by Anne Summers
Damned Whores and God’s Police
ANNE SUMMERS was born in Deniliquin, New South Wales but grew up in Adelaide. She attended Cabra Convent and the University of Adelaide before moving to Sydney, where she became active in the women’s movement, obtained a PhD and began her writing career. In 1975, after the publication of this book, she joined The National Times as a feature writer where she won a Walkley Award. In 1979 she was appointed political correspondent for the Australian Financial Review. In 1983 she was appointed to head the Office of the Status of Women in the Prime Minister’s Department. From 1987 to 1989 in New York she was editor-in-chief of Ms. magazine and co-owner of Matilda Publications Inc., which owned Ms. and Sassy magazines.
She returned to Australia to become a political consultant to Prime Minister Paul Keating. From 1993 to 1997 she was editor of Good Weekend magazine. In 1989 she was made an Officer of the Order of Australia for services to journalism and to women.
Anne is the author of Her Story: Australian Women in Print (1980), with Margaret Bettison; Gamble for Power (1983); Ducks on the Pond (1999); The End of Equality (2003); On Luck (2008); The Lost Mother: A Story of Art and Love (2009); and The Misogyny Factor (2013). She is the editor and publisher of Anne Summers Reports. She lives in Sydney.
[T]he damned whores the moment that the[y] got below fel a fighting amonst one a nother and Capt Meridith order the Sergt. not to part them but to let them fight it out ...
– Lt Ralph Clark of the First Fleet, The Journals and Letters of Lt Ralph Clark 1787–1792
If Her Majesty’s Government be really desirous of seeing a well-conducted community spring up in these Colonies, the social wants of the people must be considered. If the paternal Government wish to entitle itself to that honoured appellation, it must look to the materials it may send as a nucleus for the formation of a good and great people. For all the clergy you can despatch, all the schoolmasters you can appoint, all the churches you can build, and all the books you can export, will never do much good, without what a gentleman in that Colony very appropriately called ‘God’s police’ – wives and little children – good and virtuous women.
– Caroline Chisholm, Emigration and Transportation Relatively Considered, 1847
Damned Whores andGod’sPolice
The colonisation of women in Australia
AnneSummers
A NewSouth book
Published by
NewSouth Publishing
University of New South Wales Press Ltd
University of New South Wales
Sydney NSW 2052
AUSTRALIA
newsouthpublishing.com
© Anne Summers 2016
First published 1975. This new edition published 2016.
This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry
Creator: Summers, Anne, 1945– author
Title: Damned Whores and God’s Police: The colonisation of women in Australia
ISBN: 9781742234908 (paperback)
9781742242361 (ebook)
9781742247731 (epdf)
Notes: Includes index
Subjects: Women’s rights – Australia
Women – Australia – History
Dewey Number: 305.420994
Design Jo Pajor-Markus
Cover design Sandy Cull, gogoGingko
Cover image Portrait of Anne Summers 1974 by Carol Jerrems (1949–1980), gelatin silver photograph. Collection: National Portrait Gallery, Canberra.
Purchased with funds provided by Tim Fairfax AC 2012. Reproduced with kind permission of Ken Jerrems and the estate of Lance Jerrems.
All reasonable efforts were taken to obtain permission to use copyright material reproduced in this book, but in some cases copyright could not be traced. The author welcomes information in this regard.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction to the 2016 edition
Author’s note to the second revised edition [2002]
Author’s note to the new edition [1994]
Introduction to the new edition [1994]
Introduction [1975]
PART ONE | The nexus of oppression
1 A sexist culture
2 Manzone country
3 The sporting wife
4 The ravaged self
5 The poverty of dependence
6 The family of woman
7 A colonised sex
PART TWO | Sexist stereotypes past and present
8 ‘Damned whores’
9 ‘God’s police’
10 Education for motherhood
11 Feminism and the suffragist
12 The mobilisation of mum
13 Suburban neurotics?
14 Prospects for liberation
Letter to the next generation [1994]
The march of women [2002]
Timeline of achievements by and for Australian women 1788–2015
Notes
Index
To my mother
Acknowledgements
Over the past four decades hundreds of thousands of people have read this book. They have talked and argued about it, studied it, shared it with friends and family members. It became a consciousness-raiser and a call to arms for at least two generations. This kept the book alive, even for those sad seven years when it was actually out of print. So much so that in September 2015 we held a three-day conference about the book, addressing its impact and the question of what is still needed to achieve equality for women in Australia. Not bad for a book that, technically, did not exist.
I am most indebted, therefore, to all of you who have read this book and talked about it. Without you, we would not be back in print, in a volume that brings together each of the previous editions, with their updates that took stock of where we were in 1994 and in 2002, and which tries to assess where we are now, forty years on. It’s been an amazing journey. We started it in 1975 and now in 2016 we are still going. Thank you all for being part of it.
