Damned Whores and God's Police

by Anne Summers

  I would like to acknowledge the assistance of Mary Murnane in researching and writing this chapter and to thank her for contributing many valuable suggestions.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Suburban neurotics?

  Now we see whole streets deserted in the day time, while mothers are forced to go out to work. I do not believe that all these women prefer monotonous jobs to the pleasure of being with their children and tending their home and gardens … Those of you who enjoy Blue Hills will know what I mean. It is fashionable to laugh at this delightful story, because it has continued for so many years; but that is the way families were intended to be. It is a story with great depth, wonderful characters and a fine example of family solidarity and warm affection.

  Mrs Dulcie Willacy, ‘The family in the rural crisis’ in From a Woman’s Point of View, 1973

  I firmly believe that a mother’s first responsibility is to provide proper care for her children, especially up to the age of five. The woman who feels she will find her proper fulfilment in a career while someone else is minding her children is, in fact, depriving the children of their birthright. If a woman cannot find fulfilment in helping her children build the foundations of life in the stability and trust of those early years, then she will probably never find fulfilment. Fulfilment is found in relationships. And if she cannot find it in her own children, I wonder if she really deserves to find it elsewhere.

  Dr Francis Macnab of the Cairnmillar Institute, quoted in Patrick Tennison, The Marriage Wilderness, 1972

  The previous three chapters have attempted to show that the sexist structure of Australian society has firm foundations and has proved able to persist even through changed social conditions. Apparent radical alterations to women’s roles, such as occurred during the Second World War, were temporary and of short duration, for the vast majority of women resumed their pre-war lives of full-time domesticity when their husbands, and other job-seeking men, returned from the war. As was suggested in the previous chapter, not all women went quietly. They had begun to expand their self-definition and to realise that they had capabilities beyond those of mother and housewife. But they were still captives of their sex-role conditioning, and the impulse to reaffirm traditional family relations after wartime separations was strong and was reinforced by a widespread reaffirmation of ‘the family’ ideology in the immediate postwar period. Men wanted to forget their wartime experiences by subsuming themselves in civilian work and family lives.

  A decade or more of family consolidation took place. The birth rate rose spectacularly in the late 1940s while large estates of new houses opened up to accommodate families seeking a privatised suburban life. Family life and suburban life quickly became synonymous and were idealised as the most desirable way to live and the best environment for raising children. With these certainties being so confidently asserted it became difficult for women to express whatever doubts they may have had about the restrictions suburban family life had for them. It would have entailed abrogating the security that comes from conforming to a socially approved lifestyle; they would have had to battle against incomprehension and hostility as well as their own self-doubts. ‘There must be something wrong with me’ was the usual reaction of these restless women: as suburban wives and mothers they were embodying the ideal female existence according to the prevailing ideology. Everyone else professed contentment and happiness, so the sources of discontent were seen to be purely personal.

  But by the early 1960s, this restlessness was becoming widespread and more women were starting to articulate it in various ways. As was shown in Chapter Four, the inbuilt contradictions of the wife/mother role have caused uncertainty and unhappiness for large numbers of women and the manifestations of this misery have become so widespread that they have had to be publicly acknowledged. In recent years it has become almost a platitude that the suburbs are crammed with neurotic housewives who are searching for ways to inject meaning into their wasted lives.1 If this is the case, and the evidence of discontent provided earlier would seem to mean that there is truth at least in the statement that many housewives are not happy, then it is necessary to look at possible reasons for this.

  The immediate cause of housewives’ dissatisfaction is the vast discrepancy between their socialised expectations that marriage and family will provide them with fulfilment, and the actual experience of being a wife and mother. Most women who are aged 20 and upwards today were socially conditioned to want and to expect to marry and bear children. Some might have been given encouragement to acquire some skills or training, which they could use on the labour market, but few women were given to expect that such skills were necessary except for filling in those few years between leaving school and marrying or having their first child. Yet the majority of women, while acquiring the expectation that many years of their lives would be devoted to full-time motherhood and wifedom, were not specifically prepared for it. The shape of their futures was definite but its actual details were hazy and undefined.

  For many women, the extent of their preparation for the future was to engage in romantic fantasies about engagement rings and wedding days and perhaps to discuss with a female friend the respective merits of various house plans and interior decoration schemes. Never would it occur to a young woman that, after a few years of marriage, she could be isolated and marooned in a remote suburb in an under-furnished house with a couple of tiny children whose constant demands left her feeling continually tired and depressed. Her husband could be away for 12 or more hours a day if he had long distances to travel to work and also tried to fit in part-time study or a few beers with his friends at the end of the day. Far from feeling fulfilled, a young woman might start to feel cheated, to feel that she had been deceived about the romance of marriage and the rewards of motherhood, as she watched herself disintegrate from loneliness, overwork and boredom.

