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Dangerous Ideas explores sex and love, politics and performance, joy and anguish in a collection of essays focussed on the history and politics of the Women’s Liberation Movement and one of its offshoots, Women’s Studies, in Australia and around the world. These are serious matters: they are about tectonic changes in people’s lives and ideas in the late twentieth century, too little remembered or understood any longer. ‘Feminism’, this book suggests, ‘is always multiple and various, fluid and changing, defying efforts at definition, characterisation, periodisation’. Nevertheless, Dangerous Ideas tackles some hard questions. How did Women’s Liberation begin? What held this transformative movement together? Would it bring about the death of the family? Was it reorganising the labour market? Revolutionising human reproduction? How could Women’s Studies exist in patriarchal universities? Could feminism change the paradigms governing the world of learning? In the United States? In Russia? In the People’s Republic of China? It is great fun, too. This book tells of Hobart’s hilarious Feminist Food Guide; of an outburst of creative energies among feminists – women on top, behaving badly; of dreams and desires for an entirely different future. And, always unorthodox: it finds hope and cheer in a history of the tampon.

Originally published in 1985, this revised edition with an updated Introduction, is being published by the University of Adelaide Press to commemorate the anniversary of Catherine Helen Spence's death on 3 April 1910. Catherine Helen Spence was a charismatic public speaker in the late nineteenth century, a time when women were supposed to speak only at their own firesides. In challenging the custom and convention that confined middle-class women to the domestic sphere, she was carving a new path into the world of public politics along which other women would follow, in the first Australian colony to win votes for women. She was also much more -- a novelist deserving comparison with George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman; a pioneering woman journalist; a ‘public intellectual’ a century before the term was coined; a philanthropic innovator in social welfare and education, with an influence reaching far beyond South Australia; Australia’s first female political candidate. A ‘New Woman’, she declared herself. The ‘Grand Old Woman of Australia’ others called her.