1975: Working Migrant Women

Abstract

The ethnic and class politics of working migrant women marked them at a distance from mainstream feminism and its mostly middle-class, libertarian, and Anglo-centric outlook during International Women's Year 1975. The rights of working migrant women - especially in industrial workplaces - were the subject of sustained and intersectional analysis in migrant rights forums. Their research papers, public seminars, and welfare practices provided a more suitable multilingual platform for working migrant women (and migrant-background women activists and welfare workers) to voice concerns. This article explores the contexts in which their concerns were received and discussed in the 1970s. It explores testimony within a key report from the migrant rights movement (Centre for Urban Research and Action's 1975 'But I Wouldn't Want My Wife to Work Here': A Study of Migrant Women in Melbourne Industry), alongside the work of women migrant rights activists, to counter prevailing stereotypes about migrant women.