Virginia Haussegger
Unfinished Revolution
NewSouth Books, 2025
In 1975, the fight was alive. It was the year the United Nations declared International Women’s Year as a marker of progress and aspiration. Fifty years on, award-winning journalist Virginia Haussegger shines a light on the feminist revolution in Australia, capturing its spirited momentum and a fatigued lag.
Unfinished Revolution tells a fresh story of feminist action in this country, from the largest women’s protest rally – March4Justice in 2021 – to the dynamic Australian Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1970s. With a focus on gender and power in politics and the media, from national consciousness raising to shifting media narratives, this book is an exploration of what feminist change looks like.
“Here is contemporary history at its best. Virginia Haussegger presents Australian feminism as a promise of liberation that gutsy, passionate and brilliant women have pursued not in waves but persistently, across eras and generations. Unfinished Revolution should be compulsory reading for anyone serious about understanding, in its historical and global context, Australia’s own #MeToo “moment” of 2021 as well as the wider possibilities for a resurgent feminism amid continuing gender discrimination, male violence against women and anti-feminist backlash.”
Wonder Woman
The myth of 'having it all'
Allen & Unwin, 2005
A book for women about how the conscious and unconscious choices we make in our ambitious and focused 20s and 30s around the big issues of career, love and sex ultimately shape and define us.
It's your choice, right? Whether or not you have a career and children?
Can today's women really have it all', or have we all been duped? When did the superwomen of the 80s become the wondering women of the new millennium? And where have all our achievements left us?
When leading journalist Virginia Haussegger, frustrated and angry about her own childlessness, wrote an opinion piece for a major metropolitan newspaper she could never have anticipated the Pandora's Box she was opening. By outing' her own personal pain and confusion Virginia unwittingly set off a heated public debate about a raft of issues including whether and/or how feminism had failed women, where it had left us when it came to having children, and whether indeed career women' should simply quit their whingeing and shut up about the whole damn business. After all it was their choice wasn't it?
Virginia pulls no punches as she explores just how the big choices we make in our twenties, thirties and forties about career, love, sex, fertility and motherhood ultimately shape and define us whether we like it or not. In this passionate, compelling, thoroughly researched and at times confronting exploration Virginia reflects on her own life and those of the many women who have let her into their hearts and minds, as she examines the impact these major, life-altering decisions is having on individuals and on society as a whole.
Wonder Woman is about real choices - or the lack thereof; the women being forced to make them and how these choices will shape our future.
About the Author
Virginia Haussegger AM is an award-winning journalist and gender equity advocate whose extensive media career spans four decades. She has reported around the globe for prime-time Australian news programs on Channel Seven and Channel Nine and was lead anchor of ABC TV News Canberra for 15 years. Virginia publishes across Australian media, with commentary in The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and The Canberra Times. She is a Member of the Order of Australia and was 2019 ACT Australian of the Year. Her first book, Wonder Woman: The Myth of ‘Having It All’, was published in 2005.
