Not a day has passed this week when the role of women in this country hasn’t been front and centre of public debate. A fortnight ago we had two women in federal cabinet. Now we have five. It’s still just 24%, but it’s a big lift, even a new bottom line. From now on, surely it will be impossible for a prime minister to appoint just one woman to the most powerful decision-making body in the land and say he’s terribly sorry, but it’s a merit thing.
We still like a “first” story, too. Marise Payne is the first female defence minister and nobody suggests she is somehow less competent than her predecessor, Kevin Andrews. Of course, having a female defence minister is likely to have little impact on our defence policy – is feminism meant to change the structure of things, or just give talented women the chance to shoot for the corner office? Will there ever be an answer to that question?
This week, too, former prime minister Tony Abbott’s chief of staff, Peta Credlin, blamed sexist stereotypes for much of the criticism of her as controlling and divisive. “If I was a guy I wouldn’t be bossy, I’d be strong,” she said. That argument goes around and around because it’s impossible to prove or disprove. Some will claim she was incompetent, others that there has to be a fair dose of sexism for people to blame Credlin for the failures of her boss.
Then on Thursday, the new prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, made his first big costed policy announcement – on domestic violence against women. There was a $100m package that most people involved in the area thought was not enough but a good start. But it was his language that was most startling. This is a country steeped in the (male) mateship myth, obsessed with (male) sport, and where casual sexism is entirely unremarkable.
So there must have been some spluttering around the nation when Turnbull declared “a national objective to ensure Australia is more respecting of women”. Not only that, it was now going to be “un-Australian” to disrespect women. Given that the very essence of Australia since 1788 has been disrespect towards women, this may be Turnbull’s prime ministerial promise.
It is fitting in such a week that a conference was devoted to Australian feminism – where it had come from, and where it might be going. The conference celebrated Anne Summers’ wonderfully titled book Damned Whores and God’s Police, published 40 years ago this year. Forty is a funny number. You’re not young any more, and not yet old. You’ve been around long enough to have made mistakes, but there’s time enough to try again. Such is the state of Australian feminism, perhaps. So here are three interesting things the conference tossed up for discussion about feminism in 2015.
Language mattered then, and now
The words Turnbull used to describe domestic violence were as critical as the cash on the table. One commentator said his language alone was a “giant leap for the domestic violence debate”. How to frame issues was a conference thread, both in recalling the debates of the 1970s and grappling with issues now.
This might seem an esoteric point, but it’s hard to understate its importance. In the 1994 update of her book, Summers wrote of how significant it was when, before the 1993 election, prime minister Paul Keating announced major changes to childcare policy in an economic statement rather than in a women’s or social affairs statement. That too was a giant leap.
Australian feminism has always cared about practical matters and economic gains. Summers, who has worked as an adviser to both Bob Hawke and Keating, wrote she had learned to become a “fervent pragmatist … We must grab every bit we can whenever the opportunity strikes and not, as I would have argued 20 years ago, hold out for that perfection which, in politics as in life, almost never ever arrives.”
Yet she also stressed that during heady days of the 70s there were simply no words to describe what women knew was wrong. In 1975 when Damned Whores was published, such terms as “domestic violence” had not been coined; it was called “wife bashing” if it was called anything at all. Sexual harassment existed but there was no word for it, let alone legislation against it. There was no term for date rape. Summers called it “petty rape”, an expression that has thankfully not survived. The glass ceiling was there, but nobody called it that.
“It is almost disconcerting to realise how ill-equipped we were back then to talk about such important issues,” Summers told the conference. ”Once you have a name for something, you can start to understand it, and to address it.”
Domestic violence is the big issue and it’s all about gender
Twice the conference was interrupted by terrible news. On Tuesday we were told of the death of seven-month-pregnant Kirralee Paepaerei and the arrest of her partner. The following day came the news that a 12-year-old girl had been killed and her father had been arrested. Both times there was an audible gasp from the audience, a painful sense of “not again”.
Violence against women, especially intimate partner violence, is the defining issue for feminism (and no doubt for many people who wouldn’t call themselves feminists). Feminist research and thinking dominates the way it is understood and has a big influence on the official response to it. That is right and proper – it was, after all, feminists in the 70s, including Summers, who first insisted the issue be taken seriously, and who opened the early “battered women’s” refuges.
The former governor general, Quentin Bryce, and the former sex discrimination commissioner, Elizabeth Broderick, both spoke at the conference, and agreed violence against women was the biggest human rights issue in Australia.
Bryce has recently completed a report for the Queensland government on domestic violence and will oversee the implementation of its 140 recommendations.
