by Anne Summers
Friedan had eventually divorced Carl, but her life was a series of fights of one kind or another. She was a difficult person, argumentative and almost impossible to mollify once she was exercised about something. I admired Betty greatly for her writing and thinking but I knew how hard she could be to work with. I agreed with her pragmatism and her realism and I had managed to work fruitfully with her a number of times, but I’d been horrified by the patronising cruelty she dispensed to women she regarded as unimportant. She was a polarising figure in the women’s movement, and the hatred she and Gloria Steinem had for each other was legendary. I had had an earful of it from Gloria the first time I’d mentioned Betty’s name to her. And Betty had of course earned the undying enmity of huge numbers of women when she had warned that what she called ‘the lavender menace’—the large presence of lesbians in the women’s movement—might deter mainstream women from joining.
Yet, I thought, perhaps I understand what Betty meant when she downplayed her sex in her description of herself. Perhaps she was just tired of the struggle, worn-out by constantly having to be the one to point out where women were missing out; always the spoiler, never able to relax and just ‘be’. I sometimes felt the same way. It was often a lonely place to be. There was camaraderie in the women’s movement, of course, but the sisterhood was less enveloping and intense than it had been in the early days. Now it was the occasional meeting, a march on International Women’s Day, and a bit of informal contact. We all had other lives now. But I could never look away and ignore something I thought was unjust or unfair. I could not stop myself from naming it and condemning it but I, too, was weary of a struggle that seemed never to end. I longed to be able to be ‘just’ another person, enjoying my life and work, and not needing to always be the one who was alert to the putdowns, the humiliations and the outright discrimination that women still had to endure so much of the time. But nor did I have a choice because women often approached me, wanting to talk. Sometimes the stories were ugly, even brutal, other times just sad. But they were almost always stories that women had kept sequestered, hidden away in secret compartments of their hearts, often unable to be talked about. Sometimes it was just they had no one to tell. There was usually not much I could do except listen but back then, before a movement like #MeToo emerged in 2017 that encourages women to share these stories and to have such bad behaviour banished from the workplace, mostly that was enough. It happened a lot. It might be a knock on my front door in Canberra back in the early 1980s, with a well-known journalist and her husband on my doorstep, there to tell me the story of her harassment by a famous editor. It might be the woman from the Herald switchboard telling me about the abortion she had always kept a secret. It might be a ‘typist’, the demeaning title once used for the women, always women, who provided stenographic and administrative assistance to bosses who were invariably men, who had been brought down from one of our Scandinavian embassies to Paris to help out with a prime ministerial visit. Very late at night, after the correspondence was done, this woman rang my hotel room and asked if she could meet me for a drink. She had a story of assault in a foreign country that the Ambassador and his senior staff chose to not treat seriously. Or it might be a long-time friend, finally finding the words to talk about her rape. When you wove together all these stories you saw that so many Australian women had so little power over their lives, if not always at least during these episodes when they were vulnerable, and when there was no one to turn to for consolation or redress.
Friedan had famously warned of a backlash against women’s equality and, as with so many of her pronouncements, she proved to be distressingly prescient. In 2005, the New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd asked: ‘If we flash forward to 2030, will we see all those young women who thought trying to Have It All was a pointless slog, now middle-aged and stranded in suburbia, popping Ativan, struggling with rebellious teenagers, deserted by husbands for younger babes, unable to get back into a workforce they never tried to be part of?’
If this happens, Dowd wrote, these domestic robots will be ‘desperately seeking a new Betty Friedan’.20
After Good Weekend, I intended to establish myself as a full-time writer. I had already done my ‘big book’ on women with Damned Whores back in 1975 and, it seemed to me that I had said all that I wanted or needed to say. I had other topics I wanted to write about. I intended the first book of my new writing life to be an autobiography. This would inevitably explore what it was like to be a woman in Australia in the 1960s and 70s, and the consequent founding of the women’s movement, the setting up of Elsie Women’s Refuge, and the fight for legal abortion—but it was also a broader story of family and country and I intended it to set me on a path to writing books on a wide range of subjects. But I found that I simply could not look the other way to what was happening to Australian women under John Howard so in 2003 I wrote a book I called The End of Equality.21 It would be a tough book, tough on Howard but also tough on the women in Canberra who I considered were mere bystanders, saying nothing while our rights were being stripped from us. Joan Kirner read the chapter I’d initially called ‘Political kewpie dolls’ and told me that it was unfair. I thought she was being unduly protective of her politician sisters, but I respected her enough to tone it down somewhat; I changed the title to ‘Political eunuchs’.
I was disappointed, and surprised, that there was not more of a backlash against John Howard by women. So were my publishers. Random House had put a lot of effort, and money, into promoting The End of Equality. Based on a poll of young women in their office who had read the book and responded with outrage at learning what was being taken away from them, they expected the book to run off the shelves. It didn’t. The world was turning-in on itself. It was the era of privatisation against collective ownership, of individualism versus social actions, of DIY feminism rather than a women’s movement, of private solutions to ‘problems’ such as childcare or workplace opportunities. People endured alone and suffered in silence. John Howard had helped engineer this climate and he was very very lucky that, at the time, so few people saw through what he was doing.
