by Anne Summers
We also know that women are most likely to suffer violence at the hands of men they know. A 1985 study of sexual assault conducted by the New South Wales Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research found that only 20 per cent of incidents that were reported to police involved assault by a person totally unknown to the complainant at the time.83 A similar conclusion was reached by the Sexual Assault Referral Centre at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Adelaide: ‘… it is our clear impression that most violent sexual assaults occasioning severe physical injury occur in the context of marital or de facto relationships in which violence of all sorts has been a common feature. Such sexual assaults are least likely to be proceeded with through the courts by the victim’.84 Few cases may be prosecuted but at least the law now enables prosecution to take place. In 1976, South Australia became the first state to make marital rape a crime, and by 1989, when Queensland finally followed suit, all states had revoked the ancient English legal principle that ‘by their mutual matrimonial consent and contract the wife hath given up herself on this kind unto her husband, which she cannot retract’.
In early 1993 when remarks by a South Australian Supreme Court judge to the jury in a rape-in-marriage case the previous year became public they caused a national uproar. The reaction became an instructive example of current attitudes towards violence against women. The judge, Justice Derek Bollen, had told the jury: ‘There is, of course, nothing wrong with a husband faced with his wife’s refusal to engage in intercourse, in attempting in an acceptable way, to persuade her to change her mind, and that may involve a measure of rougher than usual handling’.85 These remarks were denounced by women and men from across the political spectrum and in editorials and letters from readers in virtually every newspaper in the country. There were calls for the judge to be sacked. The media led the discussion of the need for judges to be educated on gender issues, and for the method of selecting judges to be changed so that more women could sit on the bench. Typical of the comment his words evoked was the following, from an editorial in the Examiner in Launceston:
Justice Bollen’s statement accepts that force and the fear that come from it are legitimate tactics which husbands can employ with their wives. All of those involved in the fight against domestic violence will despair at the judge’s comments and the damage they have done. Recent surveys of young Australian males found that an alarmingly high number regard some level of domestic violence as acceptable. It is an attitude that will take a long time to overcome, especially with comments like those made by Justice Bollen.86
The outcry was instructive because it was something of a barometer both of how much has changed – and what has not. The man charged apparently thought he could abuse his wife with impunity – but his wife had the courage eventually to leave him and the law now enabled her to take him to court. The judge reflected archaic attitudes when he appeared to favour the accused and, in another part of his summing up, seemed more concerned that innocent men escape false rape charges than raped women receive justice – but he was roundly condemned by public figures, women’s groups and newspapers around the country. The outrage would have been even greater, in my opinion, had the details of the charges been made public. The ‘rougher than usual handling’ remarks might suggest some slapping around of the wife by the husband; they hardly seemed to describe forced anal intercourse, forced oral intercourse, forced vaginal intercourse and the forcible insertion of a bottle into the wife’s vagina – events that took place, not in a single night but repeatedly over a two-year period.87
It must become an urgent national task to tackle the alarming incidence of domestic violence. Some welcome changes to the law and to police procedure have meant that the abusing man can be taken into custody without his victim having to lodge a complaint; and orders requiring abusive men to stay away from home are more easily obtained. Police and women’s groups have worked, often together, to try to overcome the attitude so prevalent in the past that such violence is ‘only a domestic’ and thus does not warrant police intervention. But these measures seem to have done little to reduce the toll, and in some ways may even have led to more violence as men with orders out against them have hunted down their wives – and sometimes their children as well – and killed them.
To eliminate this violence, governments and community groups need to approach it in the same systematic, long-term way as they have addressed issues like smoking and drink-driving. Not only do sufficient funds have to be set aside to ensure that the right kind of persuasive publicity campaign can be mounted for as long as is needed to convince men that this behaviour is reprehensible and wrong, but subsidiary preventive and follow-up strategies are needed. We have to foster the attitude that violence in the home is shameful and unmanly; and we also need to break the circle of violence that so often sees people perpetuate behaviour that they witnessed or themselves suffered when they were young and vulnerable. At the same time, individuals and communities can try to work with known offenders and develop tactics to address such problems. One example of this approach is the anti-grog councils established by Aboriginal women in several Northern Territory communities, to reduce consumption of alcohol, a factor in much of the violence in those communities and elsewhere.
