by Anne Summers
It is only at this fourth ‘level’ of culture – everyday life – that women have an explicit and acknowledged place. Even here their status is low and their activities, because they are so taken for granted, are not incorporated into definitions of Australian culture. Yet here we find women engaged in an enormous variety of activities. Women are wives and mothers and grandmothers. They are child-minders and housekeepers, cooks and cleaners, gardeners and laundresses, decorators and dressmakers. These activities have been allocated to women and they are their lives and their work. They form, in a sense, a female culture, which possesses its own history and traditions. It has accumulated skills and wisdoms, which are transmitted from one generation of women to the next. But it has not been given the status of a culture, or even a subculture, by any intellectual tradition in this country. This lack of status makes the already flimsy foundations of women’s ‘selves’ even more precarious.
It has been shown in this chapter that large numbers of Australian women are unhappy and that they are trying to assuage this misery with a variety of remedies, many of which are potentially dangerous and none of which will, of themselves, resolve the basic existential problem. While men in a male-defined culture are, to a large extent, cut off from the sources of life and the material processes that sustain it, women are so deeply embroiled in them that they are unable to move beyond them and enter those areas of cultural expression whereby individuals and groups define their present situations and articulate their futures. Women are denied this experience. They are forced to be silent. Australian culture provides women with a very narrow range of validating areas of existence. Women are invisible in Australian culture and they are supposed to accept that their existence is denied. Those who extol the revered place that ‘the family’ has in this country rarely consider the toll taken by the physical and psychic imprisonment of women within families.
*The whole question of how women become dependent on men at the same time, and by the same process, as they become separate individuals needs further exploration. How can dependent women identify as separate individuals with a country whose physical and cultural dimensions are dominated and described by men? Freudian explanations are now obviously inadequate, but even those advanced by feminist psychologists such as Phyllis Chesler leave many questions unanswered. Until these processes can be described and understood, the means by which female separateness can become independence from men cannot be arrived at. Juliet Mitchell’s Psychoanalysis and Feminism (Allen Lane, London, 1974) has begun such a process of inquiry and understanding.
*I am mainly concerned here with the psychological question of ‘self ’ and its relation to women’s lives at present and have not, therefore, included in this section a critique of work within a capitalist system. I am aware of the deficiency this entails, but I am not trying to suggest that women should learn to value work that is both exploitative and alienating.
CHAPTER FIVE
The poverty of dependence
Australia is not the wealthy country that many of the glowing commentaries of our national characteristics would have us believe. Our apparent affluence harbours an enormous amount of desperate material poverty, and in the middle of the two-cars-and-a-swimming-pool suburban prosperity, there exist well over two million people who find it difficult to ensure adequate housing let alone the complacency of a full belly.
That such poverty exists, and that its true dimensions ought to be publicly known, was acknowledged by the federal government in 1972 when it established a Commission to inquire into poverty in Australia. The Commission, headed by Professor Ronald Henderson has, at the time of writing, released its Interim Report and several research reports, but its final report has not yet been published. This has been the first inquiry on such a comprehensive scale ever conducted in this country and it is to be hoped that its full report will acknowledge something that all previous poverty surveys have apparently not recognised: the vast majority of the ‘poor’ are women.
The euphemistic categories we use to describe material deprivation – ‘pensioner’, ‘deserted wife’, ‘single mother’, ‘low-income family’ etc. – obscure the fact that these terms refer either exclusively or overwhelmingly to women and the children for whom they are responsible, and that virtually the entire social security system of Australia exists as a monumental testament to our systematic refusal to grant women economic independence. No previous survey has seen that poverty is a likely consequence for almost every woman who has been unable, or unwilling, to procure for herself a male provider/protector. The irony of the promise of ‘social security’ is apparent only to those who realise that no such security is assured for women. It is not until the age of 60 that women are guaranteed a fixed income in their own right – in the form of the old-age pension. Before that age, the economic wellbeing of all women, of any social class, is determined by sheer chance. A series of ‘ifs’ will decide her fate. If she is able to obtain an appropriate education and if she can secure a job that pays well and if it is not threatened by redundancy or male competition or an unforeseen pregnancy, or if she is prepared to get married and rely on her husband to ensure her economic survival and if her husband’s income remains adequate and if they stay together he gives her a reasonable share of it and if they part she is provided for by him, then a woman can be reasonably secure economically. But a lot of things can go wrong – if any of the ‘ifs’ do not prevail, a woman can find herself in sudden and unprepared-for poverty.
