by Anne Summers
Once in a marriage both partners can suffer – and sometimes the man may suffer more. To express her resentment and frustration at her overall situation of impotence, an unhappy woman may dredge up whatever subversive weapons she can find to take what is inevitably a petty retaliation. A woman who resorts to constant nagging, to refusing to have sexual intercourse, to neglecting the housework or the care of her children will not, by these means, remedy or escape from her cultural prison. Her revenge is ignoble because it can only create guilt and self-hatred in herself – and can in no way alter the structural iniquities of her situation. Such measures can usually only be taken against a meek and acquiescent husband – for a brutal or domineering man can simply terrorise his wife into conformity to his will – and are thus directed against an individual rather than the institution. Their main result will be an increase in mutual misery. A woman who is constantly beaten or raped by her husband can do little except endure it – or run. But the momentary relief of her escape will soon be tempered by the realisation that she has merely fled to a different form of oppression: the perpetual poverty of being a recipient of State-provided social ‘security’. Once again, women’s lack of real alternatives to marriage and family is underlined.
Yet this is continually disguised by various cultural factors that reinforce the idea that women must marry. Chapter Thirteen discusses in detail the multitude of social pressures that conspire to cajole women into seeing marriage and maternity as their sole vocation. Here, it is important to examine a still more fundamental level at which this pressure is exercised. Built into Australian culture are several images of women. These exist at the level of barely conscious and thus rarely articulated certitudes about what are appropriate vocations for women. (There are also cultural images of men but since, as Chapter Two points out, most commentaries about Australia devote considerable attention to them it is not necessary to dwell on them here.) It is the curious combination of certitude and subconscious that has enabled these images to exist unexplored and unchallenged for so long, and which now makes a detailed examination of them necessary. When we consider the range of possible lifestyles available to women in Australia it does not take long to conclude that the images of women that exist in our culture, and are of course derived from what women have been able to do in the past, are very restricted in ambit and few in number. This becomes clear if we attempt to draw them from their cultural recesses in order to describe and elucidate them. We find that they consign women to only two possible destinies and that these are defined by whether or not their lives are family-oriented. These images are in fact stereotypes and, as such, they exaggerate. They slur over variations in aptitude and ambition and they distort the actual activities of women. They also ignore the absence of choice in most women’s lives. Chapter One showed that women themselves are either ignored or viewed as stereotypes in many areas of our culture: especially in the Arts, the image and the reality are merged and the stereotypes are thus perpetuated. It would seem that women can only exist as stereotyped creatures. And since the stereotypes of women are so restrictive, this sexist form of categorising and circumscribing people is more discriminatory in the case of women than it is with men.
The strength of the stereotypes is made clearer if they are named and their effects on women’s lives examined. We can identify two stereotypes and see that one is positive and prescriptive, outlining the familial roles women ought to perform, while the other is negative, defining women purely in terms of not fulfilling these roles, and hence is pejorative and punishing. The pro-family stereotype is called ‘God’s Police’ while its antithesis is ‘Damned Whore’. (The specific Australian origins of these terms and their connotations are described in Part Two.)
This means of assigning women into dual categories of good or evil is not unique to Australia. It has been a basic tenet of the Judaeo-Christian tradition and hence of most Western intellectual thought and social practice. The actual content of each stereotype differs from country to country and sometimes changes with time and social or economic conditions. For instance, in Australia until the 1960s, a married woman who took a paid job was considered to be contravening the God’s Police stereotype (except during the Second World War when a relaxation of the prescription was enforced by wartime exigencies). Various economic and sociological factors contributed to an alteration of this content of the God’s Police stereotype during the 1960s and it became permissible for mothers whose children were at school to enter the paid work-force. But variations such as these in no way alter the rigidity of the dichotomy between the two stereotypes. Working mothers with preschool age children were condemned as ‘bad’ mothers, while women who in no way conformed to the approved female role were still regarded as ‘evil’. Eva Figes suggests a reason for this:
[S]ince the standard of womanhood is set by men for men and not by women, no relaxation of standards is allowable, she is either an absolute woman or nothing at all, totally rejected. This is one of the reasons why the male image of woman has a tendency to split into two, into black and white, Virgin Mary and Scarlet Woman, angel of mercy and prostitute, gentle companion and intolerable bluestocking. A rigid image must of necessity split, since the most compliant reality can hardly fit in absolutely.2
In many societies, the stereotypes derive from woman’s relationship to man, from whether or not she is a sex object, but in Australia the stereotypes are tied to family and it is this that has given them their distinctive cast. Although they include women’s relations with men, they are more widely defined than that and involve a broader social function than is often permitted to women in other countries.
God’s Police
The God’s Police stereotype describes and prescribes a set of functions that all Australian women are supposed to fulfil: the maintenance and reproduction of the basic authority relations of society. The prototype of these is found within ‘the family’ and it is here that women ideally perform their task, but the task of shoring up these authority relations requires extensive support systems, among them the education and social welfare network. The God’s Police stereotype permits women to work within these areas, so long as they perform the prescribed functions and do not contradict any other fundamental tenets of the stereotype.
