by Anne Summers
Women who go to classes in arts and crafts are often desperately anxious to have their efforts noticed and, hopefully, commended, and it is a pathetic recognition of the handmaiden status of most female art forms that such commendation is often only convincing to its recipient if it comes from a man. Male teachers of arts and crafts are in great demand and can gather large classes around them where they command the undivided devotion of their slavish students. During the couple of years that I worked in adult education, I was at first astonished and then very much saddened at the obsequious attitudes many middle-aged women students showed towards young men just out of art school. If the teacher was an artist of some repute, this female flunkeyism reached depths of servility, which was a tragic testimonial to the need these women had for the bestowal of dignity and worth upon their underrated selves. Where the classes were taken by women, a more stimulating camaraderie existed. The distinction between teacher and student was less evident and it was possible for students to allow their individual predispositions to flourish, rather than fawning to the style or trend espoused by the male mentor.
Women’s doings are relegated to the far corner of the national consciousness, their separatism confirmed by the special magazines and sections of newspapers that are devoted to them, and their objectification completed by their being treated as special categories of description and analysis. ‘Women’, ‘migrants’ and, lately, ‘Aborigines’ are singled out for attention, on the apparent assumption that these are united homogeneous groups. This is a legitimate enough technique if the concern is with the effects on individuals of being lumped together in a single, low-status group in this way, but this kind of consciousness is seldom the motivating force among writers such as Horne, who, unable to fit these groups into his major thesis, adds them on as careless afterthoughts. Of the ‘Lucky Country’ he says, ‘it still is a man’s country, but no more so than in comparable countries’.28 He writes, ‘Men and women go their own ways, but men get the best of the bargain because they have more ways to go’29 but thinks this is the result of ‘social awkwardness rather than male dominance’. Australian women, thinks Horne, inhabit a discrete and different world, and he feebly attempts to demonstrate this by devoting an entire page of his book to citations from the social pages and cookery notes of several newspapers and for some ineluctable reason seems to think that proves his case. Apparently it did not occur to him to conclude that the trivia that fills these pages is more at the behest of the men who own the newspapers than an accurate representation of the mores of Australian women.30
When the socially valued areas of our culture are either occupied by men or depend for survival on values that are associated with the male sex role, what and where is women’s place? What alternatives do most women have but to subsume themselves within that permitted territory and strive for self-realisation at the lower levels, in the shadowy areas of allowed art forms or in the homes and gardens where they are psychically imprisoned?
Before the recent resurgence of a feminism with strong emphasis on cultural forms of oppression, few people considered or questioned this ostracism, or the reasons for it. The basic ‘maleness’ of this ‘level’ of our culture was taken for granted. If anyone did query it, as did the occasional overseas visitor, perhaps taken aback at the sight of women sitting in cars outside pubs, sipping the beers their husbands periodically lurched into their laps, then two kinds of responses were inevitable. One was the careless avowal that the women could join in if they wanted to, but they didn’t so that settled that and whose shout is it boys. The second was a defensive justification of all-male activities and the ethos that surrounded them. Often the need for a man to ‘get away from it all’ – meaning away from his wife and children as much as from the memory of the tedium of his job – was offered as an explanation. No-one considered where women might go to get away from it all.
The first response fails to recognise the legal and other barriers that do prevent women from participating in many of these pursuits. Many hotels will not serve women in the front bar, forcing them to patronise dingy ‘ladies’ lounges’ where the discomfort is exacerbated by the higher prices charged for drinks. There is at least one city hotel in Sydney that will not allow women anywhere on its premises, a practice that its patrons, many of whom are journalists, delight in helping to enforce. Ritual attempts by groups of women to desegregate these hotels have rarely been successful: often they have involved the women being subjected to jeering and abuse while one recent attempt, at Manly in Sydney, ended with the arrest of four women.31
The tenacity with which so many men cling to segregated drinking requires explaining for it seems to be a habit unique to this country. Complicated patterns of repression and guilt coupled with a hedonistic abandonment of social prescriptions have characterised the drinking patterns of many Australian men, a combination that is often attributed to the Irish-Catholic influence on Australian social mores. This ambivalence has been illustrated by attitudes male drinkers have exhibited towards women in hotels. The presence of female drinking companions was resented by the denizens of the old-style drinking dens and this was reflected in the way these places were subdivided: the largest space was allowed to the utilitarian, tiled, men-only bar while women had to brave their way to dark, poky corners if they wanted to drink. In the 1950s the burgeoning of suburban hotels, featuring large drinking halls, concrete beer ‘gardens’ and Saturday afternoon entertainments, enabled drinking, particularly at weekends, to become an integrated activity. But most old-style pubs have clung to their seeming misogynism. Some inner-city hotels have had their bars taken over by university or other non-conformist groups, where women and men drink freely with each other, often in the face of disapproval or resentment from the original male patrons. There are also instances of all-women drinking scenes. For instance there are several pubs in Balmain, an inner-city Sydney suburb, where every Saturday sees groups of middle-aged working-class women congregate for an afternoon’s drinking, following the form, listening to the races from transistors and placing bets with the pub’s SP bookie. In the public bar, visible through the serving area, the men (many of whom are the husbands of the women) are doing exactly the same, but it does not appear to occur to either group that they could get together. Even where individual men may enjoy the company of women, the pub ethic has become so strong that all must profess to prefer getting drunk without the restraining presence of wives or girlfriends.
