Pat Giles, Perth, And the Politics of Dress (Report‪)‬

Picture this: it's the 8th of March 1975, International Women's Day, in International Women's Year. Pat Giles is standing beside the dais at the Supreme Court Gardens in Perth, Western Australia, waiting her turn to climb the stairs to address the crowd. There are hundreds and hundreds of women here. A young male journalist moves in beside her, greets her warmly, then asks, "Why is everyone here wearing overalls?" Pat looks out at the crowd of women, babies, children, the occasional man, and says "But not everyone is. Look at me!" In this paper I want to use that very simple acknowledgement of visual difference, a difference of style that can be seen to have resonated in so many ways--politically, socially, culturally--depending on the location of both viewer and performer, as a way in to acknowledging the differences of class, age, sexuality, political affiliation and activist strategies that can be seen to have characterized the fledgling second-wave women's movement of Perth of the early 1970s. Such acknowledgment seems particularly necessary, given feminist scholar Margaret Henderson's recent work on public memory, and her observation that third wave 1990s 'young feminists' appear to feel they have a monopoly on diversity and difference, and appear to remember second-wave feminism condescendingly and uncomprehendingly as uniform, ethnocentric, and issues-based (Henderson, 2006: 178-179). Background research to writing the biography of Pat Giles has uncovered information that disrupts the notion of a blandly homogeneous group of women who participated in second-wave feminism in the early 1970s in WA. In this paper I'll be drawing on material generated in researching the biography of Pat Giles to explore the ways some of those differences of style were responded to and negotiated by Giles herself and by those around her.