tag:theconversation.com,2011:/us/topics/womens-liberation-93711/articlesWomen's liberation – The Conversation2024-03-21T02:52:04Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2263082024-03-21T02:52:04Z2024-03-21T02:52:04ZWomen have been excluded from men’s spaces for centuries. And that’s why the MONA Ladies Lounge matters<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/583316/original/file-20240321-26-fq9x7g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=147%2C170%2C5028%2C3709&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Gender, class, race, culture and religion are all categories used to exclude people in ways that privileged people will never experience. This exclusion can be as blatant as a gang of masked people <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-04-21/police-investigate-racist-sign-on-main-north-road-bridge/102250570">performing the Nazi salute</a>, or as subtle as an upper-middle-class golf club quietly binning membership applications from Jews or Muslims.</p>
<p>The question of how we redress these exclusions is once again in the news because of a <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-03-20/mona-ladies-lounge-legal-fight-men-excluded/103605236">legal case</a> taken up against Hobart’s contemporary art gallery, MONA. The anti-discrimination case has been launched on the basis that it contains a women-only Ladies Lounge art installation created by Kirsha Kaechle, an artist who is also married to the museum’s founder, David Walsh.</p>
<p>Jason Lau brought the complaint because he had been denied access to the space, which features works by Pablo Picasso and Sidney Nolan, on account of his gender. Kaechle said she is “delighted” the anti-discrimination complaint has ended up in Tasmania’s Civil and Administrative Tribunal.</p>
<p>“The men are experiencing Ladies Lounge, their experience of rejection is the artwork,” <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2024/mar/20/artist-behind-monas-ladies-only-lounge-absolutely-delighted-man-is-suing-for-gender-discrimination">she said</a>.</p>
<p>“OK, they experience the artwork differently than women, but men are certainly experiencing the artwork as it’s intended.”</p>
<p>Whatever decision the tribunal hands down, these recent events remind us that women still struggle to claim a small slice of the pie men have claimed for centuries.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="InstagramEmbed" data-react-props="{"url":"https://www.instagram.com/p/C4uQRjorJz0/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link\u0026igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==","accessToken":"127105130696839|b4b75090c9688d81dfd245afe6052f20"}"></div></p>
<h2>A history of keeping women out</h2>
<p>As a kid in primary school, growing up in Newcastle – a working-class beachside town – I was occasionally asked by my Nanna to head down to the local pub in my PJs and give my Granddad a nudge to come home for dinner.</p>
<p>Until 1965, women were <a href="https://humanrights.gov.au/about/news/speeches/100-years-international-womens-day-2011%22">excluded from public bars</a>. A few bars would let them drink in the “ladies lounge”, which would confine them to a small area and often charge them more for drinks than men. </p>
<p>Even so, working-class women had little time to lounge. Most worked menial jobs while also doing all the domestic labour.</p>
<p>Because I was a kid, I was warmly received at the <a href="https://www.visitnewcastle.com.au/see-do/eat-drink/the-bennett-hotel">Bennett Hotel</a> and would sit up at the bar with a raspberry lemonade. The men – most of whom had knocked off at 4pm from working on the docks or <a href="https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/founding-of-bhp">at BHP</a> – were seriously drunk by 6pm.</p>
<p>Today, there are still prestigious clubs across Australia that exclude women, the <a href="https://www.afr.com/politics/club-land-19941118-k65ge">Melbourne Club</a> being a notorious example. Even if they don’t explicitly ban women from being members, they are male-dominated by their very nature. Membership relies on being “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2011/jun/17/ascot-royal-enclosure">the right sort of chap</a>”: someone who went to the right school and university and rose up the ranks.</p>
<p>Men have controlled parliaments, the corporate sector and now claim dominion <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-are-so-many-big-tech-whistleblowers-women-here-is-what-the-research-shows-184033">over big tech</a>. It’s no skin off their collective noses if women have a room to gather and drink tea or a glass of wine.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-ai-industry-is-on-the-verge-of-becoming-another-boys-club-were-all-going-to-lose-out-if-it-does-219802">The AI industry is on the verge of becoming another boys' club. We’re all going to lose out if it does</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Why women’s spaces matter in art</h2>
<p>There’s a good reason women might want to hang out in a space where they feel comfortable. At the sharp end, there are women who are survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence. On average <a href="https://www.ourwatch.org.au/quick-facts/">one woman is killed every nine days</a> by an intimate partner. </p>
<p>Beyond that, the Ladies Lounge is an apt subversion of a throughline that has dominated the art world for centures: art is made for the male gaze. Even though art galleries are public spaces, they have been overwhelmingly stocked with <a href="https://www.artshub.com.au/news/news/win-for-women-as-new-report-shows-increased-gender-equality-in-the-visual-arts-259122-2365133/">work by male artists</a>, many of whom have built careers painting female nudes designed for the male gaze. </p>
<p>Art historian Kenneth Clarke (1903-83) <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/27823159">described</a> a female nude this way:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>By art, Boucher has allowed us to enjoy her with as little shame as she is enjoying herself. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Really, Kenneth?</p>
<p>In 1989, American activist art group Guerrilla Girls <a href="https://www.guerrillagirls.com/naked-through-the-ages">found fewer than 5%</a> of the artists in the modern art section of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art were women, yet 85% of the nudes were of women. By 2012, these numbers had barely shifted: fewer than 4% of the artists were women, while 76% of the nudes were of women.</p>
<p>Women walk through the world with an enormous cultural weight simply because they are women. The sexy young woman. The maternal saintly body. The invisible older woman. This is why women’s spaces matter, and why women should be able to choose whether, when and how they can be seen.</p>
<p>One of my favourite Australian contemporary artists is <a href="https://www.roslynoxley9.com.au/artist/julie-rrap">Julie Rrap</a> who, with extraordinary talent and wit, uses her body to make art that returns the male gaze. Since the 1980s, she has been producing photographs, videos and sculptures that play with the female form in a way that subverts the tradition of the classical nude in Western art.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="InstagramEmbed" data-react-props="{"url":"https://www.instagram.com/p/CCVXJMtAtap/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link\u0026igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==","accessToken":"127105130696839|b4b75090c9688d81dfd245afe6052f20"}"></div></p>
<p>Rrap’s work is a classic example of a woman artist reclaiming space in a traditional male setting: the art museum. </p>
<h2>Ways to go</h2>
<p>My last word goes to Emma Jones, a young woman who is completing her honours thesis at Sydney University on these very questions. Asked whether women’s spaces were still relevant, she said: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>The world is still dominated by men trying to speak on behalf of women. Social media has given a powerful platform to a fresh wave of men attempting to ‘educate’ other men about what women ‘really’ want. The need for women to meaningfully connect with other women, feel heard and develop their voice is just as relevant today as it’s always been.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I’m with you on that, babe. When you become the leader of a women-dominated federal government, I look forward to seeing you support a bill to set up a men’s space in Parliament House. I’ll be catching up with you in the members’ bar.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/why-werent-there-any-great-women-artists-in-gratitude-to-linda-nochlin-153099">Why weren't there any great women artists? In gratitude to Linda Nochlin</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/226308/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Catharine Lumby does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Lounge creator and artist Kirsha Kaechle said the lounge was being ‘experienced’ by men exactly as intended – by excluding them.Catharine Lumby, Professor of Media, Department of Media, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2022382023-03-28T19:21:34Z2023-03-28T19:21:34ZThe Whitlam government gave us no-fault divorce, women’s refuges and childcare. Australia needs another feminist revolution<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/517542/original/file-20230327-20-35bjxm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">John McKinnon/Australian Information Service/National Library of Australia</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Australia’s history of women and political rights is, to put it mildly, chequered. It enfranchised (white) women very early, in 1902. And it was the first country to give them the vote combined with the right to stand for parliament.</p>
<p>But it took 41 years for women to enter federal parliament. The first two <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-is-it-taking-so-long-to-achieve-gender-equality-in-parliament-117313">women federal MPs</a>, Dorothy Tangney and Enid Lyons, were just memorialised with a joint statue in the parliamentary triangle. It was unveiled this month – finally redressing the glaring absence of women in our statues. </p>
<hr>
<p><em>Review: Women and Whitlam: Revisiting the Revolution - Michelle Arrow (ed.), (NewSouth)</em></p>
<hr>
<p>Australia’s record of women’s rights is still uneven. We pioneered aspects of women’s welfare, such as the <a href="https://www.naa.gov.au/learn/learning-resources/learning-resource-themes/government-and-democracy/prime-ministers-and-politicians/maternity-allowance-act-1912">1912 maternity allowance</a> that included unmarried mothers. But now, Australian women’s economic status is shameful. </p>
<p>As Minister for the Environment <a href="https://theconversation.com/a-policy-aesthete-a-new-biography-of-tanya-plibersek-shows-how-governments-work-and-affect-peoples-lives-197427">Tanya Plibersek</a> notes in her foreword, Australia has plunged from the modest high point of 15th on the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap index. In 2022, it was 43rd.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/a-policy-aesthete-a-new-biography-of-tanya-plibersek-shows-how-governments-work-and-affect-peoples-lives-197427">'A policy aesthete': a new biography of Tanya Plibersek shows how governments work – and affect people's lives</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>What Whitlam did for women</h2>
<p>Federation was an exciting time for women. But the next peak didn’t arrive until the 1970s, when the Whitlam Government proved a beachhead for women’s rights. Feminism helped to swell the tide of change carrying <a href="https://theconversation.com/gough-whitlams-life-and-legacy-experts-respond-33228">Gough Whitlam</a> to power in 1972. </p>
<p>But just how did Whitlam conceive his agenda for women? What were his short-lived government’s many achievements in this area? Until now, these questions haven’t been fully studied. </p>
<p><a href="https://unsw.press/books/womenandwhitlam/">Women and Whitlam</a> is important not just for taking on this task, but for its stellar cast of essayists. Many of them were feminist activists in the 1970s, and their memories add rich narrative detail.</p>
<p>The book is edited by Michelle Arrow, a <a href="https://www.whitlam.org/">Whitlam Institute</a> Research Fellow and an authority on women, gender and sexuality in the 1970s: not least through her prize-winning monograph, <a href="https://www.newsouthbooks.com.au/books/seventies/">The Seventies</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/517350/original/file-20230324-28-qz4ve3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/517350/original/file-20230324-28-qz4ve3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/517350/original/file-20230324-28-qz4ve3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=925&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/517350/original/file-20230324-28-qz4ve3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=925&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/517350/original/file-20230324-28-qz4ve3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=925&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/517350/original/file-20230324-28-qz4ve3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1162&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/517350/original/file-20230324-28-qz4ve3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1162&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/517350/original/file-20230324-28-qz4ve3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1162&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This excellent collection’s origins lie in <a href="https://www.whitlam.org/publications/womensrevolution">a conference</a> held at Old Parliament House in November 2019, organised by the Whitlam Institute. The book has been several years in the making, but its timing is perfect. Its month of publication, April 2023, is the 50th anniversary of Gough Whitlam’s appointment of Elizabeth Reid as his adviser on women’s affairs. This role, as an adviser to a head of government, was a world first.</p>
<p>In her introduction, Arrow points out <a href="https://electionspeeches.moadoph.gov.au/speeches/1972-gough-whitlam">Whitlam’s 1972 election speech</a> only outlined three “women’s issues” as part of his program. But she also notes the late (former Senator) <a href="https://theconversation.com/vale-susan-ryan-pioneer-labor-feminist-who-showed-big-difficult-policy-changes-can-and-should-be-made-146996">Susan Ryan</a>’s excited response when she heard him begin it with the inclusive words, “Men and women of Australia” – a symbolic break from tradition. Iola Mathews, journalist and Women’s Electoral Lobby activist, captures the speed with which Whitlam acted on women’s issues: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>In his first week of office he reopened the federal Equal Pay case, removed the tax on contraceptives and announced funding for birth control programs. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Arrow summarises what else the Whitlam government did for women. It extended the minimum wage for women and funded women’s refuges, women’s health centres and community childcare. It introduced no-fault divorce and the Family Court. It introduced paid maternity leave in the public service. And it addressed discrimination against girls in schools. Women also benefited from other reforms, like making tertiary education affordable.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/fifty-years-ago-the-new-whitlam-government-removed-the-luxury-sales-tax-on-the-pill-it-changed-australian-womens-lives-194718">Fifty years ago, the new Whitlam government removed the luxury sales tax on the pill. It changed Australian women's lives</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>A world-first role</h2>
<p>Elizabeth Reid’s chapter is especially powerful, because of the importance of her work as Whitlam’s women’s adviser and because she worked closely with him. She suggests Whitlam’s consciousness of feminism grew during his term in office. By September 1974, he understood his own policies and reforms could only go so far. Fundamental cultural shift was required: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>We have to attack the social inequalities, the hidden and usually unarticulated assumptions which affect women not only in employment but in the whole range of their opportunities in life […] this requires a re-education of the community. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Reid encapsulates how she forged her own novel role: travelling around Australia to listen to women of all backgrounds, holding meetings in venues ranging from factories, farms and universities to jails. Soon, she received more letters than anyone in the government, other than Whitlam himself. After listening and gathering women’s views, she learned how to approach parliamentarians and public servants in order to make and implement policies. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/7MPQJVkgDh0?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Elizabeth Reid, in her world-first role as women’s advisor, received more letters than even Whitlam himself.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Part of the power of Reid’s chapter lies in the insights she gives readers into the revolutionary nature of <a href="https://theconversation.com/a-human-being-not-just-mum-the-womens-liberationists-who-fought-for-the-rights-of-mothers-and-children-182057">women’s liberation</a>. Feminists who hit their stride in the 1970s had bold ambitions: ending patriarchal oppression, uprooting sexism as a system of male domination, taking back control of women’s bodies and sexuality, and using consciousness-raising to find alternatives to the confinement of women <a href="https://theconversation.com/suburban-living-did-turn-women-into-robots-why-feminist-horror-novel-the-stepford-wives-is-still-relevant-50-years-on-186633">as housewives</a>. </p>