Yet opposition to the introduction of barmaids came not from the drinkers but from religious and temperance groups, which anticipated the corruption of pretty young girls in these iniquitous, alcoholic havens. The drinkers appeared to welcome a female presence behind the bar and to accept from them the chidings and rebukes that, coming from their wives, would have been classed as unpardonable intrusions. It is not uncommon for a man to entrust his pay packet to the barmaid, instructing her how much he can afford to spend, and then accepting without argument her notification that his drinking for that night is over. In her book Autobiography of a Sydney Barmaid, the author recounts how the toughest characters in the bar where she worked in the 1930s afforded her a gently protective respect and admonished any stranger who attempted to ‘get fresh’ or swear in her presence.32 On the other hand, any woman who ventured into the ladies’ lounge was considered fair game to these drunken cavaliers.
It was perhaps a percipience of this that kept ‘respectable’ women out of hotels, but there has certainly never been any correlation between Australian women’s frequenting of hotels and their willingness to drink, especially to engage in what is coyly referred to as ‘social drinking’. A 1970 survey comparing drinking patterns of people in Sydney and San Francisco showed the women of Australia to be much more likely to drink, particularly to be light drinkers, than their American counterparts. Only 18 per cent of Sydney women abstained completely while 43 per cent drank lightly; in San Francisco 28 per cent did not drink at all and 35 per cent were light drinkers.33 Australian
women have been permitted, even encouraged, to drink, but their imbibing has been circumscribed by rules and conventions that have prevented them from being able to freely and openly use drinking as the form of social release it so often is for men. There has always been, and remains, enormous social disapprobation for drunken women, and those women who do drink heavily must be secretive about it and their families will go to inordinate lengths to conceal their shame from others. But women are far less likely than men to become alcoholics. The survey already cited showed that while 48 per cent of male respondents were heavy drinkers, only 15 per cent of women were.34 The admission to psychiatric centres for treatment for alcoholism reflects this difference: in 1971–72, 1053 men were admitted to centres in New South Wales for treatment related to excessive drinking, compared with 230 women.35 Perhaps women alcoholics are less likely to seek treatment, for this entails admitting to a form of socially unacceptable behaviour, but it is also likely that women, excluded from the culture of drinking and not accustomed to equating drinking with recreation, are less likely to develop a compulsive dependence on alcohol.*
The legal or traditional exclusion from physical participation in the various recreational activities outlined so far is perhaps less important, particularly in terms of women’s social aspirations, than their exclusion from that impenetrable freemasonry that male sport followers create for themselves. Participation means much more than being able to actually play whatever the game is – the number of spectators always far exceeds the players in any sport. It involves a vicarious identification, not simply with what is occurring on the track or field on that particular day, but with the evolution and refinement of the sport or activity to its present form, and, more importantly, with the mythologies and rituals that have arisen with it.
The rewards of the actual participants are of a different order. The sheer excitement of the successful demonstration of a prized skill can transport a footballer, a jockey or a surfer into a state almost mystical, of exultant heightened consciousness, a state of extraterrestrial infinity where one moment of time contains a vision of boundless possibilities of which finite man usually remains ignorant. Several Australian Rules footballers I have spoken to have, hesitatingly, self-consciously and awkwardly, tried to put into words those ineluctable ethereal perceptions that overcame them for a few seconds after capturing a ball from a high mark. And the champion surfer Midget Farrelly has described a similar reaction:
[I]t was a good day with the sun shining, and I was sliding off the peak into the deep water when suddenly I felt as though I could keep going and going, pushing on and on as though there was no end to it anywhere. You go into oblivion. Suddenly all your life is there in this long, long stretched-out wave; you’re removed from the past, everything that has been on your mind becomes immaterial, everything goes to jelly, and you feel completely removed from the world around you. Nothing matters any longer but you and the board and the wave and this instant of time!36
Few women experience this mystical exultation from the sports they play, just as watching a football match cannot play the same functions for women as for men. Women are less bound to the culture of violence, and fraternising among the female sex takes a different form; but these are the ingredients that fuse to form a mode of release of frustration and tension for men who watch the game. Unless a person can project themself onto the field, somehow place their body and mind into the context of the game, this kind of experience remains impossible. The spectator need not even be present at the game for this to operate. Often the most avid identifiers are those who watch the game on their television sets – and there is nothing to prevent women from doing this. But while for men physical remoteness is no bar to immersion in the mystique, it is difficult for women to identify with it and there is little question of their being admitted to the fraternity.