Women in politics
It has become very apparent over the past two decades that for the kind of broad-based and comprehensive change that we still need to occur, women must be involved in making laws and implementing policy. There is now little disagreement that women should be represented at all levels of elective office and this is starting to happen. From 1979 to 1990, the percentage of women in state parliaments increased from 4.8 per cent to 11 per cent, and in federal parliament from 3.2 per cent to 12.5 per cent.88 The 1993 federal elections saw a decrease of one in the number of women in federal parliament, as although three additional women won House of Representatives seats, four fewer women senators were returned. Since the mid-1970s women have seemed assured of at least one seat in the federal Cabinet89, with Senator Margaret Guilfoyle holding senior jobs in the Fraser Government, and Senator Susan Ryan and after her Ros Kelly appointed to the Hawke Cabinet. Kelly remained a member of Paul Keating’s first two Cabinets. Joan Child became the first woman to be Speaker of the House of Representatives, and Anne Levy occupied a similar spot in the South Australian Upper House. Women ministers were no longer the exception in state governments, and even where present in token numbers, at least they were finally there. In 1990, Carmen Lawrence in Western Australia and Joan Kirner in Victoria became Australia’s first women state premiers, thus opening the way for women to hold leadership positions at all levels of government.90 In 1992 Rosemary Follett became chief minister of the ACT, the first woman to be elected to this position. South Australia continued its tradition of innovation when then Premier John Bannon appointed Dame Roma Mitchell as the nation’s first woman governor, a move that was later emulated by Queensland’s Labor Premier Wayne Goss, who in 1992 made Leneen Forde the state’s governor.
Local government proved to be an even more receptive ground for women, with 19.57 per cent of positions Australia-wide in 1992 being held by women.91 In some parts of the country, the Northern Territory for instance, women’s representation in local government was as high as 30 per cent. It became no longer unusual for a woman to be elected mayor, even of a large city. Brisbane and Melbourne led the way with Sallyanne Atkinson and Winsome McCaughey. It is perhaps not surprising that women can achieve a higher level of political representation closer to home where presumably the demands of juggling family and work in addition to politics at least does not require the additional stress of large amounts of travel.
Yet there is still something unsatisfying about this record. Even in public life, women have tended to be stereotyped, given portfolio responsibility for areas like education or welfare and, of course, women’s issues, all of which are deemed more suitable than the more robust (or masculine) portfolios of treasury, transport or defence. There have been some exceptions: Marga
ret Guilfoyle was Minister for Finance for a while and Ros Kelly at the time of writing was in charge of sport and environmental issues, and of course there were the state premiers who presided over the entire range of government responsibility. But then finance could be seen as the good housekeeping of government, and environment as Mum keeping the backyard clean; it has been difficult for women in public life to transcend the stereotypes of their sex, especially as to defy or renounce them too precipitously could mean being seen as unfeminine and perhaps be electorally dangerous.
The women premiers had the sour satisfaction of being told they were only given the jobs because they were female, that they were a much-needed, highly visible and thus handily symbolic contrast to their inept or corrupt male predecessors. In fact, whole new political theories developed around the appointments of Lawrence and Kirner. ‘At a time of crisis, it was not a strong man that was wanted,’ said Rod Cameron, managing director of the Sydney-based market research firm ANOP and political pollster for the ALP during the 1980s. ‘Strong men had made the mess. It was an honest woman with the appearance of down-to-earth common sense who was chosen to clean it up.’92 Cameron predicted the future ‘feminisation of politics’ as voters rejected in their leaders brute strength and ockerism in favour of ‘intelligence, common sense, honesty and creativity – an unusual combination of virtues more likely to be found among women than men’.
