by Anne Summers
As Rosie Batty, the 2015 Australian of the Year and a tireless campaigner on the issue of family violence, has pointed out, we cannot address violence without addressing gender inequality. Elizabeth Broderick, who until early September 2015 was Australia’s Sex Discrimination Commissioner, has made the same argument: ‘Men’s violence against women is Australia’s most significant gender equality issue. It’s both a cause and a consequence of gender inequality.’15
This is a startling, and sobering, assessment.
I could never have made such an assertion back in 1975. We had not yet made those kinds of connections. As I have already indicated, it was difficult back then to even speak about violence. It was beyond comprehension that we could have seen a casual connection between women’s inequality and the rise in violence against women. Yet Broderick has taken the argument even further, arguing that it is not only the most significant gender equality issue in Australia, but that it’s the most significant gender equality issue in the world.
Globally, around 900 million women are either currently or have recently lived in violent relationships; in Australia the figure is 1.2 million women:
Just think about that … that’s the Telstra Stadium 10, 15 times full of women. In fact, here in New South Wales, last week, we had two women murdered by their intimate partner. We’ve had 35 women murdered by their intimate partner in the first 14 weeks of this year. If there were 35 people being killed by terrorist attack or falling off a train or whatever, we’d be doing something about it.16
She said that on 7 May 2015 when 35 women had been killed. As Broderick said, if 35 Australians had been killed in any other way, there would be outrage. And there would be action.
In the seven months since then, another 44 women died violently.
Two young boys were killed as a result of random violence on my street in Kings Cross, Sydney, in 2014. As a result, the liquor laws were changed, venues have closed and there has been a dramatic decrease in violence in the area. When are we going to react in a similarly serious fashion to the ongoing deaths of women? Why do the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition attend the funerals of soldiers killed in war, but not the funerals of women killed as a result of domestic terrorism?
When are we going to treat this as the national emergency it is? Or are we in a continuing state of deep denial about the true causes of this violence? No amount of political window-dressing, or emergency packages of the kind that we saw from federal and state government in the latter part of 2015, will end the violence until we end the inequality. The two things are deeply and inextricably linked and we have to accept this – and act on it.
This book reflected the coming together of research and activism.
I spent many hours in libraries, reading documents and doing all kinds of primary and secondary research in order to understand the country and why and how it so deeply embodied and reflected masculine values. I also spent a great deal of time as an activist in the women’s movement and the resident action movement that was active in inner Sydney in the early 1970s. I was involved in setting up Elsie Women’s Refuge, the Sydney Rape Crisis Centre, the founding of Refractory Girl, the first women’s studies journal as well as numerous speakouts, meetings, marches and demonstrations.
I worried how my activism was taking me away from my writing and I was criticised by sister activists for running away from that work to bury myself in the library, but in the end, I realised that the two things were both essential to developing the framework for understanding Australian history and society. Each edition of the book – 1975, 1994, 2002 and now 2016 – similarly reflected that interaction between my research and my activism. I see the book as a living thing that has helped us to understand who we are and why we are the way we are. The activism provides the test cases of what we need to do to change, to complete our journey to equality by renouncing the stereotypes and enabling all women to flower as unique individuals able to participate fully and equally in all that society has to offer.
By focusing on the practical as well as the theoretical, we develop a greater understanding of what we need to change, as well as why it needs to.
Realising this ought to motivate us to start on the path to the deep cultural change that is necessary if we are going to subvert and destroy the stereotypes rather than merely continue to modernise them.
Not just our sanity is at stake but, in too many instances, our lives as well.
Sydney
January 2016
Author’s note to the second revised edition [2002]
Damned Whores and God’s Police was published in both hard cover and paperback in 1975, and reprinted many times over the next 19 years. In 1994, a revised edition was published that added a new introduction and replaced the original concluding chapter, ‘Prospects for liberation’, with a new one – ‘Letter to the next generation’ – which caused considerable controversy at the time. This latest, 2002, edition retains all these chapters and restores ‘Prospects for liberation’. It is therefore a compilation of the previous versions of the book, but as well it includes significant new material.
The major addition is the ‘Timeline of achievements by and for Australian women’, which follows the new essay ‘The march of women’. In compiling the timeline, I needed to revisit all our history since white settlement so that I could chart the milestones. Mostly I have concentrated on the political and economic achievements, but I thought the timeline needed to include other dimensions – as do our lives – and so I have also mentioned important accomplishments by women in the arts, in sport and in business.
Part of my task in the early 1970s, when I first wrote this book, was to uncover the story of women who had, to use a phrase made famous by the British historian Sheila Rowbotham, been ‘hidden from history’. The occasional individual woman was singled out for her accomplishments by mainstream histories, but the vast majority of women’s lives might as well not have been lived if you were to take those histories as an accurate reflection of our past. One of the early excitements of the second-wave women’s movement 30 years ago was to discover how rich and diverse women’s history actually was. Many of the young women, like myself, who made up that second wave were students or otherwise interested in research and we spent a great deal of time in libraries learning about the activities of our feminist forebears. We were astonished to discover a rich trove of radical activism, much of which had achieved material changes in the lives of women.
