A prime-time serial drama aimed at adults, Certain Women started life as a six-part mini-series with each episode telling the story of a different female member of the Stone/Lucas family. Created by writer Tony Morphett in an attempt to address the paucity of good roles for women on Australian television, the mini-series proved so successful that the format was converted to an ongoing serial which ran from 1973 to 1976. The serial is played out against the backdrop of an era that strongly influenced these women's stories: the immediate post-Vietnam War years, the tumultuous rise and fall of the Whitlam Labor Government and the feminist movement of the early 1970s.