Freda Yetta Brown
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Freda Yatta Brown (born 1919, Sydney) is an Australian political activist who was formerly a member of the Communist Party of Australia. She is mother of Lee Rhiannon, an Australian Greens who is a member of the New South Wales Legislative Council, and was the only Australian ever awarded a Lenin Peace Prize.
Freda Brown joined the Communist Party of Australia in 1936. She worked in her father’s signwriting business, before becoming a journalist whorking for the Radio Times, and then later for various trade union papers.
After the Second World War, Freda Yatta Brown joined the New Housewives Association (later known as Union of Australian Women) and ultimately became its president. She was instrumental in successfully proposing to the United Nations that it hold International Women’s Year. She worked with the Women’s International Democratic Federation, and was elected President at its Congress in Berlin in 1975, a position she held to 1989.
Freda Brown was a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Australia from 1968-72, although she subsequently resigned from the party, saying that the party was no longer advancing the interests of the working class.
