Dale Spender AM (22 September 1943 – 21 November 2023) was an Australian feminist scholar, teacher, writer and consultant.
In 1983, Dale Spender was co-founder of and editorial advisor to Pandora Press, the first of the feminist imprints devoted solely to non-fiction,[1] committed, according to The New York Times, to showing that "women were the mothers of the novel and that any other version of its origin is but a myth of male creation".
[3] Spender's work is "a major contribution to the recovery of women writers and theorists and to the documentation of the continuity of feminist activism and thought".
Where men perceive themselves as the dominant gender, disobedient women who fail to conform to their given inferior role are labelled as abnormal, promiscuous, neurotic or frigid.
[13] She published Writing a New World: Two Centuries of Australian Women Writers in 1988, the year when she returned to Australia, living in Brisbane, Queensland.
Spender was particularly concerned with intellectual property and the effects of new technologies: in her terms, the prospects for "new wealth" and "new learning".
[18] Announcing her death, Spender's family said that it was "a source of joy and humour in her life" that she shared a birthday with early radical feminist Christabel Pankhurst.