Winning for Women: A Personal Story by Iola Mathews (review)

Winning for Women is primarily an account of Iola Mathews' contribution through the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) to workplace reforms for women during the 1980s and 1990s. But its subtitle–A Personal Story– signals that it is more than a history of trade union women's struggle to achieve gender equity in the workplace and the unions. Evoking the slogan of second-wave feminism that "the personal is political," Mathews shapes her narrative in terms of her own struggles and constraints from the 1970s, the means she and other women adopted to fight against them, and the ways their experiences moulded the campaigns they undertook.

To a historian understanding the centrality of archival records, Mathews' revelation that she took and stored the ACTU documents relevant to her work there serves to confirm women's conviction that their public contributions are undervalued in what archival collections retain. What has been kept mostly derives from individual women participants and women's organisations conserving and depositing their own materials. It is a point also made by Glenda Strachan in her recent Labour History article on women's trade union activism in the 1970s and 1980s, which drew on "the little published literature, limited primary documentation and partial documentation" she saved from her own days in the union movement. This bias in the archive makes Mathews' account of her role in the union movement's fight for improved pay and conditions for working women all the more valuable. It also adds richness and dimension to the published histories of second-wave feminism, which have focused primarily on women's political organisation and activism, for Mathews' work shows the inseparability of the political from the industrial, as well as the personal. In doing so it helps fill an analytical gap identified by Marilyn Lake in Getting Equal: "The very success of … equal opportunity and affirmative action legislation has highlighted their limitations in dealing with the entrenched sexual division of labour on which the organisation of paid work is based." Challenging this has necessitated attacking the discrimination embedded in the complex system of awards on a case-by-case basis, first through work within individual unions, and then through the arbitration system and enterprise bargaining.

The first part of Winning for Women describes Iola Mathews' evolution as a feminist, beginning with the example of her paternal great aunts, the formidable Greig sisters, two of whom were among the first women doctors in Victoria and a third the first woman to be admitted to legal practice. All were active in the cause of women. Mathews (as Iola Hack) began work as a journalist at the Age in 1969, honing her research and reporting skills on the Abortion Inquiry into police corruption and then as education reporter. But, as she writes, "In February 1972, a phone call changed everything for me." As one of the ten women handpicked by Beatrice Faust to found the Women's Electoral Lobby (WEL), she applied her journalistic skills to its public campaigns and to the federal candidate survey before the 1972 election. Although this was not the first questionnaire women had put to candidates, as Mathews implies–the National Council of Women had employed candidate surveys before World War I–it was certainly the most widely publicised and thorough.

WEL activism formed the basis of Mathews' subsequent commitment to improving women's lives. Her lived experience provided the specific issues she took up. Marriage to widower Race Mathews meant caring for his three children and then for two of her own, relinquishing her job at the Age, taking on the role of the political wife, enduring long periods as a single parent, relocating the family home to new electorates, and facing the difficulty of getting paid work in the public sphere owing to her connection with a member of parliament. By the time she did get work at the ACTU in 1984 as an advocate for women workers, she knew that, in...