Unfettered and Alive

by Anne Summers

  ‘Hang in,’ he said. ‘It will get better.’

  It got worse. At another board meeting, the coach reported that a new sponsor had come to the club on Monday morning and given ‘the boys’ several thousand in cash for winning the game over the weekend. The Tigers did not win very often and this victory was a big deal.

  ‘What did they do with the money,’ asked one of the directors.

  ‘I can’t say,’ said the coach. ‘Not with Anne here.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Murray, ‘Anne’s broadminded.’

  And so we learned that ‘the boys’ had used the money to treat themselves at a local brothel that afternoon.

  I wondered whether such conversations took place around the boardroom table of BHP. Probably not, but nor were there any women at that table—or at most blue-chip company board tables in those days—so any similar ‘jokes’ about hitting women or reports of rewarding employees with sexual treats would not need to be held back, and would probably not attract any criticism. Just as that evening I did not say anything to my fellow Tigers directors. Where would I begin? It merely added to my growing unease that things were starting to unravel for women. Just as rugby league’s efforts to become ‘family friendly’ had been swept aside by the brutal power of Rupert Murdoch’s desire to dominate the sport, I could not help but see a similar thing starting to happen in Canberra where John Howard had begun to reverse many of the policy reforms for women of the Keating, Hawke and even Whitlam governments. Something sinister was happening here; why on earth would the Prime Minister want to turn back the clock for women? I watched, first with disbelief, then with growing unease and, finally, with anger.

  There had been a 5 per cent swing against Paul Keating’s government in March 1996, giving John Howard a gain of 26 seats. The new members of the House of Representatives included the surprisingly large number of thirteen women, mostly from marginal seats that the Liberals had not expected to win. Howard posed on a bridge outside Parliament House with the new women MPs, all of them wearing brightly coloured suits, facing into their political futures with an optimism that, if they had any solidarity at all with their sex, would quickly turn out to be utterly misplaced. The new Prime Minister began, systematically and ruthlessly, to dismantle almost all of the reforms and protections for women that had been so painstakingly put together over previous decades. Howard tore into the Sex Discrimination Act, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission that administered the Act, the Office of the Status of Women, and the Affirmative Action Agency. He diluted the childcare rebate I’d been so proud to have helped bring to life in 1993 and he slashed other forms of childcare assistance, turning an essential prop for women’s employment into a welfare program, only able to be accessed by those with very low incomes. He changed the family payments benefits arrangements so they penalised families where women worked and he began to put in place what would ultimately become the ‘baby bonus’, generous payments for having babies which—unlike childcare support—was not income tested.11 He had soon closed down or totally emasculated (I chose the word advisedly) all of the offices and agencies that were there to facilitate or monitor women’s progress towards equality, especially in employment. It was nothing less than an all-out assault on the employment of women, especially of women with children.

  But I did not think for a moment that Howard would get rid of the Women’s Bureau. This had been established in 1963 by his political godfather, Sir Robert Menzies—admittedly after a lot of pressure from Liberal Party women, led by the redoubtable Victorian Senator Ivy Wedgwood, who was a strong advocate for women’s rights—with the pragmatic purpose of ensuring women got a fair deal in employment. It was the only government agency that monitored maternity leave entitlements and other working conditions, and kept track of Australia’s dismal progress in implementing equal pay. But Howard brutally demolished the Bureau and with it the women’s unit in the Australian Bureau of Statistics, so that reliable and up-to-date data about women’s workforce participation became almost impossible to obtain. ‘What gets measured gets done’ is a mantra of business. John Howard made sure that nothing got done on his watch to ensure women had equal opportunities in employment. In fact, he did exactly the reverse. By 2002, only 54.4 per cent of employed women worked full-time; in 1982 the figure had been 63.8 per cent.12 John Howard’s ‘white picket fence’ view of women, and the role they should play in society was now firmly entrenched in policy, and the country was falling into line. It was an appalling reversal of fortune for the women of Australia.

