During these years, the Women's Employment Board was set up with powers to set wage scales for women entering male dominated industries. IWD was a continuing vehicle for discussion about equal pay and child care. But, after a slight hesitation at the beginning of the war, the main emphasis was on the war effort, including support or women's resistance in occupied countries and campaigns such as Medical Aid to Russia in which Jessie Street played a prominent part. In 1942, IWD was marked by an event with a decided international flavour Allied Women's Day. It took place in the Sydney Town Hall with speakers representing Greece, Free France, Poland, Netherlands, East Indies and the United States.
Woman is the mother and servant of man.
In Newcastle, in the same year, an IWD function filled the Town Hall to hear Katherine Susannah Prichard, a Yugoslav woman partisan, and a woman from the Chinese Embassy. But we had women from all sorts of organisations involved and we filled the Town Hall two or three years in succession. We tried to get people from different countries because then we saw IWD more as an international event. In 1944, in Melbourne, the IWD activities received greetings from Prime Minister John Curtin and Minister for External Affairs H.V. Evatt, in recognition of women's contribution to the war effort, though government recognition was not enough to realise full equal pay or even higher wages for most women. The same year, IWD conferences were held in Sydney, Maitland, Katoomba, Newcastle, Wollongong and Perth and meetings in Newcastle and Adelaide.