Zelda D'Aprano

Zelda Fay D'Aprano (; 24 January 1928 – 21 February 2018) was an Australian feminist activist who lived in Melbourne, Victoria. She fought for better conditions and equal pay for women in workplaces. In 1969 when an equal pay court case failed in the arbitration court, D'Aprano chained herself to the doors of the commonwealth building in Melbourne. Ten days later she was joined by Alva Geikie and Thelma Solomon, when they chained themselves to the Arbitration court building. Along with Geikie and Solomon, D'Aprano went on to found the Women's Action Committee. In 2023, a statue of D'Aprano was unveiled outside Trades Hall in Melbourne.

Life

Early life D'Aprano (born Zelda Fay Orloff) grew up in a two-bedroom house in Carlton with her brother Maurice, her sister Clara and her parents Shimshon and Rachel Leah Orloff. She grew up in an Orthodox Jewish household, but her mother became a communist when D'Aprano was still a child, prompting D'Aprano to become one herself in later years. She left school before she was 14 to work in various factories, despite being placed in a gifted class at school. She was married at 16 to Charlie D'Aprano, who left her 21 years later, a daughter named Leonie. It was at these factory jobs when she first started to notice the inequalities that female workers faced, especially related to the pay gap. She was fired from several jobs for trying to better the conditions in which women worked. She joined the Communist Party in 1950 and was a member until 1971.

The next year, these three women founded the Women's Action Committee to jump start the Women's Liberation Movement in Melbourne. This organisation tried to get women more involved in activism. Zelda stated "we had passed the stage of caring about a "lady-like" image because women had for too long been polite and ladylike and were still being ignored". This led the women to take more forceful action on their path to equal pay. These same women founded the Women's Liberation Centre on Little Latrobe Street in 1972.

She kept her left-wing values, though she left the Communist Party of Australia in 1971, and criticized left movements for being male-dominated.

The Women's Action Committee kept going, and grew as it went. They travelled around Melbourne paying only 75% of the fares, because women were only given 75% of the wage of men at the time. Because women weren't allowed to drink in bars, only in lounges, they did pub crawls across Melbourne. The Committee helped arrange the first pro-choice rally in around 1975 and over 500 women attended the march.

D'Aprano was awarded a degree in Law honoris causa by Macquarie University in 2000, and was inducted into the Victorian Honour Roll of Women in 2001. She was awarded the Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) in 2004.

Death and legacy leftD'Aprano died at Rathdowne Place Carlton on 21 February 2018 aged 90 years.

A tunnel boring machine used to construct the tunneled portion of Melbourne's North East Link was named 'Zelda' in honour of D'Aprano.