Anna Teresa Brennan (1879-1962), lawyer, was born on 2 September 1879 at Emu Creek, Victoria, thirteenth child of Mary (born Maher) and Michael Brennan, farmer. She attended the co-educational St Andrew's College, Bendigo, and in 1904 enrolled in medicine at the University of Melbourne. Her brothers Thomas and Frank were lawyers and she changed to law. On graduation (1909) she served articles with Frank Brennan & Rundle, remaining with the firm which became Frank Brennan and Co. until ultimately she was senior partner. Frank Brennan was a Member of the House of Representatives from 1911-31 and 1934-49.
Anna came from a devoutly Catholic household and Catholicism provided inspiration for her public activities. At the University she joined the Princess Ida Club, the Newman Society and the Women Graduates' Association. She became a member of the Lyceum Club and in 1916, to achieve an expanded role for Catholic women in social and political reform, she helped found the Catholic Women's Social Guild. The Guild sought equality for women in the family and in the workforce. Concentrating on the position of working women, it publicised the exploitative conditions of factory employment, advocated equal pay, urged women to join their unions and to work for a union of unions - one strong body with 'the definite purpose of having all moral and industrial wrongs righted'. Recognising women's common interests across secular and religious lines, in 1919 Anna affiliated the Guild to the Victorian National Council of Women. This departure from the inward- looking traditions of Australian Catholicism brought implacable opposition from Archbishop Mannix, and internal division. Anna Brennan, a contributor to its monthly journal Women's Social Work, and president (1918-20), was forced to resign.
In her legal practice she did general and matrimonial work. She joined the campaign to allow married women to retain their nationality and, though personally opposed to divorce, lobbied for reform of divorce law to expedite proceedings and to eliminate provisions which invited collusion. She travelled overseas in 1930 and attended the League of Nations Assembly in Geneva.
Anna joined the English chapter of the St Joan's Alliance and in 1936 was a founding member of a Melbourne branch of the Alliance, an association of Catholic lay women but not an official body of the Catholic church. It eschewed welfare work. In Brennan's words 'the work of women's organisations should be not merely remedial, nor merely charitable but must go back to the cause'. Its intentions were political, its ethos feminist; it called on Catholic women to take up the cause of equal rights for women everywhere, stressing the importance of organised action to influence political processes. One particular cause it addressed was sexual exploitation of Aboriginal women. She was president of the Alliance in 1938-45 and from 1948-62, but after 1946 as anti-Communism became the dominant Catholic concern, its influence waned. Brennan was also involved in the formation of the Century Club, a Catholic literary society. She remained an active member and honorary solicitor to the Lyceum Club, of which she was president in 1940-42.
Anna Brennan had an incisive mind and a delightful wit. She never married. Her sister May (Mary Catherine) kept house for her until her death on 11 October 1962.
Heather Radi
Sally Kennedy Faith and Feminism: Catholic Women's Struggles for Self- Expression 1985.