by Anne Summers
Australian feminism thus began a unique pattern of directly providing services to women in need. In doing so, we soon learned that we also had to become skilled in the art of supplicating governments because it cost money to provide for the women who came to us. Elsie existed for nine months on donated food, furniture, clothing and labour, but it was a hard, hand-to-mouth existence and sometimes we felt guilty that the women who came to us had to live in such squalid conditions. We were accused by other feminists of being reckless with these women’s emotional lives by failing to provide them with privacy and stability. Most of the other refuges waited until they got government money before they opened. But if our way of doing it was foolhardy, it was undeniable that there was a desperate need for the service, a need which sadly, to this day, continues to grow. In 1990, 265 women’s refuges received government funding.11 We also learned that it was impractical and even dangerous to lump all victims of violence together. Women who had been raped could not be catered for by the refuge, and soon another group spun itself off and established the Sydney Rape Crisis Centre, a 24-hour telephone advice and referral service. I happened to be on duty late one night during our first few months when we received a call from a man who said he needed help: a woman friend of his had been raped by more than a dozen men after leaving a Balmain hotel the night before.
These experiences of direct contact with women who had suffered violence at the hands of men had two important and enduring influences on the direction of Australian feminism. They not only toughened us up, moved us quickly from being mere theorists to being providers of practical services, but they required us to become very pragmatic. This, I think, is one of the hallmarks of Australian feminism and one of its most attractive qualities. Although there has always been a great deal of internal debate within the movement about the extent to which our provision of services both absolves governments and other agencies from responsibility and props up rather than radically reforms an oppressive system, at the end of the day most Australian feminists would rather act than talk. Our commitment to improving women’s lives is real, tangible and enduring. It is a tradition of which we can be proud, and a legacy I hope you will embrace.
The past 20 years have not been without their setbacks. Governments have either reduced spending on programs that fund services like refuges or have failed to allow them to grow in real terms. Many women were especially hard hit by the economic recessions of the early 1980s and 1990s, and their real levels of unemployment failed to be accurately recorded in official statistics. In many areas of employment, the initial rush of progress seems to have stalled and women complain that their prospects for promotion and higher earnings, especially in the corporate sector, seem as remote as ever.
But in surveying more than 20 years of accomplishment, the women’s movement is entitled to feel some satisfaction, and to recognise that far more has been won than has been lost. For instance, the commitment to meet total demand for child care, especially, and its announcement as part of a general economic statement rather than in the women’s package during the 1993 election campaign, represents a quantum leap forward, an acknowledgment that women’s claims are integral to the political process. So, why don’t more feminists, especially those of my generation, feel more of a sense of pride? Why is there widespread despondency, paranoia even, and a tendency to downgrade our achievements, dispute their legitimacy, even their existence, and to concentrate on negatives, on what hasn’t changed at the expense of what has?
I think we are actually more pleased with ourselves than many of us are prepared to let on; no-one who grew up in the 1940s or 1950s, or even the 1960s, can seriously claim that women’s choices and opportunities are not immensely greater than they were then. But it is not really in the makeup of rebels to rest on their laurels, or to announce that the war is over; there is always another issue, a fresh outrage, a dire cause to command our attention and keep us battle-ready. It is our continual pointing out of what remains wrong that I think causes many younger women to be wary of us, to consider us as too negative (read: anti-men), too pessimistic, too depressing, and not therefore adherents of a movement they would want to join. Who wants to be constantly portrayed as a victim? To have only the downside pointed out without the balancing reminders that life is not all unremitting gloom? We have too frequently lapsed into a kind of ghetto mentality, and have been too inclined to point out continually how women are put upon, forgetting that most women are happy enough just to try and get on with their lives. This tendency has made the movement unalluring to women who want to feel (and who indeed are) confident and assertive and ready to deal with the world on their terms.
Did we pay a price? Most of us did. Very few marriages or relationships were able to survive the first ferocious years of feminism. Then, as now, women were the prime instigators in ending relationships that no longer suited them. Most of us felt unable to continue in arrangements that had been contracted on the old, unequal terms, and many men retreated bruised and puzzled at their misfortune at having their wife or girlfriend fall under the sway of these radical new ideas. It was not uncommon when this book was first published for men I did not know to approach me and blame me for the breakup of their marriage! Many of us went for years unable to find a relationship that satisfied both our emotional and our political needs. Many women today still can’t, because most men have still not been able to adapt to the new realities of women’s lives. This has been pointed out by social researcher Hugh Mackay who has described ‘the widespread failure of Australian men to adapt their behaviour to match the redefinition of gender roles which has taken place in the minds of women’.12 Many women have preferred to live alone rather than endure the never-ending battle. Many feminists of my generation are childless, a fact that worries some young women today. Do we have to choose between independence and our desire to have children? they ask. The answer is, No it should no longer be necessary. But a generation ago it was a tougher choice and many of us opted for independence at whatever price. (Many women had last-minute regrets about this and as my contemporaries neared the age of 40, there was a surge of single motherhood among those who decided they did not want to miss out on being a mother just because they did not have a husband or a partner. Not only has this trend continued, and been made famous by the US television sitcom Murphy Brown, but changed social attitudes towards single mothers means that the kind of stigma that was still there even in the 1970s is no longer an obstacle.)
