Accidental Feminists Read online

  According to author Gillian Thomas, Congressman Smith ‘played his amendment for laughs’, cracking sexist jokes that are hair-raising in retrospect but were quite unexceptional at the time, and his suggestion was greeted with obliging guffaws by the male-dominated Congress. Some of the twelve (out of 435) women members rose to try and combat the laughter and make some serious arguments in support of the amendment that would make discrimination against women illegal. Thomas quotes Democratic congresswoman Martha Griffiths as saying to the House: ‘I presume that if there had been any necessity to point out that women were a second-class sex the laughter would have proved it.’ Despite the laughter, both the amendment (an attempt, according to Thomas, by segregationists to derail the Civil Rights Act) and the bill were passed.

  Australia was certainly not immune to this routine disrespect towards women and their work, their rights and their achievements. In 2003, the ABC ran series two of A Big Country Revisited. The program compared the Australia portrayed in the original documentary series (1968–91) with the Australia of the twenty-first century. I remembered A Big Country well from my youth and enjoyed its resurrection. The episode that etched itself into my consciousness was called ‘Grey Hair Doesn’t Mean You’re a Fuddy Duddy’, and looked at the Country Women’s Association then and now.

  What struck me was the extraordinary tone taken by the male narrator of the original program from the 1960s. He spoke of these women with the same patronising derision that the US Congress had indulged in a few years earlier. No matter how hard these women worked or how much money they raised, the narrator saw them as a joke. They were spoken of as if they were children who were aping the grown-ups (aka men). What they did might be cute, but it was also futile—an attitude that goes right back to Samuel Johnson (1709–84) and his much-quoted response to attending a Quaker meeting: ‘Sir, a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.’ This attitude of condescending astonishment towards any achievement by a woman had survived virtually unchanged for over 300 years, well into the 1960s.

  For the women of my generation (and no doubt for every previous generation throughout history), this derision mattered. The almost universal scorn and ridicule towards women very effectively undermined their confidence and self-worth. Susan’s adoptive father routinely referred to his cowed and submissive wife as ‘my little turd’. You can perhaps imagine the effect that had on his growing daughters. Social researcher Hugh Mackay in his book What Makes Us Tick? lists the ten desires that need to be met before you can live a satisfying life. He says he lists them in no particular order except for the first one, which is the most important. He calls it ‘the desire to be taken seriously’. When I first read Mackay’s book it was as if a light had been turned on. I saw clearly that feminism is the struggle by half the human race to be taken seriously by the other half. ‘Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter’ said Christine Blasey Ford as she testified about her alleged abuse at the hands of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh at his confirmation hearing. A phrase that resonated with women all over the world. When I was young, when the women of my generation were in their formative years, we were not taken seriously either. Nor, just as damagingly, were our mothers, or our grandmothers. Indeed, when I asked a number of women of my generation to answer some questions about their youth, aspirations, relationships and lives, not one of them said she wanted to be like her mother. Bev was unequivocal: ‘Trying not to be like my mother has driven me in untold ways throughout my life.’ Veronica agreed: ‘Anyone but her’ was her heartfelt response.

  Feminism has had a considerable impact in the decades since my generation were quietly rejecting the lives their mothers lived, but the damage that had been done to the women who came before us was hard to shake off. As I half-joke on occasion, 2000 years of people being disappointed when you were born is not overcome in a few decades—and, make no mistake, when I was born, the birth of a boy was still cause for more celebration than the birth of a girl.

  The major effect I can remember feminism having on my peers in the Frenchs Forest and Belrose of the 1970s was in terms of sexual liberation. We were all on the pill by the time we were sixteen, and most of us were having sex. My teenage years were also awash with illegal drugs, particularly marijuana and, for the really daring, LSD. Oddly, I was radical politically, especially about the position of women, but I was very square about drugs. Most of my friends were the exact opposite.

  I am not arguing, however, that second-wave feminism had no effect other than sexual liberation on the women I knew. It revolutionised my mother’s life, giving her the courage to do a mature-age matriculation course at tech (as TAFE was then called) and go on to take advantage of Gough Whitlam’s education reforms. When the new Australian Labor Party (ALP) government abolished university tuition fees in 1974, a wave of mature-age women like my mother grasped their second chance with both, highly motivated hands. They could finally get the university education that their fathers (poor Kerrie) had denied them. Peta missed out on a free university education, but nevertheless went to Wollongong University and studied social science. She says graduating in 1994 boosted her confidence to such an extent that for the first time in her life she felt ‘I can do anything, or at least try’. Many other women who had been trained from birth to think poorly of themselves and their capacity had the same epiphany as they found, to their astonishment, that they had gained high marks on the university essays they’d handed in, despite their sense of inadequacy. Their confidence and self-esteem blossomed thanks to their unexpected success.

