Radical Books: Dale Spender, There’s Always Been a Women’s Movement This Century (1983)

History Workshop ~ Radical Books

HWO’s Radical Books series shares subversive, seminal, and seismic texts that have shaped understandings of radical history, provoked controversy in their time, or sparked social change.

At the tail end of 2023, The Guardian lamented: ‘we’ve lost Dale Spender‘. Very early in her career, Australian author, scholar, and teacher Spender (1943-2023) wrote an internationally acclaimed feminist critique on how male superiority was embedded in and supported by language, Man Made Language (1980). She went on to write over 30 books and achieved for herself a radical feminist reputation … Her call to view feminist organising as part of one long movement that unites all who join is at the heart of her work There’s Always Been a Women’s Movement This Century (1983) and remains as critical today as it did at the time of the book’s publication.

‘I understood that a male dominated society will not forage for us the links between one generation of women and the next and that unless we take matters into our own hands and actively make those links we are just as effectively divided from older women, as we are from women of the past.’