Many women grow up with this realisation; for others it can come, at any stage in their lives, as an unanticipated and shattering recognition that their lives are out of control, they are economically impotent, unable to gather together the resources, or denied the tangible opportunities, for sheer economic survival.
It is true that many men are similarly unable to direct their lives, fall victims to accidents or are in other ways prevented from pursuing economic self-determination, and a great many women live their entire lives without knowing material deprivation. But individual instances from either category do not contradict the basic proposition that, as a sex, women are systematically denied an independent place in our economic structure: the money that women of pre-pension age receive is money for them to mother their children with – not geared to their personal needs or aspirations – and those women who are able to support themselves do so in spite of the system, not because of it.
A comparison between male and female wages demonstrates the slender chances the majority of women have of enjoying economic security.* (See the table on the following page.)
The proportion of women workers earning above $4000 in 1969 was miniscule. While 65.4 per cent of males earned less than this amount, a huge 94.2 per cent of women were concentrated in the two lowest income brackets with nearly half of all women full-time workers earning less than $2000 a year.
Women are considered a priori to be dependents, just as men are assumed almost from birth to be wage-earners/breadwinners, and the wage structure of our economy has been arranged around this basic assumption. People’s lives will not obediently follow this charter, of course, and it is when it breaks down, particularly when a man fails to provide for those for whom he is legally responsible – because he dies or deserts – that women’s dependent status, and the perpetual poverty that threatens, are made most clear. For when a dependent woman is deprived of her male provider, the state – in the form of a welfare agency – steps in and assumes the protector role, thereby perpetuating women’s dependent status, and since welfare payments are notoriously meagre, ensuring that poverty will continue to be a likely accompaniment to this dependency. This reinforces without questioning the stereotypes of dependency and protection. Not every instance of state monetary relief transforms its recipient into a handmaiden: relief to wool-growers obviously does not assume this status. What is being suggested is that the state will only pay to women money that, in its view, their husbands (or some other supportive male) should be paying them a
nd for the same purposes: it is money that is earmarked for a specific task – the raising of children. The state assumes the husband’s financial role only as long as a woman remains a full-time mother.
Male and female full-time workers; total income, 1968–691
Although this table appears rather ancient in 1975, it has proved impossible to obtain a more current rendering of it from the Australian Bureau of Statistics even though it has been asked for repeatedly. I decided to leave this table in because it illustrates so graphically the concentration of female workers in low-income jobs. Even though the actual incomes have increased markedly, it is unlikely that this pattern has altered.
Unless there were a full-scale inquiry directed specifically to this question, it would be impossible to delineate with any great accuracy the extent of poverty among women in Australia. Certainly it would be hazardous to try to estimate the numbers of women involved, but it is possible to designate those areas in which poverty is most likely to occur and then to gain some idea of how many women are possibly suffering within those areas. However, the actual numbers involved are less important than the general point that, so far, even those most concerned with discovering the extent of poverty in Australia, and with trying to eradicate it, seem unaware of the fact that they are dealing mainly with women. This oversight has important implications for proposed ‘solutions’ to poverty. If, as I am suggesting, endemic poverty is concomitant with being female unless male financial support can be obtained, then structural solutions that move beyond the ‘more money’ approach are essential. Although higher pensions would alleviate much poverty, governments are unlikely to spend the vast amounts that would be required to bring pensioners past the poverty line. In any case, it will be suggested that the structure of the Australian social security system does little to alter the posture of dependency, which women must assume in order to gain financial support.
The fact that the majority of poor people are women has been partly disguised because researchers in the past have always been preoccupied with ‘the family’. Economists who try to set a poverty-line income have always pitched this to family needs, yet it is women who live outside ordinary family situations who are most likely to be poor.
Although those who study poverty now use adjusted income scales that also apply to people outside ‘the family’, most of their discussions are still addressed to poverty among family groups, thereby implying the presence of a husband/father or a de facto male provider, and there is rarely explicit recognition of the special problems encountered by people who do not live in this fashion. For instance, the 1966 Henderson survey began by stating, ‘We have deliberately confined ourselves to a study of poverty as determined by the relationship between the income of a family and its normal needs’.2 It was stated that a basic-wage concept of poverty would be used, albeit one where ‘the incomes of different-sized family units have been standardised to make them comparable with a unit of the basic size’.3 This theoretical framework assumes that most of the population can be accommodated by a ‘family-unit’ analysis. Such a preoccupation prevents the study from acknowledging, or maybe from even observing, the existence and, more important, the causes, of several important areas of poverty.
