Portrait of Anne Summers

Anne Summers AO (b. 1945) is the author of the bestselling Damned Whores and God's Police (1975), a landmark feminist text. Summers became involved in women's rights while studying politics at the University of Adelaide, and was one of five founders of the Women's Liberation Movement group in Adelaide in 1969. After moving to Sydney, she was part of a cooperative that established Australia's first refuge for domestic violence victims. As a journalist for The National Times she investigated NSW prisons, which led to a royal commission and a Walkley Award for Summers. Appointed head of the Office for the Status of Women in 1983, Summers was instrumental in the passage of the Anti-Discrimination Act; in the 1990s she worked as an adviser to Prime Minister Paul Keating. In New York from 1986 to 1992, Summers was editor-in-chief of Ms magazine; and later edited the Good Weekend. Author of eight books, her memoir Unfettered and Alive was published in 2018 and she is a columnist for the Sydney Morning Herald.

These portraits by Carol Jerrems were taken in January 1974, while Summers was working intensely on Damned Whores and God's Police in her Birchgrove flat. Summers has said the portraits capture her anxiety about this project as well as the steeliness that enabled her to complete it.

Purchased 2012
© Ken Jerrems and the Estate of Lance Jerrems