by Anne Summers
It is the women who make homes of houses; friendly fellowships of communities; enjoyable meals out of crude foodstuffs; who keep alive the spiritual side of life and religion in the home. It is they who give the intimate care and affection to babies, children of all ages and to their menfolk … I cannot but feel that ‘the woman’s point of view’ is finally oriented to the welfare of her own family first, and her outgoing love embraces her community, her nation and indeed the whole family of man.10
The policy of the Federal Labor Government has been to facilitate women, especially married women, working. It has introduced maternity-leave provisions for women in the Australian Public Service, has set up various inquiries into child care (to recommend the most effective means of implementing a national child-care scheme and the forms the centres should take), and has begun to publicise and expand existing retraining schemes designed to enable women to return to the workforce with skills. This policy of encouraging women to work is an implicit denial of the former conception of women’s familial role, and by removing discriminatory features of the working conditions of women the government is bringing some basic justice to the situation of working women, and is attempting to meet some of their special needs. But the relationship between legislative changes and long-held social ideas is a complicated one. No Act of Parliament can dissolve the accumulated cultural prescriptions that still play on women’s psyches and affect men’s expectations of women.
This policy of government assistance is recent – since the change of government in 1972 – and so far has mainly benefited only women employed by the Australian Public Service. The flow-on to other women will be slow. In any case, we are immersed in a somewhat schizophrenic situation where alterations to the traditional female role are occurring, and are receiving some government support, but at the same time that role is being reinforced by other equally powerful forces in Australian society.
The churches still regard women as having to fulfil a discrete and traditional function. A Sydney theologian has criticised the attitude of the churches toward women:
The Christian Church in Australia, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, is one of the main agencies for reinforcing the low status of Australian women. At the most obvious level, it does this by discouraging them from positions of leadership or equality within its own ranks … The Australian mateship ethos, by which men only trust one another, has been transferred to Church life.11
All the churches argue for the retention of ‘the family’, and, like the DLP, thereby perpetuate sexist attitudes. An Anglican clergyman recently attacked the government’s proposed Human Rights Bill because it omitted the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights definition of ‘the family’ as ‘the natural and fundamental group unit of society which is entitled to protection by society and the State’12 while the Catholic Archbishop of Sydney attacked the government’s Family Law Bill on similar grounds.13
The churches will seldom spell out in detail the precise form of family they want to have guaranteed by the State, so it must be assumed they are arguing for the traditional form. They are thereby pleading for the retention of a sexual division of labour and the differences in opportunities and status this entails, the very situation that is causing women so much discontent.
But while the churches fear the erosion of what have traditionally been women’s functions, other forces are busy refurbishing and maintaining them. Most advertising is directed at women. This fact, as well as the view that the producers of this advertising have of women, is evidence enough of the assumptions they hold about the female role. The chairman and managing director of George Patterson Pty Ltd, Australia’s biggest advertising agency, claimed in an interview that psychological research conducted by his staff ‘tells us that instead of this shopping expedition to the supermarket [being] … a terrible thing … it is actually one of the great recreations during the week for the housewife, one of their great challenges during the week’.14 This man heads the same agency that produced The Patterson Report, a book that purported to ‘capture a little of the Australian scene as perceived by women in the 1970s’.15 The Introduction claimed the book ‘should be of paramount interest to everyone engaged in making or selling goods in the Australian market – in other words, everyone engaged in wooing the Australian woman’.
Advertisers operate on the assumption that women control family finances.16 This assumption is used to attract other advertising as well as informing the contents of the actual advertisements. In 1972 the Sydney Sun advertised itself in a full-page of a national weekly newspaper in the following way:
The Sun woos and wins 403,000 [Sydney women] each day, the latest survey shows. That’s 102,000 more women than the next on the list. And we’ve got more in every age group under 55 than any other daily. They also happen to be at the biggest-spending end of the population.17
If women are the big spenders, this does not mean that women are wealthier than men. Chapter Five showed that women in Australia are, if not supported by a man, very likely to be in poverty. If women do spend the most it is because they have many people to buy for – husband, children and, if there is any money left, themselves. Shopping – which can include shopping for several people for food, clothes and other items – is just one more of a woman’s many jobs, one that she must do even if she has a full-time paid job.
If psychologists have found that women enjoy the constant trips to the supermarket, arguing that it is a recreation and a challenge, there are several things they have not considered. It might be a challenge – to try and purchase family requirements when faced with constantly rising prices and a fairly static income, but it is hardly a challenge that is recreational. Rather, it is likely to produce greater worry and tension – ‘how to make ends meet’ – and if this recreation is engaged upon with a couple of young children who pull things off shelves, pile up their mother’s trolley with items she does not want (or cannot afford) so that she must spend extra time replacing them on the shelves, then it is not going to prove very relaxing. Many women claim that such trips to the supermarket, including getting there (especially without a car) and carting heavy groceries home, are so exhausting that they need to rest afterwards.