So I thought that would be my last word—or at least my last book—on the subject of women but again I was wrong. In 1994, after Keating had launched the new edition of Damned Whores, I would have been startled to know that over the next 20 years, I would continually return to the subject of the unequal and, at times, brutal treatment of women in Australian society. I was an unwilling witness and an even more reluctant chronicler of our country’s seemingly ingrained disparagement of women, but the turn of events kept sending me back to the keyboard. I was astounded at the hostility directed at our first female Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, during her three years in office and at first unable to fathom the rationale for the pornographic images that were part of the artillery directed against her. I tried to make sense of it in 2013 in a short book, The Misogyny Factor. The Gillard factor was, I believed, responsible for the amazing resurgence in feminism, especially among young women, that began around that time and which led to a period of intense self-scrutiny that continues today. Yet at the same time as we were pondering why women were finding it so hard to make headway in the world outside the home, motherhood and the domestic arts were getting a 21st century makeover.
Women were having more babies than they’d had in years. In 2006 the birthrate rose to 1.90 for the first time in fifteen years and continued to hover around that level for the next six years. It seemed that women had responded with enthusiasm to the 2004 exhortation of the federal Treasurer Peter Costello in 2004 that they ‘have one for mum, one for dad and one for the country’. The federal government’s baby bonus, a non-means tested payment of $5000 per baby, introduced in 2004, helped too. Evidence showed that women timed their pregnancies to be able to take advantage of this payment.22 Surprisingly, to me at least, this rise in the birthrate also led to a revival of domesticity. Young women began baking and doing craftwork and other home-based activities that my gen
eration had dispensed with, as emblematic of women’s domestic subjugation. Plus we simply did not have time; especially those who had jobs and kids. Now, young women were deciding not to return to work after they had children. We saw the rise of the ‘yummy mummy’. Motherhood was cool in a way it had not been since the baby boom of the 1940s and ’50s. Yummy mummies, with their extravagant baby showers and massive baby buggies, were right up there competing with their be-suited employed sisters in the status stakes. In fact, sometimes the balance seemed to tilt towards the mummies, and working mothers were made to feel guilty about having their kids in childcare, not doing tuck-shop duty or having freshly baked snacks ready when the children came home from school. I watched this development with amazement and sadness. Why did these young women not want to combine having children with having an economic life outside the home? What we in the women’s movement always wanted was for women to be able to choose when and whether to have children, and to be able to combine that choice with continued engagement with the economy. We wanted to relieve women of what an early suffragette had called ‘the unconscionable choice’ women had had to make in the early twentieth century between love and work; in those early days of unreliable contraception, choosing love invariably meant motherhood. The option that many women, including myself, enjoy today—of love without children—simply did not exist. Were we now surrendering that option? It seemed that full-time motherhood was once again becoming the preferred option for young women, especially young women with tertiary education whose workforce participation rates dropped precipitously during the early years of the 21st century. Today, women without children are no longer called ‘selfish’. Now we are more likely to be objects of pity. This is another form of social control, of course, a quite insidious one that has the effect of making childless women feel inadequate, or unfulfilled, especially now motherhood is back in vogue. Women themselves mostly seem to welcome this, but it seemed in so many ways that we were back to where we were when I’d first written about women. The God’s Police stereotype that I had described in 1975 had not disappeared, but had merely been updated.
Once again, I felt compelled to write about this. Forty-one years after its original publication, in 2016, in a new edition of Damned Whores and God’s Police23 I argued that the two stereotypes still had a powerful grip on modern Australia, even if they had been modernised to adjust to the times. Moreover, I argued that it was women themselves who were reluctant to surrender the role of running their families, physically and emotionally. It was their one area of undisputed power and authority, and they were not going to give that up lightly. ‘We have not disavowed that motherhood is still the central, preferable and most admired option for women,’ I wrote in the new introduction. ‘We might not overtly punish women who are not mothers but we have our ways of letting them know they have fallen short of the ideal. By calling them “deliberately barren”, for instance.’24 Or, in my case, certain people at Fairfax trying to undermine me by saying I had no empathy, and was a bad boss, because I had no children.
I stayed another two years at Good Weekend. A number of my staff members who had most disliked me left, while a couple of those who’d been at the forefront of trying to get rid of me apologised and decided to stay. Those who had kept their heads down throughout the entire gruesome episode were just glad it was over. So was I, of course, but I was never going to forget the effort that had been made to try to destroy me. And who knew how much of the dirt had stuck? Years later, I still kept being asked about it. People wanted to know: what really happened? What was behind all that? I wasn’t bitter but I was incredulous. If it had been intended to force me to leave, the gambit had failed. There was no way I was going to leave with that hanging over me. I recruited new staffers, including the wonderfully droll Tom Dusevic, who came over from the Australian to be deputy editor. The new mix of personality and talent revived the kind of energy that had driven our reinvention in 1994, and it felt as if we were back to where we had been trying to get to all along. We received a swag of nominations in the 1995 Australian Society of Magazine Editors awards, and took out the Best Reporting and Best Columns categories, the only magazine to win more than one award. Nikki Barrowclough won Best Reporting for her harrowing account of the Australian men who were serial importers of Filipina ‘mail order brides’, many of whom were summarily divorced, or simply disappeared after marriage, meaning the husband was able to bring in another wife.25 It was just horrible to know that women were being treated this way, in Australia, in 1995.