<p>Some in women’s liberation questioned the possibility of creating revolution from within government. But Reid’s chapter showcases her remarkable ability to take the fundamental insights of the movement and use them. She listened to Australian women and applied her insights and feminist principles to the key areas of employment and financial discrimination, education, childcare, social welfare and urban planning.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-australia-became-a-nation-and-women-won-the-vote-78406">How Australia became a nation, and women won the vote</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>A dynamic movement</h2>
<p>One vibrant thread connecting several chapters is the dynamism of the women’s liberation movement: not least, the Canberra group where Reid developed her feminism. Biff Ward recalls the night in early 1973 that she and other Canberra women from the women’s liberation movement attended the party held for the 18 shortlisted applicants for the women’s adviser job.</p>
<p>It was a seemingly ordinary Saturday-night event in a suburban home: the prime minister was among the prominent Labor men present. Ward recalls the extraordinary atmosphere at the party, with the government luminaries aware of their own newfound power, yet “sidelined” by the women. These women knew each other from the movement and constituted “a tribe” that had the men on edge, because of the women’s shared confidence and agenda.</p>
<p>The chapter on the late Pat Eatock, the Aboriginal feminist who had travelled from Sydney to Canberra in early 1972 for the <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-aboriginal-tent-embassy-at-50-the-history-of-an-ongoing-protest-for-indigenous-sovereignty-in-australia-podcast-180216">Tent Embassy</a>, then stayed to move into the Women’s House (run by the Women’s Liberation group) is co-written by her daughter Cathy Eatock. In 1972 Pat Eatock became the first Indigenous woman to stand for federal parliament. Later she became a public servant, an academic and a pioneer in Aboriginal television. She was part of the Canberra women’s liberation movement, despite not feeling accepted by some members. </p>
<p>On balance, Eatock believed the movement changed her life for the better. She participated in the celebrated <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/canberra/programs/sundaybrunch/the-1975-women-in-politics-conference/12708060">1975 Women and Politics Conference</a>, and was in the Australian delegation to the International Women’s Year Conference in Mexico City, where she found Australian feminist theory was “leading the world”.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/3LksdHh4bMg?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Pat Eatock at the 1975 World Conference on the Status of Women.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Greater expectations</h2>
<p>The book is organised into five sections, each introduced by a relevant expert. In the section on law, Elizabeth Evatt succinctly describes her path-breaking roles. She was deputy president of the Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Commission (predecessor to the Fair Work Commission), chair of the <a href="https://pmtranscripts.pmc.gov.au/sites/default/files/original/00003358.pdf">Royal Commission on Human Relationships 1974-77</a> (which brought abortion, homosexuality and domestic violence into the spotlight); and first chief judge of the Family Court of Australia. The latter was created by the Family Law Act of 1975, which introduced no-fault divorce. </p>
<p>In her conclusion, Evatt laments <a href="https://theconversation.com/book-extract-broken-requiem-for-the-family-court-166406">the recent merger</a> of the Family Court with the Federal Circuit Court, and hails the Family Law Act as one of Whitlam’s great legacies.</p>
<p>In the health and social policy section, former Labor Senator Margaret Reynolds recalls observing the Whitlam government’s achievements from conservative Townsville, where she was a founding member of the local Women’s Electoral Lobby. As a teacher, she saw how the reforms in education benefited regional schools and children. And the Townsville CAE introduced a training program for teaching monitors from remote communities, which particularly helped Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women.</p>
<p>In the section on legacies, author and former “femocrat” Sara Dowse catalogues the disastrous social consequences of <a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-how-neoliberalism-became-an-insult-in-australian-politics-188291">neoliberalism</a>, which have been braided with the many real and important gains for women since the 1970s. Hope lies, she suggests, in women’s greater expectations for their own lives.</p>
<p>I have focused on essays by senior feminists, but the 16 wide-ranging chapters include contributions from younger authors, too. </p>
<p>From our current standpoint, the fervour of the 1970s is enviable. It’s very promising that the 2022 election brought an influx of new women MPs. But if we’re going to conquer <a href="https://theconversation.com/family-violence-is-literally-making-us-sicker-new-study-finds-abuse-increases-risk-of-chronic-illness-199669">intimate violence</a>, <a href="https://theconversation.com/weve-all-done-the-right-things-in-under-cover-older-women-tell-their-stories-of-becoming-homeless-188356">women’s homelessness</a> and the <a href="https://theconversation.com/australia-has-ranked-last-in-an-international-gender-pay-gap-study-here-are-3-ways-to-do-better-168848">gender pay gap</a>, we need another feminist revolution.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/202238/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Angela Woollacott receives funding from the Australian Research Council.</span></em></p>Feminism helped power the tide of change carrying Gough Whitlam to power in 1972. What were his government’s historic achievements for women? And what do Australian women need to fight for next?Angela Woollacott, Manning Clark Professor of History, Australian National UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1914962022-09-29T20:05:07Z2022-09-29T20:05:07ZFriday essay: ‘with men I feel like a very sharp, glittering blade’ – when 5 liberated women spoke the truth<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487195/original/file-20220929-26-fi3pch.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=17%2C23%2C3910%2C1970&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Helen Garner on stage in Betty Can Jump at The Pram Factory in 1972.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo courtesy of the Betty Can Jump collective</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>There’s a climactic scene in Helen Garner’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58420880-how-to-end-a-story?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=2TyyJHICiB&rank=2">third and latest diary</a> where she describes tipping a box of her then husband’s cigars into a pot of soup, picking up a pair of scissors, slashing a straw hat that belongs to his lover and stuffing the pieces in his “ugly black suede shoes.” In her husband’s study she finds his latest manuscript: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I wrench the cap off his Mont Blanc fountain pen and stab the proof copy with the nib, gripping the pen in my fist like a dagger. I stab and stab, I press and screw and grind.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This scene of kitchen sink carnage comes after days of diary entries where Garner – the great observer of the smallest details – carries on blind (wilfully? self-protectively?) to what is staring her reader in the face: a novelist husband who is spinning fictional stories both to her and to his lover. It’s a cathartic moment for everyone. As if Garner had called her readers inside the bladder of a dark balloon, blown it up as taut as it could stretch, and then finally punctured the sides so fresh air can come screaming in. We can breathe again.</p>
<p>Something else struck me as I read this scene, which takes place in the mid-1990s: how Garner’s words echoed another scene about men and knives and stabbing she wrote and performed almost 25 years earlier, in 1972.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>With men I feel like a very sharp, glittering blade that’s only partly out of its sheath.<br></p>
<p>It glitters and glitters.<br></p>
<p>They don’t see it, but I don’t dare to show that blade, to come right out of the sheath, because I’m afraid of how fierce and joyful it will be to stab – and stab – and stab. So I don’t show it, I hold it, somehow I hold it back, but it’s there, glittering.<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>These lines are from a group-devised woman’s play, called Betty Can Jump, staged at Carlton’s experimental Pram Factory theatre in that year. A friend of Garner’s from university, Kerry Dwyer, was one of the founders of a theatre company based at the Pram Factory, the Australian Performing Group (APG). </p>
<p>Dwyer organised women from the APG, together with those from the Carlton Women’s Liberation Group, who were meeting in Garner’s share house, to build sets, make costumes and run the front of house while Garner and four other women – Claire Dobbin, Evelyn Krape, Yvonne Marini and Jude Kuring – workshopped scenes under Dwywer’s direction. </p>
<p>In closed workshops in the Pram’s back theatre, the cast explored how they felt as women, using consciousness-raising techniques from women’s liberation, and physical exercises and improvisations adapted from avant-garde theatre groups.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487016/original/file-20220928-20-p69mat.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487016/original/file-20220928-20-p69mat.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487016/original/file-20220928-20-p69mat.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487016/original/file-20220928-20-p69mat.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487016/original/file-20220928-20-p69mat.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487016/original/file-20220928-20-p69mat.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487016/original/file-20220928-20-p69mat.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487016/original/file-20220928-20-p69mat.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Pram Factory, circa 1970.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Lloyd Carrick</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As I read and reread many of Garner’s books recently, I started seeing knives and blades everywhere. Nora, the narrator of Garner’s 1977 novel Monkey Grip, describes how, after a perfunctory encounter with her careless lover Javo, she grabs a bowie knife and fantasises about “plunging it into the famous handsome picture of him in Cinema Papers”. </p>
<p>In another entry in Garner’s latest diary, Garner offers up to her father her most recent book. He criticises her author photo (it made her “look old”), then he takes a blade he is holding, turns the book on its cover, and demonstrates how to sharpen a knife against a stone.</p>
<p>I started to notice, too, other objects that keep reappearing in Garner’s work. She frequently introduces characters by describing their shoes, for example, like actors in a play walking on stage. </p>
<p>The diary scene where Garner stuffs her husband’s shoes with the remnants of a slashed hat brings these repeating objects together. The scene also vividly dramatises one of Garner’s other great concerns: the conflict between love and passion and individual freedom.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/486972/original/file-20220928-12-feronr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/486972/original/file-20220928-12-feronr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/486972/original/file-20220928-12-feronr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=469&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/486972/original/file-20220928-12-feronr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=469&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/486972/original/file-20220928-12-feronr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=469&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/486972/original/file-20220928-12-feronr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=589&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/486972/original/file-20220928-12-feronr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=589&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/486972/original/file-20220928-12-feronr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=589&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘It glitters and glitters.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo courtesy of the Betty Can Jump collective</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>‘Who will bring in a cup of tea?’</h2>
<p>In the Carlton world Garner inhabited in the 1970s – an inner-city Melbourne community of actors and artists and activists – jealousy and possessiveness was frowned upon while open free relationships were encouraged <a href="http://wayback.archive-it.org/10989/20180903014715/https://www.pramfactory.com/memoirsfolder/Hawkes-Ponch.html">writes Ponch Hawkes</a>, a photographer who documented the Pram Factory world.</p>
<p>In Monkey Grip, as Garner’s fictional surrogate Nora visits the Tower household that adjoined the Pram’s theatre and office space and the share households of her inner-city community, she constantly steels herself for the possibility of seeing her lover Javo emerge from another woman’s bedroom.</p>
<p>People, Hawkes writes of this time, “couldn’t say they were very hurt, or act hurt [when they] had to see you the next day, or the same day, in the hall.” They had to “wear it”.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487026/original/file-20220928-11-vke9gj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487026/original/file-20220928-11-vke9gj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487026/original/file-20220928-11-vke9gj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=895&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487026/original/file-20220928-11-vke9gj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=895&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487026/original/file-20220928-11-vke9gj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=895&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487026/original/file-20220928-11-vke9gj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1125&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487026/original/file-20220928-11-vke9gj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1125&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487026/original/file-20220928-11-vke9gj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1125&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>For many who were part of Australia’s social and cultural revolutions of the early 1970s – especially the denizens of the inner-city bohemia like Garner and her friends – the women’s movement and sexual liberation were so entwined they could not be understood separately.</p>
<p>In 1971 and 1972, Garner and Dwyer and the women rehearsing at the Pram Factory were developing a critique of the traditional, heterosexual, nuclear household. They were influenced by their reading of books such as Virginia Woolf’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18521.A_Room_of_One_s_Own?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=0EqHpxvnAu&rank=1">A Room of One’s Own</a>, The Female Eunuch, in which Germaine Greer argued the liberation of individual women had to begin with their sexual liberation (and satisfaction), and feminist journals and books from overseas – including the Boston Women’s Health Collective’s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Bodies,_Ourselves">Our Bodies, Ourselves</a>, a pamphlet urging women to understand their bodies, explore their sexual desires and control their reproductive lives.</p>
<p>Helen wrote another monologue for Betty Can Jump called “What is a woman?”.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>You want me to mother you, you want to worship me and make a goddess of me but I disgust you, you loathe me because of the dark wetness of my most secret place …<br></p>
<p>You expect me to find meaning in my household tasks, my hands in water and children’s shit, my back bent in your service, my mind flabby from constant distractions, but when I interrupt your recital of the day’s woes or try to speak of my daily frustration or pleasure I must hear my work dismissed as trivia, and my concern for my children called an obsession.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487022/original/file-20220928-13-vke9gj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487022/original/file-20220928-13-vke9gj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487022/original/file-20220928-13-vke9gj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1477&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487022/original/file-20220928-13-vke9gj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1477&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487022/original/file-20220928-13-vke9gj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1477&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487022/original/file-20220928-13-vke9gj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1856&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487022/original/file-20220928-13-vke9gj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1856&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487022/original/file-20220928-13-vke9gj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1856&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Pram Factory poster (created by Micky Allan).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Image courtesy of the State Library of Victoria.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Twenty-five years after Garner performed this monologue, Garner’s diary entries from the 1990s describe her then husband dismissing her anxieties, making light of her worries, and calling her concerns trivial. </p>