This kind of argument has its dangers for it encourages the belief that any woman politician is going to be an improvement over just about any man, and this simply is not the case. Rather than try and make the spurious case that women are ethically superior, we should be recognising and extolling the diversity of women’s talents and interests. Rather than try to argue that the characteristics that make some women good mothers will necessarily make any woman a superior politician, we should acknowledge that some women are dishonest and unscrupulous (just as plenty of men are sensitive and creative). Women politicians are, after all, politicians as well as being women, and in order to win office and stay there, often decide it is necessary to do things that go against this stereotype. We must have the maturity to acknowledge this so that we can start to become much more tough-minded in our approach to our political representation. It is not enough merely to elect more women to parliament; we have to ensure enough of those women have sufficient talent and energy to qualify them to become ministers and, ultimately, prime ministers. The larger the pool, one would hope, the greater the likelihood we can be proud of our women politicians – not simply because they are there, but because they are good.
Damned whores and God’s police
The contention that women are ethically superior has strong appeal, particularly to many feminists. It provides the intellectual foundation, for instance, for the American feminist Carol Gilligan’s best-selling book In A Different Voice, which argues that women represent a higher order of morality than men.93 This book articulates the assumptions underlying the general proposition that ‘the world would be a better place if run by women’ and its many associated beliefs, such as the notion that girls’ presence in classrooms serves to moderate the behaviour of rambunctious schoolboys. Such thinking is in direct conflict with the earlier feminist intellectual premise that most, if not all, behavioural differences between women and men were the result of environmental factors, especially sex-role conditioning and its concomitant exhortation to girls to act like ladies, set their sights lower than their brothers and in general confine their behaviour and their ambitions.
What kind of feminism is it that now seeks not only to give legitimacy to sex-based differences, but to reverse the previous hierarchy, which ascribed superiority to men’s physical and intellectual prowess, and replace it with women’s supposed ethical and emotional strengths? Is this just a late-20th-century version of the God’s Police stereotype, or is it a genuine breakthrough in our thinking about the qualities contemporary society now has the greatest need for? I am unable to see it as anything other than regressive. This is exactly what Caroline Chisholm contended – that ‘good and virtuous women’ were the much needed civilising agents in a rough and ready colonial society – and, the major argument of this book, she thereby provided the ideological underpinnings for more than a century of domestic servitude by Australian women. It is hardly progress for us to argue that women in public life should be political housewives, cleaning up after the men. Of course a strong case can be made for the need for these qualities and virtues ascribed to women to become the governing principles of our society, but why perpetuate the surely sexist notion that these qualities are gender innate? Why not encourage their nurturance in men, just as we have fostered in women the belief that no ambition is now beyond them?
The stereotypes that 20 years ago could be depicted as the organising principles of Australian life still exist, but they have lost their potency. Or it seemed they had. Certainly the good girl/ bad girl polarity is virtually extinct; these days all girls want to be bad if bad means making choices about their lives and refusing to follow paths preordained by previous generations. The most visible single symbol of the bad girl in the bad old days was the so-called unmarried mother and her illegitimate child; as already pointed out, such language is now thankfully obsolete along with the attitude that makes moral judgements about women on the basis of their sexual behaviour. A further barometer of changed attitudes is the outcry that occurs when, from time to time and most recently in Melbourne in 1991, a judge opines that rape is a less serious offence if committed on a prostitute. The judicial assumption in such cases is misdirected in two respects: that a person who earns their living from sexual acts has abrogated the right to withdraw consent, and that rape is a sexual act rather than an act of violence. Once, these assumptions would never have been challenged. Today, it is almost routine to do so.
