It had taken me a long time – and an act of what theologians call ‘irresistible grace’ and what I call a kick in the pants – till I was forced to do in the area of the central events of human history what I would have done automatically if I’d been reporting a minor road accident. And I found myself face to face with the evidence of what happened when God invaded time in the flesh of a man. Not very long ago – the lifetimes of thirty men. I was dealing with evidence, a large proportion of it dealing with the trial, and execution and, worst of all, the rising from the dead again of this man Jesus. And I really didn’t want to know that. It smashed a hole in my ceiling and showed me the sky, and the sight of that frightening depth forced me to my knees, which is never an attitude which has appealed to me.
Evidence. The evidence is that the central events in human history happened in the Middle East about thirty lifetimes ago. For the past three and a half years I’ve been trying to cope with that fact. I have checked my sources, I have checked my facts, and I’m convinced. And everything else follows from that.
As someone who began as a reporter, and who now reports on his society through the form of television drama, my response to Christ was not particularly religious in the sense of ceremony or stained glass or clasped hands and averted eyes. My response to Him was a response to fact. I took the view that the whole business is either true or it’s not. And if it was true, then it demanded a response.
I realised that Jesus went to the line for me. I didn’t want Him to die for me – that’s not my thing. But He did it. That laid something on me and I had to respond. And I responded as a servant – out of a sense of obligation. But it’s turned into a love affair.
Australian Feminist Periodicals in the Seventies
Jane Sunderland
(adapted, from Hecate, 2/1979)
The 1970s have witnessed the appearance and, in many cases, disappearance of a wide range of feminist papers and journals in Australia.
These publications’ variety of content, and their diversity of approach, reflect the pluralistic nature of the women’s movement, and the different, frequently non-complementary, paths it has taken. Substantial changes have occurred in many of the periodicals themselves during these years, influenced by such interrelated factors as alterations in the membership, organisation and political orientation of the collectives and other groups responsible for these publications, a changing political climate, the nature of the market, and increases or (usually) cuts in funding. The effect of these factors on a periodical is manifested in its political tendency, content and general coherence. A strengthening political line in some journals, with increasing concentration on class struggle, in conjunction with a clearer direction, for example, can be related to the decreasing emphasis on the women’s movement as a separate entity, accompanied by the gradual alignment of feminists with parties. Tendencies now dominating the publications of the women’s liberation movement range from bourgeois feminist to anarcho-feminist to socialist-feminist, the central split being between those who see the primary struggle as one of class and those who see it as one of sex.
The method of production of recent feminist publications has resulted partly from a conflation of the ideologies of sisterhood, non-specialisation of tasks, and the equal value of those tasks, and an anarchist tendency to avoid anything approaching authoritarian-style leadership. Consequently, many periodicals are collectively, or co-operatively, produced. These rarely acknowledge an editor, and members of the collective, together with contributors, are often identified by no more than a first name. Hence individual power, and ‘fame’, are minimised, and contributors protected from ‘unsupportive’ attack. However, apart from the fact that effective, constructive criticism can be inhibited by this mode of operation, potential efficiency of distribution and production can also be adversely affected. The absence of an ultimately responsible member (or members) to at least co-ordinate can, in the long term, undermine the original dedication and commitment. As one of the Vashti co-operative, discussing the struggles of small publications to survive, points out:
… the crucial factor is lack of woman resource and energy. In the final analysis … even if the money runs out, the women raise it somehow, but when the collective numbers dwindle, the commitment becomes more exhausting and paralysing for those remaining. I remember well the despair and weariness of the three women who in effect produced some four issues [of Vashti] between mid-1973 and mid-1974.
Several co-operatively produced periodicals have survived, but not necessarily with, in practice, equal distribution of responsibility.
Australian feminist periodicals can be divided into three non-discrete groups: newsletters, newspapers, and magazines or journals. At the start of the decade, regional newsletters were the primary outlet for the dissemination of information and exchange of ideas: in addition to an advertisement for Mejane, the pioneer feminist newspaper, Refractory Girl in winter 1973 listed only newsletters (from Sydney, Hobart, Canberra and Adelaide) under its heading ‘Current Women’s Liberation Publications in Australia’. Newsletters are often short-lived: the struggles they report usually fade in intensity or come to a temporary halt, or time and energy are directed elsewhere. Brisbane’s Shrew, produced in the early seventies, was eventually discontinued, its function taken on after a gap of several years by Ms. Appropriate, put out by the Women’s Community Aid Association, and the Brisbane Women’s Liberation Newsletter, produced from the Brisbane Creative Arts Centre; and again in 1978 by the Queenland Women’s Liberation Newsletter. And the Hobart-produced Liberaction, after continuing for three years, concluded with The Last Liberaction in May 1975.
