On Sunday 3 March, Brenda Richards, one of CSMC’s founding members and inaugural Treasurer, died at the age of 85. Brenda’s work in the late 1960s campaigning for the rights of ‘unwed mothers’ and their children set the course for a remarkable life of public service that changed the way government and the community viewed and treated women and families.
Brenda met fellow CSMC founder Rosemary West at the unmarried mothers branch of Parents Without Partners (PWP), and it soon became apparent to both women that their goals were quite different to those of PWP. Their focus wasn’t on re-partnering, it was on fighting for a fairer go for single mothers and their children.
In 1969, the first meeting of what would become CSMC was held, with Rosemary as Convener and Brenda as Treasurer.
The first order of business was to write to the Commonwealth Minister for Social Security, William Wentworth, demanding that the widow’s pension be extended to unmarried mothers.
Brenda was a woman who saw injustice not just in terms of how it impacted her, but every woman in the same situation. In 1969, social security inequity was leading to dire poverty for unwed mothers and forcing many to involuntarily relinquish their babies.
At the time, social security payments were available to some women we now call ‘single mothers’ – widows, deserted wives and women whose husbands were incarcerated or in mental institutions – but those deemed ‘unwed mothers’ were excluded, along with women who ‘abandoned’ their marriage (often due to violence).
“I went into the Welfare Department to get the pension and they said, ‘You can’t get it because you are a single mother’,” Brenda explained in an interview, later in life. Brenda demanded to see the legislation that said that, and they showed it to her.
“That will have to change,” Brenda announced before marching out.
And thanks to Brenda and the other stalwart founders of CSMC, it did change. In 1972, the Federal Government announced the introduction of welfare payments to ‘never married single mothers’ (once the baby was six months old) on a near equal basis with widows. It was a start.
Back in the early days of CSMC, as it is today, the organisation was as much about single mothers supporting each other as it was advocacy, something Brenda relished and benefited from.
Brenda had been born in country Victoria and had left school at 13, working in a cannery before embarking on a trip around the east coast of Australia as an itinerant worker, picking fruit and working in domestic service, before relocating to Melbourne where she gave birth to her two daughters. In her early days in Melbourne, Brenda lived in a rooming house, sharing a room with another single mother so they could help each other out with things like babysitting.
Brenda was inspired by her fellow single mothers to finish high school, followed by a degree at Monash University.
In addition to her work in single mother advocacy, Brenda worked for 25 years as the Senior Psychiatric Social Worker in the Children’s Court Clinic.
A creative and solutions-focused way of thinking led Brenda, in 1986, to develop a step-family program for parents whose children were before the courts. The program supported families and resulted in greater awareness of the structural problems they faced.
Brenda went on to become the Vice-President of the Victorian Council of Social Services and a board member of the Australian Council of Social Services. She also served on the board of the Victorian Adoption Network Information and Self-Help Group (VANISH).
She was also passionate about her local community in St Kilda, where she lived for 60 years. She was involved in so many causes and was a very well-known personality – she will be missed greatly there too.
In 2011, Brenda was acknowledged for her work when she was inducted into the Victorian Honour Roll of Women. This was followed a few years later by her appointment as an Ambassador for Women by the Labor Party.
In 2021, Brenda received an OAM for service to the community through social welfare organisations, including Council of Single Mothers and their Children.
A writer at heart, Brenda also penned two crime novels under the name of Bebe Chardis, Getting Ahead and Kava Flow: A Kip Kelly Adventure. Her other books, some autobiographical, include Adventures of a Skitterer, Girls on the Track, and Travels with Grandma.
Few people leave a legacy as profound as that of Brenda Richards. Her fierce campaigning and refusal to accept social injustice lives on in the work of Council of Single Mothers and their Children, an organisation now 55 years old, and in many of the rights and the dignity that single mothers and their children enjoy today.
Vale Brenda Richards OAM.
