by Anne Summers
The ideas, the theories, the speculations came tumbling out, as if they had simply been damned up inside the collective unconscious of women for decades; as of course they had. We soon discovered that Simone de Beauvoir had said most of it back in 1949 in her landmark work The Second Sex, that Betty Friedan had documented contemporary suburban women’s relegation to childlike second-class status in The Feminine Mystique in 1963, and that for hundreds of years women had been writing passionate tracts about the unequal treatment of their sex. Names like Aphra Behn, Mary Wollstonecraft, Harriet Martineau, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Christabel Pankhurst and Vida Goldstein soon became familiar as we dug up our past. In no time at all, a contemporary lexicon of new words was invented to name the problem – male chauvinism, patriarchy, sexism – and women’s liberation and, ultimately, feminism to describe the solution.
Because the late 1980s and early 1990s have been such depressed and gloomy times, characterised at national levels by economic scarcity and political inertia, it is difficult to recall, let alone relive, the optimism and exuberance of 20 years ago. Then, we had immense faith that we really could change the world. Even when the obstacles appeared overwhelming – and several thousand years of patriarchy was no small stumbling block – we fervently believed reform, if not revolution, was achievable. It was partly because we lived in an era when immense change was taking place (civil rights legislation had been passed in the US, the tiny nation of North Vietnam was staving off the military might of America, student protests on campuses around the world had produced unprecedented changes in university structure and curriculum). From the perspective of today, an era that has seen the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, these might not appear very significant. Historical hindsight might produce the judgement that these victories were transient or hollow: the civil rights legislation was systematically reversed by the US Supreme Court, the North Vietnamese victory produced a dictatorship, which drove thousands of their people away in boats, and campus reform in many places evolved into an often tyrannical stranglehold on universities by mediocrities who proclaim their ideological soundness to dictate intellectual endeavour. But no retrospective recantation can steal the faith we felt then that change would happen because it was necessary, and it was right.
It might at first seem paradoxical that we women who were young as the 1970s dawned should be so receptive to feminism. We were the first generation of women to have opportunity and choice; we had known neither war nor economic depression; many of us, like me, were the first members of their family ever to attend university; we had the contraceptive pill and could be sexually active without paying the price of an unwanted pregnancy; we expected to have jobs, if not careers, and to be economically independent. If anyone had told me as I entered my 20s that I should be fighting for women’s rights, I would have laughed and said, ‘We have everything we want’. And so it seemed. Except there were inconsistencies and contradictions, even if at first we did not pay them much attention. If we took note of the fact that all our university teachers were men, with the occasional exception of a lowly tutor, we thought nothing of it; it certainly did not occur to us that we could not aspire to be university lecturers. If we even noticed that the politicians who governed our country were all men, it did not concern us because we were not interested in politics.
We were, in fact, conditioned to accept the invisibility of our sex. Nor did we realise it then, but we had also been conditioned to accept limitations on our ambitions; because we seemed to have an array of options denied to our mothers or grandmothers, and because we had not yet really begun to test ourselves against a wider world so had not encountered outright discrimination, we were scarcely aware it was there. The things we did notice, like the way men felt they could patronise us or expect us to wait on them even though we were, as students, supposedly their equals, were irritants, but we did not immediately see what we could do about them.
My first glimmering that I was too accepting of an order of things that was inherently unjust to my sex came in 1966 when I read a long article entitled ‘Women: The longest revolution’ by the British writer Juliet Mitchell.6 Mitchell selected four areas for analysis – production, reproduction, socialisation and sexuality – and with the kind of Marxian precision that was so fashionable back then, produced a compelling argument that, despite our supposed advances, women were still second-class citizens who were not treated equally in any of the worlds to which we thought we belonged. I did not need to be told twice! When I compared my life with her exposé, I could see the truth of what she was portraying. Sure, I was able to attend university, but I was studying arts; it had never occurred to me, and no-one had ever suggested, that I consider law or medicine or engineering. Sure, I could choose whom to marry and we could expect an equal relationship, but once there were children, there was no question as to whose responsibility those children were even if it meant setting aside my career aspirations.
These were provocative thoughts and I shared them with my women friends. We started to look at the world differently, we began to notice things, and to be angry about what we had previously taken for granted. Why, we asked, should we have to settle for second best? It was because the door had opened partially for us, because our expectations had been raised, that we could not settle for anything less than everything.
