Beatrice Faust was an iconoclastic public intellectual. I first encountered her through her columns in the Weekend Australian in the 1990s. She was by then a standard-bearer for second-wave feminism, at a time when public conversations about feminism were defined by inter-generational conflict.
She was also a brilliant, strategic activist. Her brainchild, the Women’s Electoral Lobby (WEL), transformed Australian politics. She could be bossy: at the inaugural Sydney meeting for WEL in 1972, she was asked “why is it that you are always right?” Bea (as she was known) later told a friend that she replied, “because I do my homework and keep my cool”…
