by Anne Summers
I received another shock, in 2015, when I discovered that the first line of The Second Sex, the words that had guided my life, had been mistranslated. De Beauvoir had actually written ‘One is not born but rather one becomes woman …’ Not ‘a’ woman, as the battered copy of my 1970 book had it. It might seem innocuous but there is a world of difference between ‘a woman’—the individual—and ‘woman’—the category. Not only that, the quote which had changed my life is on page 283 of the newly translated book. Not the opening line, not even in the first chapter; rather it appears in volume two of a book that is considerably larger and more complex than the one that had been my bible. The Second Sex was first translated into English in 1953 at the instigation of Blanche Knopf, the wife of Alfred Knopf, de Beauvoir’s American publisher. She apparently thought the book, which she knew was a literary sensation in France, was a highbrow sex manual so she sought out H.M. Parshley, a retired professor of zoology at Smith College in the US, to do the translation. Pashley knew nothing about philosophy, French literature or feminism, and he was under instructions to condense the text because Alfred Knopf considered that de Beauvoir ‘suffers from verbal diarrhea’.16 De Beauvoir protested that ‘so much of what seems important to me’ had been omitted, but she signed-off on the edition and that was the version that sustained my generation of feminists. Amazingly, it was not until 2011 that de Beauvoir’s work received a meticulous, accurate and complete English translation, by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier. They ‘translated Le deuxieme sexe as it was written, unabridged and unsimplified, maintaining de Beauvoir’s philosophical language,’17 and the key sentence was revised. De Beauvoir’s intended formulation was stronger than the one served up to us, but in the end it probably does not matter. We got the message. And, finally, her epic and ground-breaking book has been restored.
By mid-July I was back at work. I was not just alive, I felt and looked fine. My hair covered the scar, which was already fading fast, and my energy levels were back to where they used to be. Just as well, because the next few months would be among the most hectic of my new entrepreneurial career. In August we published the thirteenth issue of ASR. The cover was the brilliant young British Somalian woman Nimco Ali, who is a flamboyant activist against female genital mutilation, using her own story of having been cut as a young girl as she campaigns to end FGM in Britain as well as in Africa. Nimco is an arrestingly beautiful young woman, and this means people pay her attention; they are drawn to her and they listen to her. She is blunt and forceful, talking about ‘fannies’ and ‘cunts’ in polite society and having no compunction about walking the streets of London dressed as a vagina. One of her proudest achievements, she says, was to get former British Prime Minister David Cameron to use the words ‘clitoris’ and ‘vagina’ in a speech. Nimco and I had got on famously when we’d been on a panel together in London at the Women of the World festival the year before, and I was so pleased that she had agreed to make the long trip to Australia. Destroy the Joint, now a fully fledged online activist group created by Sydney journalist and academic Jenna Price and others, spurred into existence by Alan Jones’s disparaging remark two years earlier, had agreed to pay her fare so she could take part in a conference to mark the 40th anniversary of the publication of Damned Whores and God’s Police. Nimco was one of a lineup of speakers and panelists that included luminaries such as Quentin Bryce, David Morrison, Larissa Behrendt, Senator Penny Wong as well as other terrific writers, historians and activists. The super-energetic Jenna Price had used her powers of persuasion to get UTS, the university where she works as a journalism lecturer, to donate the rooms and services for the conference, while Christine Howard, her temporary side-kick Justine Merrony and I made up the rest of the organising team. We amazed even ourselves at what we managed to pull off: three days of talking, arguing, getting ourselves fired-up, celebrating and managing to remind ourselves that feminism can, and should, be intellectually engaging as well as a lot of fun.
Once the conference was over, I escorted Nimco around Sydney and Melbourne. She was not only our very first international conversation guest, but she was also the first to not be a household name. That did not matter, because what I had in mind this time were not big money-raising events but more targeted, community-focused gatherings designed to raise awareness of an issue that has not had much attention in Australia. This meant we were reaching out to entirely different audiences, and I was thrilled to know we had at least partly succeeded when a group of Somalian women, many of them in traditional dress, walked into the lecture theatre at the University of Sydney for our event. Nimco generated huge interest because of her eloquence and her single-minded insistence that FGM be treated not as a cultural practice but as a criminal act of violence against women and children. She and I went to Parramatta and Auburn in Sydney, and to Footscray and the Royal Women’s Hospital in Melbourne, to talk to a number of different groups of women who were dealing with FGM and the myriad of issues it threw up. We learned how Australian maternity wards were dealing with women who had had stage 3 FGM (the most invasive form, involving removal of external genitalia and the sewing up of the remaining wound). The biggest issue, it turned out, was dealing with husbands who insisted their wives be sewn up again after the birth. This practice, known as re-infibulation, is outlawed in Australia, as are all forms of FGM. We met field workers who had threatened to inform the police of parents who planned to take their young daughters out of the country to get ‘cut’, as it was called. Nimco reacted to all this with the professionalism of the expert she was, while I was having trouble keeping my emotions in check. I was horrified to learn what was happening in Australia, of the courageous battles being fought by African, Egyptian, Middle Eastern and Indonesian women to protect the next generation of girls, all the while dealing with the trauma experienced by the women who had already been subjected to it. All of this pretty much under the radar. Few people wanted to know about it, but in any event forcing FGM into the public arena risked stirring up ugly anti-immigrant and refugee sentiments in a society where these were already dangerously ever-present. I learned more about the experiences of some immigrant women in Australian society in those few days with Nimco than I could possibly have imagined. I was especially glad that we had devoted so much space to Nimco Ali and FGM, because it turned out that issue of ASR would be the last.
