by Anne Summers
While it might still be possible for a woman to be completely happy and fulfilled for the first ten or even 20 years of marriage and motherhood, she is likely to find herself at middle age with her children grown up and left home, her husband devoting most of his waking hours to his work, and her previously busy life a dull and dispiriting void. We are confronted now with a situation that will not be alleviated simply by allowing that women can expand the traditional role slightly to incorporate paid work outside the home once the children have started school. As I have been arguing throughout this work, the whole notion of a sexual division of labour confined to a fairly rigid family structure is inherently oppressive. It is oppressive for both sexes but, as Chapters Four and Six argued, the results are more devastating for women. For long periods in our history this devastation was not evident simply because women were busy as wives and as mothers. But as women’s familial work has contracted, the oppressive nature of the structure is revealed and its limitations for providing self-fulfilment become more evident. Thus it is the structure of sexism and its supportive institution – ‘the family’ – that requires renovation and not the hapless women who are caught in its mesh. At present there is an overwhelming tendency to view this contradiction (or breakdown) of the traditional female role as being a problem for women and one that can be alleviated by women making enormous adjustments while the corresponding male roles remain static and unquestioned. At present women are being blamed for being unhappy about a life situation, which they did not create and which they cannot control, and they are then labelled as neurotic when they attempt to articulate the confused and directionless dimensions of that situation.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Prospects for liberation
Women, women limping on the edges of the History of Man
Crippled for centuries and dragging the heavy emptiness
Past submission to forgotten and unknown selves.
It’s time to break and run.
Rita Mae Brown from The New Lost Feminist, a Triptych, 1970
In order to create an alternative an oppressed group must at once shatter the self-reflecting world which encircles it and, at the same time, project its own image onto history. In order to discover its own identity as distinct from that of the oppressor it has to become visible to itself. All revolutionary movements create their own ways of seeing. But this is a result of great labour. People who are without names, who do not know themselves, who have no culture, experience a kind of paralysis of consciousness. The first step is to connect and learn to trust one another. Consciousness within the revolutionary movement can only become coherent and self-critical when its version of the world becomes clear not simply within itself but when it knows itself in relation to what it has created apart from itself. When we look back at ourselves through our own cultural creations, our actions, our ideas, our pamphlets, our organization, our history, our theory, we begin to integrate a new reality. As we begin to know ourselves in a new relation to one another we can start to understand our movement in relation to the world outside. We can begin to use our self-consciousness strategically. We can see what we could not see before.
Sheila Rowbotham, Women’s Consciousness, Man’s World, 1973
Is there a possibility of liberation for women in Australia?
It was the pursuit of this question that led me to write this book. It was intended to be a very practical book in the sense that the areas or events selected for description and analysis were seen as having a direct bearing on the current position of women in Australia. I hoped that I could illuminate that position and, by showing its iniquities and inherent inequalities, not merely imply that a change was needed but also suggest ways in which such change could be brought about.
Since the late 1960s and the emergence of the new feminism, there have been many analyses of the position of women in patriarchal society.1 Most of these analyses have been generalised ones. They have tried to delineate the principles and patterns of patriarchy and sexism within Western capitalism, and although some of them have used statistical and other evidence from one particular country (always England or the US), none has attempted to situate and amplify these generalisations in the specific context of one country’s history and present culture. Sheila Rowbotham has written a very detailed history of the oppression of women in England and of the various reform and revolutionary movements that fought to change it, but she is almost apologetic about confining her scope to one country.2 Yet the strategies for women’s liberation that emerge from such generalised works are necessarily also generalised and often fairly abstract. There are obviously many concrete demands that are applicable to women everywhere – the right of women to control their bodies is one such example. But if we are to consider those ‘invisible barriers’ mentioned in the Introduction that confine and restrict women, then we have to consider the possibility that these vary from culture to culture.
One of the most salient points to emerge from recent radical feminist analyses of women’s position in sexist societies is the extent to which women are oppressed by internal forces, by their low self-esteem and by the images society has constructed of women, which are generally demeaning or low-status ones and which women have ingested as part of their acculturation to the society in which they live. These internal forces have to be contended with as much as, perhaps even more than in some situations, the more readily identifiable external oppressive forces. It is often the internal restraints that immobilise women and deter them from rebelling against their powerlessness, and so it is of more than academic interest to investigate exactly what these are.
I felt, therefore, that in order to be able to start devising serious strategies for liberation in our own place and time, a more precise understanding of that place and time was necessary. We needed to be able to locate the generalisations about patriarchy and sexism within our own culture and history, to give them concrete meaning by showing them in great detail in familiar settings. The very familiarity of these settings often prevents us from seeing beyond them to reach an understanding of their oppressive nature. Also, if we are to speak seriously of liberation, we have to move beyond generalisation, rhetoric and slogans to a political understanding of why liberation is necessary. It is one measure of the deeply entrenched sexism of this country that this need is not self-evident, that it has to be argued and proven.
A political understanding cannot be based on abstractions like ‘Women are oppressed’ (and, therefore, their liberation is a logical necessity). It can only be arrived at if we learn exactly how and in what ways women are oppressed within our own culture. If we can describe these ways so that they are recognisable – and this is one test of their truth – then both women and men who have perhaps not looked at their lives and their society in this way before can identify with what is being said. Such identification will have different implications for each sex; for both it might precipitate changes in their personal behaviour, although these changes would be in different directions. But, for women especially, such identification is a prelude to political understanding and this, in turn, is a necessary precondition to devising strategies for change.
What I have tried to show is that women’s experience of being Australian differs fundamentally from men’s. While many men are hampered, restricted or exploited by their class or race, all derive some compensatory benefits from their sex. They have a freedom of movement that is denied to women, and they have the existential security of an identity bestowed by possessing a name that is indisputably theirs. Women must take their very names from men – first from their fathers and then from their husbands – and this practice aptly symbolises most women’s utter dependence upon men.* The nexus of women’s oppression is so encompassing that it invades or shadows every area of their lives, and if we are to consider seriously the possibility of liberation we have to take account of every area of that oppression.
Women are culturally impotent: they are considered to have no culture of th
eir own and are only permitted, at best, an associate status in male (so-called Australian) culture. They are economically dependent: they are prevented from being economically self-sufficient and are forced to depend for subsistence on a husband or, if he reneges, the State. They are the cornerstone of ‘the family’ and are laden with the responsibility for maintaining this institution. They perform an enormous amount of physical and psychological labour within it, but because this is seen as their ‘natural’ role, they are given little recognition or credit for doing so. They are sexually colonised: not even their bodies are their own but are regarded and treated as the property of men. Those English invaders of two centuries ago colonised more than a country and its Aboriginal inhabitants: they also forced all women under their imperial sway.
Description of an oppressed state does not necessarily, of itself, suggest how that state might be changed. It must be asked, what kinds of changes are needed? What is meant by liberation? The very word ‘liberation’ has come to be used so glibly in recent years that it seems almost devoid of meaning. We have been assaulted by advertisements that promise liberation from cooking – by buying take-away food. Or from housework – by buying certain appliances. Many women describe themselves as liberated because they have paid jobs and the immunity from pregnancy that the Pill provides. The rise of serious political movements for the liberation of women and Blacks and homosexuals from the specific things that they find oppressive has been followed by spurious or misguided cries for the ‘liberation’ of animals or of groups of people (such as those who are overweight) who are not similarly oppressed. In such circumstances, where a word has become so bastardised, it is often advisable to stop using it altogether lest the serious import it originally carried becomes confused with the trite usage it has developed.
In this case, however, I am reluctant to abandon the word and, even more importantly, the concept it represents. This is because it has been trivialised, misunderstood and abused. That this would occur to a word that was attached to a movement of women wanting fundamental social change was inevitable. Australian women have rarely been treated seriously, so it was not to be expected that a demand for their liberation would evoke a serious response. But if we are to try to end this habit of not heeding women’s voices then it is important to insist on stating the meaning of what we are fighting for, and to fight to have that meaning taken seriously.
In one sense, liberation cannot be defined. Broadly, it means freedom, and freedom cannot be imposed – by definition or in any other way. Freedom is something people must define for themselves; it must match their needs and desires. Liberation is a state that is either present or being struggled for – because it is desired. While degrees of freedom are possible, liberation cannot be so structured. In Australian society at present, a degree of freedom to do as they choose exists for most men. A far lesser degree is available to all women. For instance, the laws of a society place limits on people’s liberty to do exactly as they please, or at least to do so without the risk of incurring a penalty. Within this overall circumscription there are still degrees of freedom: people of wealth or other means (such as violence) can often engage in illegal activities and use their wealth or means to brush aside the law. Men’s freedom within and beyond the boundaries of law is determined by their class and race and, often, also by their religion, the particular job they hold and by various other factors. But the laws of our society are devised in a legislature that is dominated by, if not entirely composed of, men, and some of those laws reflect the sex of the lawmakers. The laws prohibiting abortion are one example. Those relating to prostitution, where the prostitute is penalised but not her customer, are another. Chapter Eleven of this book discusses several other laws that reflected male interests and that the early feminists were successful in having repealed or altered. Whatever limits are placed on men’s freedom, those placed on women have, to date, almost invariably been greater.
