by Anne Summers
As will be seen below, often the most ardent enforcers of the alien culture are other women. The ultimate sign that women accept their colonisation, that they accept the domination of men, is when they agree to police other women and try to ensure conformity among their daughters, sisters, friends and acquaintances. Rather than their oppressed state engendering a solidarity and mutual sympathy among women, the all-too-urgent need to attract male protectorship makes women competitive. They see each other as rivals and often become hostile to one another. The opportunities for solidarity with other women are not very great because although women as a group are colonised, each woman lives out her colonised state in isolation. She must spend most of her time at home alone – making herself feminine, looking after husband and children, doing housework – and her isolated state leaves her feeling vulnerable and insecure. She does not acquire the confidence that comes with daily social intercourse and is often frightened as well as resentful of other women, especially if they seem to be happier, or more successful with their lives than she is. She envies these women for they appear to have attained femininity whereas she feels that she is inadequate or that she has failed.
For there is a catch to femininity. It is not something women are born with, but is posed as something they must strive for. The closer they come to attaining it, they are told, the more pleasing they will be to men. And even though much of the content of femininity is spelt out and is accessible to women to try to attain, there is one element that cannot be codified: the ineluctable aura of fascination and mystery that is supposed to surround the truly feminine woman. This is what is referred to as ‘the eternal feminine’, ‘woman’s mystery’, ‘the essence of womanhood’ and various other indefinable names. It is this that must be striven for if a woman wants to be ‘truly feminine’. But because it cannot be precisely defined, because it is a mysterious and arbitrary something, which men judge whether or not women have achieved, a woman does not know exactly what she is reaching for. This creates further anxiety and leads women to perpetual self-scrutiny and comparison with other women. It is this anxiety and this incipient rivalry between women that is exploited by the women’s magazines and by the manufacturers of clothing, cosmetics, perfumery etc. who advertise in their pages.
Women can only assuage this anxiety by increasing their subservience to the code of femininity and hoping that, in this way, they will achieve the accolade of male approval. What they often do not realise is that femininity equals vulnerability, and the more subservient they are, the more easily their colonisation is effected and strengthened. Women wear clothes that are deemed to be feminine and that please men – and which are usually cumbersome or uncomfortable, inhibit circulation or ruin foot or leg muscles. Most importantly, the clothes that are deemed the most feminine are those that are the most confining and make it impossible for women to run and escape from an attacking man.
Women participate in the dating game, which is tailored to enhance men’s self-esteem and their power over women. In a typical date the man assumes total control of everything that happens. As we have already seen, this is the scenario for many a petty rape when the man feels that the woman ‘owes’ him a sexual favour for the time and money he has spent. The inequalities built into dating rituals need to be analysed one by one before their oppressive nature becomes apparent for, so successfully has the code of femininity been propagated to women, they feel insulted if the man does not take all of these initiatives. That is, women feel insulted if they are not patronised, treated as creatures without arms or wits, and steered through a social occasion as if they were ventriloquists’ dolls.
Every social facet of femininity means aggrandisement for the male and isolation, dependence and anxiety for the woman. No matter how much it is masked by romance or ritual, no matter how cloaked by notions of duty or respect, no matter how much genuine affection infiltrates, the social code of femininity robs women of their self-determination and abets in their colonisation. They give inequality and dependence an aura of legitimacy and naturalness thereby obscuring the real intent of this imposed culture.
When applied to female sexuality, femininity is clearly an alien culture which denies women their independence and the right to sexual satisfaction. The feminine woman is supposed to be sexually ignorant and, therefore, passive until initiated by her husband. (Nowadays, with extra-marital sex becoming the norm, a woman can no longer pretend total ignorance, but if she wants to be regarded as really feminine she must proclaim that all previous sexual encounters pale before the pleasures afforded by her current lover.) The forms of sexual expression permitted to the feminine woman are limited and are designed to enhance the pleasure of the male and to guarantee the purpose for which women are colonised – reproduction – rather than to give the woman satisfaction. To achieve this dual aim, women are kept ignorant about their sexuality and about their bodies generally, and the code of femininity is invoked to persuade them that this is a desirable state of affairs. ‘Nice’ women, they are told, do not reside at the level of carnality and ought not to be preoccupied with their bodies or their sexuality. That is the preserve of men, and they display an incessant concern with women’s bodies, viewing and discussing them as sexual objects.
At the same time though, women are aware of a pervasive distaste, and repulsion even, which men direct towards their bodies and which directly contradicts the value in which they are supposedly held. There is something ambiguous, to say the least, in the men who profess a desire for frequent sexual contact with women and who also use the word ‘cunt’ as a term of vile abuse. Why has the word that denotes the female sexual organ become the most vituperative word in Australian argot? The contempt conveyed by the word does not simply carry over to women, it derives its pungency from the contempt in which women are held. The worst thing in the world any man would wish to be is a woman – since they are weak, and have no independent status and barely an existence without men – and as women are viewed foremost as sexual objects, men curse each other with the word that describes women’s sex. Thus no amount of effort women make to disguise their sexuality will succeed in raising their esteem in the eyes of men because, to them, woman is a sexual category whose only value derives from the need men have of her. The woman who aspires to femininity, to this dependence on men, is cheated. The weaker she becomes, the more she is despised.
