What does power look like when women hold it — and what does it look like when they are denied it?

Bringing together established voices and emerging writers, this volume moves between politics, media, history, and personal narrative, tracing the cultural architecture that shapes authority, visibility and resistance.

Published in the early 2010s, it captures a moment before the language of the #MeToo era fully crystallised — attentive to institutional structures, media representation, generational shifts and the uneasy performance of public womanhood. 

For readers interested in Australian public life, feminist thought, and the evolution of gender politics in the last two decades, this remains a useful snapshot of a conversation still unfolding.