Growing up in Orange, in country New South Wales, Wendy McCarthy was the oldest child of two. Her mother was very young and her father struggled with alcoholism. Now looking back, McCarthy says she held a lot of pressure and responsibility early on.
“I do see myself differently, and I do see that independence, and I see the longing always– the curiosity and the longing for the adventure of pursuing,” McCarthy tells Women’s Agenda’s on the It Takes Boobs podcast, a conversations initiative in partnership with Stella Insurance.
“Curiosity is a big part of my life and sometimes that means I went on boards where I had absolutely no qualifications – that I could see– but someone else saw something in me. And what I say to the young women: when anyone asks you to do something and they think you can, you probably can,” she says.
An influential business leader, advocate, author and founding member of the Women’s Electoral Lobby, McCarthy first started off her career studying education and becoming a teacher.
“I knew that I’d always be a teacher of some sort,” says Wendy. “And of course I didn’t realise then that the trap for young women like me was that we were so thrilled with our teachers’ college scholarships that we didn’t have to pay a bond back if we got married.”
“It was only about ten or fifteen years later that I realised they were actually giving women jobs and men careers,” she says.
“We were so happy to be educated that I don’t think we thought about it until we suddenly got sidelined if we had a child.”
In her transition from teaching to political lobbying and advocacy for women’s rights, Wendy established the New South Wales branch of the Women’s Electoral Lobby in 1972.
Through this work, she is well-known for her successful fight to get hospitals to allow husbands into the labour room during their wife’s birth. Wendy has also been a fierce advocate for abortion law reform in the women’s liberation movement in Australia.
“So, with the Women’s Electoral Lobby, I couldn’t wait for the revolution,” says McCarthy. “I wanted reform right now and that’s still me.”
“And really, no woman can be successful unless she’s in charge of her reproductive rights– unless she has reproductive rights. That’s the big movement, and I got there in tiny steps, but they were winning steps.”
In 1978, McCarthy crossed the divide between lobbying into politics when she was appointed to the Women’s Advisory Council to advise Malcolm Fraser.
Her voice has also been loud regarding getting women employed at the ABC. In 1983, she asked them why they’d never employed a female and they responded that women’s voices weren’t authoritative enough– to which McCarthy replied that her voice was so ‘let’s change it’ and she did.
Detailing her extraordinary journey, Wendy’s memoir ‘Don’t Be Too Polite,Girls’ came out in March 2022. She says she largely wanted it to be “a personal social history” that honours the truth and the people who helped her get to where she is.
“There’s something redemptive about belonging to a long line of women who question where they fit and decide to redesign it,” she says.
Far too often, women’s stories of resilience and leadership go untold. And we know that so often, it’s women at the forefront of the brave push for progress. With this new Women’s Agenda podcast series, ‘It Takes Boobs’, supported by Stella Insurance, we’re challenging the typical sexist trope of it “taking balls” to get big things done.