by Anne Summers
If the critics are not harking on the joys a woman misses for not being married, they will often voice the suspicion that she must be a lesbian. This prognosis is offered in whispers, which manage to combine both prurience and horror with the implied view that she is a deviant and thus deserves to be either persecuted or pitied (depending on how liberal the critic is) or that, as an assumed man-hater, she is incapable of finding true feminine fulfilment anyway and so barely deserves inclusion in the female sex. Such is the view of practising clinical psychologist Ronald Conway who dismisses lesbians as ‘psychic half-women’.38 Most books about women in Australia do not mention lesbians at all; they and Conway make the same mistake of viewing lesbians purely as sexual categories and ignoring the fact that many lesbians are married – and have children. In terms of the prevailing sex-role ideology they have fulfilled themselves as women and so the intended slur is inaccurate as well as revealing a contempt (and a fear?) for women who professedly are not dependent on men for sexual or emotional fulfilment. This is an instance of the inappropriateness of sexist stereotypes and how their exclusive categories actually disguise the realities of many women’s lives. In terms of the stereotypes, a lesbian is by definition a Whore since she lives outside the conventional family (even if she tries to emulate its sex roles in her relationships with women) and is viewed as being incapable of disseminating pro-family values. It is assumed that all married women and mothers are heterosexual and, in fact, heterosexuality would probably be a stipulated requirement of the God’s Police role were the definers of the stereotype to suspect that their assumption is not always correct.
Socially, the single woman who has not been dismissed as a lesbian is assumed to be searching for a husband, and so those people who will ask her to dinner or to parties will dredge up the weirdest assortment of men to be her partners. Their main distinguishing characteristic will be their unmarried status. It will be assumed that the older the single woman is, the more desperate and, therefore, the less discriminating she will be.
Single people of both sexes have to pay higher taxes, are denied the concession rates that families or married couples can obtain to many social functions or membership of political or other organisations39, a rather hypocritical form of penalising people society professes to pity because they are excluded from the joys of married life. But single women have to suffer further discrimination. Society’s contempt for the single woman, especially the economically secure single woman, that most blatant contradiction to the idea that women ought to be married and dependent, is revealed in the ways it tries to remove that independence. It is difficult, and it used, until about three years ago, to be impossible for a woman of any income to borrow money without a male guarantor. This sometimes led to the ludicrous situation of a father guaranteeing a loan for a daughter who earned more than he did.
Single mothers elicit ambivalent attitudes from many people. Like lesbian mothers, they have conformed to part of the God’s Police prescription by being mothers, but they have transgressed another part of it by rejecting marriage. They are not regarded as being sinister in the way lesbian mothers often are. In the past, single mothers were also cast as Whores but they were given means of redemption. Their ‘sin’ was not so much the extra-marital sex or the resultant pregnancy, but the refusal to marry. ‘Shotgun’ marriages have been an accepted, if concealed, part of Australian family custom for most of this century so this course of action has always been advised, but if a woman refused this option she could show her remorse by hiding away during her pregnancy preferably in a religious home where she could do other people’s washing without remuneration, and by giving up her child for adoption. The woman who did this would have to endure some whispering and moralising, but she was generally regarded as being deserving of ‘a second chance’ to prove her willingness to take the socially approved routes to female fulfilment.
Women were discouraged from keeping their children by the State, making it virtually impossible for them to support them. In 1968 a single mother with one child in Queensland received $4.85 a week. The Victorian Government’s policy of paying allowances only to the children, and not to the parent caring for them, meant in 1968 that a single mother with one child was paid $4.00 a week.40 Other states paid varying amounts, the maximum being $17.00 a week in South Australia. The single mother in Victoria was in the worst position and it was not coincidental, as Sackville points out, that Victoria’s rate of adoption of illegitimate children was very high compared with states offering greater assistance.41 In 1968 the Commonwealth Government passed the States Grants (Deserted Wives) Act, which was designed to create incentives for the states to provide more uniform levels of assistance for fatherless families42 and single mothers were included in this scheme. But the average payment, of around $27 a week in 1968, an inadequate amount to house, feed and clothe two people, was a constant reminder of the low opinion society had for the husbandless mother.
There have been some changes since. The introduction of the Supporting Mothers’ Benefit in 1973 brought all single, deserted and widowed mothers into one administrative category and paid them a uniform allowance six months after they became eligible for the benefit. As Chapter Five argued, the amounts paid are still inadequate, but the government is at least not discriminating against single mothers: all fatherless families receive the same amounts. The government will also give paid maternity leave to single mothers employed by the Australian Public Service. With the changes of the past few years, many more women have begun to keep their babies. Single mothers have banded together and formed organisations such as CHUMS (Care and Help for Unmarried Mothers) in New South Wales and the Council for the Single Mother and Her Child in Victoria in order to fight for State support for themselves and to give each other moral support against still-existing prejudices that they have to face.
The single mother is probably treated more kindly than most other categories of people who eschew marriage and it is certainly the case that social toleration of her existence has increased. But it is still other women who are her champions. A survey of attitudes conducted in Victoria in 1972 showed that ‘men were more likely to disapprove of single mothers in general and gave proportionately more negative responses over all five attitude items than women. Most of the women in the sample gave only positive responses, while most men gave at least one negative or mildly negative response’.43
The sanctions applied to women who do not marry are accompanied by an even more coercive set against married women who will not have children or who wish to decide for themselves how many, and when. These sanctions were part of the now-declining view that Australia ought to populate or perish. While this notion was prevalent, and it dominated social welfare and much economic policy for more than 50 years, often in obvious contradiction to the wishes of the majority of the population, women were viewed as breeders who were to be forcibly encouraged to bear as many little Australians as possible. The most obvious weapons the State wielded here were laws on abortion and contraception.
Abortion is a criminal offence in every Australian state except South Australia where the law was liberalised in 1970 to enable medical practitioners to recommend and perform abortions if two doctors concur that continuing a pregnancy would be a greater risk to a woman’s life or would carry a greater risk to her physical or mental health than if the abortion were performed. As in other states, it is also possible to obtain an abortion if there is a substantial risk that the child of the pregnancy would suffer from such physical or mental abnormalities as to be seriously handicapped. Under this law it is virtually impossible for a married woman who is childless or who has only one or two children to procure a legal abortion except under the last provision. She will be forced to go interstate for an illegal termination unless there is a risk of physical or mental abnormality. In both New South Wales and Victoria abortion is still illegal, but for the past three years the number of abortions being performed both in registered hospitals and in illegal clinics
has steadily increased. Abortion referral centres operate openly in the large cities.
This quasi-legal situation is possible because of a combination of two lower court rulings and the exposures of police collaboration and paid protection of illegal clinics in both Melbourne and Sydney.44 But until abortion is legalised by statute it remains expensive, and only available to women who are aware of the rather devious routes necessary to procure a termination. The existing situation means that poor women, women in other cities or in the country who have neither the money nor the time nor the knowledge to search out the illegal clinics, will be reduced to begging for a legal abortion from their local doctor or hospital. The woman in this situation will be subjected to the vagaries or the whims of those who can decide, for reasons of personal prejudice, distaste or religious conviction or because the ‘abortion quota’ for that month is already full, that she ought to take her pregnancy to term. And while abortion remains quasi-legal, being performed in defiance of still existing Crimes Act clauses, the attitude of the police can change at any time. So while at the present time many Australian women have access to abortions when they need them, the State has reserved its right to remove that access whenever it chooses.
The likelihood of a change of law appears remote after the pressure group campaign and the voting of federal politicians during the Medical Practice Clarification Bill, which came before the Australian Parliament in May 1973. The Bill as presented to parliament proposed to allow abortion on request up to the 12th week of pregnancy and to allow abortions after that point if two medical practitioners agreed that continuation of the pregnancy would seriously endanger the woman’s physical or mental health. The Bill applied only to the Australian Capital Territory. A highly organised and obviously well-funded campaign by the Right to Life organisation, based on horror colour photos, distortions of medical facts45, appeals to sentimental attitudes about babies – which were equated with foetuses – and a massive letter-writing campaign to politicians and newspapers and revivalist-type public meetings totally dominated the proceedings. The Bill was rejected 98 votes to 23.46
These attitudes to abortion are even more barbaric in the context of State policies on contraception. The Labor Government has revoked the grossest aspects of these. It removed the 37½ per cent tariff import tax, which had previously been applied to all imported rubber contraceptives, and all female rubber contraceptives were imported, and has abolished the 27½ per cent ‘luxury’ sales tax on all contraceptives. Oral contraceptives have been placed on the pharmaceutical benefits list, thereby reducing their cost to 50 cents a packet. Family planning clinics have at last been recognised as deserving of federal funds. These changes have all occurred since 1972 and are a catalogue of the various measures that were employed to make knowledge of contraception difficult for women to procure and to keep the contraceptives themselves very expensive. The advertising of contraceptives is still legally prohibited in most states and even though family planning clinics have been assured that they will not be prosecuted if they advertise their services ‘tastefully’, this concession hardly begins to meet the need to disseminate this information widely.
Women are still dependent on State paternalism and the medical profession’s whims for controlling their fertility and while this situation persists, the woman who lives her entire life without having to endure at least one unwanted pregnancy will be very lucky indeed. The coercion involved in this situation rather undermines the case of those who insist that it is ‘natural’ for women to want to bear children, as does the constant railing that those women who do not have them, or who delay having children for several years after marriage, are ‘selfish’. This form of attack, which has been used to induce guilt in women for the past 50 years, is rather curious. It suggests uncertainty on the part of those arguing for child-bearing; if the experience were as they extol it, surely those women who do not wish to have children need to have the joys they are missing pointed out to them. It can hardly be selfish to deprive yourself of something that you are convinced is nice. Self-sacrificing perhaps.
