Zelda D'Aprano, Leadership and the Politics of Gender in the Australian Labour Movement, 1945-75

Zelda D’Aprano was influential in different phases of her life as a factory worker, union official, member of the Communist Party of Australia and feminist activist. This paper engages with a theoretical perspective in which the key to understanding leadership is an assessment of an individual’s capacity to influence others. Relying on D’Aprano’s writing, recorded interviews and documents in her archives, it considers her emergence as “a woman of influence.” The paper examines her engagements with employers and unions from 1950 to 1968 during her membership first of the Clothing Workers Union and subsequently the Hospital Employees Federation No. 2 Branch, where she gained the position of shop steward. Second, it considers her experiences in post-war Melbourne of leadership of the Communist Party of Australia, in which she served as a branch secretary, and with her experiences as a worker at the time of the 1969 equal pay hearing for a communist-led union, the Australasian Meat Industry Employees Union. Finally the paper explores her reconsideration of the meaning of “leadership” in the early 1970s, drawing on her experiences in the women’s liberation movement as co-founder of the Womens Action Committee and her early hopes of combining socialism and feminism in a search for equity and social justice in Australia. As late as 2011, D’Aprano was still called upon to speak at commemoration events, marches and protests, a telling recognition of her place as a leader in the history of the Australian labour movement

Communism · Direct action · Economics · Feminism · Liberation movement · Media studies · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Socialism · Sociology · Trade union · Australian History and Society · Gender Studies · Law