'Bar Suffragette': Merle Thornton

Merle Thornton speaking about the protest in 1965.

I am sad to hear of the death of Merle Thornton, Queensland feminist activist and academic, who died last year, aged 93.

I never met her, but she appears in a book I am currently writing on wine and women. She achieved so many things in her life, but she came to my attention as one of the ‘bar suffragettes’.

In March 1965, Thornton (a philosophy postgraduate at the University of Queensland) and Rosalie ‘Ro’ Bognor (who was studying sociology and anthropology) decided to protest against the Liquor Act, which forbad serving alcoholic drinks to women, minors, and lunatics. Thornton and Bognor used a dog-chain and padlock to chain themselves to the railings of the Brisbane’s Regatta Hotel in protest of not been allowed to drink in the premise. Thornton later recalled, that

The bar staff call the publican; the publican calls the police. The TV crews (we’ve tipped them off) are filming away; the bar is brilliantly lit for the cameras. Our men’s auxiliary hands around Gestetner’d leaflets explaining our reasons, the principal one being adult women ought not to be protected against their will. Adult women should not be treated as children; it’s the fastest way to make children of them. The local uniformed police come, but when we don’t do as they ask, they soon retire and are replaced by plain clothes police, two of them. They hammer off the chains, but we decline to leave. They hector, bully and threaten arrest. They even, when getting tired, try pleading (as in ‘Don’t make a fool of me, lady’). After about an hour of this, they must have decided it is arrest or back off and, to our astonishment, they back off.

An article in the Canberra Times quoted one MP as saying not only that they should have been arrested but ‘their children investigated, and their husbands given psychiatric tests’. Journalists were obsessed with their appearance and (deceptive) domesticity, telling readers that ‘they were not unattractive but neither could be described as stunning beauty [sic]’ and ‘both run neat, well-kempt homes, surrounded by trim gardens’. Thornton complained that ‘we had death threats, we had obscene messages, we were supposed to be sexually abnormal (a woman who wants to go into a public bar can’t really be a woman)’.

On the surface, it was a mild protest, but their actions reverberated throughout Australia, the UK, Czechoslovakia, and Russia. This was because pubs are male domains: as Thornton later recalled, ‘women in public bars signify the acceptance of women into public social life’.

Thornton later founded the Equal Opportunities for Women Association, which was an ‘organisation of transition between the older style of feminism and the Women’s Liberation Movement’.  She believed that, by being an organisation founded in direct action, it was ‘the world first of those direct symbolic actions which later came to characterise the Women’s Liberation Movement’. The Association was successful in eradicating the Marriage Bar, whereby women in the civil service had to ‘retire’ on marrying. In 1972, she also founded the Women's Studies course at the University of Queensland, which was the first of its kind in Australia.

Sad to hear that you have left us, Merle Thornton. I wish I could have met you.

I recommend you watch this:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-08-21/merle-thornton-dies-aged-93/104252220