Julie was a teenager when she died. While the women's movement had little effect on me as a teenager, aside from in spirit and fear, and by watching how the sophisticated girls acted at school, it certainly had more impact on me than it did on my country cousin Julie. The five children in Julie's family, of which she was the fourth born, had come in a six-year spurt. The quickest period needed to produce five children, not necessarily at the advantage of the mother or father, to mental health or general levels of stress for the family.   In 1978 I lost my virginity. A sordid scene of over-investment and some grief at the sight of the blood staining the sheets. His grief. He thought I was taking this in my stride, that I was experienced, and now hoped, I suppose, that I wouldn't be too clinging and needy. And was mean and cold to me, just in case. Julie was only a couple of years younger than me, although I had always imagined her to be much younger, as young as my sister; which was close enough to a lifetime away for some of those adolescent years.   In 1978 Julie died. The foetus she had carried to nearly full term killed her because it had died and poisoned her whole system. It died because she had not cared for herself as a pregnant woman. She had continued to wear tight jeans and had not had any check-ups or any medical attention. She had hidden the fact of her pregnancy from the world; she told nobody. My advantage over her was that I lived in a city, where I could go fairly anonymously to a family planning clinic and get the pill (not that I ever did, successfully). Julie lived in a small country town a couple of hours drive from Perth where there was probably only one doctor and it was likely to be scary to admit to needing any help about contraception or pregnancy. So she hid it, from herself, effectively. She died.   In 1970 Germaine Greer published her feminist classic, The Female Eunuch. The racier girls at my single-sex private school had read it by 1972, and had borrowed from it to formulate a radical stance. On the surface, at least. They were comfortable with that stringency, that hard-edged idea of being an independent girl-woman, an unpopular position. These girls also read Chairman Mao's Little Red Schoolbook and danced around in glee and made banners to celebrate the election of the Whitlam Government in 1972, the first Labor Government in Australia in a bloody long time.   How is it that a girl who was old enough to vote, to have left school, to have a job, was too afraid to deal with the repurcussions of her sexual activity? Once pregnant, she must have known it, so I can only presume that she made a deliberate choice to ignore what was going on in her body. Wasn't there anyone she could have trusted her information with? Not a friend, a sister, her mother or aunt who had also become pregnant before marriage? Was it so shameful to be pregnant, in a society that was beginning to accept single mothers, a community that after feminist interventions into areas of health and welfare was able to support abortion clinics that operated out in the open.   I never was pregnant: I never had to test myself.   Julie, fifty years after her grandmother's experience, after a feminist revolution, was worse off than everyone who came before her. She lost her life from her shame. Her grandmother, in 1929, was able to live with her baby for nine months. Can you believe this? This girl wasn't a baby herself: she was a clever, quiet, compassionate young woman.