Born Ann Fairhurst Cooper in Deniliquin, New South Wales in 1945, the oldest of the six children of AHF and EF Cooper, Summers grew up in a strict Catholic household in Adelaide, South Australia, and was educated at a Catholic school in Adelaide. In her autobiography, she writes that her father was an alcoholic and that she had a difficult relationship with her mother. Leaving school at 17, Summers left home to take up a position in a bank in Melbourne. She then worked as a bookshop assistant until 1964 when she returned to Adelaide, enrolling at the University of Adelaide in 1965 in an arts degree in politics and history. After becoming pregnant during a brief relationship in 1965, and refused a referral for a termination by her Adelaide doctor, she arranged an expensive abortion in Melbourne but it was incomplete. She returned to her doctor in Adelaide and was referred to an Adelaide gynaecologist to complete the abortion safely. She credits this experience as a key influence on her later work on behalf of women.
Career
While at university, Summers became a member of the Labor Club, later becoming aligned with the radical student movement and in marching against the Vietnam War. On 24 April 1967 she married a fellow student, John Summers, and the couple moved to a remote Aboriginal reserve where he worked as a teacher. Following an incident at her wedding Summers became estranged from her father, and never returned to her maiden name despite the short life of her marriage. In December 1969, Summers left her marriage and in 1969 became one of a group of five women to form a Women's Liberation Movement group in Adelaide. Other Women's Liberation Movement groups were being established around Australia: an equal pay submission in the name of the movements was submitted to the Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Commission in Melbourne in 1969, and a WLM meeting was held in Sydney in January 1970. The group held their first national conference in May 1970, at the University of Melbourne, with 70 feminists attending. Moving to Sydney in 1970, Summers and other WLM members squatted in two derelict houses owned by the Anglican Diocese of Sydney, turning them into the Elsie Women's Refuge to provide shelter to women and children who were victims of domestic violence. Summers received a postgraduate scholarship to do a PhD, which she used to write the book Damned Whores and God's Police which looked at the history of women in Australia. She was offered a position to work as a journalist on The National Times, where she wrote an investigation into NSW prisons which led to a royal commission and to Summers' being awarded a Walkley Award. Summers was appointed a political adviser to Labor prime ministerBob Hawke, heading the Office of the Status of Women in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet from late 1983 to early 1986. From 1986 to 1992, Summers lived in New York, becoming editor-in-chief of Ms. magazine, and, following a management buyout, co-owned the magazine, which eventually succumbed to a Moral Majority campaign and went bankrupt. She then returned to Australia and was appointed editor of the "Good Weekend" magazine, in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. She was also an advisor on women’s issues to Labor prime minister Paul Keating prior to the 1993 federal election. Summers joined the board of Greenpeace Australiain 1999 and from 2000 to 2006 was chair of Greenpeace International. Since 2017, she once again lives in New York.
Awards
1976: Walkley Award for the Best Newspaper Feature Story, The National Times, Sydney
Her long-term partner is Chip Rolley, the 2010 creative director of the Sydney Writers' Festival, former editor of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's opinion program The Drum, who has been Senior Director of Literary Programs at PEN America since May 2017.
Appearances
Summers was on the program for three events at the 2017 Brisbane Writers Festival in Brisbane, Queensland.