<p>She leaves the house each morning to accommodate his demands for complete solitude while he works. She returns home in the evenings from her own writing labours, with food and hours left in her day to cook for the both of them. </p>
<p>He, a novelist, belittles her non-fiction writing as a lower-order craft. And he criticises her close relationship with her daughter and extended family.</p>
<p>Garner’s life during this period eerily echoes the one her good friend Micky Allan – a painter who created the sets and slides that formed the backdrop to Betty Can Jump – had lived quarter of a century earlier. </p>
<p>Allan attended her first consciousness-raising meeting in Melbourne the day she had split with her husband, a talented artist but someone whose ideas about men and women’s roles were formed in the 1950s.</p>
<p>When I visited her in 2018, Allan told me the story of their time sharing a flat, earlier in London, where she rose early and left in snowy weather to work as a relief teacher, leaving their home to her husband and his art.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I had a little cupboard off the kitchen which was my studio, and he took over our living room as his. When I came home in the afternoon, I couldn’t get in without him making a big fuss about having to move a giant painting blocking the door.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>He had asked her why she needed to paint: “If you’re painting too, who will bring in the cup of tea?”</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-the-female-eunuch-at-50-germaine-greers-fearless-feminist-masterpiece-147437">Friday essay: The Female Eunuch at 50, Germaine Greer's fearless, feminist masterpiece</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>A reaction to frustrations</h2>
<p>Betty Can Jump is named after a <a href="https://victoriancollections.net.au/items/5209c5d92162ef0ab432313a">1951 children’s</a> reader produced by the Victorian Education Department in which a boy called John plays with his truck and dog, and Betty plays with a toy pram and her cat. The play was a reaction to frustrations the women were feeling in their personal and professional lives. Helen was feeling left out and lonely while her husband Bill spent more and more time at the Pram Factory. Kerry, newly pregnant, was feeling increasingly sidelined in the the APG.</p>
<p>Kerry Dwyer recalls the day she stormed out of rehearsals for the APG’s first Pram Factory show, Marvellous Melbourne. It was meant to be a group-created show, but she was enraged at the way the men in the APG dominated the production. While the Marvellous Melbourne cast included equal numbers of women and men, scenes “arrived in the rehearsal room with five parts for men, none for women [or] seven parts for men, one for a woman”. Why are women in the theatre considered incapable of writing? she fumed. Or directing? Why is female culture not respected and nurtured?</p>
<p>The women spent five months devising Betty. One man attended the first planning meeting, bringing a couple of plays he’d written. The women asked him to join the large circle for general discussions, but instead he stormed around the edge shouting: “Damnitall! I don’t know how you are going to achieve anything at all if you won’t accept help and advice from us”.</p>
<p>The rehearsal room was then closed to men – until they realised they needed an actor to play the male roles. So Perth actor Vic Marsh was invited to take part. </p>
<p>In the opening scene, Marsh whips the women, who play convicts emerging from a ship’s hold. The cast re-enact riots in early female factories, and tell stories about suffragists <a href="https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/lawson-louisa-7121">Louisa Lawson</a> and <a href="https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/goldstein-vida-jane-6418">Vida Goldstein</a> and other women who had been largely ignored by an Anglo, male history. They also deliver intimate monologues written during rehearsal exercises, where each cast member has to complete the phrase “As a woman I feel like …” </p>
<p>Helen delivers her scene where feels like a sharp, glittering knife. </p>
<p>Evelyn feels like a cushion plumped up and sat in.</p>
<p>Yvonne feels like a mouth filled with laughing gas.</p>
<p>The lights go out and the cast talk about their bodies and blood and sex and rape. In another scene, the cast don jockstraps and fake penises and mock ocker men drinking at a pub. (Ockers featured in many plays written by APG men.)</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487014/original/file-20220928-24-4nlw3q.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487014/original/file-20220928-24-4nlw3q.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487014/original/file-20220928-24-4nlw3q.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=491&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487014/original/file-20220928-24-4nlw3q.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=491&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487014/original/file-20220928-24-4nlw3q.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=491&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487014/original/file-20220928-24-4nlw3q.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=617&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487014/original/file-20220928-24-4nlw3q.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=617&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487014/original/file-20220928-24-4nlw3q.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=617&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A scene from Betty Can Jump.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo courtesy of the Betty Can Jump collective</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This was the first play of the 1970s women’s liberation movement, part of an extraordinary period of social change. In just a few short years, a generation of women led a transformation of our social and cultural life. It’s easy to forget just how different the early 70s were: there were still separate columns in the paper advertising jobs for “women and girls” and “men and boys”. Many public bars still banned women. Not one of the 125 electorates across the country was represented in Canberra by a woman.</p>
<p>As I researched the play and these times, however, I thought about that other definition of revolution: a movement around a circle. I saw how feminism so often keeps rehearsing and staging the same battles. There is a scene in Betty, acted in the dark, where a character taunts a woman: “Got the rags on, have you?”. Fifty years on, I found myself talking to teachers recently about a group of primary school boys allegedly harassing girls with “jokes” about rape, and taunts about being “on their periods”.</p>
<p>These circlings are not unconnected, I thought, to the way in which we forget, or repress our history. Both individually and collectively.</p>
<p>For a long time, my image of the Pram Factory had centred on the male playwrights David Williamson and Jack Hibberd and actors Graeme Blundell and Bruce Spence. Don’s Party and boozing ocker men. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-great-australian-plays-williamson-hibberd-and-the-better-angels-of-our-countrys-nature-79332">The Great Australian Plays: Williamson, Hibberd and the better angels of our country's nature</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487189/original/file-20220928-20-auq96z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487189/original/file-20220928-20-auq96z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487189/original/file-20220928-20-auq96z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487189/original/file-20220928-20-auq96z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487189/original/file-20220928-20-auq96z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487189/original/file-20220928-20-auq96z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487189/original/file-20220928-20-auq96z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487189/original/file-20220928-20-auq96z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Kerry Dwyer in 1972 - just as Betty Can Jump’s season was ending and she was about to give birth.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo courtesy of Kerry Dwyer.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>I discovered the stories of women at the APG in the archives at the State Library of NSW, where Dwyer had deposited her production diaries – her own diary, with notes of rehearsals and descriptions of the cast, as well as Garner’s production diary, with stage directions and script notes in a neat pink slanted cursive script. </p>
<p>Dwyer’s archive also contained interviews she conducted with cast members and with Micky Allan and the play’s researcher, Laurel Frank.</p>
<p>Just as I hadn’t known about the history of women’s theatre at the Pram, Frank and another woman, Kay Hamilton, had turned to archives – at the State Library of Victoria, and the NSW Mitchell Library – to discover stories of colonial women’s settler history. The researched Female Factories, stories of auctions where convict women were sold off, they researched politicians and women’s rights activists such as Vida Goldstein and Caroline Chisholm. The play’s focus is on non-Indigenous women, something that might seem a glaring oversight to contemporary readers, but Kerry tells me: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>We were not so much blind to the lives of Indigenous women, it was more that we were catching up with ourselves.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>A huge success</h2>
<p>In 1972, after a shaky preview night of their women’s show – Garner, in an account of the play she wrote in 1972 for the journal Dissent, recalled thinking the APG men watching the show were “stony-faced” – Betty Can Jump turned out to be a huge success. </p>
<p>Women who saw the show laughed and cried, performances sold out, the four-week season was extended for two more weeks. While not all of the APG members praised the play – Hibberd called it “mawkish and sentimental” – the Pram Factory shows did slowly being to change.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487018/original/file-20220928-12-r3vhgv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487018/original/file-20220928-12-r3vhgv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487018/original/file-20220928-12-r3vhgv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=425&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487018/original/file-20220928-12-r3vhgv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=425&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487018/original/file-20220928-12-r3vhgv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=425&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487018/original/file-20220928-12-r3vhgv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=535&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487018/original/file-20220928-12-r3vhgv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=535&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487018/original/file-20220928-12-r3vhgv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=535&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The play was a huge success.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo courtesy of the Betty Can Jump collective</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The company began exploring women’s issues in plays and appointing women directors. Although the APG always styled itself as a radically democratic organisation, more emphasis began to be placed on what was often described by left political groups in the 1970s as “shitwork”, such as taking minutes and cleaning toilets and kitchens. </p>
<p>APG minutes show the group organised childcare for mothers performing in shows. In 1974, the Melbourne Women’s Theatre Group moved into the Pram, and they would stage dozens of women’s shows over the next four years. Theatre critic Suzanne Spunner wrote that in 1978 in Melbourne, “Everywhere you turned it seems there were plays by and about women wrote”, listing women’s shows at La Mama, Russell Street theatre, the Comedy Theatre and at the Pram Factory.</p>
<h2>Revolutions</h2>
<p>When I interviewed Garner about the time she made Betty Can Jump and these revolutionary years (Helen was active in the abortion rights movement, and women in the Betty collective ran through Moratorium marches doing street theatre dressed up as Viet Cong), she described the sensation of discovering women’s liberation as an epiphany. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I felt as if I’d been underwater for my whole life. And now for the first time, I’d stuck my head out of the water and taken a breath … looking around and thinking: ‘Now I get it. Now I get why my life is such a mess and why I’ve been so unhappy and wrecked everything’. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>She also thought it would be easy to change.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Once I got the sort of basic gist of feminism – or women’s liberation as it was called then – I thought, ‘Oh, now I understand everything, and everything’s going to change, because all we have to do is just say to men: “This is what’s the matter, and if we could just do this, and if you could just do that” …’ And I really thought that was going happen.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>She now reflects, in the context of MeToo: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Some things might change, but there’s stuff about men and sex and women that are just not amenable to social control, and never will be.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In Garner’s latest diary, as her third marriage disintegrates, she laments some lack in her that makes her a failure at marriage. But when she documents the failure of heterosexual marriage and monogamy in her diaries, they don’t read to me as proof of her own personal flaws, but rather as proof of a systemic flaw in the heterosexual, nuclear set-up. As a vindication of the 1970s ideal of the Pram communalism and the collective ideal (if not always the practice) of women’s liberation.</p>
<p>Garner was already known for her brilliant letters before she was cast in Betty Can Jump, <a href="http://wayback.archive-it.org/10989/20180903014625/https://www.pramfactory.com/memoirsfolder/Dwyer-Kerry.html">Dwyer has noted</a>, but the play was the first time she wrote for a public audience. Dobbin described the way she took on a role that was akin to a dramaturge, someone who could “take big ideas and reduce them to a human personal scale”. Garner wrote some of the play’s most affecting and effective scenes. The collective experience, and the visceral responses of audiences, was an important part of her development as a writer. </p>
<p>When Dwyer emailed me to apologise for her messy archives (they were, in fact, a goldmine of material that left me constantly amazed at her prescience in keeping them), I thought about how it can take more than a lifetime for us as women to shake off our proclivity for apology. </p>
<p>And I realised, when I recently began meeting on Sundays with a group of women from my neighbourhood – a visual artist, a filmmaker and children’s author, two musicians, a teacher, a journalist and a public communications expert – that we were reinventing the consciousness-raising circle.</p>
<p>Betty Can Jump was never performed again. Dwyer described it to me a “pastiche” that would be difficult to reproduce. “It was a very complex show. There were slides, there were puppets. We just flung everything at it […] It was a very, very dense show.” </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487013/original/file-20220928-24-p69mat.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487013/original/file-20220928-24-p69mat.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/487013/original/file-20220928-24-p69mat.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=844&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487013/original/file-20220928-24-p69mat.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=844&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487013/original/file-20220928-24-p69mat.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=844&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487013/original/file-20220928-24-p69mat.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1061&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487013/original/file-20220928-24-p69mat.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1061&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/487013/original/file-20220928-24-p69mat.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1061&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Although Dwyer tells me “not very much of [the script] was written down”, when I comb through the APG archives at the State Library of Victoria, I find a stapled document that appears to be a near-complete script for the play. </p>
<p>Still, unlike books, theatre is an ephemeral art form. Just as the story of women at the Pram Factory has been overshadowed by the story of men, the story of the collectively created plays and short films and bands that were part of the cultural renaissance of the women’s liberation movement, has not been well recorded. There is no star author to help sustain their afterlife in our historical memory.</p>
<p>But understanding our history, and our patterns – individually, collectively, historically – seems to me a pre-condition for escaping the revolutions that take us around in circles, and into the kind of revolutions that take us somewhere else.</p>
