A message from WEL Vic 40th Anniversary celebrations

Happy Birthday to all WEL Vic members!

40 years on we can all be proud of what WEL has achieved. Certainly there are still unsolved problems and unfinished business but we can celebrate our successes in changes to the status of women.

Paid Parental Leave, equal pay for community service workers and rights to every job in the Defence Forces are the most recent successes. One woman was in federal parliament in 1972 and one in the Victorian Parliament, now there are 38 women in the House of Representatives, 29 in the Senate, 29 in the Victorian Legislative Assembly and 12 in the Legislative Council.

There are 3 women High Court Judges. Universities now have 8 woman chancellors and 10 Vice chancellors. And we are slowly getting women directors–13.8% this year.

So we can celebrate and we did.

The party was great fun–lots of champagne and a birthday cake cut by the oldest member Mary Owen and the longest serving member Iola Matthews.

On IWD, Thursday March 8th Federation Square will show our message wishing Women’s Electoral Lobby Happy 40th Birthday.

Vale Dorothy Simons

Dorothy Simons was one of a stream of highly motivated women – starting perhaps with the suffragettes, proceeding to Germaine Greer and on to women forcing their way into the military front line – who refused to remain in the stereotyped roles of wives and mothers, sidelined in society, obeying husbands and bearing children.

Women, she said, should be free – to choose their careers, to decide whether they wanted to have children or not and, ultimately, when they wanted to die. When the Women’s Electoral Lobby decided to honour her in 2002, it presented her with the Grand Stirrer award, for ”inciting others to challenge the status quo”. Such activism involved some unpleasant scenes, such as battles with pro-life campaigners, but she remained steadfast. On family planning, she said: ”If you can’t control your fertility, you can’t control your life.”

Dorothy Marie Hartog was born in Bergen op Zoom, a town in Holland, on July 23, 1913, one of two daughters of a lawyer, Maurits Hartog, and his wife, Dorothy (nee Haas), a musician.

Her father, mindful of the plight of dependent women, encouraged his daughters to go to university. Dorothy did an economics degree at the University of Amsterdam then, at 23, married for the first time, but on her wedding day she realised she should have married her husband’s very funny boss, Rudolf (Ru) Simons.

The marriage failed and in 1941 she married Ru. The family migrated to Australia in 1950.

Simons’s ideas were influenced by the feminist activist Madge Dawson and by a course she did at the Workers Education Association on women’s changing role in society. She also became involved in the Immigration Reform Association, which opposed the White Australia Policy.

In 1960, Simons joined the Humanist Society and campaigned with it for civil liberties, particularly contraception, while working as a research assistant in the department of economic history at the University of Sydney.

In 1969, through the Humanist Society, Simons attended a public meeting which resolved to form the NSW Homosexual Law Reform Society. She became a member of a working group which was quickly swept up by the Campaign Against Moral Persecution, formed shortly afterwards. In 1972 she joined WEL, which took over the Family Planning Association.

With a medical practitioner, Simons co-founded Preterm, which ran Sydney’s first legal abortion clinic, and she joined its board in 1974. In 1975, she was elected president of the FPA.

The issue had its lighter side. When she gave a tomcat a home, she wanted it desexed and had a battle with her husband to bring that about. He asked ”Where will it all end?” But she had to win that battle, she said, otherwise she would have been a laughing stock in the FPA.

The Right to Life Movement actively opposed many of her causes. Once, though, at a pro-abortion conference at Sydney Town Hall, she sat sedately knitting, as if for her grandchildren. The anti-abortionists thought she was one of them and confided in her.

Simons retired from the university in 1978, and the next year headed a team of volunteers in 1979 to produce WEL’s newsletter, WEL-Informed. She wrote witty satires for Sydney University’s Honi Soit and the Humanist Society’s Viewpoints and, presenting the feminist viewpoint, was an avid Herald letter-writer.

In the mid-1990s, Simons began campaigning for voluntary euthanasia. She co-founded the Voluntary Euthanasia Society, telling a journalist in 1994: ”Euthanasia has as much to do with murder as making love has to do with rape.” She became a board member of the society and was instrumental in ensuring a ban on the publication and distribution of Final Exit was overturned.

Simons said she wanted to stay alive until prime minister John Howard lost office.

She loved theatre, films, music, conversation and books and one of her accommodation requirements was for it to be near a library.

Dorothy Simons, who died last month of natural causes, is survived by her children Tony and Clarissa, three grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. Ru Simons died in 1996.

This obituary first appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald.