by Anne Summers
The portrayal of women in many areas of the media, and in advertising, continues to be a source of outrage not just to feminists but to women in all walks of life who feel their dignity assailed or their sense of justice offended by stereotypes or sexually degrading imagery. Despite this their protests seemingly have little impact. Why? Such images evidently work, with women as well as men, or presumably they would not continue to be used. Or are advertisers and media proprietors uncaring, or oblivious to the reactions of women? It is difficult to see such practices continuing if they suddenly were to carry a commercial penalty and it may well be that women’s best weapon is an economic one: the refusal to purchase products, including media products, that use offensive images of women.
Twenty years ago, women’s magazines were under fire for failing to acknowledge the changes that were starting to occur in women’s lives. In the chapter entitled ‘Suburban Neurotics?’ I characterised the major traditional magazines as recognising only women’s family and domestic roles. Today, those magazines are very different – but no more realistic. They have largely abandoned their traditional women’s service functions of advice on health and other family matters, and have evolved into a rather bizarre mixture of royalty, celebrity and the occult! They now peddle escapism on a grand scale with psychics, tarot-card readers and clairvoyants providing pages of advice, while the front of the magazines are crammed with gossip, scandal and the latest exploits of princesses and movie stars. Nowadays there’s barely room for the recipes. It is a strange evolution and one that probably reflects the extraordinary concentration of media ownership in Australia rather than any particularly astute reading of the wishes of the readers. After all, now that the three major traditional magazines all offer women essentially the same editorial fare, where is the choice anyway?
Only the magazines directed at younger women, Cleo, Cosmopolitan, New Woman and the teenage bible Dolly, offer anything like a realistic depiction of the actual lives of their readers and the issues and problems they have to contend with. These magazines do address subjects like sex, self-esteem, sexual harassment and the multitude of day-to-day hassles in any young woman’s life, and in this respect they are at least continuing to conform to the notion of women’s service that was the editorial rationalisation for what we used to criticise in the past. Today, those traditions have been abandoned by the magazines that used to cater for older women and they have simply become entertainment vehicles, primarily there to provide escape or distraction to readers whose real lives they now never bother to write about.
In 1988 it would have been unthinkable for the Australian bicentenary celebrations to have ignored the contribution of women, and there was a special women’s program with funds set aside to achieve this. The bicentennial book-publishing program included specially commissioned works by and about women. Yet, since then, the neglect of women in our history and culture has been identified by a parliamentary committee as a major impediment to women achieving full equality. The 1992 report, Half Way to Equal (also known as the Lavarch Report after its chairman, Labor MP and, since the 1993 elections, Attorney-General Michael Lavarch), was the result of a bipartisan inquiry into equal status and equal opportunity for women in Australia. Among its many recommendations were proposals that ‘public museums and institutions … be encouraged … to include adequate depictions of women’s history; and [that] the Government investigate the possibility of funding a National Women’s Place which would fully acknowledge women’s contribution to Australian society and provide ongoing support and recognition of women’s contribution’.33 The report also argued that the Australian honours system needed to be more responsive to women’s accomplishments, especially in the voluntary sector. Women presently are awarded about 24 per cent of all honours, but of the highest ranking awards – the Companion and the Officer of the Order of Australia – all but a tiny fraction go to men.
Clearly, there is still a long way to go before our culture adequately reflects women’s aspirations and contributions. Most societal institutions have been slow to respond to the massive changes that have occurred in women’s lives, leaving many women feeling frustrated and impatient, wondering why it is they have to continue to wait for the acknowledgement and recognition that seems so obvious and so just.
The sporting wife
Sport remains a national obsession in Australia, and although men are twice as likely as women to play sport, women’s sport is no longer the poor relation it was two decades ago. Women’s teams receive media coverage when once they were ignored, and championships in sports like netball (which is played by more people, all of them women, than any other sport) are now shown live on television. Nevertheless, discrimination against women in sports is still rampant and was a major subject of investigation by the Lavarch Committee, which found cause for complaint in virtually every area of sports participation and administration. The Lavarch Report concluded there was inequality in prize money, in sponsorship, in funding and, despite some improvements, in media coverage of women’s sports.34 The report also noted that very few women have used the Sex Discrimination Act to complain about unequal treatment in sport, but this may change as the Sex Discrimination Commissioner has since issued guidelines on how to use the Act in relation to sport.35 Women’s participation in sports, and the status of women’s sports, like women and the arts, women in politics, women in virtually every area of Australian life, is at last an issue for public debate and remedy. To this extent, there is progress even if there is still a long way to go.