<p><em>This essay contains edited extracts from <a href="https://upswellpublishing.com/product/staging-a-revolution">Staging a Revolution: When Betty Rocked the Pram (Upswell Publishing)</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/191496/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kath Kenny received funding for this project from Create NSW and an Australian government postgraduate research scholarship.</span></em></p>In 1972, 5 women – Helen Garner, Claire Dobbin, Evelyn Krape, Yvonne Marini and Jude Kuring –spent 5 months workshopping a play. Frank, angry and explicit, it was a beacon of 1970s women’s liberation.Kath Kenny, Sessional academic, Department of Media, Communications, Creative Arts, Language, and Literature, Macquarie UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1713442022-08-30T12:17:29Z2022-08-30T12:17:29ZHow Mary Kay contributed to feminism – even though she loathed feminists<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/480473/original/file-20220822-54947-jktayt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C8%2C2789%2C1996&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Mary Kay Ash's legendary love for the color pink symbolized her determination to be a business success by "thinking like a woman."</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/beautys-big-business-mary-kay-ash-the-originator-and-news-photo/502259765?adppopup=true">Colin McConnell /Toronto Star via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In 1963, the same year American businesswoman Mary Kay Ash started her cosmetics company, publisher W.W. Norton <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/powerful-complicated-legacy-betty-friedans-feminine-mystique-180976931/">released “The Feminine Mystique</a> – the book that has since been widely credited with launching the contemporary women’s liberation movement.</p>
<p>Ash loathed the term "feminist” and disliked the movement. In a 1983 Dallas Morning News interview, she dismissed “that foolishness feminists started in the ‘60s” of “trying to act just like a man” by cutting their hair short or lowering their voices.</p>
<p>Yet Ash, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/23/business/mary-kay-ash-who-built-a-cosmetics-empire-and-adored-pink-is-dead-at-83.html">who died in 2001</a>, successfully defied her era’s female gender norms. She turned a few thousand dollars into a multibillion-dollar cosmetics empire and led it for decades. Her sales force grew from fewer than 10 women to tens of thousands.</p>
<p>While researching a book on Ash’s life and work, I’ve learned that many of the Mary Kay saleswomen were comfortable with their era’s vision of femininity and motherhood. Ash’s <a href="https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/the-hot-pink-empire-of-mary-kay-ash/">company motto of “God First, Family Second, Career Third”</a> put them at ease. </p>
<p>American women today owe gratitude to the women’s movement of the 1960s for making issues like equal pay for equal work and sharing household responsibilities part of the national conversation – but also to a Dallas entrepreneur who reveled in the feminine mystique.</p>
<h2>From underpaid saleswoman to CEO</h2>
<p>In 1963, the year Ash founded “Beauty by Mary Kay” in a small Dallas storefront, barely <a href="https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300002">a third of American women were in the workforce</a>. Ash was one of them. She had peddled children’s encyclopedias door to door, and conducted “house parties” - home demonstrations of products that catered to housewives – <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/23/business/mary-kay-ash-who-built-a-cosmetics-empire-and-adored-pink-is-dead-at-83.html">with Stanley Home Goods</a> and other companies. </p>
<p>Ash consistently earned lower wages than her male counterparts, who also passed her by for promotions. When she protested, one common response was to deride her for “thinking like a woman.” Another was that men needed more money because they had families to support. </p>
<p>“I had a family to support too!” <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Mary-Kay-Ash-1981-10-01/dp/B01K175DX0">recalled Ash, a single mother, in</a> her 1981 memoir. So she quit to build a company where there would be no wage gap or male bosses, and women would be rewarded for thinking like women – all while embracing the vision of traditional gender roles that the feminist movement was trying to overturn. </p>
<p>By 1969, the company was earning US$6.3 million in net sales, according to The New York Times. And an article in the Irving Daily News, a Texas newspaper, put the sales force at around 4,000 women from 15 different states.</p>
<p>In 1976, Mary Kay Inc. became the <a href="https://npg.si.edu/exh/journal/ash.htm">first woman-founded and -led company listed</a> on the New York Stock Exchange. </p>
<p>In 1979, glowing coverage on “<a href="https://youtu.be/nrWz_MzKAMk">60 Minutes</a>” prompted nearly 100,000 more women to sign up. The company was grossing over <a href="https://youtu.be/nrWz_MzKAMk">$100 million annually</a> and had a <a href="http://www.marykaymuseum.com/highlight_1970.aspx">global reach</a>, and Ash was named one of the year’s top corporate women in America by <a href="http://3vcm07307bnr2jg8679q77x8-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Mary_KayCosmeticsInc_Corp_PlanningInAnEraofUncertainty.pdf">Business Week</a> magazine.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/nrWz_MzKAMk?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">The CBS news show “60 Minutes” aired a glowing profile of Mary Kay Ash’s cosmetic company in 1979.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In 1985 Ash and her son <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/23/business/mary-kay-ash-who-built-a-cosmetics-empire-and-adored-pink-is-dead-at-83.html">led a $450 millon deal</a> to buy the company back into private family hands. As of 2021, the company <a href="https://nypost.com/2021/10/02/how-mary-kays-founder-went-from-single-mom-to-billion-dollar-beauty-queen/">reportedly has $3.5 billion in annual revenues</a>. </p>
<h2>The Mary Kay mystique</h2>
<p>Ash rejected feminism but sought to build women’s confidence – something absent in the average housewife’s life, according to “The Feminine Mystique” – as well as their income.</p>
<p>“Here’s a woman who’s never had any praise at all for anything she’s ever done,” Ash <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Mary-Kay-Ash-1981-10-01/dp/B01K175DX0">said in her best-selling memoir</a>. “Maybe the only applause she’s ever had was when she graduated from high school. So we praise her for everything good that she does.”</p>
<p>Based on the interviews I’m doing for my research, this approach worked. </p>
<p>Esther Andrews, a housewife, told me that before she became a Mary Kay saleswoman in 1967, “nobody had ever said that I could be great at anything.” Andrews, who raised three children with her Mary Kay earnings after her husband died, was among the first winners of a pink Cadillac – a company prize for top sellers. The car was both a symbol of her success and a means of mobility few housewives enjoyed at the time. </p>
<p>Andrews’ story reflects that of many I’ve uncovered. From a former waitress and single mom in New Jersey who was able to raise her daughter and purchase her own home to a former housewife in Ohio who has more diamond rings than fingers and funds her family’s European vacations, Mary Kay has changed women’s lives. </p>
<p>Both of these women fought back tears as they shared their career accomplishments with me. Both have been in the company for more than 30 years. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Salespersons from Anhui Province, China, pose for pictures in front of a pink sedan, an award for the best sales team, during the Mary Kay China Leadership Conference on February 20, 2011, in Xiamen, Fujian Province, China." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/481609/original/file-20220829-27-801kvu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/481609/original/file-20220829-27-801kvu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/481609/original/file-20220829-27-801kvu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/481609/original/file-20220829-27-801kvu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/481609/original/file-20220829-27-801kvu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/481609/original/file-20220829-27-801kvu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/481609/original/file-20220829-27-801kvu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Mary Kay company continues to award top saleswomen with new cars in its founder’s favorite color.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/salespersons-from-anhui-province-of-china-pose-for-pictures-news-photo/109325814?adppopup=true">China Photos/GettyImages AsiaPac via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In her book “In Pink: The Personal Story of a Mary Kay Pioneer Who Made History Shaping a New Path to Success for Women,” homemaker and early Mary Kay recruit <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Pink-Personal-Pioneer-History-Shaping/dp/0985372516">Doretha Dingler remarked that</a> “much more than raising our family income, that kind of earning raised my consciousness” – language echoing that of the era’s feminists.</p>
<h2>Opportunities for women of color</h2>
<p>It wasn’t just middle-class white women who found success in Mary Kay. </p>
<p>In 1975, <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=9lwEAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA183&dq=ruell%20cone%20mary%20kay&pg=PA183#v=onepage&q=ruell%20cone%20mary%20kay&f=false">Ruell Cone</a>, a Black woman from Atlanta, was the company’s highest-earning saleswoman. She was honored in person by Ash herself before tens of thousands of saleswomen at the company’s annual seminar. </p>
<p>In 1979, Gerri Nicholson told The Record newspaper of Hackensack, N.J., that while she had “a lot of hang-ups” from growing up as an African American in the South, working for Mary Kay “substantially increased my family income” and gave her “a feeling of self-worth.” At that point Nicholson had worked her way up from saleswoman to sales manager, and would go on to become Mary Kay’s <a href="https://www.warrenrecord.com/article_a63211f2-30fa-11ec-9c07-cb0095c02517.html">first Black national sales director</a>.</p>
<p>By 1985, Savvy magazine reported that Mary Kay Inc. could claim more Latina and Black women earning annual commissions of over $50,000 – the equivalent of $137,000 in 2022 – than any other corporation worldwide. </p>
<p>Ash’s elevation of “thinking like a woman” and the company’s acceptance of Black and Latina saleswomen are also forerunners of feminism’s “third wave” in the 1990s. In this era, younger feminists shifted the movement’s focus from equal rights to diversity, embracing gender differences and celebrating femininity in its various forms.</p>
<h2>A ‘pink pyramid scheme’?</h2>
<p>Along with these success stories, the company has faced accusations of exploiting more women than it enriches. A 2012 article in Harper’s Magazine, “The Pink Pyramid Scheme,” <a href="https://harpers.org/archive/2012/08/the-pink-pyramid-scheme/">pointed at unrealized promises of success</a>, saleswomen going into debt to purchase product inventory, and high turnover rates.</p>
<p>I believe these stories are a part of any accurate telling of Mary Kay history. </p>
<p>However, based on my research, a substantial number of the company’s “beauty consultants” say they found camaraderie, <a href="https://hbr.org/2018/08/why-women-stay-out-of-the-spotlight-at-work">recognition</a> and <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/after-two-years-job-womens-confidence-plummets-180955373/">confidence</a> working for Mary Kay, and a female role model in Mary Kay Ash.</p>
<p>These are things working women today <a href="https://doi.org/10.5465/ambpp.2006.22898277">still find elusive</a>.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/171344/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Cassandra L. Yacovazzi does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Ash derided women’s liberation as “that foolishness” – but her success story is very feminist.Cassandra L. Yacovazzi, Assistant Professor of History, University of South FloridaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1866332022-07-24T20:01:41Z2022-07-24T20:01:41Z‘Suburban living did turn women into robots’: why feminist horror novel The Stepford Wives is still relevant, 50 years on<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/474488/original/file-20220718-40251-de1r44.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=5%2C11%2C1991%2C1317&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Stepford Wives (1975)</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">IMBD</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>On August 26 1970, 50,000 women marched down Fifth Avenue in New York City in a <a href="https://time.com/4008060/women-strike-equality-1970/">Women’s Strike</a>. Organised by feminist activist Betty Friedan, the march highlighted the fact women still performed the vast majority of domestic work. </p>
<p>The Women’s Liberation Movement wanted many things in 1970, but one of the most important was freedom from “<a href="https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,876783-1,00.html">unpaid domestic servitude at home</a>”.</p>
<p>Half a century later, most women are still waiting for their freedom. Women still do <a href="https://theconversation.com/yet-again-the-census-shows-women-are-doing-more-housework-now-is-the-time-to-invest-in-interventions-185488">far more</a> domestic and care labour than men. </p>
<p>Since the 1960s, more and more women have taken up paid employment, but a problem remains: how would their unpaid domestic work be replaced? </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-sex-power-and-anger-a-history-of-feminist-protests-in-australia-157402">Friday essay: Sex, power and anger — a history of feminist protests in Australia</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Dramatising women’s suburban alienation</h2>
<p>Ira Levin’s novel <a href="https://www.hachette.com.au/ira-levin/the-stepford-wives-introduction-by-chuck-palanhiuk">The Stepford Wives</a> offered a bleak answer: women themselves would be replaced. Levin powerfully dramatised women’s suburban alienation and men’s resistance to feminist change. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/474499/original/file-20220718-40251-altnkm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/474499/original/file-20220718-40251-altnkm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/474499/original/file-20220718-40251-altnkm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=902&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/474499/original/file-20220718-40251-altnkm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=902&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/474499/original/file-20220718-40251-altnkm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=902&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/474499/original/file-20220718-40251-altnkm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1134&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/474499/original/file-20220718-40251-altnkm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1134&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/474499/original/file-20220718-40251-altnkm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1134&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The 1972 original cover.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">biblio.com.au</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The Stepford Wives begins with Joanna Eberhart, a wife, mother and photographer, who moves with her family from Manhattan to the suburban town of Stepford. She is interested in tennis, photography and <a href="https://theconversation.com/a-human-being-not-just-mum-the-womens-liberationists-who-fought-for-the-rights-of-mothers-and-children-182057">women’s liberation</a>. Joanna and her husband Walter have a happy, respectful marriage. Yet Walter joins the mysterious Stepford Men’s Association, where the men of the town spend their evenings. </p>
<p>Joanna finds it hard to make friends in their new home: all the women of Stepford are too busy cooking and cleaning. In the 1975 film adaptation (directed by Bryan Forbes, with a screenplay by William Goldman), Joanna and her only friend, fellow newcomer Bobbie, begin a consciousness-raising group – designed to raise women’s feminist awareness – which is derailed by an intense discussion of the merits of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjtM8XhcA-M">Easy-On Spray Starch</a>. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/GjtM8XhcA-M?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">The 1975 film of The Stepford Wives is as iconic as Ira Levin’s novel.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The women of Stepford transform into glassy-eyed housewives within months of arriving. Watching one of them admiring her washing, “like an actress in a commercial”, Joanna thinks </p>
<blockquote>
<p>That’s what they all were, all the Stepford wives: actresses in commercials, pleased with detergents and floor wax, with cleansers, shampoos, and deodorants. Pretty actresses, big in the bosom but small in the talent, playing suburban housewives unconvincingly, too nicey-nice to be real. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Joanna and Bobbie realise, with mounting horror, that the Stepford women have literally been replaced by robots, in a scheme masterminded by their husbands – and they too, will be similarly transformed. Bobbie is first. She tells Joanna </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I realised I was being awfully sloppy and self-indulgent. […] I’ve decided to do my job conscientiously, the way Dave does his. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The women’s personalities have been erased, but their families don’t seem to mind – Bobbie’s son is delighted because his mother now makes hot breakfasts, while the husbands are thrilled because their “new” wives love sex and housework.</p>
