Radical Actions: Aboriginal and Non-Aboriginal Women's Temperance Activism in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Australia

Abstract

In the 1980s, Indigenous Aboriginal women in Australia began to agitate against liquor outlets perceived as affecting the remote communities in which they lived and mobilised in a series of fluid, grassroots public demonstrations. The women's activism resembled the ideology and strategies of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union in Australia, decades earlier, despite there being no direct influence from the WCTU*. This article explores the commonalities in the tactics deployed by these old and new temperance movements. Show more