by Anne Summers
Since most books about Australia totally ignore women, or at best give them the token consideration of a single section or chapter, there was no possibility of my following any of the conventions established in that field. Virtually all writers about Australian society and history use the terms ‘Australian’ and ‘male’ synonymously and so anyone who wishes to write about women has to seek guidance and precedents from other areas. There does exist quite a large body of writing about women in Australia. (There is virtually nothing written about men in Australia but, given the assumptions of most writers about Australia, this would be quite superfluous.) Until very recently, when the emergence of the new feminism gave rise to a preoccupation with experiential writing, there had been three ways of writing about women. I felt that Australian society and history needed to be subjected to re-analysis in the light of many of the insights and assumptions of the new feminism and so a book simply about my own experiences would not have met this need. But neither did I consider any of the previous ways of writing about women to be capable of accommodating what I felt needed to be done. In order to illustrate this I will briefly describe each of these methods and what I consider to be their limitations.
The first method can be called the feminist* approach. Generally it isolates a group of female activists, or concentrates on a single campaign – such as the struggle for suffrage – which has involved several groups and it writes about them in vacuo. Such writings about feminists are invaluable for recording and evaluating feminist activities of past and present but they are, by definition, concerned only with politically conscious, active women and not with all women. Often the campaigns of feminists herald social changes, which will ultimately affect larger numbers of women, and their activities can therefore be treated as indices of the changing nature of women’s position. Many of the memoirs of individual feminists contain informative accounts of women in other areas, for example, exploitation of women in factories, or the inequality of women before the law, and thus provide some intelligence of the position of the submerged, inarticulate majority of women. But if we want a more detailed explication and understanding of the experiences of that majority, as distinct from the feminist minority, we cannot concentrate on the activists.
The second method of writing about women comprises those ubiquitous accounts of individual women, those biographies that are generally narrative rather than analytical. Their subjects are usually selected for their notoriety, for their unusually diligent pursuit of social reform, because they pioneered a career or activity new to their sex, or because they happened to be attached by family or marriage to a famous man. A good biography can afford a microcosmic view of a larger society and can be of general as well as of particular interest. But most writing in this category does not attain this distinction; with most biographers of women there is an obsessive tendency to reproduce detailed minutiae from the subject’s family life and to treat whatever it was that secured her fame with indulgence and sentimentality. Such writing tells us very little about the female subject and even less about her female contemporaries.
The third method is the token fragment approach. Here a general (that is, mainly concerned with men) account of a particular social phenomenon or historical occurrence will include a cursory account of the activities of what is considered to be an important group of women. In practice, this approach is generally a throw-away although it is potentially the most valuable for it treats the activities of women in a social context, while the other two methods isolate women and can tend to treat them as objects outside the usual processes of society. But seldom do practitioners of this method develop its potential: they treat the activities of women as peripheral without ever asking why this is so, or even if it is so.
Past Australian writing about women has fallen exactly into this pattern. We have quite a large body of feminist literature, mainly accounts of the suffrage movements and of individuals prominent in these movements. There is also a considerable amount of institutional feminist writing: the activities of bodies such as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union or the Women’s Services Guild have been the subject of numerous books, articles and pamphlets. The (usually female) thesis writer who searches for material for her history of women’s suffrage or some similar topic will be pleasantly surprised to find that her subjects wrote voluminously and have left ample testimonies of their activities. She is surprised because she has been assured by her supervisor that ‘nothing has been written about women’. Such ignorance merely highlights the major deficiency of the feminist method at present: in Australia especially, such writing has not been absorbed into any intellectual tradition of teaching or writing. Each new generation of researchers has had to begin afresh, for there are no definitive works surveying the field to date or compiling and assessing the debates. Until such works begin to be written, forcing awareness of the existence of this rich lode of literature, feminist writing will continue to collect dust on the shelves of libraries and remain unread and unabsorbed into any tradition.
This has been the fate of Norman MacKenzie’s Women in Australia (Melbourne, 1962).* Biographies of women suffer a mixed fate. Scholarly works such as Margaret Kiddle’s Caroline Chisholm (Melbourne, 1950) are read by fairly select groups and are occasionally referred to by historians of the period, but they too generally fail to be integrated into any tradition because the subject of their research is too often relegated to a footnote in the more general studies. There is a double standard of writing and criticism operating here, which has ensured that a vicious circle exists: biographies about women are seldom taken seriously, certainly not in the way that a political biography of a male politician or some other prominent man is, and hence biographers of women have tended to internalise both this and the fact that women are trivialised and not taken seriously within Australia anyway. The result has been a plethora of chatty, discursive books about Australian women, which have concentrated almost totally on their subjects’ domestic affairs and which have reinforced the practice of not taking biographies of women seriously.
Some academic works concerned with the lives of famous and infamous women are absorbed into a kind of folklore. Here the distinctions between legend and fact become blurred and, in any case, the subjects of these biographies exist as eccentrics or heroines, both categories that ensure that they are removed from serious consideration as individuals who could be seen as providing some insights into the general situation of women of their age. There are also a number of short biographical works on famous women such as Mary Gilmore that have been specially written as school texts; they are most likely to be used in literature courses, providing ‘background’ biographical and historical material. Again, there is no way in which any of these biographies are permitted to become part of a general consciousness about women’s position in Australian society.
The third method – the token fragment – is by no means common in this country. A search of the indexes of book after book of Australian history reveals no mention of either women or the family. There are exceptions, of course. Russel Ward’s The Australian Legend (Melbourne, 1958) is one, and any book concerned with Australia prior to 1850 can hardly avoid at least mentioning female convicts and immigrants, but even in these works there is usually only a paragraph or two or, at the very most, a chapter. Moreover, the bias – in many cases amounting to outright misogyny – against treating women as historical subjects worthy of detailed analysis has meant that these fragments remain as unintegrated ephemera and are seldom related to the major theories about the evolution of Australian civilisation. Some of these biases, as they emerge in particular works or arguments, will be explored in more detail throughout this book.
The net result of all this has been that there exists a profound ignorance about the roles that women have played in our history and also of the ways in which women have been suppressed and prevented from moving outside those roles. I hope to begin eroding some of that ignorance with my insistence on the importance of un
derstanding the historical processes by which women’s current situation has evolved; unless we have some comprehension of the sources of that situation and the functions the oppression of women has fulfilled for Australian society, then our chances for evolving political strategies for the liberation of women will be remote.
Contemporary sociological writing has also contributed to both misunderstanding and neglect of the position of women in Australia. In sociology the tendency to isolate one aspect of women’s social existence and develop theories about that alone is fairly pronounced. There are, for instance, a great many articles and sub-theories about ‘women in the workforce’ but it is rare to find one that does more than outline the participation rates of women, enquire into the reasons for married women working and perhaps make some general comments about women’s concentration in low-status and unequally paid jobs. Occasionally some historical perspective will be included, but seldom is the analysis related to those tendencies in the Australian economy and society that have precipitated the increased participation of married women workers. In general, however, sociologists are far more likely than historians to include some consideration of women’s activities in their general analysis of society. But they are often guilty of the same form of sexist scholarship as the general historian: that of interpolating, rather than integrating, a particular facet of women’s many roles into their overall schema. Their sexism consists of treating women as a homogeneous object-group, not recognising their varieties of aspiration and experience; and of fragmenting whole individuals into a series of objectified roles that are based on sex stereotypes.
The term ‘role’ when applied to women’s activities has become a non-historical objectification. It is often used descriptively rather than analytically and has acquired an amorphous blanket quality: it is employed to describe everything that women do, but it actually tells us nothing. Even those writers who acknowledge that some changes have occurred in its content in the past 200 years still assume some fundamental universal content such as child rearing. Few writers in Australia have subjected this content to historical analysis and so discovered that this particular function has undergone quite marked changes even in the past 80 years. Since the entry of married women into the paid workforce has assumed such social importance in the past decade, it has become fashionable to speak of women’s two ‘roles’: home and work. Used loosely, as it often is, this dual terminology suggests a dual existence rather than a single life characterised by several, possibly contradictory, social demands and expectations.