Despite a loyal group of monthly donors, and the responsiveness of others when I appealed for funds, we were simply not bringing in enough revenue to cover our costs. Digital advertising turned out to be elusive. We had cut as much as we could. Christine now worked part-time, Helen Johnstone had not been replaced when she went on maternity leave. I did not pay myself for writing or editing, or any of the other work I did, but I was adamant that if we could not afford to pay everyone else then we could not afford to be in business. I held two more events in 2015, a small Masterclass with the business and bureaucratic whizz Kerry Schott, and a final Conversation at the City Recital Hall in Angel Place in Sydney with the wonderful Annabel Crabb. Both made money, but not enough to make much of a dent in the line of credit that was keeping us afloat. I tried to find a business partner or investor, but it soon became clear that I could not afford to keep going. It was stressful and it was sad, but it was not as horrible as it had been at Ms. where people’s livelihoods were at stake. Fortunately, everyone at ASR had other sources of income. On Tuesday 21 June 2016, just before 4 p.m., we sent out our last email. It was headed ‘Nothing lasts for long’, words I had taken from a Joni Mitchell song. ‘I am sad,’ I told our 16,500 subscribers, ‘but my overwhelming feeling is one of pride at what we managed to achieve over the past three and a half years: thirteen issues of ASR, four Digests, eight Conversation events and one Masterclass. That is a lot, especially considering the size of our team and how little money we had. I want us to be judged not by how long we lasted but by how good we were.’
Christine and I sat at the computer and had the spooky experience, via the G
oogle maps facility on our direct mail program, of watching people opening the email. Little flags popped up, with the email address of the person opening the message. First it was dozens of flags in Sydney and Melbourne and elsewhere in Australia, then we saw them pop up in Japan, in the UK, the US, in Germany and even—given the time of night it must have been there—Brazil. About half our subscribers lived outside Australia. Many of these were probably expats, but we never knew for sure as most people had Gmail addresses. But whatever their country of origin, I was immensely proud of the fact that we were a global publication. Soon, it got too sad tracing our demise and we stopped watching.
For the next few weeks messages of shock, disappointment and regret came flooding in. The sentiments were heartfelt and they reinforced my conviction that my overwhelming feeling should be one of pride rather than sadness. As did the flow of money. More than $40,000 was donated after I’d closed the business, a most practical way of expressing appreciation and it could not have been more welcome. Even more surprising was that people continued to subscribe, even months later. I still get an occasional new sub even now, two years later. But what pleased me most of all was the number of people who said they could not wait to see what I did next. I was now 71, but no one was writing me off.
I’d been born into a world that expected very little of women like me. We were not expected to have jobs or not to stay in them once we’d had the children we were meant to have. We were meant to tread lightly on the earth, influencing events through our husbands and children, if at all. We were meant to fade into invisibility as we aged, to be docile and accepting as we waited to depart this earth. I defied all of these expectations and so have hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of women like me. Forty years ago, Jill Neville and I rued that there were not yet many of us. Now we are everywhere, in all countries, all ages, all races and ethnicities and colours and sexualities, and our numbers are exploding as the next generations rightfully take for granted their entitlement to be unfettered and in charge of their lives. Women like me changed the world so we could have a place in it, and we had to change ourselves to make that happen. We are still discovering, and inventing, what it means to be a woman. No longer occupying that space between man and eunuch, women have become a new kind of person, one that scarcely existed before, and we are still evolving. We do not know where we will end up. All I can say about myself is that I know that I am not yet finished and I never will be.
In 1975 I realised one of my life’s ambitions when I was hired as a journalist at the National Times.
‘What’s the story, morning glory’ was how National Times editor Max Suich greeted his journalists. Here he is with me in New York in 1977.