  Yet children are still being inducted into these role expectations. Sex roles are so pervasive and so unquestioned, are so assumed to be the ‘natural’ order of things that the unhappy housewife seldom considers that this means of dividing people might provide a clue to her discontent. And so she does not refrain from instilling in her children traditional role behaviour and expectations. In this way ‘the family’ reproduces those very roles that are causing misery to its adult members.

  Child-care centres still tend to reinforce a differentiation of the sexes, which assures tiny girls that the dolls they play with will one day be replaced by living infants. Most girls still learn not only that maternity is their ultimate destiny but that they ought to tailor their entire lives towards preparation for it. Preschools today are less likely to encourage children into strictly defined sex-role behaviour, at least in games or other recreational activities. But the number of children who can attend preschools is still very small and, even where the children are thus privileged, their mothers are often horrified at the ‘rough’ behaviour of their daughters or the ‘feminine’ games of their sons.

  No matter how ‘progressive’ the parents or teachers, a variety of factors conspire to ensure that no real subversion of this traditional idea occurs. A combination of ‘progressive’ parents and teachers is rare and so the prescriptions of one will often counteract the encouragement of the other. In any case, few children live in an isolated environment that prevents their being influenced by their playing companions, children’s television and radio programs, and the pervasive propaganda of newspapers, women’s magazines, advertisements and virtually every other feature of the public world.

  Feminists have pointed out that even what is considered to be an innovatory – in educational terms – children’s television program like ‘Sesame Street’ reinforces absolutely the idea that women are kitchen-creatures and child-raisers, and never portrays them in any other kind of role. The books most commonly read by preschool children in Australia have been found to reflect overwhelmingly both the traditional sex division of labour and the differences in status that generally attend th
is division. A comprehensive survey of children’s picture books conducted in Sydney in 1972 found that

  The social attitude endorsed by these books is that domestic tasks are the province of the female. That this role is socially inferior to those adult male roles is described by the substitution of boys, undeniably social inferiors, in a number of all-male situations … The picture books examined include very few working women, and those few are treated unsympathetically, without exception. Small children will not, through these books, learn to accept their mother’s desire for some fulfilment outside their home as legitimate, nor will those whose mothers do work be able to identify their mothers within these books.2

  Nor will the young girls who read these books be encouraged to see for themselves any alternative or even an accompanying career to motherhood.

  It is difficult to get an accurate picture of the life’s ambitions of preschool children as there has been no such survey done in Australia, but just from observing the games and conversations of under-five-year-old girls and from talking with their parents, the impression is gained that this generation has not internalised goals substantially different from their mothers’ or even their grandmothers’. Some friends of mine recently found their four-year-old daughter (a renowned ‘tomboy’ who refuses to wear dresses and who shuns the company of other girls) in tears; when asked what the matter was she cried that she did not know how to cook and how was she going to look after her husband and children when she grew up.

  Traditional sex-role attitudes and ambitions are still overwhelmingly present in young girls and boys today. RW Connell conducted a comprehensive survey of youth aged 12 to 20 in Sydney in 1969– 70, which found that sex roles ‘are already firmly established among 12-year-olds and are found at much the same strength at older ages, both in and out of school’. Moreover, he found the girls to be deeply imbued with those feelings of social responsibility, which this book has identified as part of the God’s Police stereotype:

  A ‘morality’ inventory asking for opinions on issues of honesty, friendship, and personal responsibility found girls, on almost every item, more heavily endorsing the conventional view of strict morality. On social issues of personal freedom, boys are more libertarian and girls more restrictive. And a set of questions about sexual morality … showed the boys more permissive than girls on all issues but one (homosexuality). The pattern is clear, predictable, and almost completely consistent.3

  There is plenty of evidence to suggest that on leaving school, girls overwhelmingly expect that after a few short years at a job they will retire for life into connubial bliss and contented motherhood. Connell found that 9 per cent of his sample never expected to work, 72 per cent only until they had children, 14 per cent intended to work whether they had children or not and only a small 5 per cent said they did not intend to marry. I conducted a survey in 1970 that produced similar findings. I arranged for 118 15-year-old girls at three schools to write essays, which were designed to draw from them their expectations for adult life.4 These expectations are set out in the table below. The figures refer to the percentage of girls in each group who made reference to their pursuing the four occupations listed.

