Freda Brown

Freda Brown was born Freda Yetta Lewis in Sydney. She joined the Communist Party of Australia in 1936. She worked in her father's signwriting business, before becoming a journalist working for the Radio Times, and then later for various Communist-affiliated trade union papers. She married Bill Brown, a leading Australian Communist, in 1943.

After the Second World War, Brown joined the New Housewives Association, later known as Union of Australian Women, a Communist front, and ultimately became its president. She was instrumental in the United Nations' celebration of International Women's Year in 1975. She worked with the Women's International Democratic Federation, and was elected president at its congress in East Berlin in 1975, a position she held until 1989, when the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe led to her ouster.

Brown was a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Australia from 1968 to 1972.[1]

In 1971, Brown's husband Bill was expelled from the CPA as a member of a faction that remained loyal to the USSR after the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, a move that the party had condemned. Bill and Freda then joined the Soviet-aligned Socialist Party.[2]

Brown was the subject of SBS Television's "Australian Biography" programme,[3] which screened on 15 November 1996.

On 8 March 2004, International Women's Day, Brown, then 85, was honoured for her work against apartheid by the South African government in a ceremony in Johannesburg to mark the 10th anniversary of the end of apartheid. She had worked closely with the African National Congress women's section throughout the 1970s and 1980s when she worked with the Women's International Democratic Federation.[4]

• Obituary in the Sydney Morning Herald, 27 May 2009.