by Anne Summers
Everything is so easy for you now, women are told. You have the Pill, and so no longer need worry about unwanted pregnancies. You have fewer children than your mother or grandmother did, so your housework and child-care responsibilities are easier. With everything on your side (‘You’ve come a long way, babe’) you have only yourself to blame if you fail. Only yourself – or your body. If you cannot succeed with all the advantages you now possess, it can only mean that you are biologically incapable of full and free participation in the world and our original opposition to your leaving the home is vindicated.
What is so cunning about this situation of challenge is that not only does it put the onus on women to succeed at two jobs, and thereby gets a double amount of labour performed by one person, but it also manages to define the terms of that situation so that it is difficult for women to disagree with any of its tenets and not appear to be unable to meet the challenge.
In a society such as Australia, technological innovation has made it possible for some biological processes to be regulated or controlled. It is now possible to regulate fertility, to perform safe and painless abortions, to make childbirth relatively pain-free and to reduce or remove the pain and discomfort associated with a large number of illnesses and disorders suffered only by women. But women do not have direct access to the means of controlling these processes; they are forced to plead for access to them, and that access is regulated by the medical profession. Freud’s aphorism could more accurately be reformulated as ‘doctors are destiny’ because it is totally up to individual doctors, and to the medical profession as a body, to decide whether or not women are given the means to regulate their fertility (and what means they are given), to ease or remove irritating diseases and infections, have comfortable and pain-free childbirths, and be permitted to rid themselves forever of their reproductive ability.
All of these matters are seen in our society as being within the province of medical competence and women are given very little opportunity to determine them for themselves. The fact that healthy women have to go to doctors – curers of the sick – for their contraceptive needs* is not considered to be bizarre in this country, nor is the fact that doctors have the power to arbitrate whether or not these needs should be met. The two most effective methods of contraception, the oral contraceptive pill and the various intra-uterine devices (IUDs), can only be obtained through doctors. Women are, therefore, totally dependent on the doctor concurring with what they see as their contraceptive needs. It is still not uncommon for young girls seeking prescriptions for the Pill to be refused by doctors who make moral judgements about whether or not girls of that age should be having sexual relations. Rarely, though, does the doctor’s judgement affect the girl’s behaviour: all that she or he has the power to determine is whether or not a pregnancy might result from that behaviour. And here the doctor’s power is very great indeed.
A woman who does not wish to continue with a pregnancy must obtain the permission of at least one doctor – most states stipulate two (see Chapter Thirteen for details of various state abortion laws) to be able to secure a legal abortion. Even when the law permits abortion for ‘social’ reasons, that is, on the grounds that continuation of the pregnancy could cause damage to the woman’s emotional stability, it still endows doctors with the power to pronounce whether or not the woman deserves an abortion. In some cases a psychiatric opinion is required, but the most common procedure requires the agreement of two general practitioners that an abortion is warranted. Seldom is the woman’s own opinion that she does not want a child considered sufficient reason for terminating her pregnancy.**
There are strict penalties awarded to women who attempt to take control of their bodies and, for example, abort themselves or their friends. The necessary equipment is not available for sale to the general public, which is an understandable precaution against unqualified people obtaining it. But this legal proscription means in practice that desperate women who are refused abortions will often resort to dire methods, using instruments such as knitting needles or coathangers. Thus the proscribing of the proper instruments does not secure the desired end of preventing unqualified people from operating on themselves or upon others. The extreme professionalism of medicine in Australia has meant that lay people, especially women such as midwives who are recognised in similar cultures like the United Kingdom, are regarded here as scurrilous old wives or worse, and are not permitted to work. The power to determine women’s access to the means of regulating or controlling various biological processes is thus vested solely in the hands of a profession, the majority of whose members are men and whose professional socialisation strongly reinforces a traditional view of women’s role.
Doctors’ dealings with women as patients are almost invariably conducted with their own convenience in mind and with little consideration given to women’s comfort or dignity. Many doctors still use the lithotomy position (where the woman’s spread-eagled legs are raised over stirrups on either side of the table) for pelvic examination – a position that is not necessary for access but which exposes the woman to feelings of shame and ridicule. A series of articles in the National Times in late 1974 raised the issue of doctors inducing births so that they would occur at times convenient to them – so that they would not be called out at night or weekends – and evoked a stream of letters from regretful women who had agreed to have their babies’ births induced and who now complained that their babies had been born too soon and often suffered adverse effects because of this.37
Other women have complained of doctors’ brutality towards their suffering or distress. Caroline Graham, in a newspaper article about women’s experience with doctors, investigated the conditions in labour wards and quoted one obstetric anaesthetist as saying that labour wards were an ‘untapped reservoir of pain in the community … if the RSPCA saw what went on, they’d shut them down’.38 She reported the reluctance of doctors to administer an epidural anaesthesic, a painless injection in the spine that dissipates the pain of labour but allows the woman to be conscious and aware of the birth. At the time of her article, only 40 per cent of women in Sydney hospitals were being given epidurals although the doctor quoted above felt that 80 per cent of women could benefit from them. Women who are not given painkillers during labour and who demonstrate their pain are often abused by hospital staff: they are expected to bear the pain silently and stoically.