  Life expectations of school-age girls

  The low percentage of girls from the private school who expected to marry can be accounted for by two factors. The essay topic that their teacher gave them was: ‘It is 2036 and you are 70 years old – describe your life’. This future-oriented title evidently evoked visions of a catastrophe-wrought post-2000 world and 27 per cent of them devoted their entire essays to describing global havoc resulting from intercontinental wars, nuclear holocausts or widespread famine. Several girls related this to the futility, immorality even, of envisaging marriage and children, although most were unable to place their personal futures into such a context and wrote fairly abstract, impersonal accounts of their projected future visions. Had the topic been the same as that given to the other groups it is probable that most of this 27 per cent would have been able to describe their personal expectations and that these would have corresponded with those of the majority of their classmates.

  That marriage and family were talked about by these girls was evidenced in the additional 12 per cent who specifically argued against marriage, advocating free love. Several of them recounted that they had children by a variety of fathers. But what was most pertinent about this survey was the small number of girls who foresaw that they might work after marriage. Only one group – those from the ‘A’ stream at the high school – had expectations that in any way matched the current adult female workforce participation pattern. Particularly unrealistic were the expectations of the working-class girls. They appeared to be greater victims of the sex-role ideology than any other group, since it was clear from their essays that the majority of them had working mothers, but that they themselves still believed the myth that they would not have to work after marriage.

  All of these schoolgirls, from the evidence in their essays, appeared to be totally unaware that most of them were likely, as well as marrying and having two or three children, to return to work, often even before their children had started school. That is, if present trends continue, their lives are likely to be even more irreconcilable with their socialised expectations than is the case with their mothers, the women who today are labelled ‘suburban neurotics’.

  In 1963 Betty Friedan drew attention to the vast gap between the expectations women had and the actual lives they led:

  The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the US. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night, she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question: ‘Is this all?’5

  A few years later, Australian women started to speak out about what it was like behind those suburban walls: ‘I don’t know who I am or what I’m supposed to be doing. I have two lovely little children, but I’m so bored I want to get back to work as soon as I can. I’ll put them in preschool kindergartens. But I feel very guilty about it. I feel I should be at home looking after them for a long time to come’.6

  This woman is not alone in deciding that a paid job provides an attractive alternative to full-time domesticity. In the past decade, the number of married women taking paid jobs has increased dramatically as the following table shows.

  Married women as a proportion of the labour force, 1947–737

  Number (’000)

  Percentage

  Census June 1947

  109.8

  3.4

  Census June 1954

  258.2

  7.0

  Census June 1961

  405.5

  9.6

  Census June 1966

  686.3*

  14.1*

  Census June 1971

  960.0

  18.0

  Feb. 1973

  1175.1

  20.6

  Feb. 1974+

  1249.4

  n.a.

  Feb. 1975+

  1285 .0

  n.a.

  * This category is overstated compared to earlier censuses because of a changed definition of the labour force in 1966.

  + These figures are taken from The Labour Force, February 1975, Australian Bureau of Statistics, Canberra, July 1975, p. 6.

  The labour force participation rate for all women has increased, but it is the increase in the participation of married women that is most marked. In 1947 only 6.5 per cent of married women were in the workforce. This had increased to 17.3 per cent in 1961 and nearly doubled by 1971 to 32.8 per cent; in February 1973 it was estimated that 37.2 per cent of all married women were working, while by February 1975 this had risen to 39.7 per cent.8 As Chapter Five suggested,
it is probable that even more married women would seek jobs if suitable child-care facilities were available.

  We now have the situation where over one million married women have extended their female roles to include a paid job outside the home. They have in effect negated one of the precepts of the God’s Police ideology, that which stipulated full-time devotion to home and family was necessary to fulfil the role adequately. Altogether 29.2 per cent of women with children under 12 years are in the workforce.9 But while these women are in practice defying the ideological prescription, society has not caught up with them and altered the ideology and so these women must continue to endure feelings of guilt about their defection.

  This guilt generates anxiety and uncertainty, especially as the God’s Police ideology continues to be reinforced to adult women in a variety of forceful ways. It is still present in the publicly articulated policies of the churches and many political groups. It is present in the themes and assumptions of advertising directed towards women. It is present in the content of most women’s magazines. And it is present in the theories of psychologists (and child psychologists), sociologists and many others who are either studying women or who have set themselves up to ‘help’ them. The ideology is still voiced in its purest form by right-wing political groups such as the Democratic Labour Party (DLP) and the League of Rights. The DLP opposes married women working, favours a wage for housewives (to encourage them to stay at home) and wishes to perpetuate all policies that treat ‘the family’ as the basic unit of society and therefore maintain the present sexist division of labour and society. Lady Phyllis Cilento expressed the traditional view of ‘the family’ and women’s place within it, when she addressed the sixth annual seminar of the Australian League of Rights in 1972: