Cleo magazine and the sexual revolution

In November 1972 a new women’s magazine was launched in Australia that popularised many of the ideas of the sexual revolution and women’s liberation. Cleo was the brainchild of publisher Frank Packer at ACP Magazines and editor Ita Buttrose, influenced by the success of Cosmopolitan magazine in the United States and a determination to corner the younger women’s market before the Australian version of Cosmo launched in March 1973. Buttrose’s aim, as she wrote in her 1985 memoir, was to bring to everyday women—not those actively involved in the women’s movement—a confronting directness about both women’s and sexual liberation. ‘We equipped the rebels with knowledge and thus stoked the fires of revolution.’2