Some newsletters have aimed at national distribution and have directed their material towards particular groups of feminist and other women. Examples are Bluestocking, first published in December 1975, aiming to give ‘the latest information on resources for non-sexist learning’, the Women’s News Service, produced six times a year by the Australian Union of Students, Magdalene, ‘a Christian newsletter for women’, also put out six times a year, by Christian Women Concerned in Sydney, and Women and Work, produced three to four times a year by the Women’s Bureau of the Department of Employment and Youth Affairs in Melbourne. This prints brief articles and reports on such subjects as the right of married women to work, apprenticeships for girls, and training available for women under the NEAT scheme.
A recently founded Sydney newsletter, Women’s Voice, runs reports on women’s struggles. It may well develop into a journal comparable to the British Socialist Workers’ Party’s (formerly International Socialists) Women’s Voice, though the geographical separation of the major Australian cities could militate against its becoming a similar national journal.
The importance of a newsletter should not be underestimated: it can be distributed free to women who would not buy or come into contact with more permanent feminist literature, it can impart information about current struggles quickly and effectively without losing its readers in a mass of theoretical analysis, and it can provide a forum that does not require a wait of several months for responses.
Several feminist newspapers have also come – and gone. Mejane, ‘a women’s liberation newspaper’, first published in March 1971 in Sydney, produced its twelfth and last issue in April 1974. Carrying both ‘political’ and ‘personal’ articles, it devoted some issues to one area, like health. In 1972 Melbourne women produced Hussy, ‘the liberated woman’s newspaper’ but, like its predecessor, it has now ceased publication. Vashti’s Voice (later to become Vashti, and a magazine), was also published in Melbourne in the same year – and is continuing. It includes a variety of articles, reports, stories, reviews and creative writing, from an equal variety of political positions – the opinions expressed being ‘not necessarily the opinions of the Co-op’. The Co-operative chooses not to ‘restrict’ itself to ‘one feminist analysis or stream of thought’ but rather to demonstrate ‘the diverse views existing amongst women’s liberationists�
��. Accordingly, articles taking either anarchist or socialist positions are printed, together with frequent reports of feminist activity outside Australia. There is also a strong emphasis on women and the arts.
Mabel, a Sydney-produced ‘Australian feminist newspaper’, brought out its first issue in December 1975. It was originally more centrally concerned with questions of class than were comparable papers. Mabel ceased publication in 1977 because of ‘lack of woman resource and energy’. The gap it has left is now taken by Rouge, the first issue of which appeared in June 1979. Rouge doesn’t appear to have any particularly coherent political line, the first issue requesting only that contributors avoid ‘jargon and academic language’, and demonstrating a preference for contributors’ anonymity. Rouge collectives have been established in several Australian centres, but the newspaper’s continuation is dependent on ‘desperately needed’ donations and subscriptions.
Two other significant feminist newspapers are Women at Work and Right to Choose, both of which are aimed at a more specific market. Women at Work is produced from Melbourne by the Working Women’s Charter Campaign and is directed towards migrant as well as native Australian women workers: it includes articles in a variety of European languages. Right to Choose is the Sydney-produced newspaper of the Women’s Abortion Action Campaign (WAAC).
Magazines and journals comprise the largest group of Australian feminist periodicals, both past and current. Some have an appearance of ‘respectability’ and receive funding, but many, funded or not, frequently quietly disappear and, even while in publication, despite a few progressive librarians, go largely unseen except by those who subscribe. Many ‘political’ magazines carry creative material in the form of poems, short stories, graphics and interviews with writers, this being a feature also of most non-feminist Australian small magazines and journals, such as Meanjin, Overland and Quadrant. These publications occasionally devote an issue to women’s writing: see Meanjin’s IWY issue for an example.
Feminist magazines and journals usually have a more clearly defined editorial policy, and are written for a smaller, more select and more highly educated audience, than are news-letters and newspapers. Join Hands, published twice-yearly by the women’s collective of the CPA – responsibility for each issue being rotated from state to state – is a journal of ‘women, liberation and socialism’. Although the emphasis is on the struggles of working women, it also carries poetry and discussion of the arts.
Refractory Girl, originally describing itself as a ‘women’s studies journal’ was the first major Australian feminist magazine or journal not aligned with any political party. Collectively produced, the first issue of this quarterly appeared in 1973, and publication is continuing. Though a recent issue carries the subtitle ‘a journal of radical feminist thought’, the ambiguity of this has still led to a general editorial policy of requesting ‘contributions of all kinds’. Like other journals with a similar ‘open-minded’ approach, it thus produces a series of articles with no common tendency other than a feminist approach. One distinctive feature, however, is its regular and useful section ‘Research Notes’.
Hecate was conceived in 1974, after a group of Brisbane women produced the fourth, non-Sydney, issue of Refractory Girl. They proposed to the Sydney collective that two issues of Refractory Girl be produced each year from each of the two cities. The Sydney women were not keen to give up overall control, and so the Brisbane women decided to go ahead with their own publication. The first issue of Hecate appeared in early 1975. Apart from Perth’s feminist magazine Sibyl, Hecate appears to be the only feminist magazine or journal consistently produced outside New South Wales or Victoria.