I immediately hit it off with writer and feminist Paula Weideger when we met during my first visit to New York in 1976 and we have remained friends ever since.
In 1978 I stayed with Elisabeth Wynhausen in her apartment in Bleecker Street in the Village after she left the National Times to move to New York.
At a National Press Club appearance during the 1980 CHOGM meeting in Australia directing a question at British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
While on assignment in Pakistan for the Financial Review in 1980 I travelled through the Khyber Pass to reach the Afghan border where refugees were already crossing to escape the Russian invasion.
After I was appointed to run the Office of the Status of Women for the Hawke government, Vogue did a profile of me accompanied by a glamorous photo shoot.
Senator Susan Ryan, the Minister Assisting the Prime Minister on the Status of Women, and the first Labor woman Cabinet Minister, visits the office c.1985.
I was the first Australian journalist to interview a US Secretary of Defense when I sat down with Caspar Weinberger in his office at the Pentagon in June 1986.
In an emotional ceremony Pat Carbine and Gloria Steinem signed documents agreeing to sell Ms. magazine to John Fairfax & Sons, represented by Sandra Yates and me.
The American Legion protested my use of the American flag on the cover of the first issue of Ms. under my editorship, in February 1988, giving us lots of useful publicity.
Senator Edward Kennedy dropped into the party we held in the Capitol Building in January 1988 to launch the new Washington bureau of Ms. magazine.
On 30 June 1988, Sandra Yates and I became only the second women in US corporate history to do a management buyout when we raised $20 million on Wall Street to buy Ms. and Sassy.
Movie star Anne Archer and TV mogul Oprah Winfrey were among the women honoured as Ms. Women of the Year 1988 at a special breakfast at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in January 1989.
I wore my ‘lucky’ Anne Klein suit when I stood outside the World Trade Centre in 1989 to pose for this trade ad to try to attract financial advertising for Ms.
I was astonished to find that Betty Friedan’s name had never appeared in Ms. magazine so I remedied that with an interview to mark the 25th anniversary of the publication of The Feminine Mystique.
As Editor-in-Chief of Ms. I received many invitations to speak, including from women’s organisations such as the League of Women Voters’ convention in Springfield, Illinois.
In New York in 1990 with designer Daniel Sachs, arts philanthropist Howard Gilman, Chip Rolley and my old friend David Hay.
I was thrilled when Paul Keating asked me to be note-taker at his formal meeting with the President of Ireland Mary Robinson during her visit to Canberra in 1992.
In early 1994 when Prime Minister Paul Keating launched a new edition of Damned Whores and God’s Police I was stunned when he called for reconciliation between Australian women and men.
Almost everyone who ever worked for PJK attended the lunch at Sydney’s Bellevue Hotel in December 2012 to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of him becoming Prime Minister, including ‘the PMO Annes’: Anne de Salis, me and Mary Ann O’Loughlin.
After we moved to Sydney from New York, Chip and I settled in a terrace house in Victoria Street, Kings Cross which is where photographer Peter Brew-Bevan made this beautiful picture.
I visited my parents in Adelaide as often as I could after my father’s cancer diagnosis in 1986 and before his death in 1988, including this trip in May 1987.
On my mother’s 80th birthday in May 2003, with her five surviving children. My brothers (from left to right) are Greg Cooper, Tony Cooper, David Cooper and Paul Cooper.
With one of my early Good Weekend covers in July 1993 I wanted to illustrate how new, and potentially mischievous, technology could manipulate photographs in believable ways, but Victorian Premier Jeff Kennett was not amused.
With Jeff Allan I was fortunate to have an endlessly energetic and creative Art Director at Good Weekend and together we created some memorable work.
I was honoured that Hazel Hawke agreed to launch my autobiography Ducks on the Pond in 1999—and surprised at how frank and personal her speech was.
As chair of the board of Greenpeace International I attended Forum 2000 in October 2001 at the invitation of Czech Republic President Vaclev Havel and was tongue-tied to find myself sharing a platform with F.W. de Klerk, the man who released Nelson Mandela and ended apartheid in South Africa.
With Greenpeace campaigner David Logie and Amazon Campaign Coordinator Anne Dingwall on a remote tributary of the Amazon near Porto do Moz. (Photo by Flavio Cannalongu)
I co-curated and emceed the Serious Women’s Business conference for nine years including when newly-minted Governor General Quentin Bryce attended, pictured here with SWB founder Taren Hocking and her new-born son Hudson and committee member Megan Dalla-Camina.
In 2011 I was honoured, along with three other feminists, as an Australian Legend by having my image on a postage stamp. My aunty Gwen, S.M. Mercedes, attended the Melbourne launch with me.