Feral women -- that's what we were: Tracing the transnational circuits of mobility which linked Women's Land in Europe and Australia in the 1970s.

The emergence of women’s liberation politics in the 1970s prompted the development of a thriving women’s culture across Australasia, Europe and North America.  Many aspects of feminist activism and social space were women-only, offering new opportunities for women who already identified as lesbian and opening up spaces for others to explore same-sex desire for the first time.  In this context, women-only rural communities, or Women’s Lands, were established across North America and elsewhere in this period, in an attempt to forge self-sufficient, co-operative communities free from the ideological and physical pollution of patriarchal society.  While many of the US Women’s Lands were well documented at the time and more recently, those in Australasia and Europe have received less attention.

This paper will draw on oral history interviews and archival research to explore the establishment of Women’s Lands in Australia, Wales and Denmark.  It will explore the ways in which local environmental factors and the unique cultural contexts in which each community was formed, shaped the different Women’s Lands in regionally distinct ways.  However, these Women’s Lands were also connected both by a shared international feminist literature and perspective, and by circuits of mobility which drew individual women to travel between them.  Tracing these transnational circuits, this paper will explore the impact of patterns of movement on the Women’s Lands and the ways in which they facilitated the transmission of ideas and practices and the development of a shared international culture.