Trailblazer is a term often used to describe progressive types who have had a profound impact on society. In the case of Wendy McCarthy, AO – the formidable champion of education and feminism, business woman, mentor and author – the term is richly deserved.
For the past 60 years she has been at the forefront of major reforms to reproductive rights legislation and national policy on women’s education and health. Australian women and men owe much to her dogged efforts.
Yet, even in retirement, 80-year-old Wendy has unfinished business. She’s fresh from the federal election campaign, in which she supported Independent Allegra Spender’s successful tilt at the seat of Wentworth; has been supporting Brittany Higgins and Grace Tame; and is relishing promoting her new memoir Don’t Be Too Polite, Girls. Campaigning on the gender pay gap also continues apace as Wendy seeks recognition for a care workforce dominated by women.
“Women are certainly better off today,” she says. “We have laws around reproductive rights and access to contraception. We don’t have equal pay but we have survival pay for most of us, and the educational opportunities for women are among the best in the world.
“But gender parity in terms of pay is yet to be achieved. We have a big opportunity to change that by looking, especially, at the care economy. Women working in early learning, child care and aged care need better working conditions and pay. If we can get that right, and better value those roles, it will produce a huge surge in Australia’s economy.”
Given what she has already accomplished in her lifetime, the smart money is on Wendy. The individual who advocated for women to have control of their birthing experience – and men to be allowed to be present – is not easily placated. In 1972 she founded the NSW branch of the Women’s Electoral Lobby and risked prosecution to campaign for the decriminalisation of abortions. By 1979 Wendy was an inaugural member of the National Women’s Advisory Council. She’s always believed that the “personal is political”, and is given to taking “the long view” – @takingthelongview is her twitter handle.
“My longest commitment has been around reproductive rights and education for women,”
“My longest commitment has been around reproductive rights and education for women,” says Wendy, who came out of semi-retirement in 2019 to help see abortion decriminalised in NSW. “I didn’t let that go until we got the law changed, and that took 50 years, so I am persistent.”
There were signs of that determination at the age of three, when the little preschooler refused to swap from writing left-handed to right. A humble country childhood, riding her horse to a one-teacher school and then boarding away from home followed. It equipped Wendy – a “resilient child” – well for her arrival at UNE in 1958, at just 16, to become the first in her family to undertake tertiary study, on a commonwealth teacher’s scholarship.
There were many milestones during that time – Wendy’s first demonstration (for more opportunities and pay for women scientists), her first taste of the respect that women of letters commanded, her first cigarette, first boyfriend, and her first experience of leadership, as a “moral tutor” at Duval College.
“I fell into university life and loved it madly from the day I got there,” Wendy says. “It was a profoundly important time in my life.
“I fell into university life and loved it madly from the day I got there,” Wendy says. “It was a profoundly important time in my life. That demo in my first year was one of the first times I recall having agency, and Duval College principal Audrey Rennison was a wonderful role model, who encouraged us to take on leadership roles.
“I came out of UNE, four years later, knowing that I had been privileged to have had a whole-of-life education, with a heightened sense of what it meant to be female but not really seeing too many barriers to women. I learnt to stand my ground, and somewhere in there was the beginning of my personal political life and, many years later, my mentoring practice.”
After starting out as a secondary school teacher in Sydney, Wendy married Gordon McCarthy (her late husband of 53 years) and worked in London and Pittsburgh before returning to Australia newly pregnant with the first of their three children.
“While I wasn’t planning to change the world then, I wasn’t planning to suffer injustice or a lack of fairness, and I had learnt to speak up,” Wendy says. “I was like a little sponge, absorbing new ideas and thoughts. Living overseas and working in different education systems, where teachers were encouraged to be political, I learnt that the job of the teacher was to ensure that we always have a fair world. I got to be a person who knew that change was possible.”
It wasn’t long before Wendy became involved in the activism that would distinguish her career.
The Women’s Electoral Lobby and Family Planning Australia roles parlayed into a variety of leadership roles in the business, government, community and not-for-profit sectors, notably as deputy chair of the ABC, and Chancellor of the University of Canberra for 10 years.
Collaboration has been key. “I love collegiality; it’s my thing, when I am running a campaign or doing something else,” Wendy says. “My life has been about collegiality and now, when I want to bring about change, I am more strategic so that that collegiality works for everyone.”
At this stage in her life, being part of “the community of women” is central to Wendy’s philosophy. “I do feel very strongly that if you are lucky enough to be 80 and healthy, like I am, it is your responsibility to try and support younger women and to try to understand what their concerns and issues are,” she says. “The best world is one in which people are supporting and mentoring each other.”
In 2011, in the Griffith Review, Wendy wrote that “the daughters of the revolution have inherited new dilemmas and many see themselves as we did: in a documentary without a script”.
But there are common dilemmas, too. “Many of the issues of a 30-year-old woman today are, superficially, quite different to mine, but they are not really,” she says. “They are about finding her voice, trusting her voice and taking agency with her voice. Older women helped me to find my voice and confidence and that is something that I must and do do. It goes with the territory, and then you are engaging with your world. My mantra is respect, safety, equity.”
Describing as “heaven” the number of women recently elected to federal parliament, Wendy says it will “require some deft management from the government to utilise the talents of these extraordinary women sitting on the crossbench”. “If they can do that, we will be a much better nation in a couple of years,” she says.
In a recent newspaper article, Wendy said: “Our gift to our daughters was the reproductive choices we did not have”. But while the position of women in society has improved, Wendy urges constant vigilance, especially in the wake of the US Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe V Wade, ending the constitutional right to abortion.
“That goes with the territory of being a good citizen; you keep your eye on the game,” she says. “When women’s leadership gets to the ideal, which is 50/50, we have a much better chance of making sure our rights are protected. I am a practising grandmother to five now, so I’m pretty experienced in this caring business. I think women have to claim that territory. We need to be paid and respected because we have a strong interest in the business of raising better citizens.”
