by Anne Summers
Yet these arguments involve several admissions about the oppression of women. Firstly, they expressly exploit the sexuality of all women: the ‘good’ women are denied sexual expression, while prostitutes are regarded and treated merely as sexual vessels. Secondly, they are an admission of the alienation of the sexes from each other. Those people who cannot sanction the thought that mothers can also be sexual creatures are denying the possibility for mutually satisfactory sexual relations between wives and husbands. This attitude condemns the wives to sexual misery and frustration. Their husbands are similarly condemned but at least have the choice of patronising prostitutes.
This attempt to repress women’s sexuality is such a blatant thwarting of basic human needs that it is inevitably a very precarious undertaking and one that can only succeed during periods when women’s lives are totally regulated by men. Every woman who breaks the taboo threatens its existence – which is why sexually ‘liberated’ women are castigated as sluts, tramps, harlots and any other label that men hope will deter other women from following their example. But it is obvious that this taboo is rapidly being broken by women themselves. Once they obtain the use of fairly effective contraception, and thus remove the fear of unwanted pregnancies, women can fight this tenet of patriarchy.
Women were repressed in order to protect men’s property and their egos. The idea of the chaste woman was seen as necessary to maintain the bourgeois patriarchal family since that institution has as its cornerstone the rule of the husband and the submission of the wife. This power relationship necessarily extended to sexual behaviour as the husband felt he had to ensure that he had actually sired the children who bore his name and whom he was bound to provide for.
Once women can control their fertility – and it must be stressed that this means women determining whether or when they will reproduce, not men imposing this decision upon them – then they can demand sexual satisfaction and the argument about unwanted pregnancies cannot be used against them. Women themselves can say, and are doing so increasingly, that they too have sexual needs that must be gratified and that the distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ women is yet another means of oppressing women.
In the past this distinction between women on the basis of their sexual activities has been maintained in order to preserve ‘the family’. In Australia there has always been a profound fear of so-called sexual anarchy undermining established social mores, and this has created the polarised stereotypes of women as either maternal figures who are not seen as sexual or as whores who are seen as exclusively sexual. The effect of this has been to ignore or actively repress married women’s sexual needs – particularly by denying them access to contraception and abortion facilities and by encouraging them to internalise an image of themselves as asexual and puritanical maternal creatures (see Chapters Ten and Eleven) – and to view sexually active women as nothing but prostitutes.
Again, women’s lack of choice has been glossed over and the polarised stereotypes have been posed as descriptive of reality as well as being prescriptive (in the case of God’s Police) and proscriptive (in the case of Damned Whore). Yet they are patently inaccurate descriptions of reality and it is in the censoring of any information that would contradict the stark polarisation that the social purpose of the stereotypes is revealed. Both mother and whore are posed as mutually exclusive categories. Yet many mothers have active and satisfying sex lives and many prostitutes are also mothers, some of whom try to bring up their children to conform to the God’s Police prescriptions. But so rigid are the stereotypes that they refuse to accommodate such realities and the images projected on to women – images that they internalise while they are very young and still denied access to knowledge or information that would undermine the polarisation – perpetuate the myths of exclusivity. The effect is that the mother will keep silent to her children and friends about her sex life, and the prostitute will not tell her children how she earns her money or she will be so consumed with shame and guilt about her occupation – blaming herself rather than a society that forces women into prostitution – that she will give up her children or have them cared for by another, more overtly respectable woman.
Lesbians
Lesbians are also seen as belonging to an exclusively sexual category and the label ‘lesbian’ is supposed to be a sufficient description of a woman. Yet a woman who is a lesbian may also be a wife, a mother and have a job as, for instance, a secretary. Of course many lesbians are not, and have never, married. They may set up house and live with another woman, but they have to have jobs to support themselves so the purely sexual label is still inaccurate.
It is the rigid sex roles, based on marriage and family, of a patriarchal society that lead to the condemnation of lesbians (and of male homosexuals). They are seen as rejecting ‘the family’ because they engage in non-reproductive sexuality. Lesbians are regarded as being even more subversive than male homosexuals because they are not sexually or emotionally dependent on men and their sexual preference is a living defiance of the patriarchal precept that men are superior to women and indispensable to women’s survival. And for this reason lesbians are held in far more disrepute than prostitutes who are patently dependent on men for survival.
Lesbians are subjected to two forms of discrimination: the first is to deny that they exist and the second is to brand and persecute them. The law does not recognise the existence of female homosexuality and thus lesbians are safe from legal prosecution for their sexual activities, but this does not imply that these activities are condoned. Rather, the absence of legal proscription has been part of a tactic of annihilation by non-recognition. The same tactic is used by parents who hope that refusing to recognise that their daughter is a lesbian will make ‘the problem’ disappear: they will change the subject if ever she raises it and will repress any information they might stumble across that would confirm beyond doubt that their daughter is a lesbian. This non-recognition annihilates the identity of the daughter and this, combined with the second tactic of branding and persecution, in the past has been sufficient to keep most lesbians from being visible to the world.