A discussion about freedom and the attendant conflicts between individual and sex and society could be pursued interminably. What is important here is to distinguish between freedom as we understand it in our everyday lives, where it is generally defined in relation to law and to custom, and liberation – which is qualitatively different. As I have already said, liberation eludes definition. It can only be defined in practice as it is achieved. But it is possible to describe some of its necessary attributes. The concept of liberation explicitly challenges the present distribution of power in society and the fact that a small number of people control the lives of the majority. Liberation seeks to abolish this power relationship and has as one of its primary attributes the self-management of individuals and the groups to which they choose to belong.
A further attribute is its universality. Just as there cannot be degrees of liberation, nor can it exist in segments. To explain this requires mentioning another of its attributes and that is freedom of choice. At present our freedom to choose, especially to choose what we want to do with our lives, is limited by a form of social existence that is hierarchical, stratified and patently unequal. When we speak of freedom of choice, we implicitly take account of these inequalities. Liberation cannot. Liberation is partly the struggle and partly the attainment of abolishing such hierarchy, stratification and inequality. Such a struggle cannot select merely one example of inequality, or one level of the hierarchy to fight against, because all are interconnected. Each owes its existence to the others. There can be no top dogs unless there are also bottom dogs and the converse is also the case. But in a society as complex as ours, there are also various levels of middle dogs, and this whole hierarchy forms a unified and interdependent entity.
No one segment can be extracted without this having repercussions for each of the other segments. For instance, it is not enough – nor would it be possible – to confine the struggle for liberation to the group ‘women’. Certainly it is the case that women share sufficient attributes and experiences to warrant discussing them as a group, and to amply justify inquiring about the differences between them and the group ‘men’. This is largely what I have done in this book. And sex is indisputably a major means of stratifying people in our society; a struggle for liberation will have to take specific account of this.
But women are affected by attributes and experiences apart from their sex which also contribute to determining the niche they occupy in the hierarchy. Women also have a class, and a race and religion and many of those other factors that are deemed important in making social distinctions between people. A working-class woman is as much a part of the working class as she is a woman, and both attributes will determine her position in society. Within her class, and within her sex, each designate is important: as a woman she ranks below working-class men, as a working-class person she ranks below middle-class women. As I pointed out in the Introduction, I consider that the primary identification is likely to be with her sex (except in the case of black women where, at present anyway, it is more likely to be with their race) since it is on that basis that she is most likely to have experienced discrimination or abuse (even, or especially, from within her own class). It takes a fair degree of political consciousness to identify as an exploited worker within a capitalist society, and few working-class women have the opportunity to acquire this; they cannot avoid consciousness of their sex. But when we come to consider liberation, both are relevant for both can objectively be analysed as exploitative, as limiting women’s freedom of choice.
The struggle for, and the attainment of, liberation is all about altering the most fundamental tenets of our method of social organisation; it is about abolishing privilege and exploitation and concentrated power. Unless the interrelationship of all determinants of an oppressed person’s existence is taken into account, then we are not talking about liberation. We are merely concerned with juggling the levels of the existing hierarchy.
Another way to consider liberation is to look at what it is not. It is emphatically not a battle for equality, although this i
s how most people seem to view the movement for women’s liberation. This goal is not merely imposed upon feminism but it has been espoused both by older feminist groups and, more recently, the major political parties in this country. Bodies such as the National Council of Women and the League of Women Voters argue for equality for women, as do the Australian Labor Party and the Australia Party. Even the Liberal Party and the Country Party have been forced to acknowledge the desirability of measures such as child-care facilities, increased availability of contraceptive advice clinics, equal pay and better educational, training and employment opportunities for women. ‘Equality of the sexes’ has become a new and constantly reiterated catch-cry, an unimpeachable goal that requires no rationalisation and little explanation.
Although there are differences between these groups about how extensive the reforms ought to be, their basic premise is identical: women ought to be squeezed into the existing system. The fundamental arrangements of that system are unchallenged by the advocates of equality. Although it is conceded that some special concessions or provisions are needed to enable women to be able to have equal access to the system – and therefore things like maternity leave and flexible working hours for women are often advocated – the effect of the demand for equality is to slot women into an extant exploitative sexist class system.