The Australian Women's Register

As early as 1916 Irene Greenwood was sensitized to issues of social justice sharing her mother’s concern for the oppression of Aborigines and women. In 1920 she participated in Perth’s first strike by civil servants marking the beginning of a long career in political activism. In 1931 she moved from Perth to Sydney where she began a career in broadcasting, at the same time developing a radical political consciousness and experience in the women’s movement. Returning to Perth in 1935 she worked on the ABC’s Women’s Session and then moved to commercial radio instituting the popular Woman to Woman programme. Greenwood retired from radio in 1953. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, she intensified her involvement in the women’s and peace movements, traveling as a delegate to national conferences and forums and in 1965 to The Hague and Zurich for the Golden Jubilee Congress of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. She edited Peace and Freedom the official organ for Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom until she was into her seventies. Locally Greenwood was party to the formation of the Western Australian Council for Equal Pay and Opportunity and edited Equal Pay News for the duration of the organization’s existence. She participated in the foundation of Western Australian branches of the Family Planning Association, the Abortion Law Repeal Association, Women’s Liberation and Women’s Electoral Lobby. Greenwood expressed a special love for history, organising displays of the founders of the Women’s Movement and documenting the history of Western Australian women’s organizations and feminism. She bestowed a vast archive of unique and rare material relating to women and the peace movement to Murdoch University.

(As Giles (1999) notes Greenwood publicly changed her date of birth to 1899 to coincide with the year that non-Indigenous women won the vote in Western Australia)