  Women’s liberation had a huge effect on our teachers, too. We still had to put up with humiliating policing of our uniforms—particularly skirt lengths—but we knew enough to protest and we also knew many of our teachers fully supported our objections. That was liberating. Whether we were up for competing with blokes in the workplace or not, schoolgirls in the late 1960s and early 1970s were no longer as compliant and well behaved as those who had gone before us. This was shocking and unsettling, particularly to older generations.

  Even so, the consequences for girls who rebelled when I was a teenager could be very daunting. I remember friends of mine being threatened by teachers, parents and religious leaders with the possibility they would be charged (yes, charged) with being ‘in moral danger’ and sent to what was ominously referred to as ‘The Girls’ Home’. Decades later, when I read some of the revelations about Jimmy Savile’s predatory paedophilia, particularly at a school for what was referred to as ‘emotionally disturbed girls’ (aka mouthy and defiant girls), my blood ran cold. In Ireland, of course, they ran the risk of being sent to the infamous Magdalene Laundries. And, no doubt, some of my peers were whisked off to Homes for Unmarried Mothers to await the birth of illegitimate babies that they were then not permitted to keep. The treatment of Indigenous girls was even more terrifying and horrific. In every case, it was the girls who were seen as bad and deserving of punishment, never those who preyed upon them—a routine cruelty that was accepted almost without comment in my youth, except, to their credit, by feminists. And, worse, the stigma attached to ‘wayward’ (or ‘emotionally disturbed’) girls made them sitting ducks for predators in ways that are only just coming to light now. Many of the women I interviewed hinted at abuse when they were young. Susan became pregnant at sixteen and was coerced into giving up her baby. As an adopted child herself, she says her situation was presented to her ‘as if it ran in the family’.

  As always, vulnerability increased the lower the rung of the social ladder you occupied—but none of us were immune. Going to university might have been a marker of social class at Forest High in the 1970s, but sexism was having the same effects in posher schools and suburbs too. One of the most famous Sydney private girls’ schools (then and now) was Abbotsleigh in Wahroonga. Through the sister of a boyfriend, I had become friendly with a group of girls from that famous school, run, at the time,
by the legendary Betty Archdale. While the private-school girls I knew tended to be called Sally, Fiona, Pippi and Deirdre rather than Kerrie, Karen or Lynne, they were no more unconventional than we were. They may have expected to marry a professional man rather than a tradie, but otherwise their life plans were much the same: a job (dental nurse, interior decorator, sales assistant in a posh shop), marriage and then children. No matter your social class, a man was still the only financial plan most girls could imagine. After all, it was the only model we had actually seen. The feminists might have talked a good game, but in the early 1970s that was largely what rhetoric about women’s rights seemed to be: argument and polemic.

  The wave of discontent and rebellion that gave rise to second-wave feminism when I was young took everyone by surprise. No-one anticipated the changes in women’s lives that were to come. My favourite illustration of how blind the world was to the coming revolution is the famous Up series of films by Michael Apted. Beginning in 1964 (there’s that year again), the series continues today. A now-elderly Apted has been visiting the same fourteen Britons every seven years, starting when they were seven-year-olds. They are now sixty-one. The first episode was made for the British TV series World in Action.

  The concept behind the series was the famous Jesuit motto ‘Give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man’. The producers thought they were creating an exposé on the effects of social class—which they certainly did—but the series also turned out to be an essay on the revolution in the lives of women that has occurred in the last half-century. It is a revolution that in 1964 was unimaginable—so unimaginable that the fourteen seven-year-olds chosen by the producers for the original episode included ten boys but only four girls.Yes, four girls: one from an upper-class background, and three working-class friends. It is impossible that such a project today would be similarly cast. Indeed, even if it was tried, the outcry would be deafening. In 1964, nobody so much as noticed.

  So why did the producers choose only four girls? Well, no-one thought girls’ lives would be very interesting, not even the girls themselves. They, like my friends a few short years later, assumed girls would just grow up, work for a bit, marry and have kids. Their lives would be shaped by their husbands’ lives, as women’s had been for millennia.

  For many of the women who are over fifty in the early twenty-first century, this is another of the assumptions that formed them. Even if you had a feminist mother like mine, you still absorbed the messages about our limited future through the pores of your skin. As Australia’s former sex discrimination commissioner Liz Broderick brilliantly put it, sexism is like asbestos in the walls: you just breathe it in. We were baby-making machines, always had been, always would be, and we were supposed to be satisfied with that. The women who were beginning to assert their full and separate humanity were often caricatured as harpies, termagants and shrews. They were held up to us as awful warnings, not as women to admire or emulate. Undaunted, feminists—like all good revolutionaries before them—took on the language that was used to belittle and marginalise them and owned it. One of the first feminist publishing houses was called Virago, and an early feminist newspaper flexed its defiant muscles under the banner of Spare Rib.

