by Anne Summers
*The taking of her husband’s surname by a wife is not legally obligatory; it is merely a custom, albeit one that has been adopted so ubiquitously that few women are aware that they are not obliged to do so. In any case, even if a woman does choose, often against considerable disapproval or outright opposition, to retain her maiden name, she is merely clinging to the name of another man – her father. Under a patrilineal system women have no name to pass on to the next generation and they are, therefore, invisible except as appendages to men.
Letter to the next generation [1994]
Fear of feminism
It is now more than 20 years since the modern women’s movement began its profound social revolution, and we pioneers of that movement are now a generation older and starting to ask ourselves, What comes next? While we were immersed in the activism of the 1970s we rarely stopped to wonder about the future, or to ruminate on who would fill our shoes when the time came. Since we were so sure that the changes we had set in motion would endure, even if they took years to complete, I suppose we just assumed that the next generation of women, when they reached young adulthood, would stand alongside us and keep the movement, and the fight, alive.
So I was at first horrified, and then mortified, to encounter during the 1980s young women who regarded we feminists of the 1960s and 1970s as being utterly remote from them and their lives and ambitions. We were, after all, a mere generation apart. No chasm of history separated us and distorted who we were the way earlier groups of feminists were disconnected from us. So why did they look at us through such unsympathetic eyes? Was it us, or was it them? Was this just a generation gap – or something more profound?
When I first heard young women expounding their unflattering opinions of the women’s movement, I largely ignored what they were saying. Or, as I had mostly read their remarks, I blamed the messenger, assuming the media had either misrepresented these young women or else sought out for interview people who were predisposed to be hostile. So what, I thought, if these young puppies want to call me angry, bitter, aggressive or man-hating! It’s not true, just as bra-burning was never true. Along with most of my contemporaries I was absolutely comfortable with my feminism, and no amount of name-calling was able to unsettle my convictions.
Nor could I imagine any young woman who wanted to do something with her life not being able to make the connection between the great array of choices now available to her and the battles we had fought. Wouldn’t she acknowledge this? Wouldn’t she feel something – gratitude? a debt? a responsibility to keep widening those choices for herself and her generation? To me, it seemed inconceivable that young women in their early 20s would not feel as drawn to the movement to increase women’s opportunities as I had been when I was their age.
But, increasingly, I had to acknowledge, at least to myself, that this was not the way most young women saw it. As the evidence to the contrary piled up, I realised that my generation had a problem that we had to confront. The evidence revealed itself in various ways. Conversations with young women, listening to women talk about their lives during the market research conducted by the Office of the Status of Women in 1992, even my experiences with younger staff members when I was Editor-in-Chief of Ms. magazine all convinced me that feminists of my generation could no longer pretend – as so many still do – that we have successfully presented our case to young women today. The problem was eloquently articulated by a young American woman in an article that appeared in 1991:
Although feminism is, by definition, the theory of the political, economic and social equality of the sexes, the word has become abused and distorted. Fearing that feminism means becoming unfeminine, anti-men and ultimately alone, many women have distanced themselves from it. Feminism seems to present a social equivalent of Sophie’s choice: which of our children will we let die – our heart or our mind, our attractiveness or our independence?1
Her words recalled for me an uncomfortable encounter during my time at Ms. when I had asked the younger staff members to come up with some story ideas for the magazine that reflected their interests and the issues they thought young women would respond to. These young women editors were, naturally enough, all feminists (why else would they be working at Ms.?), but I sensed they felt the magazine offered them little that was personally useful. Nevertheless I was unprepared for their response.
Instead of a list of story ideas, they came up with a critique of us, the senior editors. The message was very clear: they did not want to be us! They wanted the magazine to show them how they could avoid our fate which, they judged, was having had to sacrifice our personal lives on the altar of the women’s movement. These young women knew us too well to adopt the conventional wisdom and see any of us as bitter or angry or man-hating but, what was worse, they felt sorry for us! Most of them wanted to marry, or at least find partners, and to have children and they were having trouble identifying with a women’s movement, and a magazine, whose veterans’ own lives seemed to imply this was impossible.
It was then that I understood how little we have left for those who follow – how we have failed to explain ourselves, what we did and why, the choices we made, the consequences we accepted (or at least became reconciled to). I realised that we must write our history, record who we were and what moved us. I had looked around at my colleagues at Ms. and seen a group of strong, independent women, with great jobs, in control of their lives and whom I assumed considered themselves far better off then any previous generation of women; that was how I felt about myself, at any rate. They had looked at us and seen a bunch of sad and lonely people who lived only for their jobs and their politics and they had pitied us. I knew then that I had to address the fact that so many women, including young feminists, feel alienated both from the women’s movement of my generation and from we women who have made it our lives.
So let me begin.