Younger women complain, too, that it is not easy to find men who understand that women today are different – and who approve of the changes. Younger men should be different, too; after all, they grew up to a changed world, and many of them have been raised by feminist mothers. Yet why are so many of them resistant? Why can’t they see that a relationship between equals is more pleasurable and more satisfying than the traditional inequalities? It remains a sad fact that it is not just women of my age who are confronted with these hard choices; most of us will be, one way or another, until the human species completes its evolution towards true equality. We can take comfort from the fact that the choices are there for us; previous generations of women seldom had any choice but to comply meekly with the wishes of father and husband.
Not all the feminists of my generation have remained activist in the sense of belonging to groups and continuing to agitate for further change, but I can think of no-one who has repudiated her feminism. Our lives, and our way of looking at the world, were so utterly transformed that the possibility of going back simply does not exist. Feminism became the filter through which we measured everything: books and movies, newspaper articles and politicians’ pronouncements, day-to-day encounters and everyday speech. It is simply impossible for us not to flinch when we see or hear examples of sexism; it is likewise difficult for us to ignore them. Even women who have retreated from organised activities are still in the trenches when it comes to contending with daily life. Those people who find this behaviour atavistic, who tell us that
this kind of constant vigilance is now tedious, that we need to lighten up, simply can’t comprehend the impossibility of what they ask.
There have been times, I admit, when my feminist filter has seemed like a burden, when I have become weary of always being the one to object to a remark, of being the spoiler or, worse, when people adjust their behaviour around me and, if they allow an ill-judged comment to slip out, apologise as if it were only my presence, rather than the inherent offensiveness of what was said, that was the inhibitor. I don’t want to be anyone’s moral guardian, a modern-day God’s Police. A conversation or a comment that demeans women is obnoxious, not because I or another card-carrying feminist happened to overhear it, but because it relies on sexual stereotypes or reduces women to sexual functions. The only consolation I take from such situations is that by exhibiting some shame, the apologist is at least acknowledging the extent to which attitudes have changed. Twenty years ago, when we first began to protest the everyday depictions of women as chicks or even cunts (to name just a couple of the labels we endured then), we were scoffed at: Waddya mean that’s sexist? Back then, that was life. Today, at least defensiveness and squirming have replaced bafflement and bluff, and young women who have grown up in this somewhat improved environment would have to go back to old (say, 1950s or 1960s) movies and magazines to get some idea of how bad it used to be.
Similarly, when we survey our unfinished agenda it is easy to be overwhelmed by what lies ahead, and to discount what we have already accomplished, rather than take heart from a record in which progress has outpaced setbacks. The strong streak of negativism that has always characterised the women’s movement could be seen as part of its Australianness (since Australians are generally prone to negative thinking) were it not for the fact that a similar attitude seems to pervade feminism in all developed countries.
No doubt because the odds were so enormous when we confronted centuries of patriarchal society, we girded ourselves with a protective armour of pessimism and paranoia, but sometimes I think we forget how joyful and optimistic we were when we began. As our movement matured, and our program for change became more complicated (especially as we developed internal disagreements about both substance and priorities), the early exuberance waned. Today, I think we understand that it is going to be decades before we see the final shape of the profound social revolution we unleashed; that recognition is profoundly depressing – particularly to those who fear that you, the women who are young today, are not ready to pick up the cudgels and continue the fight. We worry that our wins might be whittled away. That had begun to happen in the US during the Reagan and Bush years where the legal right to abortion was under siege, a setback that thankfully was reversed after the election of President Clinton. We also wonder what will happen to the momentum for change if new energies and fresh visions are not brought to the task. Will women continue to improve their position in the workplace, and to increase their earnings relative to men, if pressure from the women’s movement wanes? Will apathy replace activism and seem to signal that, once again, women are content with what they already have?
