Dangerous Ideas: Women's Liberation - Women's Studies - Around the World

In the preface, Susan Magarey describes Dangerous Ideas as ‘A memoir, a – highly selective – curriculum vitae, and a history (ix)’. She then tells the story of being invited by Daphne Gollan to the first meeting of what would become the Canberra Women’s Liberation Group: ‘It was a dream of an entirely new politics. It was a dream of friendships’ (x). Dangerous Ideas is a history and memoir of that dream imbued with critical reflection, self-deprecating humour and a desire to restore to collective memory crucial aspects of its trajectory. It is also a story of feminist friendships and is packed with references to the contributions of others. Magarey calls the book ‘plural, haphazard and conjectural’ (ix), and while this hints at the idiosyncrasies that come with any account of a movement by a historian-participant, it does not capture the sense of order that has been brought to bear on the twenty essays, published over nearly four decades (1976–2014), that are collected here.