About Edna Ryan

Edna Ryan achieved national prominence in 1974 when she presented the WEL submission to the National Wage Case, arguing that women should receive the same minimum rate of pay as men.

Now, more than four decades later, we all still celebrate this major breakthrough in the long history of equal pay, and the life of the truly remarkable woman who made it happen.

As Edna grew up she experienced at first hand the great contradiction of the family wage system.

Edna was politicised by the fact that her mother, as a woman and the family breadwinner, could earn just over half the wage paid to a man.

When she left school at the age of 16 and gained employment as a clerk typist, she found that women were second class citizens in the office.

They could earn only two thirds of the male wage and had no access to a promotion because they were expected to leave their job after a few years to marry and have children. 

Unlike their male counterparts they could not be both workers and parents, have a career and be economically independent.

Undaunted, in 1965 Edna persuaded her union to take a claim for equal pay to the New South Wales Industrial Commission on behalf of a small group of white collar women workers in her workplace. 

When the union won the case however, it made an agreement with the employer that there would not be a flow on to other groups of eligible white collar women in the industry. 

It made a similar agreement in relation to the equal pay decisions of 1969 and 1972.

But Edna did not give up. In 1973, she joined the newly formed Women’s Electoral Lobby and found her true political home. 

With a group of like-minded young women she used her union experience and knowledge of the industrial relations system to prepare and present the now famous submission on the minimum wage to the National Wage Case in 1974.

By 1985, when she was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Sydney in recognition of her services to women, Edna had become a feminist icon. 

Her views on industrial relations were sought by politicians and trade unionists of both sexes. 

When she retired to Canberra in 1991 she initiated research into the impact of enterprise bargaining and superannuation on women workers. 

She died in 1997 aged 92, knowing that she had made women’s employment issues front page news.

Edna Ryan was a shrewd political strategist and a source of inspiration, vision, and strength to the Women’s Electoral Lobby. 

She not only inspired all who her met her with her warmth, wit and optimism, great intelligence and common sense and her unquenchable energy, she also trained countless women in the art of politics and encouraged others to become trade union activists. 

She was guided by the belief that women could achieve change only by taking up the cudgels themselves.

This is her great legacy.

Lyndall Ryan, 2004