The destruction of female culture
There are further instances in which a female culture has been destroyed and replaced by an alien one designed to impede the colonising process. Part of the suppression of female culture has been the rewriting, or total censoring, of the history of pre-patriarchal eras and so it is difficult to write with any confidence or authority about the origins of patriarchy and the colonisation of women, or to know just how much of women’s culture was destroyed in the process. Those anthropological studies of historic matriarchies, such as the work of Morgan which Engels used in his study, The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, have been regarded as spurious by the apologists for patriarchy. But Mary Jane Sherfey’s suggestion, cited earlier, that female sexuality was forcibly suppressed as part of the beginnings of the rule of men is supported by several works that have tried to recover the lost history of women.40 Elizabeth Gould Davis, for instance, documents the widespread existence of castration (removal of the clitoris) performed on women by men who wanted to suppress their ability to have orgasms.41 The legendary tale of the mass rape of the Sabine women by Roman men illustrates the measures apparently adopted by the first overtly patriarchal State to subjugate women of the matrilineal Sabine clans.42 Men later founded families within these clans and they called themselves patricians: qui patres scire possunt – those who know their fathers43 – signifying that men now headed these families and gave their names to their children, and that men had, therefore, now established firm control over women’s ‘promiscuous’ sexuality.
These are probable instances of forcible suppression of practices
or other cultural norms belonging to women. A further example that can be supported by research conducted by women attempting to uncover their past is the beginning of medicine as a profession. This provides a clear instance of a female culture being destroyed and an alien, male-derived one imposed in its place. Medicine as a profession requiring university training developed in the 13th century. The fact that it was a university degree made it easy to bar women legally from practice: ‘With few exceptions, the universities were closed to women (even to upper class women who could afford them), and licensing laws were established to prohibit all but university-trained doctors from practice’.44 The new masculine medical profession sought, along with its allies the Church and the State, to discredit the lay healers and midwives who had, until then, been the only dispensers of cures to the sick. A great many, if not the majority, of these healers were women. They had acquired considerable facility in curing a variety of illnesses and were especially sought after as midwives. They were stamped out by a three-pronged strategy:
1 the licensing laws which forbade them to practise
2 denouncing them as witches and drowning or burning them
3 a relentless campaign to brand them as sorcerers and dispensers of evil.45
This strategy gradually succeeded in destroying women’s healing culture: those women who escaped death as witches were discredited, their remedies sneered at as ‘old wives’ tales’, or they were labelled as immoral – because they performed abortions and gave advice on contraception.
For four centuries, medicine remained a stolidly male profession which staunchly resisted the instruction of women into its ranks. The first woman to obtain a medical degree in modern times, Elizabeth Blackwell, was refused admittance by 29 medical schools in three countries before a small college in Geneva, New York, finally agreed to accept her as a student and from which she graduated in 1849.46 Her graduation still did not enable her to practise in her native England where she was refused admittance to the medical roll, but it heralded the beginning of a protracted campaign by women wanting to practise medicine to be admitted to medical colleges and to practice. (The battle fought by Australian women wanting to be doctors is described in Chapter Ten.) Parallel with this fight was that by women to enter a different level of medicine: nursing.
The second campaign was far more successful than the first; once the initial battle for respectability and professional status had been won by Florence Nightingale and her co-fighters, women slid easily into the secondary and subservient position nurses occupy in relation to doctors. If anything, this success undermined the efforts of would-be women doctors, because women with medical ambitions could be persuaded that nursing was more ladylike, more compatible with femininity, and entailed sufficient devotion to the sick to satisfy their helping aspirations.
Although women have in the past few decades joined the medical profession in increasing numbers, their entry has not been without resistance and attempted obstruction. Women now comprise between one-third and one-half of medical students in Australian universities, but almost every year some quarters of the medical profession instigate the cry for sex quotas to limit the intake of female students. Their cry, which is always taken up by the newspapers and so receives considerable publicity, is invariably justified by the spurious and sexist claim that medical training, like almost any other form of higher education, is ‘wasted’ on women because they tend to marry, have children and thus either drop out of practice or else devote fewer hours to this work than their male counterparts. This claim is demonstrably false and, in any case, is a graphic illustration of the colonisers’ attitudes to the responsibilities and capabilities of the colonised.