So while we can argue that the stereotypes are still there, submerged in the national consciousness, they are not as coercive as they once were. Today women can surmount them or ignore them; certainly women can exist beyond these parameters – which was exactly what the women’s movement, and feminism, in the early 1970s set out to do. What a cruel irony it would be if feminism in the 1990s were to succeed in reimposing a stereotype, one that so chillingly resembles Caroline Chisholm’s model woman, and justifying it in the name of human progress. Once we espouse model behaviour, we logically create categories of deviance from it. We see this already in the shrill moralism surrounding the new imperative of political correctness in thought and deed: the condemnations of those who are deemed not to be ‘PC’ are as tyrannical (and often as arbitrary) as the denouncements of damned whores used to be.
Introduction [1975]
This is a book about Australia. More particularly, it is about women and the ideology of sexism that has governed so much of our lives – an ideology that has determined and limited the extent to which women have been really able to participate in Australian society.
The first white person recorded as being born in Australia was a woman. Her name was Rebekah Small and she was born on 22 September 1788. However, for those who would attach symbolic importance to this, and possibly speculate that women were to occupy a pre-eminent place in the new colony, it is not the fact of being first-born but rather her name that is significant. Her surname could be seen as a presage of the status that women in this country could expect, while the first name assigned to her (in prophetic prescience by Mary Parker Small, her convict mother?) was symbolic of the likely prospects for women in a society that was both sexist and patriarchal. According to the biblical scholar Lockyer, Rebekah has the following meaning:
Rebekah is another name with an animal connection. Although not belonging to any animal in particular, it has reference to animals of a limited class and in a peculiar condition. The name means a ‘tie rope for animals’ or ‘a noose in such a rope’. Its root is found in a noun meaning a ‘hitching place’ or ‘stall’ and is connected with a ‘tied-up calf or lamb’, a young a
nimal peculiarly choice and fat. Applied to a female, the figure suggests her beauty by means of which men are shared and bound. Thus another meaning of Rebekah is that of ‘captivating’.1
The life of Rebekah Small is distinguished from those of most women in convict Australia in that it has been recorded. We know that in 1806 she married Francis Oakes, a missionary, and that she had 14 children, most of whom she outlived. She died in 1883. Such records survive to give us fragmentary details of the lives of a number of individual women and this is all we have from which to glean some idea of what life in early Australia was like for most women. Our knowledge is, therefore, scanty and inadequate and so our comprehension of the social forces and ideas that determined their lives – and that still persist today – is very hazy.
The intention of this book is to begin the process of reversing this lack of comprehension. In what follows I suggest a framework within which to explore the experiences of women in Australia’s past and present, and I put forward an argument that tries to make intelligible what I see as the crucial determinants of women’s lives today. In my view, we cannot begin to understand the position of women today simply by amassing statistics on how many women are in the workforce, how they fare within the education system, how many are married, how many children they have and so on. By doing that we might assemble an elaborate composite of information, but this Statistical Woman would be an artificial construct who would provide no insight into the experiential dimension of women’s current position in Australian society, and would be of limited value even for outlining the many variants and complexities of those areas of women’s lives that are open to more objective scrutiny. Such an approach would give a shallow and static picture, whereas I am concerned with trying to illuminate not merely the heterogeneity existing within the common experience of being female in Australia today, but also the changes that have occurred since this country was first colonised. I do not think we can begin to understand women’s position in Australia today, nor men’s attitudes to women, without at least a cursory consideration of those past events and ideas, which cast shadows on the present. Nor do I think that a comprehensive picture of women’s expectations and experiences can be gained by confining one’s inquiry to narrowly defined conventional academic disciplines. This book is neither history nor sociology although it draws on techniques and materials from both disciplines. It also explores other areas such as literature, psychology and medicine. In style it is both ‘academic’ and ‘journalistic’. It employs extensive documentation when necessary, on the one hand; and expansive speculation or description culled from experience and observation on the other. As such, this book does not fit easily into any existing categories of works that analyse either Australian society or the position of women therein. Accordingly, I want to explain in some detail what I have attempted to do, and what some of my major premises are.