Women do not therefore necessarily have to be married in order to earn this label; the kind of work they do and their social/sexual lives will determine this. For instance, a single woman teacher or social worker would be seen as God’s Police. So would nuns who teach or do other forms of charitable work. Single women who live with men without being married to them constitute an increasingly large group, and as their numbers increase so does the acceptability of their lifestyle. But at present we cannot say that their mode of living is totally accepted by society at large and so their status is uncertain. If it is counter-balanced by their working at one of the above-mentioned jobs then some sections of society are prepared to regard it benignly; for other groups this in itself is sufficient reason to condemn them and they argue about the undesirable moral influence such women could exert.
But the God’s Police stereotype applies primarily to women within families and has as its raison d’etre the perpetuation of the bourgeois family.
This stereotype describes a socially and politically conservative function: the policing and preservation of existing relations. That they need to be policed suggests that they are not very firmly implanted in Australian social practice, but while it is the case that they need to be transmitted to each generation, this policing notion is historically derived and arises from the peculiar conditions existing at the time of the formation of ‘the family’ in Australia. This is outlined in detail in Chapter Nine. The main task of God’s Police is to instil in husbands, sons, daughters or pupils the necessity of submission to existing class, sex and race authority structures. So long as such submission is maintained, these oppressive and exploitative relations persist. Women are thus called upon not merely to perform an authoritarian f
unction within a society – and within institutions such as family, school etc. – where they have virtually no power, but also to police the perpetuation of the very authority structures that oppress them. Women are specially prepared for this task when, as young girls, they are taught to be submissive and passive, to conform and obey, to imbibe the morality of their generation and class and to impart its contents to the more recalcitrant of their peers.
Women are caught in a contradictory situation whereby they pass on and police a morality that they did not devise and that includes as one of its precepts the notion that women are inferior. They can only perform this schizophrenic role if they are unaware of the authority they possess and, having internalised their roles obediently and unquestioningly, they equate their tasks with what is ‘natural’ to their sex. Women are further duped by the superficial status that is accorded to conformers to the God’s Police stereotype: they are rewarded with a degree of respect from the men whose consciences they are.
The other singular attribute of the God’s Police stereotype is that it is asexual. This is why it can simultaneously accommodate married, single and widowed women so long as they perform the policing function. It is conveniently forgotten that married women must have sexual intercourse in order to reproduce: a general Australian puritanism has managed to convince itself that mothers are not sexual creatures and female sexuality is either denied or else relegated entirely to the Damned Whore stereotype. (This curious attitude can be partly explained by the historical circumstances that led to the Damned Whore stereotype dominating white society in Australia for the first 50 years of its existence; the eventual revulsion against it, as the bourgeois family and its concomitant God’s Police notion of women gradually became dominant, led to a denial of women’s sexuality even within marriage. See Chapters Eight and Nine.)
The authority that women possess within families, schools and as social or welfare workers is not absolute. It is contingent authority, which is why it does not carry any power. It can only be exercised while it is recognised and upon those who are prepared to recognise it. Women are incapable of enforcing it upon anyone, even their children, if their authority is disputed. And of course it often is disputed and then women are, once again, left hapless and helpless, stripped of the one means by which society allows them to gather status and respectability. A woman in this position will be described as being unable to control her children, as having committed some wrong so as to have lost her husband’s respect (or why else would he spend each night in the pub?) and she will thus negate some of the meagre benefits that accrued to her upon marriage.
The God’s Police stereotype by itself could barely win any woman’s allegiance, even with its enticements of status and respectability. But the point of the polarised stereotypes is, as Figes pointed out, their rigidity: if you don’t conform to one you are automatically cast into the other. The alternative stereotype often affords women substantially more personal freedom, but it does not possess the comforting mantle of status and respectability. It is, rather, a punitive stereotype which entails relegating women classified by it to the demi-mondaine. The God’s Police stereotype, on the other hand, is posited as the apotheosis of womanhood, as that to which all women strive. This idealisation of women’s vocation is peddled to unsuspecting women while the contradictory aspects of the role itself, as well as the unequal nature of the meeting of needs in the marriage union, are disguised by the accolades poured upon the stereotype and the superficial status afforded to women who try to conform to it.
Damned whores: prostitutes, lesbians, women in prison
The Damned Whore stereotype is a negative one; it is used to describe women who do not appear to be engaged in maintaining existing authority relations and is most often applied to women who are seen as actively contravening these relations – especially those governing women themselves. In practice it is often punitive as the very labelling of a woman as ‘unrespectable’ deprives her of any status and, as is shown below, often involves her losing many of the rights she is supposedly guaranteed as a citizen. The very fear of being castigated as Damned Whores keeps women in line; most women have no option but to conform to the God’s Police stereotype in order to guarantee societal approbation and thus try to avoid these punitive measures. This stereotype is mainly applied to three groups of women: prostitutes, lesbians and women in prisons or detention homes. It is assumed that there is a necessary contradiction between being a prostitute or a lesbian and fulfilling the God’s Police function; women in custody are actively prevented from doing so.
