Our special guest bloggers, Ellie and Kerrie, are our Wikipedians-in-Residence. Below they share some of their experiences across the first two months of the project.

State Library Victoria has engaged us to address gender bias in Wikipedia and the Library’s records by improving the representation of Australian feminist activists and movements. The project, titled Radical Acts, funded by Wikimedia Australia, draws from the Library’s extensive collection of Australian feminism and Women’s Liberation materials.

To begin with we looked at the Library’s collections and resources and collated a database of activists and trailblazers. We assessed the coverage of these people on Wikipedia and found many had pages already, however there was a lack of connectivity between these pages. The stories of feminist acts in Victoria were fragmented, so we set about improving the content.

We also considered the definition of a ‘radical act’ where the measure of radical is dependent on the context of the act, the era it occurred, and what was considered socially acceptable at the time.

Chaining yourself to the court of arbitration to protest equal pay for equal work might still be considered a touch on the radical side today, yet nothing like it would have seemed in 1969 when Zelda D’Aprano did it. For the first wave feminists in the late 1800s colony of Victoria, such as Henrietta Dugdale, publicly voicing the opinion that women should have the same right to vote as men was radical. In fact, Dugdale was considered more extreme than other feminists because she wore trousers, which was entirely radical for a woman of that era.

So we set about researching individual women, which can be complicated. Women were often omitted from official histories, and then, when married, would often change their name. Henrietta Dugdale was married three times and had four surnames at different times of her life. The name she used whist making history in the suffrage movement was not the name used for her birth, nor death.

For the same reason, when researching Doris Blackburn we might miss her work as Vida Goldstein’s election campaign secretary when she was known as Doris Hordern. Additionally, she was also known as Mrs Maurice Blackburn, and, as her husband was also well known, there is a lot more information to sift through. When people are less well known, we have to look to genealogies to properly attribute the contributions of the unnamed wives of men. As I said, complicated!

Our research has lead us to incredible individuals, such as that of Helen Hart, above, who from 1880 gave public lectures on women’s rights and suffrage in small towns across much of the southeast of Australia. However, the tragedy of her story is one of isolation from the wider movement, with her final years spent writing letters of complaint to the media that her exhaustive decades of work were unappreciated by the suffrage movement.

Zelda D’Aprano can similarly be viewed as an individual force when she protested the equal pay case by chaining herself to the court. The act was part of a larger story, when Alva Geikie and Thelma Solomon joined her ten days later, when all three chained themselves to the commonwealth building. Zelda’s story is a credit to the first wave of feminists who raised equal pay as an issue, and Muriel Heagney, who lived across the first and second waves, working tirelessly for many decades fighting for equal pay, laying the groundwork for Zelda to build upon.

The project’s aim is to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of these individuals and their radical acts as they had an irrefutable impact on the feminist movements, social change, and in turn, on our lives today. To do this, we must also expand the story of when these individuals interacted, working together or against each other, forming or dissolving groups, and track the stories of the societal shifts, only possible when collective acts of individuals create momentum. Wikipedia and Wikidata are ideal for capturing the interconnected nature of these social events, as we can link people to organisations, events, and other people to create an ecosystem of complex histories.

We are also able to illuminate these stories with the State Library’s collection, adding images, or adding Wikidata items and Wikipedia pages so that they refer to SLV catalogue records and relevant collections. The ultimate goal of creating these linkages between wiki platforms and library records has been to improve the visibility of and access to the library’s significant collections related to Australian feminist activism.