I also thank Kathy Bail and Phillipa McGuinness of NewSouth for their courageous decision to undertake the hugely ambitious task of publishing a book that has now grown to over 750 pages. I salute them for going where other publishers feared to tread. I also thank Emily Stewart for her meticulous edit and Sandy Cull for her inspired cover.
In 1974 Carol Jerrems photographed me for a book of portraits of Australian women. She was just starting to make her mark as a talented photographer and I was struggling to finish this book. She took a series of pictures, most of them in the room where I did my writing. Six years later, Carol died aged just 30, but she left behind an extraordinary body of work. Most of her portfolio was portraits of women, young and old, most of them not well known, many of them, like me, just starting out. Carol caught something in me that day. I look ruminative, brooding, slightly sceptical. It’s as if I am wondering where this whole women thing is going to end up. I still am, so it is fitting that on the cover of this new edition is the young me, photographed by that insightful young woman.
Major institutions, including the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra, collect Jerrems’ work and I wish to thank them and Carol’s brother, Ken Jerrems, for giving permission to use this photograph.
A number of people helped me bring this updated book into being. Rowena Johns researched the updates to the Time-line of women’s achievements with flair and creativity; Foong Ling Kong’s expert eye made
sure we had not forgotten anyone; Dennis Altman suggested some additional achievements; Meredith Burgmann and Philippa Hall provided last-minute research assistance on equal pay; and Jenna Price, in being a driving force behind the Damned Whores and God’s Police at 40 conference at UTS in September 2015, helped create the momentum to have this book back in print which, fortunately, became unstoppable. I thank them each most sincerely. Without the assistance of Christine Howard I would not be able to manage my workload. My gratitude to her is boundless. Every writer is better off for having a soulmate and a sounding board and I am very fortunate, and thankful, to have Chip Rolley, my companion in life and love.
Introduction to 2016 edition
We have changed a lot. But we have not changed enough.
On the morning of Monday, 21 September 2015 I stood in front of a capacity crowd in a stylish new lecture theatre at the University of Technology Sydney and prepared to deliver the first keynote of a three-day conference to mark 40 years since the publication of Damned Whores and God’s Police. The audience was mostly women, ranging in age from 11 years to almost 90, who were eager to explore the question that would absorb us throughout the conference: how much has changed for Australia and, more particularly, for Australian women, in the past four decades. And, just as importantly, what is left to do – and how will we make it happen?
It was a remarkable gathering. The speakers over the three days included people who are well-known (among them former governor-general Quentin Bryce, former chief of army General David Morrison, former Sex Discrimination Commissioner Elizabeth Broderick and Indigenous academic and writer Professor Larissa Behrendt) alongside those who are just starting out or whose names are not as well known as they deserve to be. The range of people, again most of them women, who took part reflected the wonderful and challenging diversity of our country and was a glowing affirmation of the strength and tenacity of the women’s movement. I felt honoured that the ideas I had put out into the world 40 years earlier were still seen as meriting discussion – especially as the book had been out of print for seven years – but this conference was not about me. It was not even about the book, although that, of course, had provided the springboard, and the excuse, for the conference. The gathering, and the amazing amount of media attention it attracted, shows that the great project to achieve women’s equality is still so necessary – and still so far from completion. Bringing this book back into print in 2016 is part of that project, and offers a further opportunity to learn from our past as we go about reinventing our future.
The Australia I wrote about in the early 1970s has not changed totally beyond recognition, but I expect young people today might be astonished to learn what life used to be like for women. Even as late as 1975, when this book was first published, there were so many things women were unable to do. Some of these restrictions were self-imposed, cultural restraints, but in many cases they were underpinned by an absence of laws to enforce equality.
Even though in 1975 we were three years into the Whitlam government – the first federal government to commit to and legislate for women’s equality – there was still no federal anti-discrimination legislation. Nor were there any state laws outlawing discrimination. It seems almost unbelievable today, but until the late 1970s it was perfectly legal for women in Australia to be treated as inferiors. Jobs were classified by sex and advertised as being for ‘Men & boys’ or ‘Women & girls’. There was rarely any overlap between the offerings, which meant that women were excluded from even applying for many positions.
And there were certainly no laws governing how women were treated in the workplace. A woman had no legal redress if, for instance, the boss asked her to sit on his knee to take dictation. Like many terms I used in the book, or situations I described, ‘taking dictation’ is now archaic. For those of you who have never heard of it, let me explain: It meant you had to write down, usually in a special language known as short-hand, the words the boss – who was, of course, a man – wanted written in a letter or other document, which you would then type, on a machine called a typewriter, for him to sign.
The people who did this work were called ‘typists’. There also used to be a special term to describe the place where the typists – all of whom, without exception, were women – used to sit. They were lined up in rows at their desks in a configuration that was referred to as ‘the typing pool’. Along with many other totally sexist jobs, this one thankfully no longer exists. Bosses have had to learn to type. Even if only so they can text.