An agenda for the rest of our lives
What disturbs me most is the prospect of a generation gap emerging in our agenda. As I have already explained, we pioneers will not let go, we cannot let go, but our focus is already beginning to change as we take on issues that are newly relevant to us as we become older. As we pursue these, we will have less time for matters that are no longer so pressing on us. When we launched ourselves into political action, we weren’t doing it for posterity. We wanted a better world for ourselves. We still do. As we age, our issues are changing and so will our priorities. We are coming to the end of our reproductive years and are having to confront the condition of being no longer capable of maternity in a society that still overemphasises women’s maternal status. We are beginning to discover a whole new set of medical problems and social stigma associated with the onset of menopause. It is logical, I suppose, that the generation that launched the movement will have to see it through, and that new issues will emerge according to where we are in our life-cycle. (Twenty years ago we used to joke about setting up feminist retirement communities for when we got old; suddenly it is no longer a joke and we are starting to wonder, and to worry, about how to deal with being a physically frail and economically weak elderly woman after a lifetime of being strong and self-sufficient.) What this means for you is that we will not always be there to fight for the things you need. You are the ones who will have to remain vigilant.
What will your issues be? You will have to decide, but I think it is likely that, as happened with us, you won’t choose them – they will choose you. You will act if you find obstacles standing between you and what you want, or if an entitlement you assumed was yours forever looks like being taken away. The threat to legal abortion in the US introduced to political action thousands of previously apathetic young women (and men). I hope Australian women will not have to contend with an emergency of this magnitude, but I do expect that you will at various times in your lives be drawn into action simply because there is still so much unfinished business.
You are able to have it all, in the sense that you are not forced by law or convention, as earlier generations of women were, to choose between marriage and family or a career. But simply being able to do it does not make it easy. It is often exhausting and debilitating, especially for those women in their 30s who are having babies just at the time their careers are at their most demanding. I know many young professional women who, after struggling for a year or so to juggle this double burden, take the reluctant decision to leave their jobs for a while, or to work part-time, because they can no longer endure the constant tiredness, the nagging feelings of guilt that they are short-changing their children during those early formative years, the never having any time to themselves. But this choice is often not guilt-free either. Many women feel they should be able to manage, and have to deal with feelings of inadequacy when they finally admit to themselves that they cannot. But it is not these women who should torture themselves with the thought they have failed. It is the individual employer, the industry, and the society as a whole that has failed them. We are not providing women with real choices if the price exacted from them is so steep; nor is this option open to every harassed working mother, since many families cannot survive without the woman’s earnings.
We still have a long way to go in reconciling the demands of home and work. We have to make the workplace, and work schedules, more accommodating to the needs of working women, especially those with young children. We also have to stop seeing this as just an individual problem, or a women’s problem. Men are involved too, as fathers, as employers, as co-workers. So is society at large: we all must share the responsibility for perpetuating our civilisation whether we as individuals are parents or not. There is some recognition of this in the laws that now provide for maternity and parental leave, in government funds allocated to child care, and in trade union and other campaigns to heighten awareness of the issues. But these gestures have barely begun to make an impact in individual workplaces, and on the lives of most working parents. It is going to be a continuing battle, and one that will involve many of you in the most intimate way.
The other, even more intimate battleground is your love life. You will also be challenged to find new and more satisfying ways of reconciling love and independence. We all need both, but many women in previous generations had to choose. The terms of marriage, or a long-standing relationship, are inherently unequal when one partner is economically or emotionally entrapped, and for most of recorded history most women had no choice but to surrender their independence in return for economic support. We no longer need do that, but we have barely begun to learn how to relate to our lovers under our new circumstances. Everything now is open to question and negotiation, not just the mundane (like sharing housework) but the really important – Will our relationship be exclusive and committed? If one of us gets an exciting job o
ffer in another city, will we both move? Will we have kids? If so, when and how many? Whose job is set aside if that becomes necessary while the kids are young? And so on.
Most of these subjects simply did not arise under the old, unequal terms of relationships. It was an uncontested assumption of marriage that where sacrifices had to be made, the woman would make them. If you no longer see it that way, it is a sign of how far things have changed. But the pace of change has been uneven and erratic, and I think it is fair to say that most men have not changed as quickly or as profoundly as most women have. Indeed a great many men saw no need for change – why, indeed, when the cards were stacked in their favour! – and continue to resist it. For many women of my generation, the battle was simply too wearisome, and they walked away from it, some of them into the arms of other women, or to a life of solitary freedom. Some of you may make similar choices, but most of you will want to love and live with men, and there is no escaping your need to have that love coexist comfortably with the other parts of your life. Today, too, we live in a world that is terrifyingly more risky than when I was young, and where trust between women and men has never counted for more. We can no longer be cavalier about sexual freedom when the price might be a sexually transmitted disease which, like AIDS, is fatal, or like chlamydia can lead to infertility. We are still groping towards understanding the consequences of these new perils for our love lives. It is widely predicted that we will become more conservative, that sexual fidelity will once more become cherished and as imperative as it was before effective methods of birth control. This perhaps is already happening, but we need to be wary that fear of the sexual jungle beyond our sexually safe little world does not become a new form of involuntary dependency, as constricting as economic dependence once was for women.