Lesbians are branded as ‘sick’, ‘perverted’, ‘unnatural’ and many other labels that contrast them to the ‘natural’ female who bears children and is subservient to men. It is almost impossible for a lesbian not to internalise some of these attitudes and, especially when her parents and society generally refuse to grant her even a hostile recognition – which would be better than totally ignoring her identity – as a lesbian, she inevitably suffers contortions of guilt, shame and self-hatred. Many lesbians are unable to endure this combined rejection and condemnation and resolve the situation in a way that conforms to society’s death wish for them. It is unlikely that a prostitute would suicide because she is a prostitute: she has social recognition, even though she has no status, and that recognition is sufficient to bestow some identity on her.
Lesbians are relegated to the demi-mondaine because they do not usually live in bourgeois families and, it is therefore assumed, they are not fulfilling the female role of maintaining existing authority relations. A woman who lives in a sexual relationship with another woman is contravening the prescription that women should accommodate men’s needs. In this sense, the stereotype can be an accurate description of reality, but only because it is applied selectively. If it were extended to encompass a lesbian’s entire life it would not match reality so conveniently (just as the God’s Police stereotype breaks down if mothers’ actions and attitudes within families are examined a little more closely).
Many lesbians feel totally incapable of marrying and having sexual relations with men, but a great many ‘compensate’ for this inability to conform to the prescribed female role by working in jobs that enable them to act out variations of that role: nursing, social or welfare work, teaching. They have to hide their lesbianism to hold these jobs as society’s attitude is such that it is assumed that because they are non-conformers in one respect they are to
tal revolutionaries who are intent on subverting ‘the family’. Those people who fear that lesbians in schools or hospitals will influence women in their charge away from the prescribed female role do not realise that, in order to be a revolutionary, a person must have a strong self-image and a positive conviction that what she or he is doing or advocating is right. And, as we have seen, that same society that fears lesbians also actively prevents them from having these certitudes. At present a woman’s homosexuality is seen as sufficient reason to grant her husband a divorce and to take her children away from her. She is regarded as a pariah – as a total negation of everything that is desired (by men) in a woman.
Women in prisons
Both lesbians and prostitutes are seen as failing to fulfil the God’s Police functions and are condemned for this reason. But women in prisons are actually prevented from doing so and this is then used as a rationalisation for depriving them of any future opportunity to do so. This is especially the case in girls’ detention homes where, it would be assumed if we expected social attitudes to be consistent, girls would be rigorously drilled into conformity to the female role. But this is not the case.3 Girls are sent to girls’ homes (shelters, training schools or whatever euphemism is currently in use to disguise the fact that they are prisons) either because they have been charged, or found guilty, of some offence, because their families cannot care for them, or, for some other reason, they have been put into State custody.
A large percentage of the girls who come under the first category, that is, they have committed an offence, are there on the charge of ‘being exposed to moral danger’. This can mean they have been guilty of being sexually active while still under the legal age of consent (which ranges between 16 and 18 according to each state law) or that, in the eyes of the police or the court or a disapproving relative, they look as if they might be. A Sydney journalist who worked at an inner-city girls’ shelter in order to investigate conditions there reported
The most common charges were ‘Exposure to moral danger’, vagrancy and ‘uncontrollable’. In none of the cases I heard about had any of the girls involved done any harm to anyone else. They were guilty of arguing with their parents, feeling unwanted at home, going off with their boyfriends for a weekend, hitching to Sydney from Purfleet, Melbourne or Newcastle – hardly crimes against society.4
Until recently, all girls entering these prisons in New South Wales were subjected to compulsory examinations to determine whether or not they were virgins. After protracted protests by the women’s movement, including demonstrations outside several girls’ homes in Sydney, the authorities announced that this practice would be stopped.
Although the stated aim of these prisons is ‘rehabilitation’, in practice they are punishment centres. The girls have to spend their days performing senseless repetitive tasks such as scrubbing already spotless floors. There are no educational facilities – even for girls under the school-leaving age – and a girl’s formal education ceases the moment she enters one of these institutions. But another form of education commences immediately: the girls very quickly learn that they are already considered beyond reform, that in society’s eyes they are criminals. Their initiation into crime begins, encouraged by the regulations and practices of the institutions.
Rather than being homes, or even rehabilitative institutions, these girls’ prisons are in fact training schools for adult criminality. The official attitude to the girls assumes that they are already criminals, they are treated as criminals and most of the girls, not surprisingly, go on to fulfil this expected role. Girls’ prisons can be seen as prostitution fodder factories since, as the girls are denied an education, this is practically the only way they can earn a living. One-third of adult women in New South Wales prisons have a history of juvenile crime, with 70 per cent of these having spent time in a girls’ prison. None of this 70 per cent has had any secondary education.5 Men are employed at some girls’ prisons and at one place in Sydney, girls have become pregnant as a result of sexual assaults by these employees.6 These girls are prepared, at an early age and in a very brutal fashion, for their adult lives of sexual abuse and exploitation.
Several criminologists have predicted recently that as women become ‘more liberated’ the female crime rate is likely to rise.7 What they mean is that women are becoming more assertive and are hence more likely to adopt violent methods of crime. So far there has been little indication of this happening in Australia and it seems a remote possibility: these experts in crime have misunderstood the nature of women’s ‘crimes’. Angela Weir, who spent several months in a British prison, wrote after her release in 1973 that most women in prison, far from being deviant, were often incarcerated because the effort to play out their roles as mothers and wives had led them to commit ‘crimes’. Women who did not have the material means to make a decent home for their children stole to provide for their families, and women who were overcome by the stresses and tensions of their domestic responsibilities took too many pills or too much alcohol, which led to some form of anti-social behaviour.8
About half of female prisoners in Australian prisons are convicted of crimes of the kind described by Weir above; a substantial proportion of the remainder are serving sentences for vagrancy or prostitution – both, as has already been shown, almost inevitabilities for women outside marriage in a patriarchal society. It is a crime to have no money and it is also a crime to sell one’s body in return for money. Prison statistics show that the women at the Detention and Training Centre for Women at Silverwater in Sydney (the one women’s jail in that state) are far less likely to be married and if married, far more likely to be separated than the general female population. They are women who, lacking a male provider/protector, find it very difficult to survive economically. And if a women has spent some of her youth in a girls’ prison she will have absolutely no training – intelligence tests on a sample of women at Silverwater showed them to have a higher level of illiteracy than the general population – to enable her to earn a living at any kind of job that would keep her above the poverty line.
But it is also evident that the majority of women do strive to avoid criminal solutions to their poverty. Even though women are far more likely than men to be poor, the proportion of men in jails (for all crimes) is far greater: in 1972 a total of 12 056 men were received into jails in New South Wales, compared with only 1279 women.9 Of those female prisoners who had children, few had shown signs of neglecting them. Only one of the sample of 46 women at Silverwater had a child in the custody of the Child Welfare Department; four had grown-up children while a great majority of the rest had left their children in the care of their mother, mother-in-law, husband or other relatives while they were imprisoned.10
Women who give birth while in prison or who have very young infants when they commence their sentences are permitted to place the child in the prison hospital and care for it themselves. But once the child is about nine months old, it is taken from the mother and placed in State custody. If the aim of imprisonment is rehabilitation, and in the authorities’ eyes rehabilitation for women obviously means ‘settling down’ to domesticity, then it would be expected that women in prison would be encouraged to care for their own children, and would perhaps receive encouragement to learn to cook and to care for a house. But the women have to work at washing and sewing for the entire prison population of the State and at cooking for the local hospital – hardly jobs that will encourage them to want to be full-time housewives. When the sample of women studied at Silverwater were asked to state their preference for employment or home duties when they finished their sentences, only 17.5 per cent opted for staying at home. Almost 70 per cent preferred to go out to work while the rest wanted to work at home, to continue with prostitution, or wanted to go out to work but would be unable to.11
Prisons exist to punish women for not conforming to their female roles and this punishment purpose far outweighs any effort to change the women. The effect of prison is to convince women t
hat the road to respectability is closed to them forever. Women in prisons, like lesbians and prostitutes, are seen as damned, as totally beyond redemption. No attempt is made to ‘rehabilitate’ prostitutes; rather they are encouraged to return to their profession, for society still prefers to overtly exploit some women while pretending to protect others. Lesbians and women imprisoned for ‘crimes’ other than prostitution are hidden away, ignored and rejected as blights on the seemingly benign face of womanhood.
Why the stereotypes are necessary to ‘the family’
The continued existence of these two stereotypes and the romantic myths of marriage that reinforce them have prevented people, and especially women, from taking full cognisance of women’s position and all of its implications. So we need to ask, why are they perpetuated? Something large must be at stake if successive generations of women have been unable to recognise and to challenge this stranglehold that society keeps them in. The stereotypes in operation amount to massive coercion: that such coercion should be necessary undermines the argument that what women do in families is ‘natural’ to them.
Nature has never been so universally cruel and selective in its application as what we witness if we lift the veils of illusion from the marriage relationship and the family responsibilities of women. Yet an even worse fate awaits the woman who rejects this vocation. So we are led to conclude that the functions women perform in families must be of critical value to our society. Therefore we need to examine the structure of that society and try to determine just how necessary the oppression of women is to its continuation.