  It took some time to see it for what it was: a war against women. It was an onslaught on a scale we had never previously experienced, because we had never before accumulated the rights and the legal protections that we now enjoyed in 1996. I was beside myself with fury and rage, but I was also grappling with an even more profound response. For the first time in my adult life, I no longer felt optimistic. It had been an article of faith for me—indeed, you could probably call it my secular religion—that our societies were inexorably headed towards equality and fairness; that politics was about righting wrongs, ending injustices and creating the conditions whereby all citizens could thrive. I had absorbed this view of the world, and of politics, in the 1960s when I had first become aware of the writings of John Stuart Mill on liberty, R.H. Tawney on equality and Beatrice and Sidney Webb on socialism. My later, and brief, foray into Marxism had merely reinforced the idea that progress and justice were inevitable. Martin Luther King Jr had said ‘the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice’, and every social reformer I could think of had argued similarly. I knew that conservatives resisted change and sought to conserve what they regarded as sacred institutions or policies. I disliked and disagreed with them for their trying to hold back progress, for their championing of institutions and policies whose foundations all too often were discriminatory or even oppressive. I saw them as standing in the way of progress, but they were not wreckers. Now I had to confront a phenomenon I had not known possible: the actual destruction of so much that we had fought for. I knew that I had to document what was happening. I had to bear witness so that this destruction did not go unnoticed or be forgotten. I was stunned, because I never thought that we would have to do this. I really believed that the changes won by the battles of the past five or six decades were permanent. I could not understand why any political leader would want to turn back the clock for women.

  Why was John Howard doing this? As a former Treasurer, surely he understood the economic value of women participating in the workforce. Apparently not; in a contest between ideology and economics, with Howard it was ideology that won. At least when it came to women. Howard had famously told me a decade earlier ‘the times will suit me’ when he became Prime Minister. He had thought that in 1987, when the next federal election was due, Australians would have tired of Bob’s Hawke’s more interventionist role for government and be ready for the free-market economics adopted by Ronald Reagan in the US and Margaret Thatcher in the UK. Instead, Hawke had been re-elected, three times, and then Paul Keating succeeded him and remained in power until March 1996. While Howard had won decisively, there was nothing to suggest that Australians wanted him to take them back to the 1980s. Nevertheless, he hopped into his time machine and took us even further back, to the 1950s, an era when women were supposed to be content to be what used to be called ‘home makers’. Howard appeared to be incapable of dealing with the times he now found himself in. Instead, he imposed his atavistic view of women and their role in society onto a country that neither saw it coming, nor appreciated until far too late, just how much damage he had done to the social fabric of Australia. Many of his policies were dire for women themselves. For instance, he seriously tried to implement a fundamental revision to the Sex Discrimination Act in order to prevent single women and lesbians having access to IVF. He wanted such access restricted to ‘married or de facto heterosexual couples’.13 In November 1996, Howard’s office struck m
e and several other prominent women associated with Labor off the invitation list to a small gathering to meet Hillary Clinton who was visiting Sydney with her husband, US President Bill Clinton.14 Mrs Clinton had requested to meet with senior Australian women who shared her interests. Instead she got Janette Howard, the wife of the Prime Minister, and her handpicked guests, most of whom could not be accused of sharing Clinton’s interest in women’s equality and children’s rights. It was a petty gesture on Howard’s part, but it was typical of his small-mindedness. As was his reaction of surprise and disdain when he and I brushed past each other in the makeup trailer set up at Mrs Macquarie’s Chair by NBC’s Today Show, at the time the highest-rating program on US television, which was doing a series of outdoor broadcasts from the Sydney Harbour foreshore during the Olympic Games in September 2000.15 Howard looked at me with astonishment. What is she doing here? he seemed to be thinking. He must have known, as I did, that there were only four guests. I bet he did not have the same reaction to the other two: Paul Hogan and John Williamson.

