Jean McLean was a founding member of Save Our Sons, a movement of women who campaigned against the conscription of young men to fight in the Vietnam War. Informed by a free-thinking family background, Jean worked with other women on a range of long-term strategies to influence public opinion as the war progressed. She studied the history of Indo-China and visited Vietnam during the war to see first-hand what was happening. Jean was one of ‘The Failea Five’, a group of Save Our Sons activists imprisoned for two weeks in 1971. Subsequent to the war, she was an active member of the Australian Labor Party and served fourteen years as a Member of the Legislative Assembly in the Victorian Parliament.

There were newspaper articles saying the Save Our Sons women were probably ‘communists’. Then they started saying we were just ‘naïve’. Eventually, as opinion about the war shifted, they started referring to us as ‘dedicated’ women.