The myths and the enticements they hold out for a reassuring submergence in group solidarity, if not for individual glorification, begin to impinge on the boy-child’s consciousness as soon as he is old enough to perceive the elevated status certain sports have in Australia. These facts of life will probably be acquired before any sexual information complicates his social life; if they are not imparted by a paternal zealot, they will certainly be rammed into his psyche by the daily newspapers, the television and the general drift of boys’ games. Girls are subjected to the same barrage, but part of their indoctrination into the sporting way of life will include the knowledge that this is a male preserve, a fact initially made clear by the gender of the teams or the individual heroes, and reinforced by the sex-role proscriptions that condemn tomboy activities. Even if she escapes the latter, the former is too evident a description of the state of play to enable her to carry any delusions about the opportunities for female participation. She may furtively follow a team, but it is unlikely that she will be able to emulate those boys who, before they are out of primary school, already have acquired impressive memories for scores, winning margins and other historical ephemera associated with their chosen sport. Girls will know that they can play their own sports, and often excel in them, but that generally women’s sports – as with all their recreational activities – are denied the status accorded to men’s.
*See Chapter Five
*Since writing this, it has been drawn to my attention that there are in fact an enormous number of women alcoholics in Australia. Often their alcoholism is disguised by doctors who, either through compliance or ignorance, diagnose a psychiatric disorder. It also seems that alcoholism in women, especially in young women, is increasing rapidly. This can probably be attributed to the breaking down of the taboos against women drinking publicly, and many young women are starting to develop the same compulsive dependence on alcohol that so many Australian men have. I have also heard of a number of cases of elderly women developing an addiction to alcohol. Often these are women who have been teetotal all their lives, but who have started drinking to help them sleep or else simply to blot out the misery of being an old woman in a society that discriminates against both women and the old.
CHAPTER FOUR
The ravaged self
[T]he obsession of many Australian women with their homes goes beyond fashion or normal motherly concern; it represents an attempt to provide spiritual value in material things and modes of living.
Donald Horne, The Lucky Country, 1964
The fourth ‘level’ of Australian culture consists of everyday life – that constant set of activities involving work and familial and other personal relationships through which people define and sustain their lives. Most definitions of culture neglect this area. Some theorists, such as Raymond Williams1, have tried to explore the relationships between society and culture, but they generally confine their discussion of ‘society’ to wider communities. Thus the working lives of men often merit inclusion, but men’s family lives and women’s working and family lives are passed over. Culture is too often circumscribed, by definition, to include only the public and easily accessible facets of people’s lives and work. In Australia there are numerous writings about culture in this sense – the first three ‘levels’ of culture described in earlier chapters – but virtually the only writing about family relationships is to be found in fiction and, as I have already pointed out, this is only read and taken seriously if it comes from the pen of a man and deals with male perceptions of those relationships. The family lives of women remain largely unarticulated and unexplored.
I said earlier that most of the commentators on Australian society pay token homage to the institution of ‘the family’ and note that the lives of women in this country are inordinately bound up with their families. None of them, however, dares lift the veil of illusion created by these platitudes to view the realities they conceal. Similarly, sociologists and moralists extol the institution while ignoring much that goes on within it. For instance, the introduction to one recently published book claims, ‘it may still be affirmed that the family in Australia, although subjected
to strains at the present time, remains the cornerstone of community stability and continues to exert a powerful influence in promoting the well-being of Australian society’.2 Is ‘the family’ this? A cornerstone of community stability?
Those who make such assertions usually base them on generalities, or on idealised notions about the functions performed by families. Families, they consider, are places of retreat, private sanctuaries from the pressures of the world of work. Families are also places where children are physically cared for and where they learn to conform to the requirements of the adult world. In fact, sociologists and moralists do recognise that stability is not always synonymous with family and that there are conflicts and breakdowns and deviations; much of their prognosis is actually exhortation. This is what they think families should be like. But these assertions rest on a view of families and family functions that are derived from male expectations and are based on men’s needs. Nowhere in theories about families, in moralistic prescriptions about what families ought to be like, is there specific acknowledgment of women’s expectations, needs or experiences. Nor is any attempt made to see whether the theories and prescriptions are compatible with women’s needs, expectations and experiences. This fourth ‘level’ of culture is the only one where women have an acknowledged place and function and so it is important to explore their place in it in some detail. Such an exploration has to specifically recognise that women’s participation may differ substantially from men’s and that the generalisations made about men and families may be quite at odds with generalisations about women and families.