So when a year or two later we heard the first whispers of women’s liberation we were ready. Juliet Mitchell had provided us with the cool logic, the rational underpinnings of the case for women to be up in arms; now the American women injected passion, anger, irreverence and wit. They named things in ways that instantly and gratifyingly changed the way we saw things. Yes! cock rock was the perfect description of the all-male world of rock’n’roll. Yes! A woman’s place is in the House – and the Senate! Yes! Male chauvinism did describe the arrogance and domination of the men in the anti-war movement (and the rest of the world too). The American women talked about equal pay, and child care, and equal education and all the serious issues, but they also brilliantly honed in on the culture of degradation and exploitation. They staged protests at beauty pageants, they attacked advertising that belittled women, they dumped their bras in garbage bins. We were delighted – and certainly not too proud to imitate their actions. We revelled in the serious fun of it all. We learned that even our orgasms weren’t equal! When I saw the expressions of outrage and anger on the faces of the engineering students at Adelaide University, the day a couple of us budding women’s liberationists tacked onto trees outside the student library posters advertising our latest American import, a pamphlet called ‘The myth of the vaginal orgasm’, I knew we had really started something!
The American women also devised the emblem that instantly became the logo for women’s liberation worldwide: the clenched fist inside the biological symbol for women. They reached into the past to retrieve the colours used by the suffragettes, purple for valour and white for purity, and these became our colours (although we sexually adventurous young women could not really emphathise with the purity part, we quickly adjusted its meaning to refer to our political goals). Soon the purple and white women’s liberation badges were part of our daily uniform; for special occasions, like an International Women’s Day march, we sported T-shirts with the same proud, defiant symbol emblazoned across our breasts.
Women learned, too, to have faith in each other. At first it seemed odd to attend meetings of only women – and we found ourselves justifying and defending it in the face of wails of criticism from those who were excluded – but we gained an unaccustomed strength in speaking our minds in this new, non-judgemental setting. We also discovered what it meant to share our common experiences as women, to ‘raise our consciousness’ about the many ways we felt put down and put upon because of our sex.
Armed with this invigorating confidence, a product of our new consciousness, we exploded into political action. We held demonstrations outside beauty contests, we handed
provocative pamphlets to startled people on city streets, we published newspapers and magazines. It all happened very quickly; within a few months of attending my first women’s liberation meeting with a handful of other students in Adelaide in 1969, I was off to Melbourne and to Sydney for the first national conferences. Within a year we numbered ourselves in the hundreds and not long after that we were suddenly so large that we began to have factions, to split into radical and reformist wings and to begin an argument, which persists to this day, as to the most effective ways to get what we want.
Australian feminists were, in my belief, fortunate to have burst onto the political scene just as Australian politics was emerging from the long conservative hibernation of the Menzies years. In late 1972 the Whitlam Government was elected, the first Labor government for a generation, with a mandate for reform which included a commitment to women’s issues. By contrast, in the US, the Nixon Administration coincided with those years when the women’s movement was at its most energetic and most enthusiastic. There was no interest in a feminist agenda on the part of that administration; indeed Richard Nixon vetoed a comprehensive child-care Bill in 1971, the same year his conservative Australian counterpart, Sir William McMahon in the dying days of his government, committed federal money to a small child-care initiative, which would be built upon by successive administrations in Canberra. The Whitlam Government’s promises to women were the result of pressure from the women’s movement, especially the Women’s Electoral Lobby (WEL), which polled all candidates in the 1972 elections for their attitudes on a range of women’s policies, but the presence of this reformist government in turn created a pressure on us to engage with it. The distinctive pragmatism of the Australian women’s movement was born in those years. Unlike the American movement which, after two decades of political disappointments7 and something of a retreat into personal and cultural issues, was in the early 1990s having to re-learn electoral politics, Australian feminists quickly learned to grapple with the intricacies of the government submission and the techniques of lobbying politicians and bureaucrats.
The results were astonishing. A flurry of reforms at both state and federal level quickly altered the legal landscape, and before the untimely demise of the Whitlam Government (after only two and a half years in office), funding for women’s refuges, rape crisis centres and other women’s services had been put in place. It soon became a logical consequence for feminists themselves to start entering government and become advisors on women’s policies or, in some cases, administrators of the policies they had stomped the streets to achieve. By the mid-1970s, that other distinctively Australian feminist accomplishment, the femocrat, or feminist bureaucrat, was born and as we entered the 1990s these women could be found working at various levels throughout the Commonwealth and state public services.8
Although feminism very quickly became an international phenomenon, at least in the industrialised world, distinctly national styles of feminism simultaneously evolved. Australia was no exception. Australian feminists certainly drew on the thinking and the agendas of women in the US, and to a lesser extent Britain, but it was not long before we grew impatient with being mere imitators and began to fashion our own programs, deciding what were the priorities for Australian women, and developing our own strategies for addressing these.
A good example of this was the way we tackled the terrible problem of violence against women. At first we just discussed the issue. Although we had our theories about why men were violent towards women, we did not immediately see what we could do about it; then several searing experiences made a number of us determined to do something concrete and practical. The first such experience was a personal one.