For instance, although the Henderson survey devoted a great deal of attention to the poverty of aged people, there was no specific mention made of the fact that more than two-thirds of the recipients of aged pensions are women, and that in talking of the poverty of the aged, the survey was in fact dealing primarily with the poverty of old women. The family-oriented framework thereby disguised the existence and extent of poverty among one group of women.
More recent thinking has begun to recognise this, although so far no full-scale survey of poverty among women has been attempted. In its evidence to the Commission of Inquiry into Poverty, the Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS) submitted that ‘to ignore the extent to which sex discrimination operates to cause and to reinforce poverty, is to ignore issues which are a vital part of anti-poverty politics’.4 It recommended ‘That the Poverty Inquiry give detailed attention to the needs of those specially disadvantaged groups … older single women, lone parents (including lone fathers), homeless women, women outside families and Aborigine women’.5
Some of this advice has been heeded and the Interim Report shows that the family-unit analysis has been abandoned in favour of a potentially more flexible concept, the ‘income unit’:
The ‘income unit’ was chosen to correspond to the family group normally supported by a pension or benefit. It was decided that the household was too heterogeneous a unit, particularly if it contained boarders or consisted of an ‘extended’ family. Moreover, it was felt that persons such as aged relatives should be treated as individuals with a right to income regardless to whether they live with friends or relatives.6
Such a recognition of the right to an income is not extended to women. The only special group singled out as suffering considerable poverty because of their dependent status is children.7 So the previous surveys’ short-sightedness in respect of women has not been completely overcome theoretically, although in practice the report does recognise the existence of single women with or without children as having special needs. Moreover the new ‘income unit’ concept could be extended to women fairly easily were the researchers into poverty to realise the need.
Much of the poverty of women is contingent. It is the direct result of their dependent status within Australia’s economy and society generally, and the fact that they are not paid an independent income or allowance. If a woman’s continued material wellbeing is the result of her dependent status – and the consequences of abdicating this dependency would be dire poverty – then a discussion of poverty must broaden its perspectives to include some recognition of the economic bondage many women find themselves in. Therefore the following will be as concerned with those women who have no income and who are dependent on others for support, and the various factors that perpetuate this situation, as it will be with the more traditional concerns of the investigators of poverty in Australia.
Many women are forced to remain in domestic situations that they would prefer to leave simply because they have no ready cash and no financial resources to draw upon to enable them to find new accommodation. This is especially the case with women who have dependent children and who therefore must ensure that, before they leave, they have another house or flat to go to. Although emergency relief is paid to women who are totally destitute, the amounts are paltry and they will not be paid until after the woman has left home. She cannot obtain money in advance to enable her to leave. The state will spend money to stop women and children sleeping in the streets but it will not be party to encouraging the break-up of families, even de facto families. So unless a woman can find free emergency accommodation for herself and her children until she can obtain some money, it will be almost totally impossible for her to leave and she is, in fact, enslaved to a man with the state condoning her enslavement.
Stark confirmation of this judgement has been provided by the stories of many of the women who have sought temporary accommodation at the Elsie Women’s Refuge in Sydney.8 In the first nine months of this refuge’s operation, more than six hundred women and children spent at least one night there and a substantial number of these had been in exactly the position described above. Until the refuge opened – offering them free accommodation, food and clothing – these women had been imprisoned in homes with husbands whom they wanted to leave. But unless the woman had been able to save a little money or unless the man was so violent that she just waited for him to go to work, picked up her children and ran, escape was very difficult.
What she would have to go through would be something like this: once he had gone to work she would collect her children and as many of their belongings as she could carry and leave home; if she were lucky enough to have somewhere to leave the children and the suitcases she would go into the social welfare offices alone. Otherwise she wou
ld have to manage to get herself, children and belongings – often on public transport – into the nearest centre; there she would be interviewed by several people and after a wait of up to eight hours would be given a sum of money; the amount she would receive varies from $10 to more than $60 and, from my experience, appears to be awarded very arbitrarily; she would then have to find accommodation for the night and even if she had received quite a large sum of money much of this would be used immediately in eating in a restaurant or cafeteria and in paying for a hotel room. Many of the women who stayed at Elsie Women’s Refuge have described going through this process: the next day they would probably return home, exhausted and embittered at the obstacles put in the way of a woman seeking to make her own life. Thus, when talking about poverty and about poverty among women in particular, it is important to take account of this kind of economic bondage.