1973 saw a publication by the Melbourne As If collective (the Anarcho-Surrealist Insurrectionary Feminists); an editorial accordingly rejected ‘the idea that our subjection as women is somehow of secondary importance balanced up against some more important struggle’. The two opposing approaches – divided on the importance of sex or class oppression as ‘primary’ – recurring frequently over the decade, is not in fact unique to the seventies: several early working women’s and feminist publications also adhered either to the idea of women working within parties, or to the idea of a movement with no necessary connection with the class struggle.
Within the next two years three women’s journals with a primarily literary emphasis came into being. Cauldron and Fin, produced from Sydney and Kew (Melbourne) respectively, both described themselves as feminist publications, and carried short, mainly literary, articles about little-known figures, as well as poems and stories. Again, Fin welcomed all contributions ‘within a feminist context’, and Cauldron carried an implication that the fundamental struggle is that of women’s subculture against male hegemony.
Luna publishes work by feminist writers such as Joanne Burns as well as more widely known women poets like Judith Wright; nevertheless, it remains primarily a journal of creative writing by a selection largely of established writers, the majority of whom are women.
Womanspeak was first published from Sydney in 1975, when it decribed itself as ‘a magazine for women to speak their minds’. (Later, a little more boldly, it ‘aimed to introduce women to some of the ideas of the women’s movement’.) It puts out some fifteen issues per year and typically carries creative writing, book and film reviews, interviews and articles – although these are often of a primarily personal nature, rather than attempting to be informative.
Scarlet Woman also produced its first issue in 1975. Describing itself as a ‘feminist-socialist quarterly’, and aiming to ‘present and develop ideas on how socialism and feminism are related to one another’, it is now strongly CPA-influenced. Articles correspond to the editorial position and any deviations from the editorial line are highlighted. Scarlet Woman is produced by two ‘autonomous’ collectives in Sydney and Melbourne, each of which takes responsibility for alternate issues.
Scarlet Woman was followed in 1976 by Working Papers in Sex, Science and Culture (now Working Papers). It ‘critically examines the function of language, ideology and scientificity in the construction of sex theories ranging from conventional sciences to liberation movements’. Similarly oriented is Sydney’s The Politics of Sex, Sexuality and Class, ‘a new feminist-homosexual journal’, first published in 1976.
Lip is a glossy extravaganza, an annual journal now describing its area of interest as ‘art and politics from a feminist perspective’. Its feminist tendency is apparent in such articles as Women’s Art and Feminist Criticism’, ‘Sisterhood – for whom?’ and ‘Feminism and Publishing’; but other articles often focus on artists who simply happen to have been born female.
The Women’s Sociological Bulletin is an academic publication currently produced from La Trobe University, Melbourne. Though very much the preserve of the academic theoretician, it nevertheless contributes a well-researched and well-documented body of findings, together with their interpretation, to the widening fields of ‘herstory’ and gynthropology.
An odd-woman-out, and clear anomaly, is the recent Sister – A New Direction for Women. Published by the Progressive Women’s Spiritual Association – a subsection of Ananda Marga – it ‘will endeavour to print material that contributes to the all-round progress of women’. There is an emphasis on health – i.e. ‘the harmonious integration of all aspects of personality’ – the third world and, predictably, women and spirituality.
What of feminist publishing? There are some feminist presses: Everywoman Press (Sydney), Sybylla Press (Melbourne), and now Sisters in Melbourne: a new feminist publishing house which ‘will provide an outlet for the best in women’s writing and research’. Most works published will be ‘in areas badly served by current Australian publishing’. Sisters plans to publish some twelve books each year, the first being Country Girl Again, a collection of short stories by Jean Bedford; Working Women, discussion papers prepared by the Melbourne Working Women’s Centre; and Sisters Poets 1, a collection of work by four Australian women poets.
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The number of feminist publications current at any one time has risen over this decade. The newsletters and newspapers which made up a large proportion of this number will probably continue to come and go as feminist activity continues to fluctuate, and will meet needs as these arise. However, the magazines and journals, serving different but related interests to those served by newsletters and newspapers, have become reasonably stable continuing publications. They provide a forum for presenting new theoretical frameworks, for disseminating significant results of research which help rewrite Australia’s history and change its past, male, image; and for attempting to analyse contemporary feminist practice, often from a wider theoretical perspective, so that it can accordingly be placed in a wider theoretical framework.
In contrast to the relatively favourable period of the Whitlam government, where a definite shift in attitudes towards women’s liberation was accompanied by limited funding for some projects, the present period shows a marked deterioration, at both financial and attitudinal levels. Sisters reports the story of a Melbourne publisher who refused to reprint What Society Does to Girls, because ‘society has changed and a book like this is no longer necessary’ – and the output of the Australian feminist presses remains very limited. Fortunately, periodicals are less dependent on what is good for the capitalist press than are books.
Though at present in a relatively inauspicious position, feminist publications will continue in their role of developing and strengthening understanding of oppression. Despite recurring organisational problems and financial struggles – which may result in one or two disappearances and the subsequent appearance of new or ‘replacement’ journals and magazines – the survival of these feminist publications seems, in most cases, assured.
Days of Wine and Rage Page 36