In November 1996 we ran David Leser’s astonishing profile of the newly elected Queensland federal MP Pauline Hanson. She had made headlines for her maiden speech, attacking Asian immigration and multiculturalism, and for stating that she would not represent any Aboriginal people who lived in her electorate of Oxley.26 Our cover, shot by the brilliant Tim Bauer, was a very tight closeup of Hanson’s face; her green eyes and pinched scarlet lips looked out at the reader with what seemed like obdurate indifference. ‘Inside the mind of Pauline Hanson’, was the cover line—and David Leser certainly delivered that. After his many requests for an interview had been ignored or refused, he simply got on a plane, put himself in Hanson’s path, and managed to secure himself a dinner invitation to her property outside town. His discursive interview with her was revelatory. He showed the conflicts within her family, the previously unmentioned several prior husbands—and the former mother-in-law, who was a Holocaust survivor who trembled in fear at the thought her erstwhile relative might have her deported.
‘There are a couple of risks in doing this story,’ Leser had written. ‘First, there will be those who will argue that it further boosts the profile of a woman who should never have been given a forum in the first place; that, now when the dust is perhaps settling, we are continuing to turn, in the words of one commentator, a “misfit into a megastar”.’
‘The second risk is that in trying to examine Pauline Hanson’s life, we end up on an excursion through the ugly, primal landscape of the Australian character where bigotry and racism have always played their part, but which a noble bipartisanship in recent decades has attempted to obviate. By re-visiting such tribal prejudices we’re in danger of causing further offence at home and abroad.’
As editor, I felt the risk was worth taking. I was strongly of the view that we needed to shine a light on this woman and her ideas that were starting to roll like a tsunami across the Australian political landscape. We were not to know then that Pauline Hanson would remain a political phenomenon for the next two decades at least, would have her party win seats in state parliaments and that, after just one term as the member for Oxley and a subsequent brief term in prison for electoral fraud (her conviction was later overturned)27 she, along with three One Nation colleagues, would be elected to the Australian Senate in 2016. The supposed misfit has had a very long political life.
Leser concluded his piece with the following observation: ‘For a brief moment I actually feel sorry for her. I look at Pauline Hanson and see a woman hopelessly out of her depth. I see a media circus and a political neophyte who has lost virtually all privacy. I see, in part, a scapegoat for all the ugly sentiments that gnaw away at the human heart, including those of our more slippery politicians.’
But then he looked once more ‘and what I see again are the cold, sharp features of bigotry and racism’. He feels he is justified in writing about her. And so did I.
Twelve days after Pauline Hanson’s maiden speech, Prime Minister John Howard travelled to Queensland where he addressed the Liberal Party. In his remarks he noted that in the six months since his—and, let’s not forget, Hanson’s—election, ‘people do feel able to speak a little more freely and a little more openly about how they feel. In a sense the pall of censorship on certain issues has been lifted …’28 He went on to welcome the fact that people could speak freely ‘without living in fear of being branded a racist or a bigot’.
Remember that date: 22 September 1996. Australian
politics changed forever that day. Here was the Prime Minister abrogating his responsibility to lead, his duty to curb the baser instincts of many in the population and to ensure the country moved forward together. Instead the Prime Minister encouraged people to express ‘how they feel’. He literally opened the floodgates to aggrieved or angry people setting aside civic restraint and pouring out whatever vitriol or bile was bubbling away inside them. I remember walking through the streets of Bankstown one afternoon in early 1993 with Paul Keating when one of his constituents fell into step beside him and offered a complaint about the number of shops that now had Chinese names, and Chinese characters written across their windows. Keating quickly deflected the racist sentiment the man was trying to express. I can’t remember now exactly what he said, but I do recall how easily he was able to mollify the man, treating him seriously but at the same time giving him a quick lesson on how times were changing and we had to change with them. By contrast, John Howard opened a different door: say what you feel, he said. Let it rip. And people have been doing exactly that ever since. Astonishingly hateful racist abuse is now commonplace in our streets and on social media. And the more people engage in it, the worse it gets. The tenor and content of abuse against our fellow citizens because of their race, their sex, their religion or whatever characteristic disturbs the abuser has become frightening, because it points to a barely concealed violence simmering away beneath the surface of our society. At the same time, Howard was also fostering a total revision of how we as Australians saw ourselves. A whole new rewriting of our national story was underway, which denied the decimation of the Indigenous inhabitants at the hands of the British. Howard dismissed what he called ‘the black armband view of history’, and was ably assisted by craven collaborators only too willing to provide the ‘evidence’ for this shameful revisionism.