<p>Fearful that she “won’t be me next summer”, Joanne realises Walter has also changed. He tells her the women of Stepford have changed only </p>
<blockquote>
<p>because they realised they’d been lazy and negligent […] It wouldn’t hurt you to look in a mirror once in a while.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Joanna agrees to see a psychiatrist, who prescribes her a sedative. But soon after, her voice vanishes from the novel, as she too has been transformed. At the story’s close, Joanna is gliding slowly through a supermarket, telling an acquaintance that she no longer does photography because “housework’s enough for me”.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/beyond-breadwinners-and-homemakers-we-need-to-examine-how-same-sex-couples-divide-housework-92585">Beyond breadwinners and homemakers, we need to examine how same-sex couples divide housework</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>An extraordinary feminist horror novel</h2>
<p>The Stepford Wives is an extraordinary feminist <a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-scary-tales-for-scary-times-181597">horror</a> novel. Its vision of a group of men who engineer housework-loving robots to replace their restless wives offered not only a satire of male fears of women’s liberation, but a <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-is-heteropessimism-and-why-do-men-and-women-suffer-from-it-182288">savage view of heterosexual marriage</a>. In this telling, a man would rather kill his wife and replace her with a robot than commit to equality and recognise her as a whole person.</p>
<p>Sarah Marshall, host of the podcast <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-stepford-wives/id1380008439?i=1000488996114">You’re Wrong About</a>, argued the novel dramatised a real problem of the 1960s and 1970s: suburban living <em>did</em> transform women into robots. Tranquillisers like <a href="https://theconversation.com/weekly-dose-valium-the-safer-choice-that-led-to-dependence-and-addiction-59824">valium</a> were massively over-prescribed for women who were suffering from “suburban neurosis”, both in Australia and the US. </p>
<p>The extraordinary 1977 Australian documentary <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8n50REW3Rw">All In The Same Boat</a> suggested suburban women had to take drugs to cope because their husbands refused to shoulder their share of the burdens of home and family. In short, what was happening to the women of Stepford was happening to women everywhere. They were losing their identities in a sea of endless <a href="https://theconversation.com/we-can-we-reduce-gender-inequality-in-housework-heres-how-58130">domestic labour</a>.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/K8n50REW3Rw?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">This 1977 Australian documentary shows that what was happening to the women of Stepford was happening everywhere.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Joanna’s bafflement at her neighbours’ absorption in domestic chores echoed the feelings of many women of the era. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique resonated with so many white women in the 1960s because it articulated their dissatisfaction with the postwar gender order. Friedan declared: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>we can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: ‘I want something more than my husband and my children and my house.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Like many who joined women’s liberation, Joanna also wanted something <em>more</em>. The novel made it clear that “more” would be difficult for many women.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/damned-whores-and-gods-police-is-still-relevant-to-australia-40-years-on-mores-the-pity-47753">Damned Whores and God’s Police is still relevant to Australia 40 years on – more's the pity</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>From post-feminism to Get Out: cultural influence</h2>
<p>It is telling that in <a href="https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100339445">post-feminist</a> 2004, the Joanna in the Frank Oz film remake of The Stepford Wives is not a woman seeking liberation, but a TV network president who creates crass <a href="https://theconversation.com/humilitainment-the-sorry-story-of-reality-tv-32571">reality TV</a> programs. Women’s liberation had been transformed into <a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-the-personal-is-now-commercial-popular-feminism-online-79930">corporate feminism</a>, and the engineer of the scheme was not the Stepford Men’s Association, but an exhausted career woman who wants to return to a “simpler” life. The remake took a feminist premise and made an anti-feminist film.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/SuAADocdVn0?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Women’s liberation was transformed into corporate feminism in the 2004 remake.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Despite the dismal failure of the 2004 film, The Stepford Wives left a significant cultural footprint. The term itself entered the vernacular. Filmmaker Jordan Peele cited The Stepford Wives as a key influence on his horror film <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5052448/">Get Out</a>, also set in white suburbia. And Alex Garland’s 2014 film <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0470752/">Ex Machina</a>, centred on a lifelike female robot who turns on her creator, was a biting critique of tech bro misogyny. </p>
<p>In a <a href="https://theconversation.com/us-supreme-court-overturns-roe-v-wade-but-for-abortion-opponents-this-is-just-the-beginning-185768">post-Roe v Wade</a> world, where many men still seek to control women’s bodies and curtail their imaginations, Levin’s novel remains as chilling as ever.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>Correction: this article originally stated Sarah Marshall is “co-host” of the You’re Wrong About podcast, but this has now been amended to “host”.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/186633/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michelle Arrow receives funding from the Australian Research Council.</span></em></p>In his 1972 novel The Stepford Wives, Ira Levin powerfully dramatised women’s suburban alienation and men’s resistance to feminist change. Michelle Arrow traces its enduring influence.Michelle Arrow, Professor of History, Macquarie UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1820572022-05-06T00:37:37Z2022-05-06T00:37:37Z‘A human being, not just mum’: the women’s liberationists who fought for the rights of mothers and children<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/461199/original/file-20220504-26-q3xh4g.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=44%2C0%2C5903%2C3977&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales and courtesy SEARCH Foundation</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Mother’s Day has long been exploited for commercial and political gain. This year, again, my inbox is filled with gift ideas to “make mum smile”. With the federal election looming, we can expect candidates to make the most of this weekend to demonstrate their pro-family credentials.</p>
<p>But advertisers and politicians are not the only ones with a stake in Mother’s Day. The day’s origins lie in feminist campaigns in the late 19th and early 20th century to promote <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-05-13/history-of-mothers-day-from-civil-war-to-family-reunions/8517898">peace and greater recognition</a> of women’s social and economic contribution as mothers.</p>
<p>For subsequent generations of feminists, it has proven to be a site of contest. This was especially so in the 1970s, when women’s liberationists set out to challenge prevailing expectations of female domesticity. </p>
<p>In their view, the dominant model of the male breadwinner and female homemaker was a leading source of women’s oppression. Many felt Mother’s Day only reinforced the problem.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/461201/original/file-20220504-19-v463my.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Protest sign reads: If motherhood is so satisfying let the men have a turn." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/461201/original/file-20220504-19-v463my.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/461201/original/file-20220504-19-v463my.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=404&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461201/original/file-20220504-19-v463my.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=404&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461201/original/file-20220504-19-v463my.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=404&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461201/original/file-20220504-19-v463my.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=507&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461201/original/file-20220504-19-v463my.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=507&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461201/original/file-20220504-19-v463my.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=507&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Women protested against the notion ‘motherhood’ was always women’s work.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales and courtesy SEARCH Foundation</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>A pamphlet issued by Adelaide women’s liberationists in 1971 claimed Mother’s Day was little more than an exercise in hypocrisy. </p>
<p>For one day, the pamphlet asserted, society paid lip service to women’s “martyrdom” in the home. For the rest of the year, their domestic labour remained invisible and their “basic needs” were left unmet – including for some independence from their children. </p>
<p>But it is worth noting women’s liberationists argued the “cult” of domesticity not only had dire consequences for women, but for children too. On this Mother’s Day, it bears remembering activists were committed to their joint liberation.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/dont-give-mum-chocolates-for-mothers-day-take-on-more-housework-share-the-mental-load-and-advocate-for-equality-instead-182330">Don't give mum chocolates for Mother's Day. Take on more housework, share the mental load and advocate for equality instead</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Liberation for children</h2>
<p>This vision was put forward most explicitly in North American radical feminist Shulamith Firestone’s bestseller, <a href="https://www.versobooks.com/books/1853-the-dialectic-of-sex">The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution</a> (1970).</p>
<p>The book is now best known for its forthright critique of maternity: Firestone went so far as to describe pregnancy as “barbaric” and advocated for artificial reproduction in its place.</p>
<p>But The Dialectic of Sex was also noteworthy for Firestone’s analysis of <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/04/15/death-of-a-revolutionary">children’s status in the nuclear family</a> and the power parents wielded over them. Mothers played a particularly insidious role, Firestone argued, in the psychological formation of children, determining “what they become as adults and the sorts of relationships they are able to form”. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/shulamith-firestone-why-the-radical-feminist-who-wanted-to-abolish-pregnancy-remains-relevant-115730">Shulamith Firestone: why the radical feminist who wanted to abolish pregnancy remains relevant</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Firestone’s views on the subject were far from exceptional. Indeed, the concept of children’s liberation reverberated through a wide range of feminist texts of the period. </p>
<p>And as I discovered when I started <a href="https://www.mup.com.au/books/feminism-and-the-making-of-a-child-rights-revolution-paperback-softback">looking for evidence</a> of the concept’s impact in Australia, it was also put into practice in diverse ways.</p>
<p>For feminist mothers in the 1970s, access to affordable childcare services was an especially high priority – not only to enable their equal participation in public life, but because of its benefits for children’s social development and connection beyond the nuclear family. </p>
<p>This sentiment was best captured in the slogan used at protest marches: “Free Mum, Free Dad, Free Me, Free Child Care”.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/461123/original/file-20220503-14-mhvgtd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C3389%2C2326&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Partially obscured banner reads 'mum, free dad, child care'" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/461123/original/file-20220503-14-mhvgtd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C3389%2C2326&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/461123/original/file-20220503-14-mhvgtd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461123/original/file-20220503-14-mhvgtd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461123/original/file-20220503-14-mhvgtd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461123/original/file-20220503-14-mhvgtd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461123/original/file-20220503-14-mhvgtd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461123/original/file-20220503-14-mhvgtd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The rights of mothers, fathers and children were explicitly linked.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales and courtesy SEARCH Foundation</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Many feminist teachers and mothers were attracted to new approaches that <a href="https://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/n5524/html/ch03.xhtml?referer=&page=6#">emphasised</a> children’s autonomy and self-direction. These principles also informed broader decisions about childrearing, such as mothers’ selections of books, toys and clothing, and their attempts to be more open and frank when addressing their children’s questions about sexuality.</p>
<p>When they could not find readily available alternatives, one Melbourne group even began producing their own resources. In 1974, they formed the <a href="https://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/n5524/html/ch07.xhtml?referer=&page=11">Women’s Movement Children’s Literature Cooperative</a>. Their first book, <a href="https://blogs.unimelb.edu.au/librarycollections/2015/10/05/sugar-and-spice-and-all-things-nice/">The Witch of Grange Grove</a>, was typical in featuring characters who disregarded gender stereotypes and pursued their own interests.</p>
<p>By the mid-1970s, the issue of violence within the family home had become pressing. Children comprised more than half of the residents at women’s refuges, such as <a href="https://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/forty_years_of_the_elsie_refuge_for_women_and_children">Elsie</a> in Sydney. Along with physical and emotional abuse, child sexual abuse – particularly by male relatives – was one of the issues that refuge workers, along with activists at rape crisis services, frequently confronted.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/461202/original/file-20220504-27-kytr1a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Women outside a ramshackle house" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/461202/original/file-20220504-27-kytr1a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/461202/original/file-20220504-27-kytr1a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=603&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461202/original/file-20220504-27-kytr1a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=603&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461202/original/file-20220504-27-kytr1a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=603&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461202/original/file-20220504-27-kytr1a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=758&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461202/original/file-20220504-27-kytr1a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=758&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461202/original/file-20220504-27-kytr1a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=758&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Elsie Women’s Refuge, Glebe, 1975 – half of the residents of refuges like this were children.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">National Archives of Australia: A6135, K2/6/75/2</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/damned-whores-and-gods-police-is-still-relevant-to-australia-40-years-on-mores-the-pity-47753">Damned Whores and God’s Police is still relevant to Australia 40 years on – more's the pity</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>The forgotten revolution</h2>
<p>For many feminists of the era, women’s and children’s liberation were inseparable. </p>
<p>This was certainly true for the Adelaide activists protesting Mother’s Day in 1971. As their pamphlet had it, for both their own sake and so as not to “suffocate” their children, women must “renounce [their] martyrdom” and redefine themselves as “a human being […] not just ‘mum’”.</p>
