Early in the 20th Century the women of Broken Hill fought strike breakers with axes and broom handles. Rebel Women tells more such stories right up to the 1980s, challenging conventional views of working class women and their struggles.

None of the struggles in this book were part of a generalised, revolutionary struggle to transform the whole of society. Nonetheless, they reveal the potential for unity between male and female workers, and the possibilities for struggle to begin to challenge the oppressive roles which are central to women’s oppression.

hey also reveal the unbridgeable gulf between working women and the women of the capitalist class, against which workers must struggle for every improvement in their lives. They show how women can emerge as leaders of strikes and campaigns. Finally they demonstrate the possibilities for overcoming, in the course of the fight, sexist prejudices among their male workmates.

Such lessons are forgotten or ignored in much feminist writing today. But they leap out at us from the history of these rebel women.

In the state-run prison that was early New South Wales, pockets of capitalism sprang up like sturdy weeds. With them came wage labour and class struggle. Australian workers were organising well before the gold rushes, and later a mass labour movement confronted the employers across the continent, opening the way for bitter confrontations.

Controversy surrounds the colonial labour movement because of its racism and sexism, but this book sheets home the main blame for both reactionary ideologies to the ruling class. And despite many criticisms, the author renews pioneering labour historian Brian Fitzpatrick’s argument that ‘the effort of the organised working class
. . . was an effort to achieve social justice.’

This book uncovers new aspects to Australia's history of struggle, and offers interesting and provocative interpretations. Just as important, it tells an engrossing story, which makes for lively reading.

Professor Verity Burgmann
Political Science Department
University of Melbourne

United We Stand
Class Struggle in Colonial Australia
isbn 0 9580795 5 2 rrp $20

EDITED BY 
PETER LOVE &  PAUL STRANGIO

Communist and Catholic activists recall what seemed to them a desperate struggle between liberty and tyranny, for the future of the labour movement and the security of the Australian people. 

Labor people remember their party tearing itself apart. Skilled historians explore some of the significant events and issues that scarred a generation and degraded our political culture with simplistic certitudes. 

As so many of our current public debates resemble school-yard squabbles, this book is a salutary reminder that politics can be about principles that matter.

arguing the cold war 
isbn 0 9577352 6 X  rrp $20

BY LES LOUIS

In this timely addition to Australian cold war histories, Les Louis has given a comprehensive analysis of Menzies' 'national security state' in the early 1950s. 

He argues compellingly that, in addition to outlawing communists and readying the nation for war, Menzies strove to position capital and the state to usher in a new dawn of capitalism down under - at the expense of labour.

Menzies' Cold War 
96 pp isbn 0 9577352 7 8  rrp $20