The activist's archive: Merle Thornton

When Merle Thornton and Ro Bognor chained themselves to the foot rail of the front bar of Brisbane's Regatta Hotel in March 1965 to demand the legal right for women in that state to drink alongside male patrons, their actions marked a new turn in the history of feminism. As Kay Saunders observed three decades later: ‘when you use the term “second wave” it actually started in Brisbane’ (Saunders Citation1999). In a leaflet distributed in the bar that day, the two women were at pains to articulate that their primary concern was not with the exclusion of women from drinking opportunities; they were concerned with what the legislation symbolised: women's wider exclusion from public spaces and from public life. They were staging a protest for equal citizenship, a demand that underpinned much of Thornton's subsequent career as a feminist activist.