Bryce has said: “It’s about the rigid gender roles and stereotypes that characterise our society – the culture and the attitude that support violence against women.”
This is the orthodox feminist view and I declare myself a bad feminist on this one. Gender inequality is crucial, of course, but it is baffling to me why many feminists are so dismissive of other factors. At this conference and elsewhere, they are deliberately downplayed or specifically rejected.
Perhaps there is a fear they will complicate the gender equality story, the bland idea put about that all women are at risk of domestic violence pretty much equally because of the culture’s overall attitude to women. Perhaps it has something to do with that old debate about feminist resistance to acknowledging the centrality of class and race when it comes to issues like this.
Whether or not they are causes of domestic violence seems a pointless discussion – factors such as alcohol and entrenched disadvantage are so strongly associated with domestic violence that to seriously reduce its incidence requires tackling them or least talking about them loudly and publicly.
To take the feminist argument to its logical conclusion, if the central cause of violence against women is gender inequality, does that mean that gender inequality is is 34 times worse in Aboriginal communities than non-Aboriginal communities? After all, Aboriginal women are 34 times more likely to be hospitalised for family violence injuries. Or are entrenched poverty and chronic alcohol abuse huge factors, along with the legacy of dispossession?
Given that reports of domestic violence to police are so concentrated in pockets of disadvantage, particularly in regional and rural areas, does this mean there is much less gender equality in these communities than in affluent city areas? And if that is so, could it have something to do with entrenched disadvantage that means much higher rates of all violence in these communities, including domestic violence?
Turnbull made no mention of a national objective to reduce our “un-Australian” abuse of alcohol or even a goal to reduce the number of liquor outlets – which would indeed have an impact on violence – or to tackle the “un-Australian” nature of entrenched disadvantage. These things would be hard indeed. Easier, perhaps, to talk about “respect” for women.
Academic Dennis Altman hinted at another possible way of looking at this. He suggested to the conference that if domestic violence was seen in the context of male violence generally – often directed at other men, as well as women – and was specifically linked with this countries’ relationship with alcohol, “it may give us a new way of entering into what has got to be a crucial debate”.
At the moment, feminists don’t seem to be interested.
Young women are feminists, too
Summers, now 70, has a droll sense of humour. She recalled the earnestness of the 70s, when feminists embraced collective decision-making and all-female meetings. They were so hard line that only women were invited to the launch of Dammed Whores and God’s Police, which meant that Summers’s male publisher couldn’t attend (he was understanding about it, apparently). Summers recalled intense discussions about whether “no men allowed” included boy toddlers.
Many conference goers were 70s feminists – ageing now, but still firing. There were women who worked in women’s refuges and health centres, and as teachers and academics and writers. There was a smattering of young women – I sat next to 16-year-old Katie Sproule, who took notes as though she were in class.
Novelist and nonfiction writer Emily McGuire demolished the oft-heard view that young women weren’t interested in feminism, or confined it to a lazy “like” on a Facebook page. Young feminists, she said, were everywhere, in political parties and unions, organising Slut Walks, working in refuges and health centres. They were in women’s professional groups, running businesses, launching blogs.
“Women’s voices are now heard in every field of public life, which is why it’s so sad to talk to young feminists who say they feel unheard, they feel invisible. [No matter] how loud they shout … how politely or ultimately forcefully they interject, their very existence [is] ignored.”
What McGuire also compellingly argued is that young feminists are entirely relaxed about something that older feminists still struggle with. Damned Whores does talk about Aboriginal and lesbian women but, like most feminist books of the time, was overwhelmingly engrossed with the concerns of middle-aged white women.
That gender intersects with matters like race, class and disability doesn’t faze young women in the least, said McGuire. “Feminism must be intersectional she said, or it’s just another way “for the already privileged to gain more for themselves”.
Queensland-based writer and journalist Amy McQuire said she never calls herself a feminist. She calls herself an Aboriginal feminist.
“I think Aboriginal men are actually more naturally allies to Aboriginal women than white feminists have been in the past.”
Siobhan Towner, a NSW public servant and activist for LGBTI and disability rights who uses a wheelchair, said her parents approached 60 primary schools before one would accept her. Then at 18, she told her mother she was a lesbian. Her mother said, “that’s a lot of otherness for someone to take on. To her I’d like to say, yes it is, and challenge accepted.”
McGuire said it was time to abandon the notion of “waves” of feminism. There were now pools of feminism, hidden pipes, even oases. Feminism was diverse and always had been. “The whole idea of a cohesive movement was a myth,” she said. Now, and in the 1970s.
