Sheilas: 28 Years On

I'd heard about burning the bra and there was Germaine, a full grown woman, I think it was probably the first time I'd ever seen a woman not wearing a bra. It really was, in some sense, really liberating to think that you didn't have to constrain yourself.

– Psychologist Aloma Parker on Germaine Greer in the early 1970s

I gave up modelling and became a concrete worker because I wanted a job where I could be independent, and use my body, and have workmates. You've just got no idea the difference between being a model and a concrete worker. It's like being dead and alive.

– Concrete worker Miriam Cameron in 1977 TV series Women

It seems silly now but it was considered hugely radical. There was something almost obscene about women talking about their needs.

– Journalist Marcia Russell on a 1970s Broadsheet magazine cover article, in which women talked about taking pharmaceutical drugs to deal with life in suburbia

I look back and think why did we put up with that?... I guess it's given me, my whole life, that anger against anyone being abused.

– Donna Awatere Huata on her mother being physical abused by her husband

...Stroppy, sassy women then, they're no less engaging today.

– Shonagh Lindsay on the subjects of Sheilas, The NZ Herald, 2004