  In August 1998 I spoke at a women’s fundraiser in Byron Bay and, in a speech entitled ‘A Dangerous Liaison: Women and the Howard Government’, reported on the contraction of choices for women, especially when it came to their reproductive freedom, being orchestrated by John Howard, in partnership with Senator Brian Harradine, the rabidly religious zealot from Tasmania who held the balance of power in the Senate. What, I asked rhetorically, would such men do if they wanted to force women out of employment into full-time motherhood:

  ‘They’d probably start by taking the razor to the family planning agencies—even the Catholic ones (forcing Catholic women back to “Vatican roulette”?); then they’d ban non-surgical alternatives to abortion like the drug RU–486 and after that they’d get officials working on a new model criminal code to replace existing state abortion laws with a new national code that was significantly more restrictive than the current situation in New South Wales and Victoria. They’d amend the Sex Discrimination Act to ensure that only married women had access to fertility programs.’16

  That was just for starters. I went on to describe the deregulation of casual and part-time work, where women were concentrated, and the resultant pushing down of wages; the cuts to childcare, including afterschool care, further restricting women’s workforce options. We were, I said in another speech, going back to the future.17

  I literally shuddered to think that we might be returning to the days so brilliantly expounded by Betty Friedan in her classic 1963 book The Feminine Mystique. According to Future Shock author Alvin Toffler, this was the book that ‘pulled the trigger on history’. It was the book that lifted the veil on the misery of the legions of educated middle-class housewives in affluent mid–twentieth century America, whose failure to find fulfilment from shopping, cooking, chauffeuring, running a perfect house and trying to be a faultless wife made them feel guilty and depressed. It was, Friedan wrote, ‘the problem that has no name’, so she set out to identify, document and label it. She called it ‘the feminine mystique’. Her book sent shock waves around America and then much of the Western world. Yet here we were a mere 35 years later, seemingly forcing women to return to a world that had made their grandmothers so miserable. It was not just the government trying to restrict women’s options when it came to combining motherhood and employment, it was the government seemingly saying that motherhood was women’s destiny. If you were not a mother, you did not matter.

  If that was the case, where did it leave women like me? I am nobody’s mother and I am not the least bit unhappy about it. While I was still in my twenties I decided my life would be freer and fuller if I did not have children. Would my life have been different if I’d had them? Of course it would. Would it have been better? I do not think so. I am very happy with the choice I made. Back in the 1970s, childless people were criticised for being ‘selfish’. This was an almost explicit admission by parents that having children was such a burden that they needed everyone else to be similarly encumbered. It was another way of expressing the envy many parents felt for the freedom enjoyed by their childless friends. In the 1980s, when I was in my late-thirties and early-forties, it became fashionable to talk about ‘the ticking’ of our supposed biological clocks. Women my age were made to feel that we might ‘miss out’ if we did not ‘hurry up’. And quite a few women felt this way, or were made to. There was a blip of baby-having among my single friends in the late 1980s, a trend that was happening with educated and economically self-sufficient women across the developed (or at least English-speaking) world. It was exemplified, even glorified, in Murphy Brown, the US TV sitcom starring Candice Bergen as a single mother, that ran for ten years from 1988. And I thought about it. Despite my firm resolve in my twenties to never allow myself to be encumbered by children, of course I did.