The ravaged self
There is no doubt that most women in Australia today are pleased with the changes in their lives, with their increased opportunities, with the greater freedom they enjoy compared with their mothers, and with the independence that participation in the workforce provides. Research conducted in mid-1992 for the Office of the Status of Women among average-income women around Australia produced remarkably consistent findings: ‘Women and their status in Australian society are perceived to have undergone a major and dramatic transformation. The changes and gains made can be described as both “revolutionary” and “evolutionary”. The women of “middle Australia” generally recognise these changes and tend to embrace their new roles in a positive manner’.36 The women also acknowledged that enormous pressure and stress had accompanied the positive changes; they felt they had to succeed as wives, as mothers and in the workplace. They were generally impatient for the men in their lives to catch up to the new realities, and to do their fair share of household and other necessary tasks, and they were also angry that so many workplaces were still condescending or hostile towards women. But there was near unanimity that they did not want to turn back the clock: women valued their choices and their new-found financial independence too much.
So what does this mean for women’s sense of self? Are the conflicts and contradictions involved in being female today less corrosive than a generation ago? I believe they are, since women have much greater choice than then, but it is also true that new pressures and constraints have arisen and some of these may be at least as destructive in their own way as the old ones. The stress and constant tiredness that besets so many working mothers is too high a price to pay for increased choice, and women rightly resent it. Other women feel the pressure to be superwomen: able to effortlessly combine being a career woman with being the proud mother of perfect children with being a responsive and exciting lover, a gourmet cook and still have some personal space.
For the most part, women have been the shock absorbers of change, the ones who have made all the adjustments, taken on all the extra work, including that tiresome, and tiring, work of managing the emotional lives of their families. In short, women are doing more of everything and they are getting impatient about the unfairness of it all. Market research conducted in 1992 by the Bulletin on how Australians feel about themselves and their country, especially on social issues, produced, among other things, the following conclusion:
Austr
alian married and de facto couples consistently agree that a wide range of household chores and family decisions should be shared fairly equally regardless of gender. Yet this is not the reality. Women are being shortchanged, and they are angry about the inequality which persists in their lives. Women tend to initiate family break-ups in Australia – often to the bewilderment of their male partners, who fail to perceive the tension over the gap between ideal and reality in family life.37
It is perhaps because of these pressures that women’s use of drugs, including cigarettes and alcohol, has increased over the past two decades. Women still have a greater reliance on painkillers, tranquillisers and sleeping tablets than do men, and the ‘dependency gap’ seems not to be narrowing. In the early 1970s, women’s consumption of these substances accounted for two-thirds of total usage (see table on p. 204). Ten years later, according to the 1989–90 National Health Survey, women were 50 per cent more likely to use these drugs than men; while the proportion of both men and women using such medications had increased slightly since the early 1980s, women’s greater dependence remains marked.38
Many young women are confronting a different set of pressures from those their mothers experienced. They are growing up in a distressingly confusing world to which they are reacting in almost inexplicably self-destructive ways. There seems to be an alarming epidemic of eating disorders among teenage girls, and while conventional wisdom ascribes its causes to low self-esteem, there is really very little understanding about why it has become such a problem. Naomi Wolf ’s The Beauty Myth, for instance, contends that this self-hatred and obsession with body weight among young women coincided with the rise of the women’s movement39, but she does not draw an obvious, albeit unpalatable, conclusion that this may have been a reaction to the repudiation of beauty and physical attractiveness by many 1970s feminists. Were these young women repulsed by their mothers’ and older sisters’ nonchalance towards weight, body hair, make-up and clothes? What new notions of femininity are infecting the psyches of these young girls, and why are they so insidious? Why do they find the world so difficult just when it seems to be providing them with chances not available to any previous generation of women? Is it the pressure of being pioneers and the lack of a path to follow, or is it a deep-seated ontological fear that they – and we – are dealing with nothing less than a profound change in what it means to be a woman? Who wants to carry that burden? Older women can argue that it is preferable to what went before, but young women have no experience of what went before and can hardly be expected to incorporate that into how they view themselves and their place in the world. We should acknowledge that young women are having a hard time today, and that older generations really haven’t a clue as to why this is or what to do about it. The greater propensity for young girls today to take up smoking (just when many of their mothers are finally winning the battle to quit) is perhaps further evidence of the pressure they are under. These are issues that need urgent investigation and redress if young women are to reap the bounties their futures should hold for them.
It is perhaps ironic that it is middle-aged and older women who are more content today. Many of the women whose unfulfilled or frustrated lives were part of the inspiration for this chapter in the first edition are today more able to pursue their dreams. Although as a society we still place a premium on youth, and tend to attach a stigma to ageing, this is starting to change. Women themselves were not slow to recognise the opportunities presented by living longer: the postmenopausal freedom facing a woman in her fifties who is still healthy, able to work and with perhaps 30 more years to live. As the large baby-boom generation – that which also produced the women’s movement in Australia, if not in the US – begins to age, self-interest will see it dictate further major social and political changes. Age discrimination will figure prominently on the political agenda as baby-boomers resist being forced to retire from the workplace. Health issues, especially those affecting middle-aged women, are already starting to attract debate.
