around the globe. But what about the generation in between?

Throughout the twentieth century, a group of trailblazing women writers challenged the nation's status quo. Miles Franklin's forceful voice invigorated the emerging women's movement, Mary Gilmore was a groundbreaking feminist journalist, and novelists Katharine Susannah Prichard and Eleanor Dark explored the colonial displacement of Australia's Indigenous people. Kylie Tennant spoke up for battlers during the Depression. Dymphna Cusack, Katharine Susannah Prichard, and Dorothy Hewett, all members of Australia's Communist Party, advocated for social reform. Ruth Park's The Harp in the South jolted the NSW government into developing slum clearance programs. And the work of First Nations poet and activist Kath Walker (later Oodgeroo Noonuccal) was crucial in achieving constitutional reform for Indigenous peoples.

Acclaimed biographer Jacqueline Kent traces these women's stories, shaped by the seismic social and political events of their time, and illuminates their immense courage and principled determination to change the world.

Kent brings her cast of writers effortlessly to life. – Jason Steger

Each of these seven women writers set out, in her own way, to change the world, and this well-researched and engagingly written book makes clear their individual and collective bravery, curiosity, and fearlessness. – Heidi Maier, InDaily

Highly informed, engaging, often wittily observed, this is also an impressively orchestrated study of groundbreaking writers and the tumultuous times they mirrored and interpreted. – Sydney Morning Herald / The Age

Inconvenient Women is a fluent stream of fascinating detail. It brings to the fore names half-remembered now, their collaborations with activist men such as Guido Baracchi and Egon Kisch as well as other women, and the political environment they all operated in. Once begun, it is difficult to put down: you'll finish with dozens of notes to follow up. – Miriam Cosic, The Saturday Paper