by Anne Summers
This new Introduction updates the picture I presented in 1975, providing something of a measure of how much change has taken place, while also canvassing some of the things we still need to do. I begin with a few personal thoughts on how to achieve lasting change developed as a result of working in government and in the media, both here in Australia and in the US. The various jobs I have held inside these powerful institutions have given me the opportunity to test, often in a very direct and hands-on fashion, the question of how we expand women’s opportunities, and how governments and the media contribute – or impede – this process.
The rest of this Introduction largely follows the chronological sequence of the first half of the book, and I have used the chapter titles as subheadings to make it easier to refer back and forth. I have also introduced some new subjects, such as women in politics, which I did not deal with before, and have included random observations where relevant. I have replaced the previous last chapter, ‘Prospects for liberation’, which was a rather muddled attempt to look into the future, with a new section titled ‘Letter to the next generation’. Here, I tell the story of the women’s movement in Australia since the early 1970s and try to give young women today an understanding of their legacy. This book was always a passionate perspective on women in Australia’s past and present. I hope it remains so.
The personal is still political
While I was working on the first edition of this book, trying to apportion my time between long hours of solitary library research and the exhilarating activism of the early women’s movement, my perspective was very much that of the community organiser. Like most of my contemporaries in the movement, I viewed the media with suspicion, especially as it seemed so hostile to our cause, and we regarded government mainly as a source of funds in return for which we felt we were expected to prune our radicalism to fit existing policies. I would never have guessed back then that I would spend the next 16 years moving between government and the media.
What I would once have been quick to label as ‘selling out’ has in fact been a fascinating voyage of discovery and insight. I have had four major work experiences since 1975: writing for Australian newspapers, first the National Times and later the Australian Financial Review in Canberra and then in New York; running the Office of the Status of Women in the first Hawke Government; working with the US women’s movement, and the New York–based magazine industry, as editor-in-chief of Ms. magazine; and, most recently, working as a political consultant in the office of Prime Minister Paul Keating. Each has helped shape my views on how women can achieve genuine and lasting change. I have come to understand the real power of government and of media, as distinct from how these are often imagined from the outside. These continuing encounters with reality, some of them involving the challenge of how actually to design and put into effect policies long advocated by the women’s movement, quickly rid me of my youthful utopianism. I became, instead, a fervent pragmatist, committed to the notion that political change is usually incremental and that we must grab every bit we can whenever the opportunity strikes and not, as I would have argued 20 years ago, hold out for that perfection which, in politics as in life, almost never ever arrives.
Inside the media
The newspaper world I entered in late 1975, a few weeks after the publication of this book, while not being exclusively male was certainly very male-dominated. Not only were all the editors and most of the high-ranking staff men, but a male culture pervaded the workplace. A great deal of business was conducted in the pub across the road from the office, and to hold down a job in journalism in those days the ability to drink was almost as important as being able to write. Nevertheless there was a genuine and quite pressing interest in ‘the story’ of the changes that were happening in women’s lives, especially on the part of the editor of the National Times, the first paper I worked on. In fact, the very first story I wrote when I joined the staff was a two-page account of what happens to women and their children once they leave women’s refuges and strike out on their own. It was comforting to be able to learn the craft of journalism by writing about so familiar a subject.
But the media’s coverage of the revolution in women’s lives has been sporadic and patchy and very often coloured by ridicule, prejudice or even hostility. It is difficult to think of many – indeed any – other issues or subjects where the coverage could be so subjective and so unfriendly. Even though there are now greater numbers of women in journalism, few have made it to the very top or to positions where they can influence the tone and content of what is presented. Many sections of newspapers are still written from a male vantage point and seem to assume a male readership, or the headlines put on stories give that impression. Women are still routinely described in newspapers by the colour of their hair or their maternal status (and sometimes both) – ‘a young blonde mother of two was rescued today’ – whereas men tend to be described by their occupations alone. Stories about so-called women’s issues, such as child care, are not seen as hard news warranting serious attention. When Prime Minister Keating included major changes to child-care policy in an economic statement during the 1993 election campaign, some reporters attacked him for confusing major issues with supposedly soft items. These reporters – and they included several women – seemed unaware of the extent to which their reaction reflected unfair and outmoded assumptions about what is news. (Not to mention what is of obvious importance to a nation’s economic and social future.)
The media are not comfortable covering the story of the profound changes that continue to take place in the relations between women and men because they are themselves part of the story. It is ironic, to say the least, that while many major papers continue to treat this story less than fairly in their news and feature pages, their management is embroiled in battles with reporters over maternity leave, child care, job-sharing and other contemporary work and family issues. But you would never know this from reading the papers. Part of the reason for this apparent double standard is the code of professional conduct that requires journalists to quarantine their own opinions and, by extension, their personal lives, from what they are writing about. Some journalists manage this so successfully the reader would never suspect they were as busy juggling jobs, children and personal interests as most modern parents these days are. But I can also sympathise with the dilemma this presents to journalists and their editors.