With such a range of negative sanctions in the form of attitudes and legal restrictions all reinforcing the idea that marriage and maternity are still necessary for female fulfilment – even if it is now being conceded that women may do other things as well – it is small wonder that many women find it difficult to reconcile their actual lives with their socialisation. Women, especially those who are aged 30 and upwards now, are caught in an excruciating double bind. Demographic and economic factors make it almost imperative that they take jobs outside the home, at least once their children are in school. But the sex-role ideology and the view that women can only fulfil themselves as women by being wives and mothers contradicts this.
Men learn that they can fulfil themselves as men through their jobs as well as through their sex roles and so they are not subject to the same double bind. The male role does not have the same moral imperative attached to it, nor is it subjected to the same extensive examination and debate. Nor will men admit so readily to feeling insecure or unhappy with the demands of their sex roles. Men can be, and usually are, discussed outside the context of ‘the family’. It is not considered necessary to know, say in a newspaper interview, whether or not a man is married and has children. It is possible to extract him and his job or hobby, or whatever it is that is of interest, from his family relations, whereas for women these are crucial. Women are still analysed and discussed as elements of a family and any extra achievements are things that are tacked on to that primary definition of their sex.
Much academic research on women perpetuates this tendency and the woman who feels the double bind described above and who would like to be able to fashion some other means of self-definition will find little encouragement in the theories that emerge from institutions of research. For example, a much-quoted study of power relations within the family conducted by Dan Adler in 1957–58 concluded that ‘the wife’s leadership role in Australia compared with other Western cultures, is so prominent that it requires identification as the special social phenomenon which we call “matriduxy”’.47 He arrived at this conclusion by analysing who does what, who makes decisions and who carries them out within the family. After discovering that women both made more decisions and carry out more of them than their husbands, he reached the amazing conclusion that this meant that women are more powerful than men within the family. This conclusion not only confuses activity with power, but, because it isolates the family group from its total economic and social context, is completely unable to accommodate such factors as the husband’s economic power, and, therefore, the wife’s economic dependence.
Because the surveys were conducted among children – who were asked to list what their parents did – there were a further series of elements that were omitted from consideration. No account could be taken of sexual power, of the extent to which the wife can be forced into sexual activities against her will. In a society such as Australia where there is no legal recognition of rape within marriage, a husband immediately accrues an enormous armoury of oppressive mechanisms. He may not exercise them, but they are available to him. Further, the survey simply did not ask other pertinent questions. Maybe the wife decides many things but what else happens at home? Does the husband beat his wife or his children? The children were not asked this and the framework of the survey precluded them from volunteering such information. This survey obviously requires more detailed criticism than is possible here because its conclusions have been so widely disseminated and it has provided the justification for the conclusion that Australian women dominate their families to an even stronger degree than American ‘Moms’ are said to. It is obvious that when women are considered only in their family context, then it will be found that, in comparison to men who have an entire working and recreational life outside ‘the family’, women are more active within that sphere, but this tells us nothing about the perceptions or the desires of the women. As has been pointed out bef
ore ‘the family’ is less and less able to provide for women the validation and fulfilment that it was once capable of doing. For women who are caught in this double bind to be told that they are too powerful – for the finding is usually presented with a tinge of moral disapproval – is cold comfort indeed.
The second kind of thesis that is advanced about Australian housewives is that they are ‘neurotic’. Such is the conclusion of Dr Francis Macnab of Melbourne’s Cairnmillar Institute, a private consulting clinic that conducts therapy groups for unhappy women. Macnab believes that at least 70 per cent of women in Australia’s urban communities are suffering emotional and, in some cases, physical hindrances through leading unfulfilled lives.48 What he means by this is that many women find that they are discontented with their maternal and wifely roles and that this discontent is likely to become neurotic. In his view, women express this neuroticism by stating that they feel worthless, that their lives are empty and devoid of purpose and that they have little interest in their families. He finds these feelings incomprehensible and labels women who give voice to them as neurotic.
Macnab’s views have been widely aired in newspapers and through the book The Marriage Wilderness, which is a mouthpiece for Macnab’s ideas and methods of treatment, and hundreds of women have been in therapy groups at the institute. Yet the method of therapy adopted is a very restricted one because it is based on the assumption that the grievances aired by these women are personal rather than social problems. Although Macnab demonstrates compassion for the obviously unhappy women who seek his help, he sees the problems as personal ones, which require personal solutions. He appears to have no understanding, or sympathy with, the kind of historical, demographic and economic explanations that have been advanced in this chapter to suggest why such feelings of self-abnegation are likely to be widespread among women. Rather than seeing these women as victims of social changes that have left them without life-fulfilling functions, he instead blames women themselves – as the quotation at the beginning of this chapter suggests. Thus women who seek treatment for feeling guilty about their dissatisfaction are likely to have that guilt compounded when, acting on his advice, they try to find fulfilment in the traditional wife/mother role. That, I have attempted to show, is becoming increasingly difficult, if not totally impossible.