A great day all round!

I write to wish everyone a Happy International Women’s Day as we celebrate WEL’s 40^thAnniversary.

WEL members will be attending the International Women’s Day community picnic at First Fleet Park on 10 March from Midday. Make sure you come along, meet with fellow WEL members and talk the future of feminism in good company.

WEL continues its advocacy for women’s equality and the protection of women’s rights.

WEL has lobbied successfully for many reforms over the past 40 years.

In 1972, when WEL began, women won equal pay, but only when they were performing identical work under the same award as men. This was only about 18 per cent of women.  The February 2012  Fair Work Australia  decision means that at last women  have a law that should apply wherever work is undervalued  simply because  it is done by women.

Australia now has 18 weeks paid parental leave.  In the first year of the scheme 126,000 expectant and new parents applied for the payment.

Since 1972, Australia has introduced, and improved, both sex discrimination and equal opportunity legislation. This year we are optimistic that both sex discrimination and equal employment opportunity laws will be strengthened to tackle underlying discrimination.

With violence against women, Australia now has a zero tolerance to violence policy. We have some of the strongest laws and best funded programs in the world to stop violence against women in all its forms.

In 1972, there were a small number of childrens’ services in Australia with governments spending around $50 million a year. Government spending on early childhood education and care is now around $5,300,000,000. By 2013, the aim is that every child has 15 hours per week of preschool education in the year before they start school.

In the early 1970s more girls left school at younger ages than boys.  There was strong lobbying  about sexism in schools,  including by WEL. Since 1984, female students have been more likely to continue through to Year 12 than male students. In 2010, the Year 12  retention rate for female students was 83% compared with 73% for male students. This improvement flows through into higher education.

WEL is working on many key issues at the moment.

For girls’ education, WEL advocates

Expand girls’ career aspirations and encourage them in to Maths and Science streams in high school and beyond.

For women in the workforce WEL advocates:

• Eliminating systemic discrimination
• Closing the full time work pay gap (currently17.2%) between men and women.
• Properly valuing of the work of early childhood and aged services sector workers and pay them accordingly. Women are very much in demand in the every expanding services sector. By 2050, Australia will need 800,000 paid workers to care for the aged- up from 300,000 at present
• Making women’s jobs more secure with acceptable pay and working conditions.40% of jobs in Australia are casual/ insecure and the growth is in part time work.
• Improving women’s access to decent superannuation

For women in need, WEL advocates:

• Eliminating all forms of  violence against women
• Provision of affordable housing. At present women over the age of 45 outnumber older men in government funded shelters
• Stopping the inevitable slide into poverty that retirement brings to many single women. There are nearly 3 times more single female aged pensioners than there are men, with the majority of women having little in the way of housing wealth, savings and superannuation
• Breaking inter- generational poverty including    through special programs, by  governments increasing benefits to sole parents to match those on other pensions, and by  ceasing conditional welfare policies
• Introducing a National Disabilities Insurance Scheme
• Eliminating problem gambling - Women account for 64 per cent of the use of poker machines, which in turn accounted for 74 per cent of the growth in gambling in Australia in recent years. Research shows that compared to men, women were found to have a more rapid progression into problem gambling.

Governments needs to take far more account of women’s needs and economic status when developing policies and implementing programs.

Throughout 2012 WEL is holding 40^th Anniversary functions in nearly all states. Please come along and celebrate WEL’s achievements and talk about what we need to do over the next ten years. If you would like to come to a function please email WEL at info@wel.org.au . We will gladly put you on the list.

If you would like to join WEL that would be wonderful – you can download a membership form (and read lots more about our polices and achievements) here.

Happy International Women’s Day 2012 and Happy WEL 40^th Anniversary!

Women, she said, should be free – to choose their careers, to decide whether they wanted to have children or not and, ultimately, when they wanted to die. When the Women’s Electoral Lobby decided to honour her in 2002, it presented her with the Grand Stirrer award, for ”inciting others to challenge the status quo”. Such activism involved some unpleasant scenes, such as battles with pro-life campaigners, but she remained steadfast. On family planning, she said: ”If you can’t control your fertility, you can’t control your life.”