Anyone can read this letter, but it is addressed especially to women who were born after 1968, to you who are the daughters of the feminist revolution. The world began changing for women as you were being born, and as you have grown, so too have women’s expectations and opportunities. By the time you came of age, the changes were so great that the world was almost unrecognisable to women like myself who had come of age as you were being born. There have been few periods in the past when women’s prospects have expanded so dramatically in such a short time and even though they so far have fallen short of what we wanted, we could judge it a good beginning. We could feel some satisfaction that you, the daughters of our revolution, would find the world a more hospitable place for women than we had.
Some of you may be pleased with this inheritance, others may regard it with scepticism; most of you probably just accept, without reflection, the world as you find it. Whichever way you feel, you are, like it or not, the custodians of the future and I urge you to become acquainted with your recent past so you can gain some perspective on your lives today. You may not be able to imagine a world where married women were not allowed to be permanently employed teachers (or any other professional on the government payroll), where pregnant women could be fired, where you could be refused a job or a course of study because you were female, where abortion was illegal and dangerous, where it was the law of the land to pay women only 75 per cent of the male wage, but this was the world into which I came of age in the mid-1960s. Then women Members of Parliament were rare (and the handful who were there mostly occupied seats left vacant by the deaths of their husbands or fathers); the only women we saw on news and current affairs television were the ‘weather girls’; it was virtually unheard of for women to be managers or bosses, except of other women, and only then in what were considered women’s occupations, like nursing, where they still had to defer to the male doctors and administrators; women were starting to go to university in large numbers but more often to find a husband than to acquire career training, and the thought that a woman would retain her own last name after marriage was considered a dangerous and rebellious act.
Not that it happened often.
One of the reasons I decided to add to rather than rewrite and update this entire book was because I felt strongly we need to preserve a picture of our recent past. With the exception of the historical chapters, most of this book stands as a snapshot of how it was for women, and men, in the mid-1970s when it was first published. If the portrait of Australian society it presents seems unbearably quaint and old-fashioned, I hope it can thus serve as a measure of how much has changed in less than 20 years. If you contrast your life today with the description of how life used to be, you will have some idea of what we have won – and what you must never lose.
Past waves of feminism seldom lasted more than a generation, so there was rarely an opportunity for the old to speak directly to the new. There was little possibility of passing the torch. Today there is some connection. Even where it is marked by misunderstanding or even repudiation, our generations are contiguous and we can, if we choose, talk to each other. I am optimistic enough to believe that many of you want to maintain the momentum and keep pushing forward. Some of you even seek guidance or inspiration from us; in doing so, you are more embracing than we were.
As we young women began our rebellion I was struck by the way the earlier generation of feminists reached out to us. They were excited about us, so glad that their movement was reviving, and they wanted to know all about us. One evening, during a women’s liberation meeting in the inner Sydney suburb of Glebe, an elderly neighbourhood woman stormed through the doors and exclaimed to the startled group inside, ‘I’ve been waiting for you women all of my life!’ But Bessie Guthrie was an exception with her uncritical enthusiasm; the gulf between us and them was enormous – far greater than that which separates us from you. Most of these women were our grandmothers’ age and they could not understand, or approve, the way we dressed, the crudity of our language or our obsession with sexual issues. We, in turn, felt no connection to them. We did not even call ourselves feminists, a word we judged to be old-fashioned. Feminists, we thought, were quaint relics with their fixations on peace, abstinence from alcohol, and an obscure concept called rights. We weren’t for women’s rights, an old-fashioned notion I associated with fighting for the right to vote and other long-past issues; we were women’s liberationists! Quite a different thing altogether. Oddly, at the time, most of us did not see ourselves as part of the peace movement; we were anti-war, the Vietnam War in this case, which we took to be a more aggressive and radical stance than the passive protests of the peace movement. It was some years before we realised they were two sides of the same coin.
Yet we were flattered by the attention of these older women and their efforts to understand us. The first time it happened was on International Women’s Day 1969 when I was invited by the Adelaide branch of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom to come to their celebrations and tell them about this new group of angry young women. I was not the key speaker; that honour rested with the distinguished jurist Roma Mitchell, the first Australian woman Queen’s Counsel and, subsequently, Supreme Court judge, later a Dame of the British Empire and the nation’s first woman governor. After speaking for only a few minutes, I was astonished to hear Dame Roma say, ‘I’m going to stop now because we all want to hear about this new women’s liberation’ and suddenly the spotlight was on me, a 24-year-old student facing a roomful of women in their 50s and 60s, trying to find the words to tell them that a revolution was underway.