A reporter who wears her heart on her sleeve (as distinct from a columnist who is paid to air opinions), or otherwise burdens readers with her personal problems, may soon find herself out of a job. Such an approach is likely to polarise readers into those who agree and those who don’t, and thus diminish the reporter’s credibility as an objective witness, and to reduce the number of sources who judge it worth their while to provide information to someone whose mind is already made up.
Of course life is more complicated than that, and over time both readers and sources are likely to get at least a feel for the views of particular reporters, but I found during my time as a reporter that it was important to maintain some form of cordon sanitaire between my personal views and my professional conduct. Sometimes this meant maintaining a frosty civility towards politicians I knew to be incorrigible sexual harassers, and otherwise engaging with all manner of creeps and low-life. I took the view that the short-term, one-on-one approach to change was energy misdirected. I was a reporter not a crusader, and the best I could do to improve opportunities for women in journalism – and elsewhere – was to conform to the highest professional standards of conduct, as women in the industry before me had done, thus helping pave the way for future generations of women to get jobs in journalism. This need not mean totally suppressing private views or desisting from political activity. Unlike in the US, where during the early 1990s newspapers forbade their staff from participating in the huge pro-choice marches in Washington, Australian editors recognise the distinctions between private and professional opinions and actions.
This w
hole debate is relevant to what I view as the naive notion, long advocated by certain strands of feminism, that the only way to make the media less sexist and more female-friendly is to have more women journalists, editors, producers and so on. While it is certainly to be hoped that a critical mass of women in the media would alter the predominantly male ethos that still prevails in most places, this by itself would not necessarily produce the kind of changes feminists crave. Just look at the traditional women’s magazines, which are run and staffed by women but where issues affecting women, such as child care, seldom get an airing! Nor can we assume that women in management positions in the media will behave all that differently from men in such jobs. It can be argued that getting the job requires individuals to be socialised in corporate conduct of a kind that is gender-blind, and therefore what needs to be changed is the corporate culture. It also seems to me to be placing an unfair burden on the few women who do make it to top jobs in the media to require that, in addition to the stresses and strains of the job itself, they are expected to be activists and advocates on behalf of their sex. Of course, we should shun the old Queen Bee syndrome, whereby women who made it kicked away the ladder, ensuring no other woman could come close and compete for a share of what used to be a stingy stipend of glory for our gender. But we should take care to ensure women are not set up to fail in their chosen profession because we have saddled them with unreasonable expectations of the power of an individual to alter decades of doing things a certain way.
The kind of change we should strive for is that which permanently alters the priorities and perceptions about what is important in our society; for that to happen, the media should reflect a broader world than they tend to do at present. There are some small signs that the need for change is starting to be recognised. At least some of the issues are getting a regular run in columns such as ‘A woman’s place’ by Sue Neales, which in 1992 began to appear weekly in the Age, joining the ranks of the longer-running columns ‘Corporate woman’ in the Australian Financial Review and Adele Horin’s ‘My generation’ in the Sydney Morning Herald. Perhaps the real breakthrough will be when men become writers of such columns, but it is important that the columns at least are there. A decade ago, when I wrote for the Australian Financial Review, they did not exist and there was rarely a spot in the paper where I could raise such issues. Unless I could legitimately find a news angle – and the Fraser years in Canberra seldom produced women-related news except in the form of budget cuts for, say, women’s refuge funding – there was rarely a hook for such stories. There are a few more hooks today, and a lot more women working in journalism, but the culture of the news media has responded more sluggishly than the society it supposedly reflects.
Heading the Office of the Status of Women
My experience of working for government as a feminist bureaucrat or femocrat4, as they are called, drew me into that very seductive world of helping theories evolve into government policies; it was to be a time of activity and accomplishment where one could feel pride in the fact that we were making actual, measurable progress. When I went there in 1983, the Office of the Status of Women had recently been returned from the bureaucratic outhouse to which the Fraser Government had consigned it to the power and prestige of the Prime Minister’s Department. This not only honoured a campaign commitment by Bob Hawke, but was a potent acknowledgment of the increased political power of women. Labor frontbencher and the party’s most senior woman, then Senator Susan Ryan, had worked assiduously since the mid-1970s to improve Labor’s standing with women, arguing to her colleagues that the party needed women’s votes if it were to regain office. She developed policies designed to appeal to women, including the very basic commitment to take their views and needs seriously by politically upgrading the women’s policy advice office, and in 1983, for the first time, women and men voted Labor in about equal numbers.