It was sobering for us in the 1970s to realise that we were not the first feminists. Why didn’t we know about this history? we wondered. Why was it not taught in schools? Even more worrying, what had happened to these previous movements of women? If they had disappeared from history, was that also going to be our fate? Would a future generation of young women have to forage through information systems to retrieve data about the feminist revolution of the 1970s and 1980s? We did not think so for a moment, such was the self-assurance of the times! Yet, a mere decade or so later, many of the accomplishments of the second wave are forgotten while the earlier ones might never have occurred. I am not suggesting that we need to dwell obsessively on the past, nor that we should be overly preoccupied with our feminist heritage, but I am astonished at how quickly we have forgotten even our own recent past.
I frequently find myself having to check dates and events that not so long ago seemed permanently etched in my consciousness. This is not just a problem of memory fading with the years. The collective story of women is still not sufficiently integrated into the national story to be assured of being automatically passed on. It is incumbent upon those of us who think that we need to understand our past, in order to shape our future, to ensure that women do not once again disappear from history.
The new timeline, which appears at the end of the book, is not meant as a substitute for the narrative history that is the key to our story. It is intended to provide something of a skeleton for that narrative. Reading it, you will observe a tra
jectory of progress. What you will not find is the flesh on the bones of that skeleton. For that, you will need to read the whole of this book, or the various others that tell the story of women in Australia over the past 200 years. But it seemed to me that we needed an accessible reference tool that simplified the task of being able to check the dates of key events and milestones in that story. With this timeline you can quickly remind yourself, or learn for the first time, when Australian women won the right to vote, or the right to legal abortion; when the first woman doctor was able to practise, or the first woman pilot to fly. But the story is not complete. The timeline concludes with a check list of the barriers we have yet to breach, positions of power that have yet to be occupied by women. Eventually, this will happen and then perhaps we can conclude that most, if not all, of the legal and social obstacles to women’s equality have been overcome. But will this be enough for the lives of all women to be transformed? Does the success of a few individual women herald changes for all? That is the question for the future.
Sydney
January 2002
Author’s note to the new edition [1994]
When this book was first published, the reviews ranged from lukewarm to unremittingly hostile, but it quickly found an audience of women, and men, who were receptive to what was then a new way of looking at ourselves and our country. I was also pleased to learn that, although it was published only in Australia and New Zealand, the book managed to find its way into the hands of feminists around the world. I received enthusiastic letters from women in Canada, the US, England, South Africa and Nigeria. I was sorry it was never published in either Britain or the US, despite vigorous efforts on my part, but it is good to know that books have a way of finding their way around the world despite the decisions of international publishing houses.
This book would probably never have been written had it not been for the efforts of the late Professor Henry Mayer, who let me into his postgraduate program in the University of Sydney’s Government Department even though he knew I had a contract with Penguin Books, who gave my draft chapters attention worthy of a thesis and then, when the book was finally published, insisted I honour my undertaking to submit it for examination for a postgraduate degree. It took several years of negotiating our way around the labyrinthine university regulations to obtain agreement that, despite its most irregular title, I could submit for examination the published book – rather than have it retyped and bound into the usual thesis format. I happened to be in southern Africa, on assignment for the Australian Financial Review, for whom I worked by 1979, when I received a telegram from Henry informing me that I had been awarded a PhD for the book. He had only one request: that he not have to attend the graduation ceremony. We both stayed away, but I want to place on record here my immense debt to this extraordinary man who, sadly, died in 1991.
Most of the new material I have added to this book was written in New York City. Working on an Australian book from that distance was not easy, and it would have been impossible without the unstinting help of a great many friends, former colleagues and kind strangers who responded to urgent faxes seeking information. I would like to thank the people in the following government offices who helped by sending much of the documentation I required: the Office of the Status of Women, the office of the Sex Discrimination Commissioner, the Affirmative Action Agency and the Equal Pay Unit in the Department of Industrial Relations. I am especially grateful to Sue Binney, Kay Daniels, Liz Harvey, Mary Murnane, Angela Nordlinger, Lyndall Ryan, Gavin Souter and, most of all, Chris Ronalds, who collected and sent over reams of material and found a wonderful researcher, Jane Ellis, who did some last-minute checking. We tried hard to produce an error-free book; if we failed, the responsibility is mine.
I also want to thank those people in New York who stood by me while I rushed to finish these new chapters: Pat and Richard Cantor for generously giving me their apartment to work in while they were being initiated into the delights of Down Under; Anne Banks, Cate Breslin, Jane Ciabattari, Grace Lichtenstein, Robin Reisig and Marilyn Webb who invited me into their writers’ group and have been a great source of encouragement and friendship; Molly Haskell and Martha Lear for allowing me access to the Upper West Side Writers’ Studio, that haven of industry and solitude where it was impossible not to write; Clare O’Brien for reading more drafts than should have been necessary; and, above all, Chip Rolley for his unwavering support at all times.