<p>But this message was often lost on women’s liberation’s <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1031461X.2021.1941148">opponents</a>, who were intent on casting the movement as “anti-mother” and “anti-child” – a stereotype of this era that has persevered.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A child in a protest holds a sign reading 'free 24 hour childcare'" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/461198/original/file-20220504-665-at00lu.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/461198/original/file-20220504-665-at00lu.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461198/original/file-20220504-665-at00lu.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461198/original/file-20220504-665-at00lu.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461198/original/file-20220504-665-at00lu.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461198/original/file-20220504-665-at00lu.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461198/original/file-20220504-665-at00lu.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">While the movement was often painted as ‘anti-mothers’, women campaigned for mother’s rights, like the right to childcare.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales and courtesy SEARCH Foundation</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><a href="https://www.outskirts.arts.uwa.edu.au/volumes/volume-28/isobelle-barrett-meyering">Internal tensions</a> within women’s liberation have also shaped feminist and popular memory of this period. While many involved in the movement worked hard to improve the conditions of mothers and their children, not everyone felt these efforts went far enough. </p>
<p>Some women were alienated by the staunch critiques of motherhood, or felt judged by those who did not have children. And although women’s liberation attracted participants from diverse backgrounds, many First Nations and migrant women chose to organise in groups outside it, in part due to a perception that their experiences of motherhood required different political remedies.</p>
<p>The relationship between 1970s feminism and maternity was at times a fraught one. But we should not forget that this ambivalence about motherhood could also be productive, creating space for new ways of thinking not just about women, but children too.</p>
<p>We continue to grapple with many of the same issues, from childcare and gender socialisation to child abuse and family violence. </p>
<p>In seeking lasting solutions to these problems, it is worth remembering there is a longer history of feminist activism that might inform our contemporary approaches – not least of all when it comes to responding to the predictable cliches that surface each year on Mother’s Day.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/182057/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Isobelle Barrett Meyering does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Feminists in the 1970s knew the liberation of women and children was inextricably linked.Isobelle Barrett Meyering, Research fellow, Macquarie UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1728432022-01-17T01:54:55Z2022-01-17T01:54:55ZMaternal metamorphosis: how mothering has changed in Australia since the second world war<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/434596/original/file-20211130-19-4t29ns.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C6%2C4585%2C3437&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>When I first became a mother in 2013, I realised my experiences of motherhood did not match the kinds of messages circulating around me. </p>
<p>As a society we talk about motherhood either in cheesy sentimentalities – think of gift catalogues for Mother’s Day – or in terms of how overly burdensome it is for women. Too often, we depict motherhood as a problem or a crisis, rather than considering whether there are ways that mothering enriches a woman’s life.</p>
<p>Psychologists recognise becoming a mother as a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/08/well/family/the-birth-of-a-mother.html">fundamental shift in a woman’s identity</a>. </p>
<p>So, I decided to try and understand this metamorphosis of the self that I recognised in myself, to track how it has developed over time, and what it can tell us about motherhood today. </p>
<p>By interviewing more than 60 Australian women who entered motherhood between 1945 and the present, I’ve created an oral history of how it feels to become a mother. While each interview is unique, together they form three broad eras of generational experience.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/why-coronavirus-may-forever-change-the-way-we-care-within-families-134527">Why coronavirus may forever change the way we care within families</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Postwar mothers</h2>
<p>Women who had their first child in the 1950s and 1960s had a distinctive experience I call postwar motherhood. During these decades, Australians embraced plans for marriage and parenthood that had been delayed by the second world war. Under conditions of full employment and high male wages, many families could live on one income. </p>
<p>In 1954, for example, only <a href="https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/2f762f95845417aeca25706c00834efa/42e23011aaf49548ca2570ec001971c8!OpenDocument">15% of married women were in paid work</a>. Most girls grew up assuming that their identity would centre on motherhood and for many, that meant becoming a full-time housewife. <a href="https://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/allprimarymainfeatures/6E0DF2AA818A74B7CA257987000F6EFE?opendocument">Women became mothers at a younger age and had larger families</a>: almost half had their first child in their early 20s and mothers had 3.5 children on average.</p>
<p>When I asked postwar mothers whether motherhood had changed them, many were dismissive. Eve felt that “I was the same person but growing in skills” and explained that – like many Australians in the mid-20th century – she did not analyse herself very often.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/434646/original/file-20211130-18-98ddam.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/434646/original/file-20211130-18-98ddam.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=661&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/434646/original/file-20211130-18-98ddam.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=661&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/434646/original/file-20211130-18-98ddam.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=661&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/434646/original/file-20211130-18-98ddam.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=830&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/434646/original/file-20211130-18-98ddam.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=830&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/434646/original/file-20211130-18-98ddam.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=830&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Postwar mums were characteristically stoic when recalling their time raising children.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Museums Victoria</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Postwar mothers were characteristically stoic in remembering motherhood. By contrast to living through the Great Depression or the second world war, they tended to downplay the challenges of toilet training or infant feeding. </p>
<p>However, a minority admitted finding the transition to motherhood difficult. Grace, for example, became “seriously depressed” from “managing two babies, and being isolated all day”. It was hard to speak openly about perinatal depression in an era when mental illness was considered shameful and the condition was not widely understood.</p>
<h2>Second-wave mothers</h2>
<p>Women who had children in the 1970s and 1980s had their experiences shaped by second-wave feminism.</p>
<p>More and more Australians came to believe a woman’s potential reached beyond breeding and raising children. Better access to birth control, abortion and sex education gave women a <a href="https://aifs.gov.au/facts-and-figures/births-in-australia">greater ability to control reproduction</a>. The average age of first-time motherhood rose to 25 in 1971, and women were having 2.1 children on average by 1976.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/lookup/6105.0feature+article1oct%202011">Women’s participation in the labour force</a> grew from 34% in 1961 to 62% by 1990, supported by the slow expansion of paid childcare.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/434652/original/file-20211130-23-fph4pd.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/434652/original/file-20211130-23-fph4pd.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/434652/original/file-20211130-23-fph4pd.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/434652/original/file-20211130-23-fph4pd.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/434652/original/file-20211130-23-fph4pd.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/434652/original/file-20211130-23-fph4pd.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/434652/original/file-20211130-23-fph4pd.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">By the 1970s, Australian women saw their identity as stretching beyond just being wives and mothers.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Museum of Australian Democracy</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>There was growing discussion of psychology and emotion, as feminism encouraged women to speak about personal experiences, including mothering. Many second-wave mothers felt they were changed by having children. Susan said “having the first baby made my whole life worth living” and “fulfilled something that I didn’t know I needed”.</p>
<p>Second-wave mothers were franker about the difficulties of first-time motherhood. Sally found her initial experience was “hell on earth” and a “shock to the system in every way”. While Sally’s difficulties were short-lived, some mothers experienced more serious and long-lasting emotional struggles.</p>
<p>Miroslava remembers her sister Mary’s perinatal depression. Mary’s mother-in-law told her “it’s nothing” and “you’re being silly”. In an era when mental illness was stigmatised, Mary’s family was determined that “no daughter-in-law of ours was going to be diagnosed with a mental issue” and impeded her access to support services. </p>
<p>Mary’s story highlights the tragic incomprehension of many people towards perinatal depression in earlier eras. It also demonstrates that difficulties coping with motherhood do not happen in a vacuum, but rather in social contexts with many contributing factors.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/mothers-explain-how-they-navigated-work-and-childcare-from-the-1970s-to-today-117617">Mothers explain how they navigated work and childcare, from the 1970s to today</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Millennial mothers</h2>
<p>Women who have become mothers from the 1990s to today I call “millennial mothers”. The influence of feminism means <a href="https://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/bb8db737e2af84b8ca2571780015701e/1e8c8e4887c33955ca2570ec000a9fe5!OpenDocument">motherhood is viewed as a choice</a>, and around one-quarter to one-third of Australian women alive today will likely never have children. </p>
<p>Those that do are <a href="https://aifs.gov.au/facts-and-figures/births-in-australia">having children later</a>, with the average age of first motherhood rising to 31. Australians are also having <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-08-24/fertility-rates-in-australia-at-all-time-low-cause-for-concern/100367258">smaller families</a>. In 2020, the average number of births per woman was 1.8. Our gender norms have fundamentally shifted: millennial mothers have grown up assuming female identity is rooted in career. </p>
<p>Our cultural ideals of the “good mother” have also changed: from judging mothers who go out to work, to judging women who stay home with their kids. Assisted reproductive technologies have enabled motherhood where it would have been difficult or impossible before, for single mothers, lesbian mothers and for women with fertility issues.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/434654/original/file-20211130-21-15b2og4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/434654/original/file-20211130-21-15b2og4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/434654/original/file-20211130-21-15b2og4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/434654/original/file-20211130-21-15b2og4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/434654/original/file-20211130-21-15b2og4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/434654/original/file-20211130-21-15b2og4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/434654/original/file-20211130-21-15b2og4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Millennial mothers assume having a career is a vital part of female identity.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Katerina evoked the sense of intensity that characterises the early months of mothering, explaining it was both “the hardest thing” and “the most amazing thing” she has experienced. In fact, these extremes were linked in her interview, implying that the satisfaction and joy of mothering stem from mastering – or at least surviving – its difficulties.</p>
<p>After she decided to have a child on her own, Connie found motherhood much harder than anticipated. After what she describes as a couple of “breakdowns”, she was prescribed antidepressants. Connie’s depression stemmed from a disappointing birth experience, unsympathetic hospital staff while she was recovering, and inadequate support in looking after her new baby, manifesting in exhaustion and loneliness.</p>
<h2>A more complex picture emerges</h2>
<p>Across these 75 years there is a clear shift from the stoic and pragmatic accounts of postwar mothers to the more personal and expressive accounts of millennial mothers. There is also a rise in the number of women expressing difficulties adjusting to new motherhood.</p>
<p>Several factors explain these shifts. The rise of an <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14780038.2018.1551273">expressive culture</a> over the second half of the 20th century means more people feel comfortable sharing emotions. Linked to this, the popularisation of psychology has <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Oral-History-and-Australian-Generations/Holmes-Thomson/p/book/9780367133627">normalised mental illness</a> (to some extent) and made it easier for mothers to admit emotional difficulties.</p>
<p>The dynamic nature of memory plays a role. For millennial mothers, memories of early motherhood are vivid and identity shifts easier to remember. For postwar mothers, memories of temporary difficulties have faded and any identity change has been integrated over decades.</p>
<p>But it’s also likely first-time motherhood was less of an identity shift for postwar mothers than today. Many grew up assuming motherhood would be central to adult identity; they didn’t view motherhood as optional. Since the women’s liberation movement, many Australian women have regarded their identity as closely linked to work, and motherhood disrupts that, at least temporarily.</p>
<p>A rising age of first motherhood contributes to this disruption. Postwar women were significantly younger when they became mothers – and it is very different for a 20-year-old to have a child compared with a 35- or 40-year-old, who may find motherhood more disruptive to her sense of self because her prematernal identity had become more solidified over time.</p>
<p>More and more women are choosing not to mother in the 21st century. I suspect one influence on women who decide against motherhood is because it looks inescapably and inevitably difficult. Yet motherhood itself is not the problem. It has the potential to be the most enriching experience of a woman’s life – but the preparation and support we provide to new mothers require dramatic improvement.</p>
<p>Motherhood comes with intense emotions, the likes of which a woman may never have previously experienced. This is hardly surprising if we keep in mind that two births are taking place: that of the infant and of the mother. </p>
<p>By improving our understanding of this profound transition we will also be able to better appreciate how mothers can be more effectively supported through one of the most cataclysmic – and rewarding – experiences of their lives: the maternal metamorphosis.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/172843/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Carla Pascoe Leahy receives funding from the Australian Research Council under DE160100817.</span></em></p>As women’s relationship with work and career has changed, so too has the relationship with parenting. What women need now is more targeted support in raising children.Carla Pascoe Leahy, Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1585932021-04-20T14:49:45Z2021-04-20T14:49:45ZWhat men’s roles in 1970s anti-sexism campaigns can teach us about consent<p>Senior lawmakers <a href="https://time.com/5949199/australia-sex-parliament/">in Australia</a>, <a href="https://www.dazeddigital.com/politics/article/52328/1/sciences-porcs-france-second-metoo-sexual-violence-toulouse-university">powerful professors</a> at France’s Sciences-Po college and <a href="https://www.everyonesinvited.uk/">elite schools in Britain</a> have all recently been accused of failing to deal with rape and sexual misconduct. In the face of those issues, talk of “rape culture” (the normalisation of rape and sexual violence) has provided a hard-hitting way of calling out the powerful.</p>
<p>This reckoning isn’t the first, however. Looking back to the Me Too movement, <a href="https://theconversation.com/changing-the-message-about-rape-one-slutwalk-at-a-time-43982">slutwalks of the 2010s</a> and longstanding efforts by feminist campaigners to highlight male violence, it feels like exposing misconduct isn’t bringing down structures of abuse and impunity fast enough. </p>