A survey of women who had graduated from Australian medical schools between 1910 and 1969 carried out by Ione Fett at Monash University found that 56 per cent of these doctors practised full-time and only 14.7 per cent were not practising at all at the time of the survey.47 Several of them had reached retiring age, and of those who were not practising, a significant number had young children and planned to return to practice or to postgraduate studies in the future. The number of women doctors who had dropped out of practice permanently was thus shown to be very small, probably no higher than the male drop-out rate. But then that is never surveyed. If it were, it would probably be discovered that the percentage of men who give up practice because of disillusionment with the profession or because they want to become farmers, wine-growers, politicians or hippies is as high as the percentage of women who give it up to become wives and mothers.
This attitude towards women doctors illustrates the hypocrisy of much of the profession. As a body it is conservative to the point of atavism, and tends to subscribe to and advocate a very traditional role for women. A very great number of men doctors prescribe maternity and full-time housewifery for their female patients. Yet when a small number of their own profession chooses, or is forced, to adopt that role, all female participation in the profession is castigated. Little or no effort is made to create facilities for women doctors to be easily able to combine a professional career with motherhood and so the woman doctor who wants children is virtually forced into at least temporary retirement unless she has a husband who is prepared to do more than a token part of the child care. Opposition to women within the medical profession is evidently not so much that some women drop out to become mothers, but that most of the profession think that all women ought to forget all ideas of obtaining professional training and devote their lives to domesticity. Female participation in the profession is still resented, and a great many men doctors would like to see their profession revert to being an exclusive all-male fraternity.
Despite the increased numbers of women doctors, the concerns and practices of the medical profession as a whole remain, if not misogynist, certainly designed to prevent women from having any meaningful control over their bodies. Medicine as it is currently practised is, therefore, both the imposition of an alien culture upon women and an attempt to deny them self-determination. The care and efforts of individual female or male doctors does not invalidate this generalisation, for these individuals are forced to work within a profession that cares little about women beyond ensuring that they are kept alive so that they can fulfil their colonised role as child-bearers. Doctors I have spoken to have told me that there was very little attention paid in their training to contraception or to other areas of women’s special needs such as gynaecological complaints. A great deal of attention was devoted to obstetrics, however. General practitioners learn a lot about bringing babies into the world, but very little about preventing conception.
In addition, all doctors undergo at least six years of socialisation into their profession. This induction process occurs almost imperceptibly but it underpins the content and the method of teaching – and, by implication, what is learned. Students learn that medicine is oriented towards curing existing illnesses rather than anticipating or preventing them. It is a profession that accepts the status quo, not only in medicine, but in society generally. Most doctors graduate having internalised the goals of wealth and success, as well as a traditional notion of what women’s place in society is. The students who commence a medical course inspired by humanitarian ideals will be very lucky if they complete the degree without having had these ideals replaced, or at least severely tempered, by cynicism and impatience or even contempt for patients. Once in practice, these attitudes are likely to be reinforced when the doctor has to cope with a never-ending stream of people, many of whom bear to the consulting room trivial complaints or problems more suited to the training of a social worker or community welfare worker than to that of a medical general practitioner. A majority of these patients are women, and so they are likely to become the main recipients of doctors’ impatient and uncaring attitudes. Instead of the empathetic treatment they once received at the hands of women healers and midwives, women must accept treatment from a male-dominated profession that not merely believes, but actively abets and perpetua
tes, the colonisation of the female sex.
Divide and rule
Divide and rule is the technique employed by the colonising powers to ensure the allegiance of a strategic majority of the colonised, to convince them that colonisation is beneficial to them, and to persuade them to collaborate in the task of pacifying or punishing the more recalcitrant of their sex who refuse to accede to the demands of the invaders. By imposing divisions among the colonised sex, and allowing privileges to the favoured group, the colonising power is able to prevent the colonised from forming a united opposition and from refusing to perform the labour required of them by the invaders.
The origin of the stereotypes
It is in this colonising technique that we discover the origins of the Damned Whore and God’s Police stereotypes. Women are divided according to whether or not they are prepared to uphold the colonial order. The women who are called God’s Police are those who do not (or cannot see how they can) resist their female socialisation, which can now be called – more accurately – induction into colonial mores, and who adopt the code of femininity, seek a male protector and remain faithful to his will while raising children within the prescribed family institution. The women who are called Damned Whores include those who were discussed in the last chapter – prostitutes, lesbians and women in prison – and any other women who demonstrably have, or who are thought to have, contravened the code of femininity or in some other way not conducted themselves in accordance with the role required of women by the colonisers. Single mothers, for instance, fulfil the colonial imperative of producing offspring, but because they have done so outside the prescribed institution, their babies are labelled ‘illegitimate’ and they and their children are usually subjected to some form of social disapproval. Women who subscribe to counter-cultural values and customs and who, therefore, dress in ways that are considered to be ‘unfeminine’, who live with men but do not marry them, and whose language and general demeanour are not consonant with feminine propriety are condemned – often merely on the meagre evidence of their appearance.