The Office was charged with helping the government deliver on its election promises, especially the undertaking to introduce sex discrimination and affirmative action legislation, but we were also given the brief of monitoring what all government departments were doing so we could identify, and try to head off, any measures likely to have a detrimental impact on women. This latter role cast us as something akin to the God’s Police of the bureaucracy, and made us very unpopular as we poked around other people’s policies and wrote comments on their Cabinet submissions. I soon learned the immense power of the prime minister in the Australian political system.
Without the strong support Bob Hawke gave us in that role, we would have been isolated and impotent. But with his blessing, reinforced from time to time with a telling phrase or sentence in an important speech, the Office became a powerhouse of enterprise and activity. We worked with big business, the trade union movement and the higher education sector to pilot programs that were later enshrined in affirmative action laws; we became involved in tax reform; we got more women appointed to boards and authorities; we got a commitment to increase the number of child-care places. A powerful symbol of Hawke’s support came in 1985 when, for the first time in Australian political history, a prime minister introduced a piece of legislation: the affirmative action Bill.5 Some of the work we did was invisible to those outside government, for example, heading off potential disasters such as the abolition or reduction of certain programs proposed at Budget time each year with monotonous regularity by the Department of Finance. In such cases, success meant that a particular thing did not happen, but it was hardly the kind of victory that could be trumpeted from the rooftops. Indeed, much of what we did had to be kept secret until such time as the government had reached a decision and was ready to make an announcement. These facts of bureaucratic life were almost impossible to explain to our sisters in the women’s movement, many of whom expected us to be always available and accountable – to them.
In fact, there were constant mutterings from many in the women’s movement who were suspicious of the ‘sisters in suits’ – beige suits were a trademark of femocrats in the early 1980s! – and who feared that femocrats would water down the policies they’d put on the political agenda. The tension between those inside the bureaucracy and the activists outside is in many ways necessary and even beneficial, keeping the femocrats honest and the activists in touch with what is politically possible. It may not always seem this way, especially when the tension spills over into outright hostility – as happens from time to time – but femocrats, unlike almost any other bureaucrats except perhaps for Aboriginal bureaucrats and those of some ethnic origins, are in an unenviable position. They tend to be seen within the bureaucracy as infiltrators whose primary loyalty is to an outside constituency – as missionaries, rather than as professional public servants – while the constituents characterise them as part of the government – as mandarins, in fact – and as driven by goals of careerism and self-preservation. Getting the balance right, so as to be credible and therefore effective with one’s departmental and government masters, while not losing touch with women in the community, is extremely difficult and personally wearing. Most femocrats retire after a few years suffering from burn-out, the task of balancing their competing worlds in the end too big a personal price to pay.
While at the Office I became a member of an OECD Working Party on the Role of Women and the Economy, and at the two meetings in Paris I attended had the opportunity to meet with women doing comparable jobs in other countries. It was here that I learned that Australia had become an inadvertent pioneer on status of women policies. The Working Party included women from Japan, Germany, Canada, France and the US and they were astonished, and envious, to learn about Australia’s achievements. They were generally impressed by Australia’s high-level political commitment to women’s issues, and they were especially taken with the Women’s Budget Statement, a Budget document in which all government departments have to report annually on how their policies and programs affected women. This of course was the Reagan era in the US, a time when policy for women was
going backwards. In fact, while Australia was adopting a professional approach to the issue – appointing femocrats and listening to their advice – Ronald Reagan nominated his daughter to lead the American delegation to the 1985 United Nations World Conference of Women in Nairobi.
The responsiveness of the Australian political system, and especially of Labor leaders, to the political clout of women was again apparent to me in 1992 when I returned to Canberra to act as a consultant on women’s issues to Prime Minister Paul Keating. Unlike American political leaders, who tend to react to their lack of popularity with women voters either by ignoring the problem, or with utter cynicism (by initiating advertising campaigns designed to scare or seduce women), Australian leaders are much more prepared to woo votes with policies. Like Hawke, Keating showed himself willing to heed professional advice and to act on issues of which he had no particular prior knowledge or interest. Keating took an additional step, authorising use of the very democratic tool of market research to seek the views of the women of ‘middle Australia’, women not usually reached by government – or able to put their views to a prime minister.6 As a result, he was armed with concrete information about what women actually thought was deficient in existing government policies – the perceived failure to provide adequate and affordable child care, the need for special women’s health measures and the wrenching plea to stop violence against women. Keating outlined his policy responses to these subjects in speeches and in grabs on the nightly news, communicating directly to people, including women, rather than through slick advertising. He was prepared to be bold in his approach and to take quantum leaps in areas such as child care. In less than a year, he transformed himself from a politician women had tended to distrust to a leader able to respond appropriately to a diverse range of groups of Australian people, including women. And unlike the US, or possibly any other country apart from Iceland and Norway, both of which have progressive records on women’s issues, Keating – and Australia – demonstrated once again that good policies make excellent politics.