Mother and daughter feminists, 1969–1973. or why didn't Edna Ryan join women's liberation

When I began the biography of my mother, Edna Ryan, in 1998, I was confronted by what I now realise are two furphies about the genre of mother/daughter biography in Australia: how can a daughter write a serious biography of her other; and what was it like to have a mother who was a feminist? The first implies that all daughters have fraught relations with their mothers and can never develop an emotional distance to write about them. The second implies that, as a feminist, Edna Ryan must have been like a witch, who neglected her children and tried to destroy their lives. In other words, I had embarked on an impossible project and the sooner I recognised this, the sooner I could abandon it. But I knew enough about my mother to realise that as a woman out of the ordinary she was a marvellous subject for biography, even if I could not properly start the project until after her death at the age of92 in 1997. 1 While.her death provided the emotional distance I needed to gain a historical sense of who she was, I also knew that Edna did not call herself a feminist until she was 61 years old in 1966 when, as the youngest of her three children, I left home at the age of 22. Over the next seven years Edna Ryan transformed herself from what my sister Julia has called, 'a loyal Labor Party hack' to a second-wave feminist activist in Women's Electoral Lobby. She recorded this remarkable transformation in her diary, which she began the day I left home and later in her autobiographical fragment, 'The Backdrop'about the years 1970-1974. The diaries are located in her personal papers, currently in my possession, and the autobiographical manuscript is in her papers in the National Library of Australia. In this article, I have selected for exploration some of the lively exchanges that took place between Edna and me about our understanding of Women's Liberation, when we both lived in Sydney between December 1969 and February 1973. Her diaries provide a record of our discussions and how we tried to persuade each other to our own ways of thinking. In the process I hope to provide a glimpse of how Edna and I perceived each other as mother and daughter and how our commitment to political change formed the backbone of our relationship

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