by Anne Summers
Yet the ‘liberated’ image these monthlies project is as much a gloss as the coating on their pages. They do not reject the sexist division of society. They simply capitalise on it in different ways. Belle and Dolly hardly bother to differentiate themselves at all. Dolly concentrates on dolly-type clothes and endless articles on where and how to catch a man. Two feminists recently appraised the Dolly philosophy and wrote:
After having discussions with many regular readers it became clear to us that the girls, who were mainly between fourteen and sixteen, really felt that it did answer the right questions. For the real question is ‘How do I get a man to love me?’ There seems no point in plunging the girl into a worse dilemma by querying the values when the girl is well aware that in this society, without a man to love, cherish and provide for her, she will be doomed to loneliness, deprived of the only identity allowed a woman. Dolly provides very simple answers. The whole purpose of buying all the goodies advertised is to look good. This means assuming a particular appearance which is in keeping with current fashion. You will then feel good, all your nervousness will fade away. You will have become perfect ‘manbait’! Consume in order that every man you meet will want to consume you!30
The editor of Belle says her readers are
proud of their role in an exciting, expanding feminine world, whether as career girl, young housewife or mother … The Belle woman wants to get the most living out of life she can. She knows a lot is expected of her. She’s expected to create a home with that ‘something special’ look, to do wonders with menus, to serve wine knowledgeably, to wear the right clothes and, at the same time, to look beautiful, be desirable, and be informed. Belle will show her how to meet these needs.31
The Belle woman is in essence no different from the Women’s Weekly woman: she has just incorporated a few modern trends into a traditional role. There is no recognition of the problems the young woman trying to be all these things might encounter; Belle defines the needs and then teaches women to fulfil them and portrays life as being much too breathless and interesting ever to be sullied with the slightest glimmer of self-doubt or conflict.
Cleo, Cosmopolitan and, in recent issues, POL are similarly motivated by market considerations but their content orientation is rather different. The Cosmopolitan credo, as outlined in a 1973 promotional brochure, sums up the ethos these magazines subscribe to:
WHO IS OUR GIRL? SHE IS … Between the ages of 18 and 34. Loves men, may be married or single. Interested in sex but not preoccupied with it. Intelligent. Emotional … naturally. Chic … has class and money to spend on the products advertised (either her own or her husband’s money). Probably has a job. If not, she is hip, lively, and interested in a lot of things. Not primarily house and home-oriented … May or may not have children. If she does, she loves them and is a good mother but she doesn’t live through the children. She doesn’t live through her husband either. She likes to do it herself.
These monthlies play it safe and never disavow the sexist division of society, and they readily assume that most – but not all – women will want to marry and have children, but they are more alive to the conflicts and problems experienced by young women today. They are heavily oriented towards sexual performance and problems (despite their statement that ‘their girl’ is not preoccupied with sex) and this is a definite change from the avoidance or euphemisms of other magazines and newspapers. They recognise female sexuality, and argue for a woman’s right to sexual fulfilment. They also run features of practical help to women who want to, say, borrow money or buy a car without male assistance. They mouth support for feminist issues and many of their editorial pieces reinforce feminist ideas. But they are still caught within the contradiction of arguing against the superstructure of a sex role while wanting its foundations to remain intact. They argue for female independence without recognising that this is impossible in the kind of sexist society Australia is. While their fashion pages and advertising continue to reinforce the idea that women should dress and make up to be alluring seductresses, that frippery is necessary to being female, in other words that women should accentuate their differences, then the cry for independence rings rather hollow.
The confusion for women created by these magazines is of a different order from the others. Their aura of ‘liberation’ appears to offer a way out of the old double binds of the female role. But what they offer is an illusion, the myth that modernisation is a substitute for the revolutionary changes that are necessary where organisation along sex-role lines has led to a society in which women are ostracised from its culture, exploited economically and sexually and where women themselves constantly voice anger, frustration, annoyance or discontent at the roles they are expected to fulfil.
One of the major reasons for the gap between the expectations and the actual lives of most women is that there has been a shrinking of the traditional work performed by the housewife. Even though more women marry now than at any time in Australian history, the majority of married women have fewer children than their grandmothers and certainly their great-grandmothers had. Women who had completed their families at the time of the 1911 census had had around five children; this dropped to about four at the 1921 census and ever since has been less than three.32 Factors such as early marriage, early child-bearing (and having fewer children) has restricted the effective period of reproductivity for Australian women to an average of eight years.33 The median age for brides in Australia in 1971 was 21.39 years34, and over half of all first births to married couples occur within the first two years of marriage.35 Thus by age 30, a large proportion of married Australian women have completed their child-bearing and their eldest child will be halfway through primary school. By age 35, the youngest child will have commenced school and the time a woman can spend in actually supervising or tending her children has been considerably reduced. A woman who was born in Australia between 1946 and 1948 has a life expectancy of 70.63 years36 and so, with nearly half her life to go, a woman whose expectations of fulfilment have centred entirely around the idea that women should be wives and mothers is likely to discover that this is no longer possible.
She can of course expand these roles so that they occupy more time, by becoming a more fastidious cleaner, a more experimental cook, an inveterate redecorator of the family home. She can take up adult educational classes, or become involved in local politics. She can pursue hobbies or recreational activities, which she previously had little time for. Various combinations of these ‘solutions’ are adopted by thousands of Australian women, but they do little more than underscore the fact that in a sex-role divided society, one sex’s roles are no longer adequate to occupy their entire lives, that women have been deprived of a viable life-defining function.
Many men express resentment about the contrast between their own and their wives’ working days. In reply to criticisms about the inferior status of women in this country, they will often say that they would swap jobs with their wives, that they would prefer to have all day and nothing to do than to have to put in a work-filled day at office or factory. These are rarely serious suggestions of course, for few men would be willing to forgo the monetary and status rewards that their jobs bestow. But even if they were, men would soon discover the enervating effects of having very little to do, particularly in a society that sneers at ‘bludgers’ and sees industry as a virtue. For ‘women’s work’ has not merely contracted, it has also lost most of the status that attended it until the last decade or so. As Chapters Ten and Eleven tried to show, early this century women had some success in obtaining a respected status for their work.
For about 40 years, most particularly during the interwar period, the housewife’s role was a respected one. This was perhaps the major achievement of the first feminist movement. The respect the housewife role carried was contingent on accepting a sexual division of labour and the status of the housewife did not match that of most male occupations or recreations. But there did exist a separate sphere, a women’s realm, w
ithin which women’s competence went unchallenged, where her expertise was acknowledged and valued and which thereby provided most women with both status and function. It was possible for a woman to experience both pride and fulfilment in raising her children, caring for her husband and in keeping house.
An impressive repertoire of skills and accomplishments was necessary to be able to be an Australian Mum. She had to be an implacable creature, the mainstay of the home, the human bulwark against any forces (such as unemployment, death, family scandals) that might undermine family harmony and happiness. She had to clean houses that required seemingly miles of vacuuming or polishing and dusting, and to satisfy family appetites with a sparse available menu of acceptable foods (though the dull repetition of roasts, chops and steaks was compensated for by an apparently never-ending variety of cakes, puddings and biscuits). At the same time she had to demonstrate thrift by sewing children’s clothes and soft furnishings, by preserving fruits and making jams and chutneys. She had to be tireless, able to be up at dawn to prepare breakfasts and school lunches and to be the last to bed, having put out the billy for milk and set the table for breakfast.
She had to be mother and lover, enduring in silence the ceaseless worry of an unplanned pregnancy – because contraception was never perfect and abortions hard to procure – for Such Things were not discussed even between husband and wife. All this as well as keeping up a lively interest in what the children were learning at school, how husband was getting on at work, corresponding with relatives interstate, organising visits of reluctant children to ageing grandparents. The Australian Mum’s work was seldom explicitly extolled, except in those women’s magazines read only by Australian Mums. She could not expect constant praise. Her rewards were her family’s appreciation, the annual tributes of Mother’s Day and the occasional prose or verse outpourings by sentimental writers of either sex.
It was a more subtle form of oppression than exists today for it was cloaked in pious and sanctimonious attitudes, which were not a just recompense for the labours performed by women. And women were more totally defined by their maternal responsibilities than is now the case. It was common for husbands to address their wives as ‘Mum’ rather than use their names and, as mentioned earlier, this practice still persists. Many women must have resented the fact that their individuality, their personalities, and their sexuality, had been engulfed by maternity. But it is probable that housewives during this period did not experience the wide-scale frustration and discontents of women today. This was mainly because it was a very busy occupation and one that was constantly punctuated by the demands or even just the presence of other people. Australian cities were smaller and, before the suburban sprawl began to dislodge people from the relatives, friends, clubs and so on, which provided them with company, the loneliness of today’s suburban housewife was something that only women in the bush would understand. Children arriving home from school would trail around the house after their mother, telling her of what they had done that day before they went off to play or to do their homework. There was no imperious television set demanding to be turned on as soon as school ended; if children listened to children’s radio programs it was very likely in the same room as their mother was preparing the evening meal and she could feel some involvement with their interests.
