by Anne Summers
It also seemed necessary in the mid-1970s to devote a lot of time to talking about the family, a term I then used in quotation marks to indicate that I was referring to an ideological construct rather than a social norm. It was not easy at the time to document what was true then, and is even more the case today, and that is that an increasing number of Australians do not live within traditional nuclear families. Yet the political rhetoric of the time proceeded from the assumption that most people did live within this traditional structure or if they didn’t, they should. Not only was this kind of hectoring unfair to single parents, divorced or single people and the many other groupings of people who did not conform to this traditional pattern, but it was also flying in the face of what was actually happening in our society. Today, even conservative politicians acknowledge (if with regret) the diversity of living arrangements and we can now use the word ‘family’ to encompass a wide range of blood and other relationships.
But in the early 1970s the research material simply did not exist. The Commission on Human Relationships had yet to complete its work of investigating the reality of contemporary Australians’ lives. The Australian Institute of Family Studies had not yet been established and the census figures were frustratingly uninformative on such matters.19 Since the 1986, census statistics on families have improved and there is now more accurate information available on how people actually live. In that year, 42.8 per cent of families comprised married parents with dependent children (a decrease of 5 per cent since 1982)20, which means that more than half the population was living in family or household arrangements other than this.
When this book was written it seemed important to try to have something to say on the relationship between sex oppression and capitalism; not even the most ardent Marxist would probably bother to do so today and I certainly have lost interest in this once-pressing subject. There is these days a vigorous debate among many Australian feminists about how theoretically to accommodate the relationship between feminism and the state, a debate that has generated some useful and informative books.21 But, as I noted in the personal section at the beginning of this Introduction, my own interests these days are not in the realm of theory and I have not engaged in this debate.
In 1975 we could not really speak of a specific women’s agenda. We had a list of demands, we were evolving a coherent analysis of why and how women had been excluded from most areas of public life, but we were still camped on the fringes of politics. Today we are far less marginal and, in some areas at least, we can claim to be part of the mainstream. The responsiveness of political parties and governments in this country, particularly the federal government, has been very significant. Even before the term ‘gender gap in voting’ had been coined, party officials had identified, and exploited, this phenomenon to their advantage. The Liberal Party since its inception had given women a guaranteed place in the party structure and part of its electoral strategy was to appeal, through family-oriented policies, to women voters who, until the late 1970s, tended to vote more conservatively than men. The most spectacular example of this occurred in 1978 when Malcolm Fraser introduced family allowances, a special (at the time, non-income-tested) payment to women based on the number of children they had. (The payment combined the former child-endowment allowance and the child tax rebate and was a daring step because it took a tax advantage from the husband and converted it into a direct payment to the wife/mother.) The Labor Party had been a trade-union dominated party until the late 1960s and was not especially appealing to many women, but once Gough Whitlam became leader in the mid-1960s, and especially after he became prime minister in 1972, he set out to attract women voters. By the mid-1980s the ALP had instigated affirmative action policies within its ranks to ensure women were represented in party structures, although it has yet to take similar action to improve the representation of women in parliament. Labor differed from the Liberals in that it had no qualms about taking up feminist issues, and so began what has remained a strong alliance between the women’s movement and the ALP. As Lyndall Ryan describes it, ‘the pragmatic face of feminism found a space in the political agenda that had not previously existed’.22
During the Labor governments of the 1980s and continuing into the 1990s, women’s issues became an explicit part of the government agenda, and feminists were brought into the bureaucracy to give advice and implement policy. In 1983, early in the first Hawke Government, Australia ratified the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), which gave it a constitutional ability (under the foreign affairs power) to legislate against sex discrimination, and which also exposed the nation to international scrutiny of its policies and practices towards women. This was a potent acknowledgment of the government’s willingness to legislate and otherwise act to improve the status of women, and during the rest of that decade a large number of initiatives followed. These ranged from announcing a five-year National Agenda for Women, to increased funding for child care and women’s refuges, to legislation to promote equal opportunity for women in the workforce.