The other area of complaint by women concerns the callous and uncaring attitude of doctors to commonly experienced vaginal infections and to menstrual pain. Many doctors are disinclined to believe that the latter even exists, and although there are two drugs available that relieve it, few of the women who could benefit from them have ever even heard of them. Both Buscopan and Merbentyl are drugs that can relax the uterine muscles, thereby relieving menstrual cramps without adversely affecting the woman’s activities.
Women consulting doctors about vaginal infections such as monilia (also called thrush) are often treated with distaste and are led to believe that they have contracted a venereal disease39, an insinuation that many – young girls especially – have no knowledge with which to counter. Yet monilia is a fungal affliction that is related to the state of the bacteria in the vagina and not to a woman’s sexual activities. It can occur while taking the Pill, during pregnancy or after taking a course of antibiotics. While remedies exist, which can get rid of simple cases, many women suffer monilia chronically and get little relief from these pessaries and creams. These are most likely to be Pill-taking women, on whom the remedies are virtually wasted as the Pill continues to produce the symptoms. Monilia, and the slightly rarer trichomonas, are both intensely irritating and often extremely painful complaints which, if suffered for a long period of time, can often send women quite deranged with the discomfort. They also make sexual activity either very painful or totally impossible. One Sydney gynaecologist informed me that monilia is so common at present that she estimates that up to 90 per cent of women suffer it at some stage of
their lives. Yet it is a non-talked about, virtually taboo subject. Women themselves are often extremely reluctant or embarrassed to admit that they suffer from it, an attitude they have adopted following the way doctors regard them when they describe their symptoms. Women’s magazines, which could play a very useful role in explaining the causes and the extent of these complaints to their readers, almost never mention them. The more traditional magazines devote pages and pages of discussion to pregnancy yet manage to omit any reference to this common accompaniment to pregnancy. And the distressed woman who takes her symptoms to a doctor is likely to be treated as dirty or immoral, the doctor exhibiting an obvious distaste at being forced to examine her, and refusing to believe that the prescribed remedies have not been effective in curing it.
All of these complaints about doctors affect women as women. In addition women have to suffer the range of afflictions to which all human beings are susceptible, and which doctors are often unable to treat, or whose treatment involves side-effects that are almost as debilitating as the complaint. Women are no more vulnerable in these cases than are men. But as well as this general impotence most people experience in the face of illnesses and the men who treat them, women must suffer the indignity and the frustration of being expected to function as well as men in the world outside the home yet not being able to receive the benefits that our technological capacity could provide. This is because the men who control that capacity or who provide women’s access to it collaborate in the colonising of women, in denying them control over their bodies. They ensure by demarcating the areas of health in general, and gynaecology in particular, as being within the province of their expertise that women do not gain the power of knowledge of or control over their bodies and what happens to them. Women’s hazy understanding of the processes of menstruation, contraception and childbirth makes them dependent on the assessments and prescriptions of doctors. In general, the doctors are very reluctant to surrender their professional monopoly of information and provide women with anything more than a cursory explanation of how their bodies work and, therefore, how some of these processes can be regulated or, where they cause discomfort, made less painful. Lacking this very basic power, women are rendered even more susceptible to the other kinds of invasion and denial of control already described.
Cultural domination
So far I have concentrated on describing how the colonisation of the female sex is accomplished. We have to look also at how it is perpetuated and who profits from it. The colonisation of women, like that of a native people, is perpetuated by the two classic weapons of cultural domination and divide and rule. We will look first at the cultural domination of women.
The imposition of femininity
Women have been stripped of their own culture and have had an alien one imposed upon them. That colonial culture is referred to as ‘femininity’ and is so thoroughly and pervasively propagated to women that they have been persuaded to accept many of its precepts as being inherent and ‘natural’ to their sex. Femininity is a cultural imposition upon the female sex, an artificial contrivance designed to replace natural conduct and appearance with conventions which make their governing easier.
This has been done so successfully that women no longer know what their own culture is, what natural female behaviour and appearance might be; in accepting femininity they have collaborated so completely in their colonisation that they have risked losing forever the possibility of perceiving the violation of their integrity and self-determination that it entails. Femininity has both social and physical components and is a total culture in the sense that it is intended to provide rules of conduct for every facet of a woman’s life. (If the same can be said of masculinity, which is also a cultural overlay guiding men’s conduct, the difference is that men have created it themselves and can therefore alter it. As we shall see, the notion that femininity and masculinity are complementary codes and that both are equally oppressive is a fiction that serves to disguise the benefits to men, and the disadvantages suffered by women, resulting from the imposition of femininity. There are few reciprocal benefits to women from the masculinity code – it is devised by men for themselves.)
