The Liberal member for Northcott, Jim Cameron, agreed: “the government was proposing to “knock down the bedroom door and invade the sanctum”.

When recounting this debate, I tend to repeat the place and date, just to make sure those listening people don’t think I’ve suddenly shifted topic to medieval England. It’s Sydney. It’s 1981.

Even rape on the streets was explained away. Consider the case of two nurses, trying to make their midnight start on a Sydney hospital ward. They missed the only bus. They accepted a ride. They were raped. Hearing the case in 1973, the judge, Mr Justice (Jack) Lee, said they didn’t “really deserve much sympathy”. He said: “it is like placing a saucer of milk before a hungry cat and expecting it not to drink it.”

They didn’t “really deserve much sympathy ...it is like placing a saucer of milk before a hungry cat and expecting it not to drink it”.

Mr Justice (Jack) Lee in court talking about two rape victims, 1973

He sentenced the men to two years jail, with a non-parole of six months.

The cat reference is creepily similar to the comments made in 2006 by Sheik Taj Aldin al-Hilali, boss of Sydney’s biggest mosque. By then, the sheik’s cat-attracting “uncovered meat” was met with outrage by Muslims and non-Muslims alike. In 1973, it was an unremarkable commentary from a senior judge.

Sometimes the problems faced by women were more mundane. In the Herald’s letter’s page this week, women responded to Saturday’s article by talking of the difficulty of ordinary financial life.

It was certainly hard to get a home loan. In the early ’80s, the Commonwealth Bank refused to even consider the income earned by my partner, as she’d “fall pregnant” and therefore quit work, just as soon as the bank gave her a roof.

My partner was so angry, she stormed instantly downstairs and closed her account. I can still remember her hard stomp on every step. Go Debra! The local credit union was the beneficiary of the bank’s misogyny.

Other examples crowd in. Married women required their husband’s permission to leave the country. Until 1983, you couldn’t get a passport without his sign-off.

Until 1984, jobs were routinely advertised in two sections – for “Men and Boys” and “Women and Girls”. You can guess which column offered the larger wages.

And guess how many women there were in the House of Representatives by the end of 1975? The answer: zero. There had been one, Joan Child, but she lost in the December election.

What’s hardest to capture is the way female victims of misogyny often blamed themselves, or thought the horror of their situation was particular to themselves.

As historian Michelle Arrow points out in her gripping book The Seventies, the much-mocked “conscious-raising sessions” were crucial to developing a new attitude, particularly to sexual violence and male control.

By telling their stories in groups, women realised they were suffering under a shared system, of which their personal experience was one example.

In 2021, Australia remains a tough, unfair place for women; their lives too often stalked by harassment and violence.

Female fury exploded this week in a new way. Some are optimistic this moment will drive lasting change; others more pessimistic.

The lesson from the past: change is possible. The commonplace can become the unthinkable in the space of a generation.

It’s happened before and it can happen again – driven by courageous women, armed with a righteous rage.