Going to the supermarket might be a change from domestic routines and a superficial relief from the isolation and loneliness of being cooped up in a house with small children, but it is hardly a recreation or a challenge. Such shopping trips can actually exacerbate a woman’s isolation, for although she will see lots of other people, her actual contact with them is likely to be limited. Unless she happens to meet other women she knows, her only conversations will be with shop assistants and be circumscribed by the conventions of such casual contact. Many of the large suburban shopping complexes, such as Roselands in Sydney, mount spectacular entertainments for shoppers, bringing well-known people from show business, sport etc. to ‘meet the people’. These mass circuses may distract women shoppers from their personal problems, but they are only momentary escapades, not real alternatives to the isolation of women in the suburbs from each other.
A further aspect of women spending money is exploited by advertisers. Quite often women will displace anxiety or depression by compulsive spending – the buying a new hat ‘to cheer me up’ syndrome – or by buying on impulse things they do not really need and maybe cannot afford. When this occurs, women’s big spending is yet another measure of her oppression. Caught in a series of double binds and conflicting desires about what she should do with her life, it is inevitable that many women will resort to the activity that is so assiduously encouraged in our market society – spending money. The advertisers are quick and cunning in their efforts to capitalise on a woman’s anxieties and to woo money from her purse. Advertisements appeal to fears about being a good mother – ‘Your family needs product X’ – and to anxieties about her appearance, her hair style or colour, her body smells, her complexion, her clothes. They also appeal to women’s anxieties about her family’s status18
, encouraging her to conformity in her purchasing: certain types of furniture, or cooking utensils or other items will show you are a discerning woman.
Advertising that employs these techniques still holds the assumption that it is women who are primarily responsible for the management of their family’s lifestyle, that they do most of the buying and they decide what is to be bought. This assumption permeates the sales pitch, becoming yet one more pressure on women who are either confused about their roles or are trying to change them in some way. To be constantly cajoled that your family needs this product will create self-doubts in a woman in either position. Outwardly she may scoff at the advertisers’ suggestions; inwardly her self-assurance is dented and the proscriptions and admonitions of the ‘good mother’ role will come flooding back into her confused consciousness. Often a woman who feels guilty about having a paid job will spend more, obediently complying with the advertisers’ prescriptions in an effort to quell her self-doubts. She will compensate for her absence from full-time motherhood by plying her family with items it could not otherwise afford.
Affirmations of sexism are also explicitly propagated in all Australian women’s magazines; their very existence assumes a society divided on sex lines. These magazines are an important feature of Australian life, both for the ideas they contain and as mass vehicles for inducing women to spend money, and so their content and assumptions deserve some scrutiny. In 1971 women spent an average of $325 000 each week just on the three main weekly magazines (the Australian Women’s Weekly, Woman’s Day, New Idea19) while by mid-1975 Australians were spending $43 million a year to buy 12 296 000 locally produced women’s magazines.20
In 1972 the average issue readership for these magazines was as follows:
Average readership per issue Percentage of persons 13 years and over21
Women
Housewives
Australian Women’s Weekly
47.5%
45.8%
Woman’s Day
35.2%
33.5%
New Idea
27.8%
27.1%
Woman’s World
11.0%
10.5%
Dolly
7.4%
4.7%
Pol
4.9%
3.6%
Belle
3.3%
2.1%
At the end of 1972, a new magazine, Cleo, appeared and mass promotion of the first few issues soon secured it record sales. A survey conducted after the first few issues found that single and married women aged 35 and under were the main readers of Cleo, and that of a readership potential of 1.3 million at the end of 1972, it had achieved a 9 per cent penetration into this market – ‘far more than any other women’s monthly’.22Woman’s World, a weekly, started publication in 1972. Its promotion brochure claimed it was particularly effective in reaching housewives with children, notably those with large families who are heavy spenders on food and groceries, and that within six months it had achieved a higher proportion of its total readership in the 25- to 29-year ‘home-making age brackets’ than the three other weeklies.23
In her survey of the three existing women’s weeklies in 1969, Madge Dawson concluded:
The women for whom our magazines seem to be writing typify longstanding concepts of the Australian woman. Her place is in the home; in her role of wife and mother she finds fulfilment; her role as worker or citizen, if any, is minor and subordinate. She is inward-turning – concerned only with things appropriate to her sex.24
Five years later the market is crammed with many new magazines (Woman’s World, Australian Family Circle, Dolly, Belle, Cleo, Cosmopolitan) and the picture is rather more complex. Women’s magazines now fall into two categories: the family-centred weeklies (Australian Women’s Weekly, Woman’s Day, New Idea, Woman’s World, Australian Family Circle) and the woman-centred glossy monthlies (Cleo, Dolly, Cosmopolitan, Vogue), and the now quarterly, POL and Belle.
