by Julia Baird
By the 1990s, however, Crosio told me her views had changed:
I thought I was free even the first day I took my own breath . . . but to be called a feminist, I probably said no in those days, what do you mean by feminism, do you mean that you are not free to do, to think, to speak? Since then, of course, I have seen a lot of problems with females not getting the same wages, not getting the same representations in what they are able to do . . . I’m fighting the fight for the people I represent and half those people — in fact now it’s more — happen to be women . . . Maybe I was doing it and maybe I was acting it, maybe I was living it, without all of those platitudes and rhetoric going on behind — I don’t know.
Crosio’s insistence that she personally had no need of it, and was tall or talented enough to fend for herself, was representative of a more widespread view that feminism was a cop-out or soft option for those who wanted to leapfrog to the top by claiming they represented the absent voice of women. This was a nascent version of what came to be known as ‘the gender card’.
Other women politicians were simply ideologically opposed to feminism. They argued, in a decade where public debates about the role and status of women centred on sex discrimination and affirmative action legislation, that women were not disadvantaged by their sex. National Party politician Flo Bjelke-Petersen said she thought that feminists sought to eradicate the differences between the sexes; were opposed to motherhood; and were generally angry, ‘hard-hitting’ women dressed in overalls. Some, like Bronwyn Bishop, sought to portray feminists as whingers who lacked sufficient talent to achieve on their own merits.9 Many politically conservative women shied from being linked to the women’s liberation movement because it was strongly associated with a critical Marxist or socialist class analysis in the 1970s, and increasingly with the Labor Party in the 1970s and 1980s.10 However, some women from the ALP Right objected to the women’s movement for the opposite reasons, and resented what they believed was a request to place gender before class. Joan Child thought feminists irrelevant, and was irritated that, as the member for a marginal Labor seat, she was portrayed as a representative of women before she had opened her mouth.11 She argued feminist policies were too sectarian for a staunch Labor MP, who represented both men and women. Child believes the greatest problem she had politically was not the press but women’s groups who criticised her for not representing their interests and a lack of sympathy to problems faced by women.12
And women of colour were rarely asked for their views or included in any discussion of feminism. Definitions of feminism varied widely. Ros Kelly, for example, told me: ‘Of course I’m a feminist if you believe in women developing to the fullest and doing everything you can to support them.’ Victorian Liberal MLC Gracia Baylor called herself a ‘right-wing feminist’, and claimed feminism was about gaining power, not lobbying those who had it.13 This was partly because the term feminist was associated with a broad set of demands, few of which formed part of their own political platform. But from the mid-1980s a growing number of female MPs, especially those from the ALP, owned the word without qualification.
In newspaper coverage of the women’s movement in the 1970s, feminism was as closely associated with the ‘burning bra’ symbolism in Australia as it was in America.14 By focusing on a trivial aspect of feminist activism — which was in fact most likely a fictional event — women MPs could laugh off any suggestions that they were ‘women’s libbers’ who refused to pander to conventional codes of feminine dress and behaviour in order to make themselves attractive to men.15 ‘Burn my bra?’ asked Janice Crosio, a couple of years after her cleavage was displayed on the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald: ‘I need all the help I can get.’ Jean Melzer said she believed in women’s equality, but not women’s lib: ‘I’m much more comfortable in a bra.’16 Liberal MP Kathy Sullivan, who was sympathetic to the goals of the women’s movement, told me in 1997 that she had always avoided the ‘misleading’ term feminist. In 1974, being a feminist meant ‘to burn the bra’, she said, and she ‘wanted to be listened to on other topics’. She found ‘some of the feminist rhetoric at the time very offensive’. She wanted to be taken seriously by a ‘very heavily male chauvinist’ press and believed calling herself a feminist would have put her ‘at the mercy of these male journos’ who tended to stereotype feminism.
Behind the jokes were fears that the label feminist could marginalise women in parliament. Identifying as a feminist was interpreted not just as having a particular view about the place of women in society, but as only having views on women.
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The term ‘feminist’, which had originated in Europe more than a hundred years earlier, was not used unquestioningly by those active in the Australian women’s movement in the 1960s and 1970s.17 According to Anne Summers, author of Damned Whores and God’s Police, an activist and later a journalist, second-wave feminists did not wish to be called feminists because it was considered an old-fashioned word: ‘Feminists, we thought, were quaint relics with their fixations on peace, abstinence from alcohol and an obscure concept called rights. We weren’t for women’s rights . . . we were women’s liberationists!’18 According to Ann Curthoys the term ‘women’s liberation’ was gradually dropped around 1973–74 and replaced by ‘feminism’ and for some time the ‘women’s movement’.19 A rough correlation can be seen in the words used by journalists, and by the mid-1970s feminist was the term most frequently used.
Australian feminism has always been multiple and diverse: consisting of intersectional feminisms, and not just one single view, perspective or theoretical framework, though those of white middle-class straight women usually dominated. The women’s movement which burst onto the political scene with such exuberance into the late 1960s was influenced by several strands of thought, and riven with debates about how to prioritise class, race, gender and sexuality, as well as the most appropriate strategy to employ to effect change. Few of these ever appeared in newsprint. It was strongly influenced by the critiques of British and American writers, such as Juliet Mitchell, on the sexual and material subordination of women, Pat Mainardi’s deconstruction of the politics of housework, Kate Millett’s analysis of patriarchy, and Shulamith Firestone’s utopian vision of a world where women would be freed from the burden of reproduction.20
Woven through much of the more radical literature were the voices and experiences of First Nations women, and women of colour, but in the public eye, in press reports, they were often absent. Notable exceptions were civil rights activist and South Sea Islander Faith Bandler, who was a high-profile member of the NSW Women’s Electoral Lobby in the 1970s, Kuku Yalanji woman and lawyer Pat O’Shane, who became Australia’s first Aboriginal magistrate and often confronted white feminists about racism in the women’s movement, and Yaegl elder Joyce Clague, who campaigned for the rights of Indigenous Australians, ran for parliament and worked on councils advising the NSW premier about women.
Radical feminists (women’s liberationists), who sought revolution and employed consciousness raising as a means of personal transformation, were frequently at odds with liberal feminists (from the Women’s Electoral Lobby), who sought to reform existing institutions, usually by lobbying the government or through bureaucratic channels.21 Unlike activists in the United States and Britain, many Australian women flooded into the state and federal bureaucracies after the election of the sympathetic Whitlam government in 1972, which enacted a range of pro-women policies, such as equal pay in the Commonwealth Public Service, paid maternity leave for public servants, funding for women’s refuges, the abolition of the luxury tax on the contraceptive pill, as well as the appointment of an adviser on women’s issues. But many women MPs also faced accusations from others in the women’s movement that they had sold out, allowing themselves to be co-opted by a masculinist, capitalist political system in a pursuit of personal power.
The Women’s Electoral Lobby (WEL) was formed in Melbourne in 1972 specifically for the purpose of political lobbying.
It was most prominent during the 1972 federal election, when members canvassed candidates for their views on a range of policies affecting women. Female journalists were recruited (often by other women journalists) to help with media strategy, with great success.22 Nancy Dexter wrote in the Age that ‘the 1972 federal election must go down as the first in which the average woman is really interested. Much of this interest is due to WEL.’ Another Age journalist, Sally White, argued WEL’s success meant ‘that Women’s Lib is not a dirty word to the media if they are approached in the correct way’.23 There were 164 press articles on WEL in 1972, many written by women journalists, and only three were unfavourable.24 A significant number of members went on to become politicians.25
For many journalists, WEL was the acceptable face of feminism.26 Members were described by the press as different from other ‘women’s libbers’ because they wore nice frocks, brushed their hair, were mostly married with children, and aimed to improve, not overthrow, institutions. WEL’s public relations officer, Wendy McCarthy, told interviewers she was not a women’s liberationist, because ‘WEL defined its role as reformist, not revolutionary.’27 It was the rowdy elements of women’s liberation — particularly anything to do with breasts — that had captured the imagination of the press, however, and became the standard by which journalists compared women politicians. By 1975, the undefined and open-ended question ‘Are you a feminist?’ had become critical in a self-conscious formation of identity.
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Susan Ryan was elected as senator for the ACT in 1975 under the slogan: ‘A Woman’s Place is in the Senate’. Unlike the 14 women who had entered federal parliament before her, her political career was spawned by the women’s movement. She was elected as a feminist, supported by her own feminist faction in the ALP, and voted for on the understanding that she would promote the views of, and policies for, women. She was different from her female colleagues, wrote Phillip McCarthy in the National Times, because she had ‘used feminism as a political weapon and never seen it as a liability’. When she first appeared in the press, as a candidate, headlines read ‘Women’s libber aims for the Senate’ and ‘A Woman on the move’.