Many of those same second-wave feminist writers who helped women understand who we were and what we wanted two decades ago are now beginning to address issues affecting older women. A world that valued women only for their child-bearing abilities accorded women little status or power once those years were over; this state of affairs is, needless to say, totally unacceptable to the pioneers of the women’s movement, who are themselves now middle-aged or older. Betty Friedan published a major work on ageing, The Fountain of Age, in late 1993, and Germaine Greer has tackled what once was seen as the stigmatised subject of menopause.40 Just as 20 years ago women had to tackle the patronising and often discriminatory attitudes of doctors, especially obstetricians and gynaecologists, today women are having to contend with a medical profession that treats menopause as a psychological disorder. Women are now insisting that the real physical problems accompanying menopause be taken seriously. In the past, many doctors tended to dismiss such symptoms as hot flushes and night sweats as inevitable and natural and therefore not requiring of treatment. Today, medical advice seems to promise relief, in the form of hormone replacement therapy (HRT), but we still do not know at what future health risk and very little research appears to be being done.
Women’s health generally is grossly neglected, yet it is central to our sense of self, which in turn is critical for our wellbeing. There has never been a serious study of women’s health in this country, although during the 1993 federal election campaign, then Health Minister Brian Howe undertook to commission a longitudinal study of women’s health so that we might improve our understanding of the different physical stages of women’s lives and the long-term impact of drugs like oral contraceptives and HRT.
There are many issues in women’s health that seem not to have changed much in two decades, while others seem more urgent today. We have gone backwards when it comes to choices about contraception, with new techniques such as implants still in their early stages of acceptability (and the long-term risks still unknown). Several of the contraceptives in long-term use, such as some of the IUDs, have now been proven to have caused infertility and other problems. The contraceptive Pill is still problematic, as I argued in 1975, and is not always advised for women over 35, especially those who are obese or who smoke. The increase in sexually transmitted diseases has made the condom prevalent again as a prophylaxis, but it was never especially reliable in preventing pregnancy.
A whole movement has arisen to champion women’s rights in childbirth, something that did not exist in the mid-1970s when parturition was more likely to be organised around the timetables and other needs of the delivering doctor. The rights of mothers is now a cause, with a growing literature of its own, able to bring informed debate to the many issues involved in childbirth. Had such a movement been active when this book was being researched, I may have been less inclined to arrive at the sweeping advocacy of Caesareans over natural childbirth which, on the evidence of the mail I have received over the years, was the most controversial assertion I managed to make in the entire work. Today, I leave such subjects to those who are more qualified to debate them; they are too specialised for someone who is neither a mother nor a health practitioner to take on.
Increasingly, all of us have to deal with diseases such as cancer, especially breast and cervical cancer, which seem more prevalent today, although we don’t know why (another compelling reason for specialised research on women’s health), and a great deal of effort over the past decade has gone into encouraging women to monitor their health to try and detect early signs of such diseases. At the same time, many women are becoming more combative about health issues. Inspired to a large extent by AIDS activists, who have adopted militant tactics with drug companies and government agencies to fight for less costly drugs and increased funds for AIDS research, many women are pursuing the issue of breast cancer with tenacity. They point out that the annual death toll from breast cancer far exceeds that from AIDS, yet breast cancer lags far behind AIDS when it comes
to attracting research funds and political support. Women, especially many who are surviving breast cancer, are determined to change this; their activism is a welcome sign that the political agenda for reforms affecting women continues to broaden and be responsive to newly perceived needs.
Women in Australia have been less prone to AIDS than men, but many are nevertheless at risk and most people who are not in long-term monogamous relationships have had to adjust their sexual practices to avoid exposure to diseases that are spread by sexual activity. There seems to have been an alarming rise in infertility among women in their 20s and 30s, much of it apparently due to the spread of sexually transmitted diseases such as chlamydia. This in turn has led to a greatly increased demand for in vitro fertilisation (IVF) and other medical techniques that can help women to conceive. The whole issue has been a controversial subject among some feminists who argue against the cost and commercialisation of such services, as well as the physical and emotional burden they impose on women. Other approaches such as surrogacy are condemned outright as exploitation of the female host’s body. At the same time, few of the feminists who argue this have done much to discourage the cruel and untrue but still prevalent view that women are somehow incomplete, and certainly unfulfilled, if they have not borne a child. It is a cruel hoax on women to tell them they are feminine failures if they are infertile and at the same time condemn the technologies and practices that offer the possibility of redress.
The poverty of dependence
The original argument of this chapter was that women were economically deprived both in the workforce and by the welfare system. The most reliable means for a woman to protect herself against poverty was through marriage, giving her access to her husband’s income, which was deemed to be greater than any income she could generate for herself. Today this is less likely to be the case. Women’s earnings relative to men’s have improved significantly, single women are generally able to achieve financial self-sufficiency and are not forced into marriage for economic reasons, and the welfare system now delivers more effectively – and for the most part more generously in real terms – than was the case in the early 1970s. At the same time, women as a group still earn less than men, are more reliant on the social security system, have less access to non-pension retirement income, may spend periods of their lives without remuneration doing voluntary or domestic work, and many women today still find themselves barely able to survive economically.