A few years later, this time in Sydney, a friend and I received an invitation, conveyed by a quavering voice over the telephone, to have afternoon tea with Ruby Rich. By then, I had begun researching this book and was becoming familiar with the names of early Australian feminists, so I knew about Ruby Rich. Almost 50 years earlier she had founded a society in Sydney to disseminate sex education literature (see pages 541 and 542), a radical act in those days, and she had fought all her life for women. She was now in her late 90s, frail but alert, and eager to give us advice. It was not an easy meeting. My friend and I had made concessions (we were respectful and we wore dresses instead of our usual jeans), but the more than 70 years that separated us was simply too great; it became easier to ask her about the past than to explain what we were all about.
It is almost the opposite today. Now it is the older women who are impatient with the young, unable to understand why so few of you are embracing the women’s movement, why you seem to reject us and all we stand for when you mouth that anthem of the 1980s, ‘I’m not a feminist, but …’ Yet I am not as dispirited as some of my contemporaries. I think you are there but, like us, you will do it in your own time and in your own way. I also recognise that for many of you, being the daughters of a revolution is far more difficult than it was being on the frontlines of the battle for change. I hear this in conversations with women who are exhausted with the effort of trying to ‘have it all’ and wonder why equality and opportunity have to be such hard work. I watch women all around me trying to come to terms with a world that is still confusing, contradictory and often so combative as to make you sometimes wonder how much things really have changed.
I don’t want to wait until I am 98 to try and explain to a 25-year-old what moved me and so many of my generation to activism and revolt. I want, while there is still some chance of communicating, to tell you the story of the modern women’s movement. I want you to know how it started, what we did, and what it did to us. In hearing our story, I hope you will also learn something about yourselves, about where you stand in this great movement of change, and that it might just move some of you to reach out for the torch. It is time for it to be passed.
Our story
It is astonishing that the group that learned the hard way that history belongs to those who write it has not yet written its story. We had to delve through dusty library shelves to get just the bones of the story of the women who preceded us 50 or so years earlier, and one of our demands soon became that women’s history be taught in schools and universities so that the circumstances and accomplishments of our gender were no longer ‘hidden from history’.2 Because our history was rarely written, or failed to be absorbed into the mainstream of the story of our civilisation, each new wave of activists has almost always had to begin all over again: making the case for women’s rights, arguing against those who would deny us equality, reaching back into the past for reassurance that others have been there too. I remember my excitement at discovering the battles waged to win votes for women by fin de siècle English and Australian suffragettes. It was chastening to realise these women of my grandmother’s generation were far more militant than we young women’s liberationists of the 1970s – they horsewhipped Cabinet ministers, they chained themselves to public buildings, they went to prison and, once there, went on hunger strikes and were forcibly fed by barbaric methods, which often ruined their health and shortened their lives. I found it astonishing that I had completed a high school education without even hearing about these women warriors.
Yet we soon became so engrossed in discovering the past, and so absorbed in redefining the present, that we neglected to record the evolution of our own movement and our struggle in any permanent and continuingly accessible form. The history of the modern women’s movement in Australia remains to be written.3 There have been two or three engrossing histories of the early days of the American movement4 but there is nothing to match the literature other contemporary revolutions, like the civil rights movement, have spawned. We told our story as it happened, in pamphlets and small-circulation newspapers, in now out-of-print anthologies or hastily published books. It still exists, difficult or impossible to retrieve unless you know exactly what you are looking for5 but no-one has yet drawn on this material to produce a book or movie or television program, which could become a more enduring record of what it was like to be there, on the crest of an exhilarating wave of radical social change.
They were intensely exciting times. The first subversive thoughts of women’s liberation trickled in f
rom the US when I was in my early 20s and still at university (I was a late starter!), and my friends and I embraced them hungrily. Here were notions that made so much sense. It was true, we realised with that flash of empathy that forever changes one’s life, that while we were all passionately espousing the cause of liberation for oppressed peoples everywhere (people of colour, Third World people, students, workers, and so on) oppression stalked our own daily lives. It had not even occurred to the radical groups of the 1960s, which boldly demanded the transformation of the state, the military, the corporation and the classroom, to question the inequality that governed relations between women and men. Once we women began to apply the language of liberation to ourselves, and to insist that we be part of this radical restructuring of society, there was no looking back.
Everything was suddenly open to question; not just why women should have to resign from permanent employment in government jobs upon marriage, but also why women were waiting hand and foot (making coffee, cranking mimeograph machines, performing sexual favours) on the male radicals of the anti–Vietnam War movement. Not just why abortion was illegal, obliging women with unwanted pregnancies to resort to dangerous and expensive backyard operators, but why there was no child care despite the increasing numbers of women in the workforce. Not just why women received on average 60 per cent of men’s wages even when they were doing the same work, but why university textbooks in literature, history, politics (you name it) contained virtually no references to women. Not just why victims of rape could not press charges unless there were collaborating witnesses, but why advertisers persisted in using women as sex kittens to sell products as diverse as automobiles and lawnmowers. Why? Why? Why? we asked, and of course asking the question was the first step to finding its answer.