The oldest and still the most read women’s magazine is the Australian Women’s Weekly. In 1971 it had a circulation of 820 000 and reached over 50 per cent of the total population of women in Australia each week.25 Every content analysis of this magazine has revealed it to propagate the idea that women are happiest as housewives. A recent study concluded, ‘It’s not that working women don’t exist at all in the pages of the Australian Women’s Weekly, but they exist ONLY as wives and mothers and housekeepers. They are not portrayed as active and independent units in an economic system, and so provide no choice of role models for young girls. The image of the role of women is of home duties as central’.26
The same study reported a survey that had found that 56 per cent of girls aged 12 to 17 years read this magazine weekly or nearly every week.27 Large numbers of girls are thus still receiving a view of adult female life that not only contradicts their likely futures, but which distorts the reality of the lives of their mothers.
All of the family-centred women’s magazines present in their contents a society based on the traditional family and divided on lines of sex, in which the female’s appearance, marital and maternal status and possession of numerous domestic skills are apparently her most appropriate attributes. They all extol escapism in the form of romantic fiction, features about royalty or the international jetset and numerous travelogues. They applaud traditional women’s skills, such as cooking, knitting and other handicrafts, child-raising and home management and generally offer useful information or aids in the form of recipes, patterns and so on. But contemporary social and political issues of relevance to women – such as abortion law reform, equal pay, child care, equality with men in the workforce and in society generally – are paid scant, if any, attention. Women’s liberation is treated as an interesting phenomenon, deserving of periodic feature articles, but the tendency is to separate it from the rest of the magazine’s content by discussing the mere fact of existence of the movement rather than what it aims for or what it has achieved. Some of the jargon of women’s liberation, phrases such as ‘male chauvinist pig’, are used occasionally, with an amused editorial twitter, as if to highlight the differences the editors perceive between their readers and that bunch of crazy feminists.
The woman who has difficulty reconciling her socialisation and her actual adult life will sometimes find a discursive ‘commonsense philosophy’ article on the breakup of the family, or new sexual standards, or some similar contemporary issue. But she will seldom be given concrete help with such dilemmas by articles that direct themselves to the roots of her problems. If practical advice is given to the working wife, it will generally be in the form of recipes for quick-to-prepare meals. All this does is confirm that women must endure a double burden; there is no suggestion that the sexual division of labour itself, and the functions it serves for our society, should be examined. Thus these magazines, which profess a service function to women as their raison d’etre, play a decisive role in actually defining the problems they consider it behoves a woman to have.
The economic function of the magazines is relevant to their editorial concerns. Editorial and advertising content merge into a single compelling whole and it is obviously necessary to distract women from basic problems of role conflict in order to keep them interested and receptive potential consumers. Hence the concentration on practical hints in domestic areas. Persuade a woman that she can expand her domestic competence and feed her with plenty of escapist or fantasy material to sustain her while she does it. In this way it just might be possible for women to remain permanently distracted, busy enough (especially if they have paid jobs as well as being housewives) not to have time to think. In fact, this does not work for many women and these magazines are forced to acknowledge the existence of ‘suburban neurosis’, but they have to do so rather gingerly. They bravely suggest play groups and other community activities to dissipate loneliness – seeing this as the major problem.
Woman’s Day recently combined the usual woman’s magazine obsess
ion with diets and a recognition that many housewives are unhappy by publishing a ‘High energy anti-depressant diet’. The diet was introduced by a short article, which discussed the problems many housewives have:
Do you frequently feel depressed, listless and lacking in vitality and energy? This condition is so prevalent nowadays that it has been labelled the ‘housewife syndrome’. Many Australian women try to solve their problems by swallowing increasing amounts of tranquillisers, sedatives and antidepressants. But drugs are not the answer. Physicians today say that sensible eating habits will correct this listless state.28
Women’s magazines will consider physical or hormonal problems or lack of company to be causes of ‘suburban neurosis’ but never dare come to terms with the notion that the traditional roles for which they are catering are becoming increasingly anachronistic.
The glossy monthlies direct themselves to women as individuals and play down the family context. Even more blatantly than the weeklies, they exist because a market exists, not just a market for their magazines but for the products the advertisers, on whom they depend for existence, can promote through their pages. Unlike the weeklies, they do not assume heterogeneity of the female sex and cater for the swinging, with-it, Today Woman, whom they see as being discontented with the kind of images projected by the weeklies. The promotional brochures of these magazines define their purpose and their intent. ‘Women ARE different … as different as DOLLY, BELLE and POL. That’s why Sungravure now has three young women’s magazines. Each has its own personality, each has its own thing to say … Yet they all have one aim in common – to entertain, to inform … to SELL to women – young women!’ The chairman and managing director of Vogue explained his magazine’s ethic: ‘Vogue does not appeal to age groups, but a standard of personal quality and a set of values … We therefore cater to an attitude in women who have this interest in improving the quality of their life and have the money to satisfy their aspirations’.29