Socially, femininity decrees how women should walk, what they should wear, the conversations they can have, the places they may go, the people they might associate with – in short, their total demeanour, movements and social conduct. The actual content of the culture of femininity varies slightly from place to place and over time. For instance, it used to be an abrogation of femininity for women to smoke or to wear trousers. Most social groups within Australia now permit their women to smoke cigarettes (but not pipes or cigars), and to wear trousers (but only to certain places), but changes such as these do not subvert the overall authoritarian intent of this imposed culture, and it is illusory for women to think that minor extensions to the list of permitted activities amount to an erosion of that culture.
It is like the South African Government’s propaganda which documents the things that coloured people in that country are now permitted to do and which is meant to try and persuade the critics of apartheid that it is being eroded. Even to take this propaganda seriously entails adopting a subservient attitude, accepting that that government has the right to demarcate areas of permitted activity, to give and to take away the freedom of a group of people to do as it likes. If there were no apartheid, there would be no need for the propaganda. So long as the propaganda is produced, we will know that apartheid exists.
A significant difference between apartheid and the cultural domination of women is that many women are not conscious of that domination, that they accept their separate and inferior status as natural. They will tend to see changes in the code of femininity as evidence that they are not oppressed. They do not recognise that in allowing such changes, the colonisers are merely making political calculations about the steps necessary to keep women deluded about the existence and the extent of their colonisation. Femininity has not varied or altered in its essential form: women are expected to be socially dependent and physically passive because this state is claimed to be necessary for their maternal role. In fact it is because it enhances the power of men.
The code of femininity is spelt out fairly clearly through a variety of agencies: individual men’s requests or demands to the women they associate with (as husbands, boyfriends, fathers, employers etc.), collective male requirements as these are embodied in laws, religions and mythology, and that specific vehicle for coercing women into conformity to the current content of the code: women’s magazines.
The popular magazines have as their principal raison d’etre the codification and constant updating of femininity. By consulting these magazines women can gain a pretty good idea of how to behave and dress and whatever else is deemed to be consonant with or compulsory to being a woman.
Essentially, femininity entails women stripping themselves of their sexuality and their individuality and trying to conform to a uniform image. That image is remarkably constant through class and other differences, although it varies according to age. The ultra-feminine woman is a bland creature who has acquired the ultimate in passivity: she does not act, she merely reflects. She slavishly adopts whatever appearance or demeanour she believes will earn her the approval of men and, also important, other women. Even though she is aware that it is her sex that makes her desirable to men, she knows that this must not be brandished brazenly but has to be secreted behind an alluring and seductive facade. She therefore carefully removes most of her body hair, disguises all body odours with perfumes and sprays, and wears ‘foundation garments’ or diets diligently in order to acquire an approved shape. She will disguise the fact that she menstruates or suffers from monilia, cystitis or any of the other debilitating complaints that women endure, and although she might allude to her sexual encounters she will never admit to being a creature who could be engulfed by sexual passion.
Women who want to be feminine must devote an enormous amount of time to self-mai
ntenance – to tending their hair, their fingernails, their skin. These are all activities that are conducted privately, at home. The acquisition of femininity demands that women confine themselves even further. It also means that women are continually prone to anxiety about their appearance, and they often endanger their health in the effort to be feminine. Such dangers are seldom pointed out by the merchants who profit from the cultural domination of women. Instead they reinforce female anxiety in the attempt to peddle their wares. Virtually every women’s magazine is guilty, through both their editorial and advertising content, of making women feel fearful that they might not be sufficiently feminine. In almost every issue of every magazine, readers are urged to diet: the amazing array of different diets being surely intended to persuade each woman that there is one that must suit her. Yet there is little recognition given to the hazards that can accompany compulsive dieting: an over-scrupulous dieter can develop a total aversion to food, a sometimes fatal medical condition known as anorexia. Readers are told through endless advertisements that all body odours are repulsive, and a certain deterrent to male approval, and that they must be destroyed with deodorants. It is never pointed out that many underarm deodorants cause skin irritation and that vaginal deodorants can destroy the natural balance of chemicals in the vagina and lead to infections or irritations. There is a multimillion-dollar industry in telling women how they can, and must, be feminine. Obviously it is not going to jeopardise the enormous profits it reaps off women’s bodies by informing them that their products are not necessary and that some of them are indeed harmful.
Femininity is not an option for women. They must adopt this alien culture if they want to attract men – and, as we have already seen, few women can survive without the protectorship of a man. The woman who eschews femininity, who is content with her natural shape and size and smell, who is impatient with the lengthy rituals of femininity, is condemned by both sexes. To women, she is an uncomfortable reminder of the extent to which they have abandoned themselves to the demands of men. To men, she is a threatening warning that their domination is not total and that women still have the power to regain themselves. But few women can afford to forego the demands of femininity for it means disapproval and ostracism.