Emily Maguire - This is What a Feminist Looks Like

Emily Maguire's passionate and timely This Is What a Feminist Looks Like charts a course through the history of Australian feminism, showing how we got to where we are today—and reminds us that some battles must be fought over and over again.

Emily will appear in-conversation with Sarah Ayoub.

About the Book

Women must quit their jobs when they marry.

They are barred from trade unions and universities.

Their husbands can legally beat or rape them.

And they are not allowed to vote.

This could be the reality in Australia today—if it weren’t for the many women who, over more than a century of activism, fought for change.

In this passionate and timely account, Emily Maguire charts a course through the history of Australian feminism—from the First Wave to the Fourth, from suffragists to Riot Grrrls, from equal pay to #metoo. Along the way, she pays tribute to those who’ve spoken up and taken action in the face of ridicule, dismissal and violence.

Included are snapshot profiles of both famous and lesser-known Australian feminists such as Edith Cowan, Stella Miles Franklin, Vida Goldstein, Zelda D’Aprano, MumShirl, Stella Young and many more. She covers topical and relevant issues, including: the underrepresentation of women in parliament; the forced sterilisation of women with disabilities; online abuse and hashtag activism; abortion reform; marriage equality; the Stolen Generations; and non-binary gender identity. 

This Is What a Feminist Looks Like shows us how we got to where we are today—and reminds us that some battles must be fought over and over again.

Praise for Emily Maguire

"[Maguire is] one of my first feminist inspirations"  - Clementine Ford.

About the Author

Emily Maguire is the author of five novels, including An Isolated Incident, which was shortlisted for the Stella Prize, the ABIA Literary Fiction Book of the Year and the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Her 2008 non-fiction book Princesses and Pornstars: Sex, Power, Identity was a frank, personal examination of what it meant to be young and female in Australia. A Young Adult version of this book titled Your Skirt’s Too Short: Sex, Power, Choice was published in 2010. 

Emily works as a teacher and as a mentor to young and emerging writers and was the 2018 Writer-in-Residence at the Charles Perkins Centre at the University of Sydney.

About Sarah Ayoub

Sarah Ayoub is a journalist and author whose work has been published in The Guardian, The Sydney Morning Herald, Girlfriend, ELLE, Marie-Claire, SBS, ABC The Drum, Cosmopolitan and more. She teaches journalism and writing at the University of Notre  Dame, where she is a PhD candidate researching the representations of  culturally diverse females in Australian YA literature. 

She is a regular fixture at schools and writer's festivals around the country, has been invited to speak at Children's Literature events both  locally and abroad, is a Stella Prize Schools Ambassador, and is a mentor to the youth curators of the Sydney Writer's Festival YA program. Her second novel, The Yearbook Committee, was longlisted for The Gold Inky, Australia's premier teen choice award, and her forthcoming novel will be published by Harper Collins in 2021.