  Feminism and its supporters—the unladylike, shrill ‘women’s libbers’—persisted, despite the mockery, scorn and ridicule. And thanks to them, the lives of women and girls have changed beyond recognition since 1964. Yet it is important to point out just what attitudes to women were like during my generation’s childhood and adolescence. They set the context for the rest of this book, because we heard the contradictory messages and absorbed them. On the one hand we saw the limited lives most women then lived. We saw the disrespect in which women—no matter who they were or what they did—were held. But we were also encouraged to get a decent education, and, as we reached our adolescence, many of the women in our lives began to rebel and directly challenge the shackles that bound them and the attitudes that held them down. As we grew up, we found that we were expected to be in paid work while still doing the lion’s share of the unpaid work at home. We married, but—thanks to those paid jobs—if we were unhappy with our husbands we could leave them, and many of us did. Intellectually, we knew we had a right to lives just as rich and varied as those of our brothers. Emotionally, we still struggled against our own and others’ unconscious assumptions. We fought guilt, disapproval and the sense that whatever we did was somehow wrong. Karen concentrated on being a parent and is pleased in one way that she did, but she still beats herself up: ‘I failed totally at finding out what I was good at and having a career. I had the potential and I failed.’

  Women who are over fifty grew up in one world and now must exist in quite another. They are the generation that has experienced the greatest change in women’s lives in recorded history. Yet such is our lingering inability to take women’s lives seriously that society barely acknowledges that there has been such a fundamental shift. It is almost as if the world has spent the past fifty-odd years waiting for women to get back into their kitchens and for everything to return to normal. Indeed, one could arguably see much of Donald Trump’s triumph over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 US presidential election as being symptomatic of precisely that. However, the furious response by so many women to Trump’s presidency is also a clear indication that most of those who used to be considered ‘the second sex’ have changed and will not put themselves second anymore.

  Indeed, the likelihood that women (in the West, anyway) will ever return to the small lives they were sentenced to in previous generations is growing increasingly unlikely for all sorts of reasons, not least economic. As I have said, women over fifty today are the first women ever to have almost universally earned their own money for most of their lives. Yet it is almost as if what happens to women remains largely invisible. Nevertheless, these momentous changes have brought both great benefits and great challenges.

  Sadly, not all women over fifty have benefited equally from women’s invasion of the workplace or our triumph in education (women and girls now enrol in universities in greater numbers than men and boys, and also win most of the academic prizes) or our expanded choices. Some women have found themselves increasingly left behind. They grew up in a world that taught them to expect that they would be looked after by somebody else, but now live in a world that expects them to look after themselves. Because so many older women have not benefited from the change in women’s lives, feminism remains an incomplete project. As long as women make up the poorest of the poor—and the fastest-growing group among the homeless is women over fifty-five—there remains work to be done.

  Interestingly, we can pinpoint exactly when this work began. It started, as always, with a new technology.

  The contraceptive pill was first prescribed to women in 1960. ‘The pill’ (as it quickly became known) was controversial. Its inventors intended it to give married women control over how many children they would have and how they would space their pregnancies. Doctors were very well aware of the negative effect constant child-bearing had on the health of women. However, they never imagined it being used by single women to enjoy their sexuality because they could now safely and effectively avoid the usual consequences. This anxiety was probably behind the refusal of many religious organisations, notably the Catholic Church, to embrace safe contraception with the same enthusiasm as most of their followers. In fact, if control of female sexuality is your aim, then their concerns were well founded. Once the pill was made available, all sorts of women started taking it—from the onset of menstruation until the end of menopause, and everywhere in between.

  In combination with other equally effective and reliable forms of contraception, the pill enabled women to escape the chains of their biology and make choices about their own lives in much the same way as men could. Not to put too fine a point on it, the pill liberated them. My generation of women could get educated, they could work, they could earn, travel, fall in and out of love, and still decide
when and if they would have children. With greater control over reproduction came greater control of every part of their lives. This was the change that became known, in popular culture, as ‘having it all’. (‘Having it all’, by the way, just means having meaningful paid work and a family—something men had just assumed was their birthright since time immemorial.) For women, the idea that they might live lives as full as those of men was (and still is, in some quarters) seen as selfish. Disapproved of or not, the improvements in contraception, combined with much better prenatal and antenatal care, obstetrics and medical science in general (most children who are born now live beyond infancy), meant my generation of women could choose to have children around their paid work. It wasn’t easy, but it was doable.

  While I am eulogising the pill, I feel the need to give a little nod to the tampon, which also freed women from the potential embarrassment that accompanied menstruation. Indeed, whenever people nominate the world’s most important inventions (the internal combustion engine, the world wide web, battery storage), I always suggest the pill and the tampon. I simply can’t imagine what my life would have been like without them. Actually, I can imagine, and vividly. It would have been like that of all the generations of women who lived before me. The very idea makes me shudder.