The 1993 election campaign saw further evidence of Labor’s willingness to embrace a feminist agenda – in stark contrast to the Coalition parties whose stance ranged from policy paralysis to, in the case of child care, policy plagiarism. During the campaign, Paul Keating undertook to accommodate two longstanding feminist policy demands: to make work-related child care available to all who needed it by the end of the decade (in addition to making care more affordable to middle-income families by the payment of a cash rebate to reduce the cost of child care), and to ‘cash out’ the dependent spouse tax rebate into a direct payment, to be called the Home Child Care Allowance, for mothers at home with children. He made other promises too: to set up a new service for women and children escaping domestic violence in rural and remote areas; to give a significant funding boost to women’s organisations, and to provide funds to the Australian Institute of Judicial Administration ‘to develop courses for magistrates and judges to help them identify prejudices that might impact on their judicial conduct towards women’.23 Responding to these promises, the previously sceptical feminist writer Dale Spender enthused:
Paul Keating got it right when he launched his women’s policy. Apart from the fact that the entire female population benefitted from being taken seriously, the “promises” that produced the greatest buzz were the ones that cost the least but made the right noises about access and equity. End gender bias in the law. Send judges back to school, the Prime Minister declared to the enthusiastic gathering. [Justices] Elizabeth Evatt and Deirdre O’Connor were named as models for the day. And every woman – from the sex worker to the middle-class divorcee and the wealthy victim of domestic violence – got the message. The law which has been made by men over the centuries could well start to respect women’s experience. Equity, access, a fair deal. It’s a motivating force for women.24
When Labor won its historic victory in 1993, women were widely acknowledged to have contributed to the win and, indeed, the exit polls on election day indicated that, at least in some age groups, for the first time in Australian electoral history, more women than men voted Labor.25
In looking at the changes in Australia of the past 20 years, we also have to take into account the vast economic and political upheavals that have reverberated around the world. The beginning of the 1990s saw the end of communism in Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union collapsed into a confused constellation of independent states, changes that brought mixed blessings for the women of these beleaguered nations. Under communism, women had had little choice about participating in the economy and the consequent double burden of paid jobs and housework weighed more heavily on them than on their sisters in Western countries. The services sector failed to provide or adequately distribute consumer goods, especially food. Women had to spend long hours after their day in the office or factory queuing for whatever food was available, after which they would return home to put whatever they
could on the table. The labour-saving devices that make life considerably easier for so many people in the West were rarely available. Contraceptives were hard to get, making abortion, usually performed under nightmarish and unsafe medical conditions, the only option for controlling fertility. But women did enjoy better government-provided support than is usual in many Western countries, services that were being withdrawn in the name of efficiency and reform as these countries struggled to introduce market economies. As well as losing their child care and family leave, many women also lost their jobs as workforces were slashed and places of employment closed. Some of the newly elected leaders, equating women’s participation in public life with communism rather than with human progress, removed provisions that guaranteed women political representation, while others argued that it was more democratic for women to stay home and become full-time housewives.
Two major recessions affecting most of the industrialised world, one at the beginning of each decade since this book was published, have altered the face of employment. The experience of women in the workforce, especially in the most affected industries, may have to be reassessed in the light of this. In some industries, finance being just one example, women were beginning to gain a foothold, or to move through the ranks into management, when economic adversity forced layoffs or hiring freezes, with the most recently hired or promoted being the most vulnerable. The recession of the early 1990s, coming as it did after almost a decade of profligate corporate behaviour that leveraged future earnings with unprecedented levels of debt the economy was no longer able to sustain, may produce grim and permanent changes to our ability to provide jobs. We are having to accustom ourselves to uncertainty, and to lower our expectations about the inevitability of progress. These changes affect everyone, but they may have a greater impact on those women whose attachment to the workforce is most recent, or who do not possess the skills and flexibility to adjust to what is happening.
In other words, we have experienced two decades of change, some of it turbulent and unsettling. Our private worlds have altered as we reached to realise our full potential as women and as human beings, and as we struggled to achieve equality within our relationships; our nation has had to adjust in response to our claims for full citizenship and for recognition of our special needs as women; and our larger world, planet Earth, to which we are more intimately connected than ever before because of modern communications technology, has reverberated under the shock of wars, massacres, famine, ecological disasters and political revolution.
The remainder of this introduction specifically addresses claims or arguments made in the first edition, updating or amplifying where necessary.
Still a sexist culture?
It is too soon to sound the death knell of sexism as an organising principle of Australian culture and society; we still stereotype people according to their gender and we still fail to acknowledge fully the contribution women have made to the evolution of Australian culture. Nevertheless, it is no longer legitimate to complain, as it was in 1975, that women artists are invisible and neglected. One of the most exciting and energising aspects of cultural life in Australia in the past two decades has been the emergence of so many talented and creative women – and the rediscovery and retrospective homage paid to women who had been ‘manhandled’ by history.
