The voices of women are quiet and overwhelmed,
Not listened to and disagreed with...
How long, O Lord, how long,
Before the voice of women is listened to in the land?

American feminist author Tilly Olsen, who at 94 died in the early days of this year, wrote of the silence to which she was tethered as she worked to earn a living and raise four daughters single-handedly. “These are not natural silences”, she said, “that necessary time for renewal. They are the unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into being but cannot.” Reclaiming her voice at age 50, she applied her language, insight, and intellect to the honest telling of women’s shared experiences of marriage, maternity, work, and domestic life. Where silence once excluded change, her writing opened up every possibility.

It’s over forty years since Tilly Olsen began to recount her stories. The international women’s movement has indeed delivered many gains to many women, although to many more gender equality is beyond their powerless reach, and by both necessity and default, silence continues to dictate their disadvantage.

The women of Mother Who are neither powerless nor silenced. They, with education, earning capacity, and independence of thought and action, can largely determine the quality and direction of their lives. Their stories, however, belong to mothers everywhere. Universal, commonplace, but far from ordinary, the love, joy, pain, and fear in bearing a child and rearing a family of individuals and citizens affect us profoundly and lastingly. Mothering shapes us, strengthens us, and at times utterly shatters us.

It’s as important now, as it was for Tilly Olsen nearly half a century ago, for women to tell their stories. Today, they reveal the conversations that are yet to be had: those that will determine the responsibility society must take for the raising of its children, and not simply what women might be offered to do the job themselves.

The stories of Mother Who? speak for themselves, they yield what is already. May we hear their voices, their message, and their possibilities for change.

Ms Quentin Bryce, AC
Governor of Queensland
January 2007