<p>The reasons why are numerous. The criminal justice system is widely distrusted by victims and survivors due to <a href="https://victimscommissioner.org.uk/published-reviews/rape-survivors-and-the-criminal-justice-system/">patterns of injustice and discrimination</a>. Calls to educate boys and men about consent, respect for women and gender justice are vague. </p>
<p>In the 1970s, feminist activism revealed a catalogue of male violence that permeated everyday life for women. Organisations such as <a href="https://www.bl.uk/spare-rib/articles/violence-against-women">Women Against Violence Against Women</a> and books like Susan Brownmiller’s <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/19854/against-our-will-by-susan-brownmiller/">Against Our Will (1975)</a> turbocharged this issue. New networks of rape crisis helplines, battered women shelters and Reclaim the Streets campaigns were creative, proactive responses. What was different then, however, was the active, organised response among some men. </p>
<h2>The anti-sexist men’s movement</h2>
<p>For a radical minority, encouraging men to campaign against rape culture was an opportunity to listen and learn from feminists and bring change to male socialisation. The 1970s <a href="https://www.bl.uk/womens-rights/articles/male-allies">anti-sexist men’s movement</a> was notably active in Australia, the United States, France, Britain, Denmark and the Netherlands, and had an infrastructure of magazines, conferences, men’s centres and local anti-sexist men’s groups.</p>
<p>Its members were passionately engaged with the problem of male violence – suffered by women, queer and non-binary people, as well as men and boys. So, what can we learn from their activism?</p>
<p>My <a href="https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/266139">research</a> on the anti-sexist men’s movement has uncovered men who identified with feminist goals who established groups such as Men Against Violence Against Women, active in Cardiff in the 1980s. They picketed films that they felt glorified violence against women, daubed graffiti onto sexually objectifying adverts, and handed out stickers that declared “rape is violence not sex”.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/mens-liberation-what-todays-metoo-sceptics-can-learn-from-their-1970s-brothers-92530">Men's liberation: what today's #MeToo sceptics can learn from their 1970s brothers</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>In discussion groups, anti-sexist men scrutinised their own behaviour and criticised their own relationships. In Bristol, London and Nottingham, men also worked with the MOVE (Men Overcoming Violence) network. MOVE offered counselling to violent men through probation and social work referrals, challenging both sexism and homophobia.</p>
<p>Nonetheless, many women found it hard to see how men could be part of the solution after years of sexist socialisation. The problem of rape was often understood as so profoundly embedded in the way that gender worked in society that it was seen to structure every encounter between men and women.</p>
<h2>Little rapes</h2>
<p>Women’s liberation activists of the 1970s and 1980s saw male violence as all-embracing. In similar ways to today’s talk of “rape culture”, feminist theorists discussed the idea of “little rapes” – the heckling, looks and wolf whistles that women encountered in pubs and on streets, routine microaggressions of workplaces, bum pinching and comments on bodies. These behaviours were part of the constant threat posed by what anti-sexist activist <a href="http://www.feministes-radicales.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Stoltenberg-Refusing-to-be-a-Man.pdf">John Stoltenberg </a> termed “the rape-like values in our conduct”.</p>
<p>Writers and theorists <a href="https://studsterkel.wfmt.com/programs/andrea-medea-and-kathleen-thompson-discuss-against-rape">Andra Medea and Kathleen Thompson</a> defined rape in 1974 as “any sexual intimacy, whether by direct physical contact or not, that is forced on one person by another.” Within radical feminism, rape was conceptually expanded to include a wide set of interactions, which complicated things for the anti-sexist men’s movement. Though male activists continued to hand out anti-rape stickers, many of them became disheartened about progress when rape was defined so widely and seemed to include every possible sexual encounter.</p>
<p>A student survey in 1980 from the University of Essex showed how this played out on an intimate level. Because of these broader definitions of rape, men who thought themselves anti-sexist became detached from feminist activism, either by positioning themselves as victims, or taking such extreme precautions that they began to see interacting with women as being entirely off-limits. </p>
<p>One man described his struggle between objectifying women and “fancying women physically”. Another said he couldn’t stop his sexual desire for women, but had become “at least half convinced” by his female partner that it was “a form of discrimination”. Others became more laddish or even began to talk about men’s liberation and the need for men to “heal their hurts”. This shift resulted in a growing “men’s rights” movement. Increasingly centred on child custody disputes and other problems blamed on feminists, this movement is still alive <a href="https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/young-men-should-be-furious-inside-worlds-largest-mens-rights-activism/">today</a>.</p>
<p>However, clearer models of <a href="https://theconversation.com/lad-culture-of-conquest-targeted-by-new-oxbridge-sexual-consent-workshops-32523">consent training </a> in the 2010s seemed to create positive change for men’s activism against rape. Perhaps ironically, ideas about consent had come from sado-masochist circles, a world that caused considerable feminist disquiet but supplied workable, practical models of affirmation (“yes means yes”) and enthusiastic (“ask first and ask often”) consent. These models have spilled out more recently into practical schools and community-based programmes where sexual consent is normalised. Instead of painful and all-embracing talk of rape, consent is presented as being as simple as <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZwvrxVavnQ">offering and accepting a cup of tea</a>. </p>
<p>Non-consensual behaviour by men and boys everywhere should be seen as a problem. But talk of rape culture is best understood as a way of getting the ball rolling; it makes for vivid headlines, but may hinder change in men and boys’ behaviour due to confusion about what constitutes healthy sexual approaches. Like the problematic use of “little rapes” in the 1970s and 1980s, some terms can lead men to totally disengage. Campaigns are better organised around clear, positive models of good sexual behaviour – that’s the conversation to start with your boys, co-workers, students and friends.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/158593/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lucy Delap does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>As women around the world call out sexual misconduct, the role of men in rooting out misogyny needs to be consideredLucy Delap, Reader in Modern British and Gender History, Murray Edwards College, University of CambridgeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1574022021-03-25T18:54:43Z2021-03-25T18:54:43ZFriday essay: Sex, power and anger — a history of feminist protests in Australia<p>Rage and roar are two words commonly used to describe the events of Monday 15 March, when tens of thousands joined the March4Justice: the emotional rage fuelling the protests; the roar of angry shouting voices raised against the treatment of women.</p>
<p>The anger driving the marches around the nation connects the day’s events to earlier feminist protests in Australia, and by Australian women in London. For well over a century, feminists have been angered by women’s lack of equal rights, their treatment by governments, and issues surrounding sex. </p>
<p>Indeed, for some women this recent protest was just one more in a lifetime of fighting for women’s rights and expressing their anger.</p>
<p>This was especially evident in front of Parliament House in Canberra. The large and energised crowd was diverse: from babies to the elderly; mostly women but many men; Indigenous people and whitefellas; dogs and prams threading among university and school students and those in business attire on their lunch break.</p>
<p>Feminists of the 1970s generation were in abundance, expressing their demands through placards, t-shirts and with their voices. <a href="https://www.womenaustralia.info/biogs/AWE0023b.htm">Elizabeth Reid</a>, who served as Women’s Adviser to Prime Minister Gough Whitlam from 1973 to 1975 — making her the first women’s adviser to a head of government anywhere in the world — sat down at the front in a folding chair, a highly-deserved queenly position. Her presence and globally historic role were acknowledged by the speakers.</p>
<p>Reid’s friend <a href="https://canberraweekly.com.au/canberra-womens-liberation-prepares-to-march-half-a-century-since-its-first-steps/">Biff Ward</a>, a key founder of the Women’s Liberation group in Canberra, was one of the speakers, appearing alongside younger women like Brittany Higgins. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/391583/original/file-20210324-17-aar579.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Four women of different ages stand with a fist in the air." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/391583/original/file-20210324-17-aar579.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/391583/original/file-20210324-17-aar579.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=448&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/391583/original/file-20210324-17-aar579.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=448&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/391583/original/file-20210324-17-aar579.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=448&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/391583/original/file-20210324-17-aar579.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=563&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/391583/original/file-20210324-17-aar579.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=563&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/391583/original/file-20210324-17-aar579.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=563&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Biff Ward, third from left, joined thousands of women from across the generations at the March4Justice.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jessica Whaler</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>It was a joy to observe this range of generations joining forces.</p>
<p>The March4Justice adds to the long history of feminists using public space in spectacular ways to draw attention to society’s gender problems. Anger, sorrow and issues surrounding sex run through this history. </p>
<p>But so too do themes of joy, hope and resilience.</p>
<h2>The spectacle of women’s suffrage</h2>
<p>Feminist protest in Australia began in the late 19th century, when women were galvanised <em>en masse</em> for the first time by the issue of voting rights. Many were angered by the inequality and violence they witnessed and faced on a daily basis. They saw the vote as the key to transforming society, believing it would allow them to elect leaders sympathetic to women’s rights.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="Pamphlet reads: 'Womanhood suffrage. Public meeting. Protestant hall, Monday, 4th June, 1990.'" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/391571/original/file-20210324-15-1qst7h0.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/391571/original/file-20210324-15-1qst7h0.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=928&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/391571/original/file-20210324-15-1qst7h0.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=928&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/391571/original/file-20210324-15-1qst7h0.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=928&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/391571/original/file-20210324-15-1qst7h0.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1166&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/391571/original/file-20210324-15-1qst7h0.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1166&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/391571/original/file-20210324-15-1qst7h0.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1166&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Pamphlets were distributed to invite women and men who supported the suffrage movement to rallies and meetings.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/collection-items/pamphlets-relating-australian-womens-suffrage">State Library New South Wales</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As the historian Marilyn Lake explains in <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/3244654-getting-equal">Getting Equal: The History of Australian Feminism</a>, while all women lacked rights in the Australian colonies it was the plight of the married (white) woman that really captured suffragists’ attention. Upon marriage, women lost what little independence they had. They could not own property, easily file for divorce or maintain custody of their children. </p>
<p>The <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-long-history-of-gender-violence-in-australia-and-why-it-matters-today-119927">gender-based violence</a> dominating feminist conversations in 2021 was also rife and politicised many early feminists. They were outraged wives had no personal autonomy and frequently suffered marital rape, unwanted childbearing, physical violence and economic control.</p>
<p>In response to this dismal situation, from the 1880s <a href="https://theconversation.com/australian-politics-explainer-how-women-gained-the-right-to-vote-74080">campaigns for women’s suffrage</a> mounted. Local suffrage and other women’s organisations were formed and acted as pressure groups lobbying for change. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-long-history-of-gender-violence-in-australia-and-why-it-matters-today-119927">The long history of gender violence in Australia, and why it matters today</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Activists like <a href="https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/lawson-louisa-7121">Louisa Lawson</a> and <a href="https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/scott-rose-8370">Rose Scott</a> made impassioned speeches, held public rallies and wrote to major newspapers to press for the vote, refusing to stay silent and submissive as was expected of women at this time.</p>
<p>Campaigns in Australia were more peaceful than elsewhere, but, like those marching for justice last week, suffragists were very much motivated by anger and frustration. They wanted to make a splash and used spectacle to bring attention to their efforts. </p>
<p>In 1891, Victorian women collected a massive 30,000 signatures on a 260-metre-long “<a href="https://www.parliament.vic.gov.au/about/the-history-of-parliament/womens-suffrage-petition">monster petition</a>”. </p>
<p>In 1898, two to three hundred women in the colony reportedly “<a href="https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/page/11314883">invaded the club-room of the Legislative Council</a>” to pressure members to pass a women’s suffrage bill. </p>
<p>Although unsuccessful at the time, the scale of these efforts revealed the force of women’s desire for change.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/391573/original/file-20210324-23-5vory5.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="13 women in rows of three, in stiff formal wear of the time." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/391573/original/file-20210324-23-5vory5.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/391573/original/file-20210324-23-5vory5.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=451&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/391573/original/file-20210324-23-5vory5.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=451&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/391573/original/file-20210324-23-5vory5.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=451&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/391573/original/file-20210324-23-5vory5.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=567&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/391573/original/file-20210324-23-5vory5.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=567&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/391573/original/file-20210324-23-5vory5.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=567&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Suffragists about to march on the Parliament of the colony of Victoria, published in the Australasian on 17 September 1898.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/page/11314882#">Trove</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>It is important to note the suffragists were almost exclusively concerned with the rights of white women like themselves. Aboriginal women — who endured even greater and more institutionalised forms of discrimination and violence — were not included in their vision for a new society based on equal rights. Then just as now, feminism had a significant race problem.</p>
<p>In 1902, white Australian women became the first in the world to enjoy the dual rights of voting and standing for parliament. They revelled in their new-found status as enfranchised citizens. But as daughters of the empire, they felt strongly connected to their British “sisters” and despaired they remained voteless after decades of protest. Some even travelled to Britain and contributed to its increasingly spectacular suffrage struggle.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/australian-politics-explainer-how-women-gained-the-right-to-vote-74080">Australian politics explainer: how women gained the right to vote</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>One Australian who captured imaginations in Britain was the performer and activist, <a href="https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/matters-muriel-lilah-7522">Muriel Matters</a>. </p>