Ryan was of particular interest to the media because she was articulate, young and a divorced mother of two — someone to be welcomed as a source of entertainment in the dull and conservative ‘old men’s House’ of the Senate. It was often implied that Ryan’s appearance was the spoonful of sugar that made the feminism go down: ‘It helps . . . that she is feminine as well as feminist, a woman who never forgets she is one. She is petite and attractive, dresses well and always aims at looking good.’28 She still managed to look attractive to men despite her views, wrote Dorian Wild.29 ‘It has to be said that despite once belonging to a fairly militant women’s lib group, Susan Ryan is a very feminine feminist,’ he wrote. Another reporter declared:
Senator Susan Ryan is a together lady, although she’d probably consider such a description demeaning. It is indeed a sexist comment about a woman whose success in Canberra has come as much from her personable ability to wave the flag of feminine feminism in a manner which has the male dominated corridors of power willing to listen as from her undoubted political prowess.30
Largely because the word was considered pejorative, many journalists were careful that the labelling of Ryan as a feminist — and socialist — was her responsibility, not theirs. They usually said it was ‘self-described’, or put the word feminist in inverted commas. But most of her coverage in the late 1970s was positive. She was touted as a ‘brilliant Labor Senator’ who, predictably, was considered to be ‘a Prime Minister in the making’.31 Ryan was appointed shadow minister for communications, arts and letters after Labor lost the 1977 election, and was described in a spate of articles as a credible, passionate ‘optimist in the Senate’.32
Over the next few years, however, Ryan’s feminist views gradually came to be seen as a liability. Ryan had been hugely successful in making her party take the views of women seriously, particularly when she utilised research that found that if women had voted for the ALP in the same numbers as men, Labor would have won all elections since World War II, including the 1977 election.33 She convinced the ALP leadership to change their policies for women, embarked on a national publicity campaign, and put the gender gap on the political agenda. Labor won the 1983 election, and the gender gap closed for the first time when more than 50 per cent of women voted for the ALP.
At the same time, complaining she was being typecast by print journalists who were only interested in her views on women, Ryan began to downplay her image as a feminist mouthpiece. She argued that women’s issues had moved to the centre of Australian politics. Some of her fellow feminists accused her of selling out.34
But Ryan’s rhetorical shift away from feminism as a defining identity was viewed by many journalists as a sign of maturity, revealing again how feminism was seen as being marginal to the political process, and how women were portrayed as peering over the edge of ‘real politics’. The Sydney Morning Herald’s Jenni Hewett wrote that, for Ryan, feminism had become ‘the fall back position rather than the battering ram’. Ryan told her:
I don’t see myself so much as a feminist representing women. I see politics as broader and with more complex interactions than when I started. I’ve gone from concentrating on specifics like child care much more into the mainstream. What we call women’s issues are really marginal. Though I support campaigns like women’s refuges — and people still identify me with them — I see them as peripheral to issues which affect women’s position such as access to employment, tax policies, distribution of income.35
Both male and female journalists interpreted the shift as signalling Ryan had become tougher, more ambitious and more adept at the political game. She had toughened as a politician and no longer ‘let her heart bleed in public’, wrote one.36
After Labor’s victory in 1983, Ryan became the first woman in a federal Labor cabinet when she was made minister for education and youth affairs and minister assisting the PM on the status of women. As Ryan grew in status, her feminist views were no longer considered cute, or quirky. They began instead to be described in the press as liabilities, as her opponents used her views to attack her. This was triggered by the active role she played in driving the ground-breaking sex discrimination and equal opportunity legislation through the federal parliament. There was a protracted, powerful and hugely personal campaign orchestrated against her in 1984 as she introduced and fought for the Bill which outlawed discrimination on the grounds of sex, marital status and pregnancy in employment, housing, goods, services, education, accommodation, and finance, and made sexual harassment unlawful in employment and education. Andrew Symon wrote in the Advertiser, ‘A year in Government has left Susan Ryan in no doubt about the price she must pay for her feminism . . . she says she has been a target of extreme conservative groups opposing Labor policies because she personifies the changes in society they oppose.’37 But the passage of the Sex Discrimination Act, a critical pieces of feminist legislation, was a momumental feat. ‘Suffragette Susan’ considered it her greatest political achievement.
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In 1977 a 31-year-old Janine Haines entered the Senate to fill a casual vacancy for the then fledgling Australian Democrats. The party had been formed by former Liberal cabinet minister Don Chipp in 1977, and was intended to be a third political force in Australia, located somewhere between the two major parties.38 Coinciding with a period during which a greater number of women were becoming involved in political parties, the Democrats ‘seemed to present an ideal opportunity to create a party free of patriarchal legacies’, with more transparent decision-making processes, and a structure that sought the involvement of party members at a grassroots level.39 The party prided itself on avoiding male-dominated machine politics, and consistently fielded a high number of women candidates. Although Haines — who only stayed in parliament until 1978 but was re-elected in 1981 — had identified herself as an advoca
te for women from the start, in the early stages of her political career she was ambivalent about the word feminist. In 1981 she said that although she supported equal rights for women, calling her a feminist because she opposed injustice to women was like calling her an Aboriginal person because she opposed injustice to Aboriginal people. However, by 1984, journalists reported that Haines described herself as a feminist. In 1989 she insisted she still did not like the use of labels, but accepted they were often used: ‘They are meaningless statements by and large but, given we are stuck with labels, now when I’m asked I will say, “Yes, I am a feminist. The fact that I look like a reject from the Liberal Women’s Council of Victoria is totally irrelevant.”’40 Haines consistently aimed to voice the concerns of women, saying when she first entered the Senate chamber, she was ‘struck by the maleness of the place’ and felt it to be ‘awash with testosterone’. Women’s groups hailed her as a heroine.