In contrast to God’s Police, the Damned Whore stereotype is avowedly, although not exclusively, a sexual category. The prototype is the prostitute and, with her, any other women who trade on their bodies, such as strippers, as well as call girls, hostesses, massage parlour workers and the host of occupations that are euphemisms for selling some form of sexual service. But also included in this stereotype are any women who are sexually ‘liberated’, women who have extra-marital sexual relationships and especially those who bear children out of wedlock. There are obviously many, many women included in this stereotype, but their numbers are partly disguised by further labels or descriptions that are used to categorise them, for example, gangsters’ molls, bikies’ girlfriends, groupies.
Many male groups, like surfers or the men who congregate around a particular pub or a social or even political activity, have names for the women who attach themselves to the group, proffering sex in return for some recognition and status as a group member. These names, like the ones mentioned above, are always denigratory and serve to differentiate those women from respectable women. The latter are the women these men would marry, and the labels they assign to the women who trail after them are designed to be constant reminders of the low esteem in which they are held. Other labels are used to identify women who are seen as ‘fair game’ to rapacious men. The purpose of such labels is always to single out sexually active or acquiescent women and to contrast them with the sisters, mothers or girlfriends of these men. In this way they both perpetuate the dual stereotypes and also tend to relegate the women so labelled to inconsequence. The latter tactic only works if the women accept the labels – but they often have little choice, especially if they are very young, very poor, come from certain suburbs or if they are black.
Women, too, have internalised the stereotypes and have accepted men’s right to decide which one they belong to, and it is only very strong women who can assert their right to be sexually active and not be treated purely as sex objects. The fear of being labelled a ‘moll’ or a prostitute deters many young women from using contraceptives: they argue that if they take ‘the Pill’ they are admitting (to themselves) that they are promiscuous and that their boyfriends will think this of them. Their reasoning often leads to a pregnancy which, if they cannot marry to ‘legitimise’ the child, confers on them the very label they were trying to avoid.
Prostitutes
Prostitution is as old as patriarchy. It occurs inevitably in a society where women are seen as sex objects and are also denied economic independence. When women are paid even less for their labour power than men are, they cannot usually survive in the labour market except by selling the one commodity they possess for which men are willing to pay a good price: their bodies. Women are thus forced to sell their bodies in return for economic support. If they are fortunate, the market nature of this transaction is disguised by the myths and rituals of love, courtship and marriage. Many women who do not have this opportunity, or whose marriages fail, are forced to sell their bodies to a series of men.
All pretence of affection and romance is stripped away with the prostitute and the purely sexual nature of the transaction is laid bare. This means that she is in a better position than the married woman for she runs no risk of disenchantment. Unless she works totally in isolation – and very few do – she is better protected from rape and other forms of sexual violence than the woman alone in the marital bedroom wi
th her husband. She also has far more independence for she can reject a customer, and can determine the extent of the sexual activities with one whose custom she has accepted. The prostitute is of course exploited by those who prey on her. A large industry hovers behind her and most prostitutes are forced to pay for ‘protection’ as well as continually lining the coffers of the State with regular fines for soliciting, and the pockets of individual policemen who demand monetary consideration for regulating the number of times they are arrested.
Prostitution can only exist where men are prepared to pay for sexual gratification, and so men both create and perpetuate prostitution. Yet it is women who are punished for working as prostitutes. Patrons are immune from prosecution while prostitutes are hauled before the courts and treated by male police, magistrates and court officials with disdain and contempt. Preying on the bodies of women is a privilege patriarchy bestows on men: there is no comparable industry where women may buy men’s sexual favours. Patriarchy sees the prostitute as being necessary to protect the virtue of ‘good’ women and it is this argument that is generally advanced by those who advocate legalising prostitution.
Those who favour legalising prostitution often argue that their proposals would ensure better treatment for the women by removing their need for protection, by abolishing the need for police payments and by introducing trade union arrangements for hours, working conditions, wages etc. But in fact these arguments are designed to make conditions better for the patrons of prostitutes: legalisation is always accompanied by the introduction of compulsory venereal disease checks for the women – thus removing the risk of infection, and of the client having to tell his wife that he has been with prostitutes – and the unionisation of prostitutes is designed to keep the price down, again benefiting the customers. The only honourable alternative to the present prostitution scene is its total abolition and that can only come about when women are well paid for jobs that do not involve commercialising their sex. To enable this to happen, men must cease seeing women as sex objects. It is unlikely that a patriarchal society would ever realise these preconditions, but that is no argument in favour of institutionalising the sexual exploitation of women by legalising prostitution.