Dorothy Marie Hartog was born in Bergen op Zoom, a town in Holland, on July 23, 1913, one of two daughters of a lawyer, Maurits Hartog, and his wife, Dorothy (nee Haas), a musician.

Her father, mindful of the plight of dependent women, encouraged his daughters to go to university. Dorothy did an economics degree at the University of Amsterdam then, at 23, married for the first time, but on her wedding day she realised she should have married her husband’s very funny boss, Rudolf (Ru) Simons.

The marriage failed and in 1941 she married Ru. The family migrated to Australia in 1950.

Simons’s ideas were influenced by the feminist activist Madge Dawson and by a course she did at the Workers Education Association on women’s changing role in society. She also became involved in the Immigration Reform Association, which opposed the White Australia Policy.

In 1960, Simons joined the Humanist Society and campaigned with it for civil liberties, particularly contraception, while working as a research assistant in the department of economic history at the University of Sydney.

In 1969, through the Humanist Society, Simons attended a public meeting which resolved to form the NSW Homosexual Law Reform Society. She became a member of a working group which was quickly swept up by the Campaign Against Moral Persecution, formed shortly afterwards. In 1972 she joined WEL, which took over the Family Planning Association.

With a medical practitioner, Simons co-founded Preterm, which ran Sydney’s first legal abortion clinic, and she joined its board in 1974. In 1975, she was elected president of the FPA.

The issue had its lighter side. When she gave a tomcat a home, she wanted it desexed and had a battle with her husband to bring that about. He asked ”Where will it all end?” But she had to win that battle, she said, otherwise she would have been a laughing stock in the FPA.

The Right to Life Movement actively opposed many of her causes. Once, though, at a pro-abortion conference at Sydney Town Hall, she sat sedately knitting, as if for her grandchildren. The anti-abortionists thought she was one of them and confided in her.

Simons retired from the university in 1978, and the next year headed a team of volunteers in 1979 to produce WEL’s newsletter, WEL-Informed. She wrote witty satires for Sydney University’s Honi Soit and the Humanist Society’s Viewpoints and, presenting the feminist viewpoint, was an avid Herald letter-writer.

In the mid-1990s, Simons began campaigning for voluntary euthanasia. She co-founded the Voluntary Euthanasia Society, telling a journalist in 1994: ”Euthanasia has as much to do with murder as making love has to do with rape.” She became a board member of the society and was instrumental in ensuring a ban on the publication and distribution of Final Exit was overturned.

Simons said she wanted to stay alive until prime minister John Howard lost office.

She loved theatre, films, music, conversation and books and one of her accommodation requirements was for it to be near a library.

Dorothy Simons, who died last month of natural causes, is survived by her children Tony and Clarissa, three grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. Ru Simons died in 1996.

This obituary first appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald. 

Last year was the 100th Anniversary, so let’s look forward this year!

Meet some fabulous young women & hear their views.

Click here to download the poster

There will be fantastic feminists to chat to.

There will be lots of feminist organisations to find out about.

There will be feminists working for a world where there is creative stuff, fun & fairness for all.

There will be information for you to gather and spaces to talk & share ideas.

There will be fabulous female artists.

There will be you.

It’s your world. Start shaping it on IWD 2012.

The case was lodged by the Australian Services Union in collaboration with several other unions on March 11 2010 to deliver a better deal for community service workers who have long been undervalued.

FWA ruled that workers will receive a pay increase of between 19% and 40% over an 8-year period.

The decision shows that the introduction of the Fair Work Act can make a real difference for women, recognising for the first time, after many attempts and failed cases, that wage increases should be awarded to a highly feminised sector that is undervalued on the basis of gender.

While it is great to see workers finally granted these rises, it is disappointing that workers will have to wait this long to see the full increase. Many workers struggle to make ends meet and this is, for many, too long to wait.

Aside from this, the decision is the most significant regarding wages for women in 30 years and will make a real, positive difference.

WEL congratulates everyone who was involved in the long campaign and who worked so hard on this case to achieve this fantastic result.

Read the full decision here.