The 80 Australian women who dared to sign their names before Steinem's sisterhood

For anyone tracking the movement of capital and power in Oceania, the obituary pages can read like a ledger of who got to write the rules. Gloria Steinem, who died this week at 92, was one of those rule-writers — but her real legacy for Australians was not the speeches or the magazine covers. It was the permission she gave a group of women in Sydney and Melbourne to do something almost unthinkable in 1972: put their names to a public confession that they had terminated a pregnancy, knowing full well the police could come knocking.

That October, the scrappy independent weekly Nation Review ran a full-page advertisement headlined “We have had abortions and are willing to admit it in the interests of legislative change”. Eighty Australian women signed it. At the time, abortion was a criminal offence in most of the country, carrying potential prison terms. These were not anonymous activists hiding behind pseudonyms. They were teachers, nurses, artists, mothers — women who calculated that the risk of prosecution was worth more than the safety of silence. The ad was a deliberate act of civil disobedience, a legal grenade thrown into the debate over a law that forced women into back alleys or overseas flights.

What outsiders may not grasp is how closely that act was tethered to Steinem’s own gamble months earlier. In the spring of 1972, the debut issue of Ms Magazine in New York published the names of 53 women who admitted to having abortions, Steinem among them, at a time when the procedure was illegal in most American states. The Australian ad was not a copycat stunt — it was an act of trans-Pacific solidarity, a signal that the feminist current running through Manhattan could reach the harbour cities of a country still clinging to British-era statutes. For the women who signed, Steinem’s name on that list was proof that shame could be converted into a political weapon.

To understand why this matters for readers of a wealth publication, consider the context. In 1972, Australia was a country where a woman’s earning power, credit access and bodily autonomy were all legally constrained. The women who signed that ad were not just making a moral statement; they were challenging the economic architecture that kept women dependent on men — on husbands for mortgages, on fathers for approval, on employers for the right to keep working while pregnant. The Nation Review ad was a precursor to the feminist campaigns of the 1970s and 1980s that would eventually pry open boardrooms, law firms and bank lending desks. The capital that now flows through Australian family offices, the women who sit on ASX boards, the female founders raising venture rounds — they all stand on the shoulders of those 80 signatures.

What the ad signals about Oceania’s wealth story is often overlooked. The region’s fortunes are built on mining, property and agriculture — industries that have historically been male-dominated and conservative. Yet the most significant capital shift in recent decades has been demographic: women now control a growing share of inherited wealth, and they are outliving men by an average of four years. The legal changes those 80 women demanded were the first cracks in a system that treated female bodies as property and female income as supplementary. When a Sydney heiress now sits on a family council, or a Māori trust appoints a female chair, they are beneficiaries of a battle that began with women willing to risk jail for a newspaper ad.

Steinem’s death closes a chapter, but the Australian story she helped inspire is still being written. The Nation Review ad did not immediately change the law — abortion remained illegal in most states for years, and it took until 2019 for the last Australian jurisdiction, New South Wales, to fully decriminalise it. But the act of naming themselves created a template for accountability that echoes in everything from the #MeToo declarations to the modern push for gender pay gap transparency. For the billionaire class and the aspirational wealthy alike, the lesson is simple: the most durable capital is not money — it is the courage to sign your name when the law is wrong. Steinem gave Australian women that template. They used it well, and the dividends are still compounding.