Late one evening, at home with the two friends with whom I shared a house in inner-city Sydney, we heard a pounding on our back door. We were startled, and a little frightened, because our backyard was inaccessible except through the house. We rushed through the kitchen and found a young woman with a baby standing at our door. She was in a state of complete terror and begged us to take her in; once inside she told us her husband had been beating her and to escape she had clambered over the 2.5-metre-high fence that separated our backyards. I could scarcely believe how she had managed such a feat, let alone with a baby in her arms, and I suddenly understood the desperation of a woman who fears for her life at the hands of a violent husband. I knew then that the women’s movement had to do something immediate and concrete to help women escape permanently from such violent situations. Within a week a small group of us began meeting to decide what to do.
We knew of Erin Pizzey who had started a refuge for battered women somewhere in the north of England and we decided to do the same. I phoned Erin to talk to her about how she had got started. It was not an especially satisfying conversation as she was obviously stressed, babies were screaming in the background and there was not a lot of relevant advice she could provide. Just do it, she said, and that was really all we needed.9 We began looking for a house.
At first, I thought we could persuade someone to give us one. I approached a number of Sydney property developers and explained what we wanted, and tried to make the idea attractive to them by pointing out the favourable publicity such a gesture would bring. (At the time, developers were getting a very bad press for the heedless manner in which they were tearing down historic inner-city houses and replacing them with ugly high-rises.) Only one responded and the house he offered us was not suitable because, apart from being totally derelict, it was on a very busy street and we thought it would be neither restful for women seeking refuge nor safe for their children. Then I remembered a recent ABC television documentary, which had exposed the role of the Church of England as a slum landlord in the inner-city suburbs of Sydney; the program had revealed that as properties became vacant they were being warehoused in the hope they could be sold to the federal government for its proposed new public housing scheme.
I began a systematic survey of all vacant houses owned by the Church of England, and I knew I had struck gold when I found myself standing outside a pair of tiny semi-detached cottages in Westmoreland Street, Glebe. They appeared to be in reasonable condition, and seemed to have working plumbing, they were in a quiet tree-lined street in a neighbourhood that probably had a higher density of feminists than any other part of Sydney – and they were unoccupied. One of the houses even had a woman’s name: Elsie.
All this happened in February 1974. Early in March, to mark International Women’s Day, a huge two-day speak-out on violence was held at the Teachers’ Federation auditorium in Sussex Street. It was an emotionally wrenching experience to listen as woman after woman stood up and told her story. We heard women tell of being raped, of being beaten, of being intimidated, of living in fear. Many of these women were telling their stories for the first time, finally able to reveal what had seemed a shameful secret. By the end of the first day, there was not a woman present who was not weeping in empathy and seething with rage: we had to do something. The next afternoon I rose to speak. Mine was not a personal story, I said. My purpose was to tell everyone about the plans a small group of us had to establish a refuge for women wanting to escape from violence – and to invite them to join in. The next Thursday, at our final planning meeting before seizing Elsie, more than 100 women turned up. We explained that we intended to break into the house we had found, change the locks and thereby establish legal tenancy, and then try to shame the Church of England into letting us remain there rent-free until we could approach the federal government for funds to run the refuge. Security was paramount, we warned, because we did not want the police to be there to prevent us gaining entry. We did not disclose the address but asked everyone to meet us on Saturday morning in a nearby street from where we would march to our destination.
It was accomplished with utter ease. Once we had taken possession of the two houses, we rang all the television networks and announced to the world that Australia’s first women’s refuge was now open for business. We organised our
selves into rosters to ensure Elsie was open 24 hours a day – and waited for our first woman to show up. She came three days later, a Scottish woman with two small boys who had been beaten by her husband for years, but because she had no family in Australia had nowhere to go to escape him. She had seen us on television, and found her way in from Sydney’s outer-western suburbs to our front door. Within a week the two houses were crammed full with women and children – and a new movement was born.
It was very quickly apparent that two little houses could not begin to meet the demand for refuge. Other groups began planning to establish new refuges in other locations and soon there were three, then 30, in every city and every state. Within five years there were more than 100 refuges, all of them receiving at least some government funds. A great many of them, in tribute to the first, have women’s names. The refuges established by the women’s movement differed from traditional shelters run by religious or charitable organisations in several important ways. When members of our group had visited some of these places we found that women could not stay there during the day, nor could they leave their children while they travelled into the city to apply for emergency relief money. This meant that women had to find somewhere for themselves and their kids to spend more than eight hours each day, not an easy task in any city, and an almost impossible one for someone who is traumatised, often injured, and usually has no money. We resolved that our refuges (and we chose that name deliberately to differentiate them from the shelters run by these organisations) would provide women with total psychological, physical and economic support. ‘The Refuge would be a living and working community based on autonomy and self-management, in which we would put into practice the Women’s Movement’s organizational principle of collectivity’, explained Vivien Johnson in her account of the Marrickville Women’s Refuge, which opened its doors in April 1976.10