Undoubtedly women’s greatest successes have been in the field of writing. Works of fiction and non-fiction by and about women now abound and are routinely included on school and university reading lists, where once students were presented with reading lists that seemed only to include male authors. Today there are thriving subcategories like detective fiction and collections of essays. In the non-fiction field, it has become almost commonplace for women’s activities and women’s history to be the subject of scholarly works and to take their place within the archives of our national intellectual heritage. The popular Writers’ Week of the Adelaide Festival of Arts, which was once an almost all-male affair, now routinely has several women on its organising committee and women are prominent among invitees and audience – although this was not achieved without a fight.26 It would be a scandal nowadays if women’s works were overlooked when the prestigious literary prizes are handed out each year. And while some women contend that Australian women are still less likely to be published and to be reviewed than men, this is not the impression I have.27
In other areas of the arts, there is less cause for congratulations. Women are no longer invisible or excluded from most fields but they are a long way from achieving parity in terms of representation and, especially, income. An Australia Council study on women in the arts conducted in 1983 found that across all art forms, women were disadvantaged compared to men and that the difficulties women artists experienced were very similar to those suffered by women in the labour force at large.28 Other studies have shown women musicians to be especially disadvantaged, getting fewer jobs and earning considerably less than men, while in the visual arts, where women are actually in the majority, they nevertheless are more likely to work part-time and to earn less.29
A pilot study of women in the visual and performing arts in Western Australia in 1991 concluded that women’s opportunities varied with the art form – with theatre providing better opportunities than music but not as good as dance – and that smaller, more commercially attuned galleries and theatres provided better opportunities for women artists than the larger funded bodies that supposedly had EEO (equal employment opportunity) programs.30 Similarly, women’s opportunities are more limited in film and television as was eloquently attested to by speaker after speaker at a one-day conference on the subject sponsored by Women in Film and Television in Sydney in September 1992.
What is different today, however, is that women’s participation in the arts is an issue, just as the depiction of women in the media and in various art forms is also hotly debated. It is no longer necessary to make the case that women artists are entitled to practise and to receive support; in fact women artists now receive project and fellowship support from the government at a level equivalent to their male counterparts, and almost half the members of the Australia Council’s boards and committees are women.31 So with women no longer being overlooked for funding, the question today is how to make institutions and companies more responsive to women practitioners, including the recognition that many women have special needs or responsibilities – such as having to care for children – which are usually more likely to impinge on their participation than on men’s. This entire debate has had some interesting and unanticipated consequences, the principal one perhaps being the demystification of the artist in society as the language of work-place reform, equal employment opportunity and financial equity is applied to people who perhaps were once seen as untouched by such mundane concerns.
Manzone country revisited
While Australian culture is not the thoroughly masculine construct that prevailed in the mid-1970s, it is still true in the early 1990s that women’s views and presence are under-represented. We are still coming to terms as a society and as a nation with how to reconcile our various parts into a fair and coherent whole. The debate includes such issues as Aboriginal reconciliation, multiculturalism, reconciling work and family responsibilities (as part of the larger question of achieving balance between the work we do and the leisure we need), and how to conduct ourselves as a largely European nation on the cusp of Asia. It does not yet adequately address what should perhaps be the most fundamental question of all: achieving reconciliation between women and men.
Although this is something we all discuss constantly – it is referred to in books and in the media, and is a new and permanent thread through our lives – we have not yet learned how to make it part of the national debate about who we are. This is not likely to happen until more women become more involved in all aspects of national life, from politics to religion, from business to the arts. Until then, despite the significant changes that have occurred, women will still tend to be portrayed as
the other, as a separate group, somewhat on the periphery of our society. As I noted earlier in this chapter, the media in this country (as elsewhere) have barely begun to report and comment fairly and adequately on this revolution within our society, and within our families. Often the subject is treated as remote and even alien, as if the writer were dealing with a foreign war rather than day-to-day domestic reality. Women themselves are fed up with this and want nothing more than to be integrated into every aspect of life, wanting at the same time to ensure their special needs, usually arising from being mothers, are not overlooked. It is no coincidence that during the launch of the National Agenda for Women during the 1993 election campaign, the loudest cheers from the mostly female audience came when Prime Minister Keating said he had announced his sweeping new child-care policies as part of his national economic statement, ‘Investing in the Nation’, the previous day ‘rather than the very tempting option of “saving them up” for today, because I think it is time that child-care was included amongst our mainstream economic issues … the time is long past, as far as I am concerned, where child-care was tagged as “a women’s issue” or a “welfare issue”’.32