Anne Conlon Memorial Lecture: Education: What's in it for Women and Girls?

My compulsory school life began in the forties and ended in the fifties. I was good at school work and was encouraged to succeed. I was accustomed to working in small groups as I attended a one teacher school from the age of seven to eleven and never had more than one other person in my class. When I attended high school I was aware of the need to succeed in order to be able to stay at school. I was consistently encouraged by my mother, who believed that education was essential for survival. If we were to restate it now we would say that education for girls like me was a way out of the ghetto of dependency. In order to attend secondary school I had to board in the nearby country town and it was my mother's continual negotiations with the Canteens Trust Fund which paid for most of my education. I would not have been able to attend university without a teachers' college scholarship and a guarantee of employment at the end. There were no role models in either late secondary or tertiary education in my family, but there was certainly a lot of maternal encouragement and support for the education that my mother had been denied, although she passionately wanted it. My university education changed my life ?it connected me to ideas, people and life styles of which I had no previous awareness. Many of my peers at the University of New England became very involved and active in the women's movement in the late sixties and seventies. In fact, we were probably one of the best educated group of women to be launched into the Australian workforce. It was inevitable that we would be the next wave of the feminist movement.