We are four women who decided some time ago to stop waiting for others to change the world and to commit ourselves to a plan of action aimed at resisting the worst elements of the male agenda. We are doing this by promoting a feminist agenda and pledging to form alliances with other individuals and groups with similar aims to our own.

 

Joanne Baker has a social welfare background and has worked in women's services in Britain, Canada and Australia. She is now working as a Lecturer in the School of Social Work and Community Welfare at James Cook University in Townsville, where her research interests include neo-liberalism and other contemporary challenges to feminism.

 

Coralie McLean has been involved for many years in Management Collectives for Women's Services such as Information and Referral, Rape Crisis and Women's Health. She is interested in preserving our feminist herstory, building global feminist networks and exploring the connections between local and global feminist activism.

 

Chantal Oxenham, a French woman born and raised in Vanuatu, has a particular interest in issues around the impacts on women of colonialism and post-colonialism and the effect of globalisation on the North/South divide.

 

Betty McLellan has been involved in feminist activism in the US and Australia. Combining the personal and the political, she is a feminist psychotherapist with a life-long commitment to social justice. She is the author of three books, Overcoming Anxiety (1992), Beyond Psychoppression: A Feminist Alternative Therapy (1995) and Help! I’m Living with a (Man) Boy (1999; 2006) - all written from a strong feminist perspective. She is currently working on a book on Free Speech as a feminist ethical issue.