What none of us knew in May 1992 as I rushed to meet my deadline was that I would have to set aside this work for almost a year because of an irresistible invitation from Prime Minister Paul Keating to return to Australia as a consultant in his office on women’s issues. This invitation provided me with the opportunity to put my money where my mouth was, so to speak, and give advice on implementing many of the policies women had long advocated. My return to Canberra, and to women’s policy issues, was especially helpful for this project as it enabled me to bring myself up-to-date on the reality, as distinct from the theory, of how these issues were developing. Altogether it was a rare and extremely enjoyable opportunity to work at a high political level with a man who, despite a prior reputation of having little interest in women’s issues, proved to be extraordinarily responsive and willing to instigate big political reforms. His election promises to women in the 1993 campaign were the most comprehensive ever made by an Australian political leader, and once they are implemented, Australian women will truly be able to say that much of the agenda we drew up 20 years ago has been accomplished.
Sydney
April 1993
Introduction to the new edition [1994]
Much has changed in the 20 years since I first began writing this book. Australia itself has altered in important ways; we are a more diverse and tolerant nation than we used to be. Women’s lives are different, and for the most part better; we have more choices, and more opportunities. Men’s lives, as a result, have changed too. But what can be said about the nature and, especially, the quality of these changes? To attempt to answer that question is both enticing and intimidating. How can 20 years of struggle and setback, trial and triumph be encapsulated in a few pages? How can we possibly assess and measure what has occurred, when we have witnessed and been part of nothing less than a revolution in the lives of women and men? How can we make sense of it all?
I believe that to address these questions adequately, a new book is needed and I hope that someone, somewhere, right now is hatching another ‘big book’, a sweeping feminist perspective on contemporary Australia, because we need another interpretation, a new perspective. I am happy to update my account, where it is now factually inaccurate, and to provide a perspective on some of the important changes of the past two decades, but we need new voices and new visions.
So much has changed since 1975, International Women’s Year, when this book first appeared. Parts of the book now seem antiquated and perhaps even irrelevant. For instance, the description in Chapter Five of the social security system and its impact on women no longer stands because of the many important (and continuing) changes to that system over the past two decades. Some of the book’s descriptions of contemporary culture, and even of the women’s movement, now seem quaint and outmoded. Much of the language we use today to describe everyday exploitation or abuse of women did not even exist then. The term ‘sexual harassment’ had yet to be coined; we had not begun to speak of domestic violence, although we were becoming depressingly aware of how widespread what we referred to as ‘wife-bashing’ was; what I clumsily called petty rape is now more accurately known as date rape or acquaintance rape. We had only just begun to grapple with barriers to employment opportunities such as sex discrimination and we had yet to discover the glass ceiling. The women’s movement is now 25 years old and is very different from the inchoate, youthful movement of the early 1970s. We now have our own story to tell, our history of what we thought and felt, and what we have achieved during a quarter century of struggle. So there is a great deal to
examine, to reflect on and to make judgements about.
Despite all this, I feel the existing chapters offer a perspective on the period in which they were written and should stand. If we constantly rewrite history to fit how we see things now, we forget how things used to be and, equally important to future scholars, how we used to see them. So the core of the book remains intact, but I have added to it a new beginning and a new end. I decided not to add to the historical chapters, tempting though it was to re-enter the seemingly never-ending debate about the virtues or otherwise of the convict women. Since my efforts to rescue these women from the condescending moralism of previous (and mostly male) historians, a veritable industry seems to have built itself around the fate and fortunes of the somewhat fewer than 25 000 women who came to this country as convicts. A few of the more recent writers, Portia Robinson being a prime example, have sought to discount my account on ideological grounds. She attacks my interpretation as a guileless acceptance of the judgement of contemporary authorities that the convict women were whores (totally missing my point about the imposed sexual slavery that was de facto British policy at the time), and tries to tether to a few flimsy biographical sketches the unsustainable notion that most women in early Australia were virtuous wives and mothers.1 But most have endorsed my premise and either, as in the case of Robert Hughes2, added even more graphic documentation than I was able to muster from the secondary sources I mostly used or, as with Marian Aveling3, dispensed with my feminist preoccupation with the status of women in favour of a gender analysis of the power of the state.
While deciding not to engage with any of these theses, I am nevertheless obliged to correct an error that was brought to my attention by Robert Hughes some 12 years after this book was first published. Hughes pointed out that Lt Ralph Clark was on Norfolk Island on 3 June 1790 – the day the Lady Juliana sailed into Sydney Harbour – and could not, therefore, have made the famous remark about ‘not more of those damned whores’ on the day I said he did. I acknowledge this error, and having been unable to retrace the archival steps that led me to the quote in the first place, decided to replace it with another from Ralph Clark. His journals, having now been published, leave the reader in no doubt that he continually referred to the female convicts as ‘damned whores’.