Professor Kim Rubenstein delivers the 53rd National Council of Women of Victoria’s Australia Day Address

Trailblazing Women and the Law research project leader, Professor Kim Rubenstein, was the invited speaker for the National Council of Women of Victoria 53rd Australia Day ceremony on January 23rd, 2014. Speaking in the Pioneer Women’s Gardens, in the Melbourne’s Domain, Professor Rubenstein said that NCWV 

… has always been intimately concerned with issues about women and the law. In Ada Norris’s excellent book we hear “In 1905 our first woman lawyer had awakened Council members to legal inequalities affecting women. Subsequently, particular aspects of this subject came before the Council. The demand for legal equality with men has grown ever since as more and more women have realized that many things they had taken for granted and considered inevitable and even right and proper were indeed unjust and discriminatory”.

Professor Rubenstein also gave the audience an update on the Trailblazing Women and the Law project and what has been achieved since the project began in 2013. Her address can be read in full at the site for the joint ANU/University of Melbourne research project with a short introduction by Dr Nikki Henningham on Tuesday, January 28th, 2014.

                                L-R Back Row: Mrs Elizabeth Chernov - NCWV Patron-in Chief,
                                Cr Cathy Oke - City of Melbourne

                                L-R Front Row: Professor Kim Rubenstein, NCWV President Sheila Byard, 

                                Photo by ‘Nuie’ Official Party