  In the early 1980s, I was heading for 40, which was seen then as the absolute age-limit for having a first baby, I had no partner and there seemed no prospect of one while I lived in Canberra. But there was probably no better town in which to raise a child as a single mother. I had a good job, I owned a house (well, almost), and I lived and worked in an environment that would support my making such a choice. The services were there and in Canberra you had none of the stresses like traffic and overcrowded childcare centres that made Sydney such a nightmare. But when I looked at friends who had done it, I saw them struggling. Some of them, if they were honest with themselves, were regretting their choice, but of course there was no going back on a decision like this. The child was there, with all its needs and the mother had to deal with them. I saw domestic tragedies: a child who was difficult, a mother unable to cope, physically or emotionally, with what she’d taken on. For me, this was a needed dose of reality. You would have to really want to do this. And, when I thought about it, deep down, honest to God, I didn’t. Maybe I was different from other women, but I did not have the maternal hankerings so many women talked about. I simply did not feel that same desperate need I’d heard some women describe. Nor did I understand how a modern woman in the 1980s or 1990s, able to earn an income and with freedoms her grandmother could not even have dreamed of, could claim that her very identity was dependent on having a child. I had absorbed earlier in life that many of the women I admired did not have children. Simone de Beauvoir for example. I was astonished to discover that Doris Lessing actually had three kids. I could not recall her mentioning children in those life-changing novels of hers that I devoured as a young woman. I guess I did not notice. I absorbed literature that matched my needs and interests, and families and children were just not on my horizon, so I remained oblivious to the maternal status of many of the women whose books I read. Later, when I made a study of these things, I would discover that having children was almost impossible for artists, but that many women were able to combine motherhood and writing. But I was not to be one of them. I guess I was lucky because it meant that I did not suffer the psychological pain that was clearly the lot of some women. I felt some sympathy for them, although I could not understand their feelings, but I also felt relief that I was not that way. Plenty of women, including a number of my close friends, chose to have children. Others already had them when the women’s movement came along and they had no option but to figure out how to make the new ideas work with their existing obligations. But I was able to get on with my life, with no pangs and absolutely no regrets. It meant, as well, that I had no constraints when opportunities presented themselves. I could take a job with the government that would involve a lot of travel. I could move to New York. And I could move back to Sydney, not fettered by considerations of schools and children’s friendships and all the other complications of parenting.

  In late 1993, Betty Friedan visited Sydney as a guest of the NSW government. Chip and I, along with Chip’s mother Beverly Rogers who was visiting us from Boston, took her and her companion to dinner at The Pier, a restaurant that juts out into Rose Bay. Betty was a short, fierce woman who exuded energy, but w
hose argumentative style could make her exhausting company. Yet here she was, the mother of modern feminism, in Sydney, being charming and relaxing herself into a good time. You got the feeling that this was not something she often allowed herself to do. During our conversation over martinis and a meal of some of the city’s finest seafood, I asked her how she would describe herself. Her answer initially floored me.

  ‘First I am an American,’ she said. ‘Secondly I am Jew, and third, I am a woman.’

  The woman who had coined the term ‘the feminine mystique’, who had revolutionised the lives of millions of women around the world, now ranked being female as behind her national and ethnic identities. And, although she had three children, she did not mention being a mother. I looked at her and wondered if she was simply tired of the struggle. She was 72 and she was now concentrating on the issue of ageing (she was in Sydney to take part in Seniors Week). Perhaps she was now ready to leave the women’s fight to others. Yet just the year before I had joined her in Dublin where she and I and Irene Natividad were running a Global Summit of Women,18 a gathering hosted by the Irish President Mary Robinson. The Summit, which is still in existence and now run solely by Natividad, had brought together women from around the world, aiming to internationalise the women’s movement. I could not see Betty Friedan retreating from that ambition. And yet she had paid a heavy price for her activism. I recalled the awful story I’d read about Friedan not showing up to a major protest she was due to lead at the Plaza Hotel in New York in February 1969. A group of women planned to invade the Oak Room, that genteel bastion of Yankee privilege that would not permit women to be present between the hours of 12 and 3 p.m., when the power lunches were held. Friedan herself had been humiliated there five years earlier; she’d turned up to meet the publisher Clay Felker for lunch, and been denied entry. Felker had invited her, apparently blissfully unaware that in the past he was surrounded only by men when he dined there at lunch times. Now, at precisely noon, a bunch of fur-coat wearing women (they were not going to allow dress codes to be an excuse for denying them entry) was about to storm this hallowed sanctum. The media was there in droves but Betty Friedan was not.19 She could not come, Betty told the woman who’d rung to see where she was, because she had a black eye and a big bruise on her cheek. The previous night Betty’s husband, Carl, had hit her. He did this often before she had a big public engagement, Betty told her friend. The friend was resourceful: a theatrical-makeup artist was hastily dispatched to Betty’s apartment and, her bruises artfully concealed, America’s most famous feminist made it to the Oak Room in time for the protest.