People of my generation might remember sardonically many of these details of the bad old days – and be eternally thankful that they are over. It is difficult not to seethe with anger, even all these years later, when recalling the multitude of ways in which we were humiliated and degraded. I found it quite illuminating myself when I re-read this book recently and was reminded just how bad the everyday constant, and institutional, denigration of women used to be. (Although the television series Mad Men is a painfully accurate reminder.)
When we compare then and now, the changes are impressive. Many of the statistics, on such things as employment, welfare payments, prescription drug-use and other contemporary matters that I set out in the book, are now almost quaint in how little bearing they have on how things are today. Parts of the book read rather like an historical archive. It is a snapshot of how things were in 1975, and in the convict, colonial and other periods that I wrote about.
I think it is well worth revisiting those eras to recall, or learn for the first time, our history and the story of Australian women’s evolution towards equality. But reading the book also reminds us how different much of our language is now. We can reflect on attitude changes of course, how we have enlarged our understanding of things, but our shifts in language also represent our progress in identifying, through naming, issues and forms of oppression that we did not fully grasp 40 years ago.
It is almost disconcerting to realise how ill equipped we were back then to talk about many key issues. We now understand the importance of language in political struggle. Once you have a name for something, you can start to understand it, and to address it. Looking back, it is fascinating to see how much our language has changed as we have identified new issues and found ways of talking about them.
There are many instances in the book of archaic language and usage. ‘Gay’ meant something else then. We used the term ‘domestics’ to refer to violence in the home. It was standard to use the term ‘Blacks’ rather than Indigenous Australians. Reading the book today is like taking an historical excursion, in time and place, but also into how we talked and the things that mattered to us back then. It seems extraordinary today, but in the mid-1970s we did not use terms like ‘domestic violence’, ‘sexual harassment’, ‘date rape’ or ‘glass ceiling’ – let alone ‘same-sex marriage’ – because they had not yet been coined. We had not yet given names to some things even though they certainly existed. It is astonishing that I devoted almost a page in the book to the setting up of Elsie Women’s Refuge in 1974 and never once used the word ‘violence’, let alone ‘domestic violence’.
We did not use the term ‘gender’, let alone ‘gendered’; we did not talk about ‘gender equality’ the way we do now. We had yet to discover ‘the gender pay gap’; instead we talked about ‘equal pay’. We also talked about ‘women’ and ‘sex’ and ‘sex roles’ and other terms that have fallen into disuse today.
We did not use the term ‘equality’. We preferred ‘liberation’ to ‘feminism’. In the early 1970s we called ourselves ‘women’s liberationists’ and got annoyed when the media dumbed it down to ‘women’s libbers’. When we did refer to ourselves as feminists, it was always qualified by another word. We were ‘radical feminists’ or ‘socialist feminists’ or ‘lesbian feminists’. We felt ‘feminist’ was a rather incomplete description.
I have no intention of updating the language in this new edition of the book. Not only would it require me to completely rewrite the bo
ok but, more importantly, it would alter the context and undermine the authenticity of what I wrote in the early 1970s. We need to understand how it was then, partly so we can see how much we have changed.
Today we also argue endlessly and, in my view, rather point-lessly, about ‘feminism’. What is feminism? What does it mean? Who calls themselves a feminist and what do we think about those women who won’t? (Julie Bishop, the first woman to become Australia’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, managed to trigger acres of coverage over her refusal, in response to questions at her address to the National Press Club on 29 October 2014, to call herself a feminist.1 No-one actually reported her speech, which contained a lot of feminist assumptions and policy announcements.2) I think our energies would be better directed towards addressing the issues of inequality and actually changing them, rather than worrying about what people do or do not call themselves. We would do better to measure women’s representation – be it in boardrooms or on bookshelves – and to concern ourselves with the substance of women’s equality and how we can accelerate its pace.
We are entitled to take pride and comfort from the barriers that have been broken and the triumphs of individual women in expanding the possibilities for all of us: the first prime minister or state premier, governor-general, High Court judge, CEO of a major corporation, the first jockey or football umpire or chemical engineer.3
All of these triumphs were over the horizon in 1975. It was only with the laws designed to end legal discrimination against women that they even became possible.
In the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s – some states were slower than others – we saw the passage of various anti-discrimination laws that were intended to provide a legal basis for equality. These included the landmark federal Sex Discrimination Act 1984, which outlawed discrimination against women on the grounds of their sex (as we used to say then, rather than gender), marital status or condition of pregnancy, in employment, in education and the provision of goods and services. It is almost impossible to convey today just how hard-fought that legislation was, how formidable the opposition to it was and how much changed once it finally became the law of the land (and, over the decades since, has been amended and strengthened). For instance, in 1983, when Australia first ratified the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, which provides the legal basis for the Sex Discrimination Act, the government secured agreement to exempt two provisions of that Convention: paid maternity leave and allowing women to serve in combat roles in the military. Both those exemptions are now redundant, with a Paid Parental Leave scheme introduced by the Rudd Government in 2009 and all positions in Defence finally being opened up to women in 2011 by the Gillard Government.