But also important was the way in which women reinforced each other, convinced themselves and their friends that their housewifely lives were busy and contented. This is not meant to imply that all Australian housewives were serenely happy in their roles; it is inconceivable that there were not many women who were restless with their domesticity, who longed to be more than somebody’s Mum and who looked enviously at the rare women of those days who had careers. But the restlessness was nowhere as ubiquitous as it is today. The female role and the demands of society were attuned to each other, were in a kind of harmony. It was not economically necessary to family survival for many women, even working-class women, to work. The percentage of married women working rose only very slowly before the forced mobilisation of the Second World War. In 1933, 5.4 per cent of married women had jobs outside the home compared with 4.4 per cent in 1921.37
Women were occupied within the home. There was little impetus for them to examine their roles critically. That came with the wartime mobilisation and afterwards things could never be the same again. Even though the majority of women left their jobs and returned to their housewifely roles, a major rupture had occurred. They now had some experience of a different kind of life. They had tasted a new kind of dignity, that which comes from performing a job that, no matter how menial it might have been, had the automatic status of a wage.
In the postwar period it became more and more impossible for the urban woman to be an Australian Mum. Those who bore children before 1950 could perhaps manage it for ten years, but the shrinking of the tasks the housewife had to perform, along with other social factors, were irrevocably sabotaging housewifedom as an honoured profession. The balance that had existed before was never to be re-established once the government realised that the country’s women constituted a splendid labour reserve force. Henceforward the opening of jobs to married women, particularly in those areas of the economy that were low paid and which men with a choice of jobs available were reluctant to undertake, was a foregone conclusion. It was just a matter of time. And there was little question of having to coerce women out into these jobs. Australians in the early 1960s were acquiring consumer tastes that were beyond the family incomes of all but the upper strata of the middle class. So for the family that wanted to purchase a new suburban brick-veneer home and to fill it with the sparkling consumer durables that spilled out of department stores and, later in the 1960s, discount houses, there was little alternative but for the wife to take a job. Australia was becoming a two-income society even though it still masked this with a one-income ideology.
Along with changes in the family already mentioned, the workforce itself was changing as the demands of society became increasingly sophisticated and pluralistic. The service sector of the economy expanded rapidly as professional aid agencies opened and new avenues for consumer activity were created. Large numbers of women were needed to be social workers, health officers and office workers to support the activities of all these welfare agencies. Even larger numbers of women had to be employed in the multitudes of shops, theatres, recreation centres and so on that began to appear as evidence of the new diversity Australian society had acquired. If married women had not been prepared to juggle their roles a bit, and add working at paid jobs to their wife and mother roles, then the rapid expansion of these sectors of the economy would not have been possible.
Given the reality of so many married women working, it could perhaps be said that the traditional role was disappearing, even if gradually, and that it was merely a matter of making the necessary adjustments to people’s expectations. But as has been shown in this chapter, there have been few signs of this happening. The traditional role is being performed full-time by fewer women, but the ideology lingers on and seems as strong as ever. It has only been in the last two or three years that there has even been widespread public acknowledgment of what has been a reality for over a decade. Women, and men, are still inculcated with the idea that marriage and maternity are the primary routes to female fulfilment for women in Australia. This is evident not only in the ‘positive’ socialising agents already described, but also in a host of ‘negative’ agents. These mainly take the form of social attitudes and as such are difficult to identify with precision, but they are recognisable as part of a general currency of ideas and attitudes that can be gleaned from newspapers, from conversations with people and, less often, from books that claim to speak with some expertise. They are also sometimes confirmed by discriminatory treatment meted out to women who do not conform to these two great imperatives.
Marriage is still posed as desirable and necessary, and women who spurn it are regarded as peculiar, eccentric, objects of pity or, if the
y have children, as immoral. The Whore stereotype is still strong even though, as will be discussed later, it has become less clear-cut as more women refuse to conform to some or all of the God’s Police prescriptions. The middle-aged woman who has rejected marriage – or who perhaps did not have the opportunity for it, but the scorners seldom bother to inquire – is derisively referred to as a spinster and assumed to lead a dreary sexless unfulfilled life with only a caged canary and maybe a few bountiful (married) relatives for company. She is the object of cruel jokes about old maids and is generally excluded from most social gatherings except those ritualised family gatherings when her relatives feel obliged to invite her.
The younger single career woman is treated to a mixture of respect and awe – if she is successful – and pity. She might be able to have affairs now, they say, but who’ll want her when she gets old. Such critics might be taken aback if it was suggested to them that sexual attraction is rarely a factor in cementing any marriage once the partners are middle-aged; their view of single women as being primarily sex objects precludes them from recognising things like companionship, respect for a woman’s intelligence, and thus her conversation, as being important.