A similarly uncritical use of the term ‘the family’ has added to the propensity to reduce the discussion of women’s activities to simple schema whose content is assumed rather than actually described and analysed. Such a term implies the existence of a universal institution – or at least one that is common to all societies – whose variations at present and in the past are totally overlooked. It is questionable whether it is possible to speak of ‘the Australian family of 1975’ let alone use this term to describe the varieties of familial groupings and relationships that have existed among Europeans in this country since 1788. The term assumes a norm, at present the heterosexual ‘nuclear’ family of conjugal couple and two or three children. Yet there are an enormous number of exceptions to this norm: people who live in a vast range of non-kinship household arrangements or with kin who extend beyond the ‘nuclear’ norm; and these are not accommodated by the insistence that we can treat this country as a society in which ‘the family’ is the pre-eminent form of social organisation. Such a sweeping generalisation excludes from consideration, and hence from awareness of their special needs or problems, single people, unmarried heterosexual couples, homosexuals, single-parent families, childless couples, migrant families with several generations coexisting in one household, one-sex or mixed-sex communes, and people living in institutions such as prisons, orphanages, children’s homes, convents or seminaries. If all of the people living in these extra-‘nuclear’ family relationships were added up they would probably outnumber those who live according to the norm, and so the norm is of dubious value even for describing how the majority of Australians live. It is also evident from the great variety of situations described above that the situation of women is going to differ markedly according to how they live: how then can we speak of women’s ‘role’ in ‘the family’? If sociologists do this – without acknowledging that this blanket phrase is in reality one that can only be applied to a proportion (and possibly a quite small proportion) of the female population – then their findings and theories are going to be of very limited value. They are going to exclude enormous numbers of women and yet appear to be oblivious of having excluded them. They will continue to propagate the fiction that all women live in situations defined by traditional sex roles without exploring the processes by which some women follow these while others reject them.
For the reasons outlined above I found I could not follow the established conventions of Australian historical or sociological writing. I see the need to move beyond merely accepting the premise that people’s lives are to a large extent governed by sex roles and to start investigating the extent of this control and the influence it has had in shaping Australian society. Both women and men are socialised into sex-role behaviour, but what follows concentrates mainly on women and on the social forces that affect women. These of course include men, and sex-role behaviour in men, for it is impossible to talk about women’s lives without also talking about men. Within a society where men occupy all positions of power in government, law, the churches, and the civil service, women as a group are powerless and that powerlessness needs to be explored. Women in Australia are powerless, but we still do not understand exactly how or why. In 1958 Kathleen Fitzpatrick said that women ‘have a legal right to do almost anything, but they are in fact hedged in with invisible barriers which keep them, as it were, on the outer of our national life.’2 This assessment is still true 17 years later, but so far no-one has tried to delineate these ‘invisible barriers’ with any clarity or precision. This is what I have attempted to do.
Broadly, my argument is that women in Australia are forced to eke out a precarious psychic and physical existence within a society that has denied them cultural potency and economic independence and hence has prevented women from being able to construct their own identities or from having more than a very restricted choice about what they can do with their lives. Although basic sexist assumptions about women and men were transported from England with the First Fleet, social and economic conditions in the first 50 years of colonisation of this country gave rise to an indigenous variety of the ideology of sexism. A particularly rigid dualistic notion of women’s function in colonial society was embodied in two stereotypes. They have been both descriptive and prescriptive, at the one time both adumbrating a function for women and exhorting them to conform to it, and also maintaining that they actually represented what women were. Each is a sex-role stereotype that exaggerates the characteristics of the basic dualistic notion that women are either good or evil: this judgement is based on whether or not women conform to the wife/mother roles prescribed by the bourgeois family.
Prior to 1840 when the majority of the population in colonial Australia did not live in this kind of family structure, and women were viewed primarily as objects of sexual gratification, the ‘Damned Whore’ stereotype was predominant. Female convicts and female immigrants were expected to be, and were treated as, whores, and this label was applied indiscriminately to virtually all women in the colony. During the 1840s and 1850s, the bourgeois family was propagated as the most suitable form of social organisation for the new nation and the ‘God’s Police’ stereotype assumed ascendancy. Its general prescription was that women as wives of men and mothers of children were entrusted with the moral guardianship of society, that they were expected to curb restlessness and rebelliousness in men and instil virtues of civic submission in children. Both these functions were to be exercised primarily through fami
ly relationships, but during the past century the sphere of this function has expanded. Women have been permitted some participation in social or political affairs, so long as they confined that participation to performing this moral policing. While this kind of role has been the lot of women in most Western societies, in Australia it has acquired an almost evangelical cast and many of its particularities have given it a unique form. It is perhaps no coincidence that in 1915 Australia was the first country to appoint women police:
They (the first women police) did little in the way of tracking down criminals. Their work consisted mainly in patrolling dance halls, parks, beaches and other places where young people congregate, on the lookout for girls under age. They also watched railway stations, bus terminals and wharves. They developed a flair for detecting girls who were trying to appear over eighteen, or who had run away from home.3