The Australian Women's Register

Born in Chicago, USA, Sara Dowse (nee Rosenthal) grew up in Hollywood, the daughter of an actor mother and celebrity lawyer father. Born of Jewish parents, she experienced anti-semitism in her early years, and left for Australia at nineteen (in 1958) when she married a visiting Australian footballer.

She studied Arts at Sydney University, and after experiencing sexism as a pregnant student and in society generally, she became what has been described as an ‘old-style feminist’.

She arrived in Canberra in 1968 and worked as a journalist, publisher’s field editor and tutor at the Canberra College of Advanced Education. She was a member of the Women’s Liberation Movement and the Women’s Electoral Lobby-ACT, and became the inaugural head of the Women’s Affairs Section of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet (now the Office of the Status of Women) for the Whitlam government. At the time of her appointment, she was dubbed ‘Supergirl’ by the press.

Dowse became spokesperson for 130 organisations that opposed the removal of lawfully performed abortions from the medical benefits scheme.

After a publicised resignation from the public service, she worked as a teacher at The Australian National University, a reviewer for newspapers and journals, and became a writer of novels and short stories. She has also been an interviewer for the National Library of Australia’s Oral History Program. She was forty-five when her first novel, West Block, based on her experiences in the Prime Minister’s department, was published in 1983.

Dowse’s other books include Silver City (1984), Schemetime (1990), Sapphires (1994) – a largely autobiographical work about rediscovering Jewish roots – and Digging (1996). She has contributed to Worth Her Salt: Women at Work in Australia (1982); Leaving School, It’s Harder for Girls (1983); Women, Social Welfare and the State (1983), Sisterhood is Global (1984) and Home Grown Anthology (1993).

She was a member of Seven Writers – a group of seven Canberra-based writers whose work vividly portrayed life ‘beneath the surface of Canberra’ – and as part of this collective she contributed to Canberra Tales (1988), republished as The Division of Love in 1996, an anthology of short stories about life in Canberra. The work received an ACT Bicentennial Award.

Dowse has also been awarded the AIPS/APSA Women in Politics Prize (1982); 3M/Royal Blind Society Talking Book of the Year (1994); ACT Book of the Year (1995); ACT Book Reviewer of the Year (1995 and joint winner in 1997 with Marion Halligan). She was short-listed for the Steele Rudd Award (1995) and long-listed for the IMPAC Dublin Prize (1996). She has also been the recipient of an Australia Council fellowship; a Harold White Fellowship (1991) and an ACT Literary Fellowship (1996).

Sara Dowse has five children.