<p>She was incensed by British women’s second-class status and, in 1908, famously <a href="https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/electionsvoting/womenvote/parliamentary-collections/ladies-gallery-grille/grille-incident/">chained herself to the iron grille</a> separating the ladies’ gallery from the rest of the House of Commons, proclaiming “We have been behind this insulting grille too long!” </p>
<p>Both she and the grille — which many women saw as a symbol of their oppression — were removed in a dramatic scene, and Matters was sent to Holloway Prison.</p>
<p>The following year, Matters took her protest to the skies. Laden with a megaphone and 25 kilograms of flyers, and with a huge grin on her face, she crossed London in an airship emblazoned with the words “Votes for Women”. </p>
<p>There was a joyousness in this act of defiance. As <a href="https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/26223544?searchTerm=muriel%20matters%20airship">Matters said</a>: “If we want to go up in the air, neither the police nor anyone else can keep us down”.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/390783/original/file-20210322-15-cv8pds.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/390783/original/file-20210322-15-cv8pds.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/390783/original/file-20210322-15-cv8pds.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/390783/original/file-20210322-15-cv8pds.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/390783/original/file-20210322-15-cv8pds.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/390783/original/file-20210322-15-cv8pds.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/390783/original/file-20210322-15-cv8pds.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/390783/original/file-20210322-15-cv8pds.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Australian-born suffragette Muriel Matters prepares to take off in a dirigible air balloon from Hendon airfields, London, 16 February 1909.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Vida Goldstein was another Australian who made waves in London. In 1911, she was invited by Emmeline Pankhurst — whose suffrage organisation, the Women’s Social and Political Union, was infamous for its <a href="https://www.bl.uk/votes-for-women/articles/suffragettes-violence-and-militancy">militant tactics</a> — to travel to London, where she participated in the Women’s Suffrage Coronation Procession. </p>
<p>The scale of this event was huge. Over 40,000 people marched four miles across the city, in what Goldstein <a href="https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/198145165?searchTerm=vida%20goldstein%20london">described as</a> “the most amazing triumph of beauty and organisation”. They were watched by great crowds of spectators and ended with a rally at the Royal Albert Hall.</p>
<p>Goldstein, along with Margaret Fisher (the Australian prime minister’s wife) and Emily McGowen (the NSW premier’s wife), led the Australian contingent. This group carried a <a href="https://www.aph.gov.au/Visit_Parliament/Art/Online_Gallery/History_of_the_Australian_Parliament">banner designed</a> by Australian artist Dora Meeson Coates. It was adorned with the figures of two women — representing Britain and Australia — and the words “Trust the women mother as I have done”. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/391575/original/file-20210324-15-1je2m7v.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Five women, whole-length, full face, wearing full length gowns, jackets, wide brimmed decorated hats, standing in a row. Text reads: Mrs. Fisher, Mrs. McGowen and Miss Vida Goldstein from Australia." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/391575/original/file-20210324-15-1je2m7v.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/391575/original/file-20210324-15-1je2m7v.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=326&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/391575/original/file-20210324-15-1je2m7v.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=326&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/391575/original/file-20210324-15-1je2m7v.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=326&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/391575/original/file-20210324-15-1je2m7v.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=410&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/391575/original/file-20210324-15-1je2m7v.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=410&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/391575/original/file-20210324-15-1je2m7v.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=410&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Many Australian women took part in the Great Suffragette Demonstration in London, 1911, after they had won the vote back home.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://viewer.slv.vic.gov.au/?entity=IE390752&mode=browse">State Library Victoria</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Vivid imagery and clever slogans continue to be part of feminist protests today.</p>
<p>The suffrage protests of the late 19th and early 20th centuries used spectacle to draw attention to women’s grievances. They were driven not only by anger and frustration, but also an enduring sense of hope that sustained them in the face of adversity.</p>
<h2>The roar of Women’s Liberation</h2>
<p>The many protest marches of the Women’s Liberation era of the 1960s and 1970s were also driven in good part by anger. They were spurred, among others, by issues of sex: legalising abortion; access to the pill; the sexual double standard; objectification of women’s bodies; sexual harassment; and violence against women.</p>
<p>The anger was palpable in the size and noise of the marches, the protesters’ willingness to disrupt city streets and public spaces, the eagerness to shock spectators through casual styles of dress, and the deployment of both occasional profanities and popular music. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/391587/original/file-20210325-21-6q9sup.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/391587/original/file-20210325-21-6q9sup.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/391587/original/file-20210325-21-6q9sup.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=460&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/391587/original/file-20210325-21-6q9sup.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=460&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/391587/original/file-20210325-21-6q9sup.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=460&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/391587/original/file-20210325-21-6q9sup.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=578&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/391587/original/file-20210325-21-6q9sup.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=578&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/391587/original/file-20210325-21-6q9sup.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=578&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Women on the march wave their placards at the International Women’s Day march, Melbourne, March 8, 1975.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/3510654">Australian Information Service photograph by John McKinnon, via the National Library of Australia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Just as rage and roar have been used to describe the events surrounding the March4Justice, the Women’s Liberation anthem written and sung by <a href="https://www.nfsa.gov.au/collection/curated/helen-reddy-performs-i-am-woman">Australian Helen Reddy</a> featured the lines: “I am Woman, hear me roar, in numbers too big to ignore”.</p>
<p>Yet there was also a joy to some demonstrations of this protest era, especially the Women’s Liberation marches that allowed feminists to ventilate their rage, to prove to the world and themselves they were strong in number, sisterhood really was powerful and there were plenty of women who weren’t going to take it anymore.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/helen-reddys-music-made-women-feel-invincible-147179">Helen Reddy's music made women feel invincible</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Both the anger and the joy are well documented in the recent film <a href="https://www.brazenhussies.com.au/">Brazen Hussies</a>. Brazen Hussies tells the story of the Australian Women’s Liberation movement from 1965 to 1975, covering its roots and rise. </p>
<p>Catherine Dwyer’s film provides insight into the anger fuelling the movement, from women’s individual stories of pain and injustice — the awful grief and trauma of having your baby taken from you because you weren’t married, the fury of being paid less for comparable work just because you were a woman, the trials of being a single mother, the enraging burden of shame due to the sexual double standard. And it covers the movement’s exclusion of Indigenous women and, to some extent, of lesbians through interviews with people like Pat O’Shane and Lilla Watson. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/sTOccDdT0Gg?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>But there are also the triumphs and achievements: the legislative victories, the intellectual joys of feminist insights, the growing visibility of the movement. </p>
<p>That Australian Women’s Liberation was also marked by a sense of fun is perhaps best shown by a key event sparking the movement. On March 31, 1965, three Brisbane women dramatically protested their <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-03-27/merle-thornton-revisits-regatta-hotel-50-years-after-protest/6355004">exclusion from the front bar</a> at the Regatta Hotel in Toowong. When they were refused service (as was customary at the time for women in a front bar), two of the women chained themselves to the bar footrail, and the third took the key and threw it into the river.</p>
<p>It took hours for the police to remove the chain, and the event won an enormous amount of publicity. </p>
<p>Merle Thornton, Rosalie Bognor and Elaine Dignan were consciously playing on history when they staged this event, evoking the proclivity of suffragettes to chain themselves to fixed objects. It was also a clear echo of the moment when Muriel Matters chained herself to the grille in the House of Commons over 50 years before.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/GRTf_B5n4lc?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>The fact protesters at the March4Justice were urged to wear black, and many did, signals a vital difference in its overall emotional affect compared to such earlier moments of fun. </p>
<p>The sombre colour of the rallies on March 15 was in stark contrast to the international suffragettes’ customary white dresses (with green and purple sashes), or the Women’s Liberation style of blue denim and colourful t-shirts, hippy skirts and dresses. </p>
<p>Black is the colour of sorrow, which was evident last Monday alongside the anger: sorrow at the terrible pain and suffering of women who are harassed, assaulted and raped, and not able to speak up, or are denied justice. </p>
<p>And sorrow at the fact women are still being harassed, assaulted and raped. </p>
<p>But even stronger than the sorrow was the anger at the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/mar/15/scott-morrison-declares-it-a-triumph-that-march-4-justice-rallies-not-met-with-bullets">Morrison government’s failure</a> to deal with the assaults and allegations, or even to send a representative to the protest happening at its front door.</p>
<h2>Fighting gender-based violence in 2021</h2>
<p>Looking back at the history of feminist protest highlights striking continuities in the nature of gender-based violence and discrimination over time. </p>
<p>It shows the various ways women’s bodies have been controlled and abused. </p>
<p>It reveals how feminists have persistently protested their subordination, taking up space and refusing to be silenced. Anger, frustration and despair have driven people to action. Optimism, resilience and joy have empowered women to keep fighting even in the face of significant barriers.</p>
<p>21st century feminists are building on a substantial legacy of women’s protest. They are also grappling with the limits of feminisms past and present. </p>
<p><a href="https://nit.com.au/march-4-justice-demands-change-as-tens-of-thousands-protest/">Indigenous women, leaders and community groups</a> participated in many of the rallies around the country last week, drawing attention to the extensive trauma First Nations women have endured and continue to face. Their presence called for feminists to meaningfully engage with issues of race and to help <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/15/my-hope-for-the-march4justice-and-beyond-is-that-we-consider-the-plight-of-black-women-in-australia">end systemic injustice</a> in the era of Black Lives Matter. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/mar/17/my-feminism-will-be-intersectional-or-it-will-be-bullshit-whats-next-for-the-march-4-justice">Trans and non-binary activists</a> are calling for recognition gender-based violence disproportionately affects gender-diverse people. Feminists of the past largely viewed their fight through a gender binary. The challenge for today’s activists is to move beyond this. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1371338837461405698"}"></div></p>
<p>Intersectionality exists as an ideal; the challenge now is to meaningfully put it into practice.</p>
<p>It remains to be seen what will come of the March4Justice and whether it lasts as a genuinely transformative cultural moment. What is sure, despite the many hurdles they have faced, Australian feminists have consistently found creative and captivating ways to express their indignation and visions for a better future. Feminists today can find inspiration in — and learn from — the various moments and the people who have shaped this history.</p>
<p><em>Brazen Hussies is now available on ABC iView, and will be broadcast nationally on ABC TV on Monday 5 April at 8.30 pm.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/bad-times-call-for-bold-measures-3-ways-to-fix-the-appalling-treatment-of-women-in-our-national-parliament-157683">Bad times call for bold measures: 3 ways to fix the appalling treatment of women in our national parliament</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/157402/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Angela Woollacott is a member of the Greens Party. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michelle Staff receives funding from an Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Domestic Scholarship.</span></em></p>Through history, themes of anger and sorrow have run through women’s marches — but so too have themes of joy, hope and resilience.Angela Woollacott, Manning Clark Professor of History, Australian National UniversityMichelle Staff, PhD Candidate, Australian National UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1471792020-09-30T07:19:24Z2020-09-30T07:19:24ZHelen Reddy’s music made women feel invincible<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/360674/original/file-20200930-18-geq26v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=5%2C237%2C1272%2C1460&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>“Show business”, Helen Reddy once <a href="http://www.womenaustralia.info/leaders/biogs/WLE0713b.htm">said</a>, “was the only business that allowed you to earn the same salary as a man and to keep your name”.</p>
<p>The singer and actress best known for her trailblazing feminist anthem I Am Woman <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-09-30/helen-reddy-dies-in-los-angeles-aged-78/12716886?nw=0">has died in Los Angeles, aged 78</a>. She was one of the most famous Australians in the world during the 1970s, and an icon of women’s liberation. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/rfQCiDCIZVI?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>Born in Melbourne in 1941 to vaudeville performers Max Reddy and Stella Lamond, Reddy learned to sing, dance and play piano as a child. By her late teens, she was performing in her father’s touring show. </p>
<p>At 20, she married the musician Kenneth Weate. The marriage was brief and, after it was over, she and her daughter Traci moved to Sydney. </p>
<p>Ambitious and keen to try her luck in the United States, in 1966 she entered and won a singing competition. A trip to the US and a recording contract were her prize. Arriving in New York with three-year-old Traci, the promised contract evaporated. Reddy performed in clubs in the US and Canada to stay afloat. </p>
<p>She had the good fortune, however, to meet the expat Australian journalist Lilian Roxon (author of the groundbreaking <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4819278-rock-encyclopedia">Rock Encyclopedia</a>) who organised a rent party for Reddy on her birthday. There, she met her second husband (and manager) Jeff Wald. They married shortly after, moving to Los Angeles in 1968. </p>
<h2>Persistence</h2>
<p>Reddy and Wald initially encountered resistance from the music industry when trying to build her career. But their persistence paid off: in 1970 she recorded a cover of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i12PWD9EQvE">I Don’t Know How to Love Him</a> from the musical Jesus Christ Superstar. The song made it to number 13 in the US charts and number one in Australia.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/WOCwE5D9Ghk?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/i-am-woman-review-helen-reddy-biopic-captures-the-power-and-excitement-of-womens-liberation-143344">I Am Woman review: Helen Reddy biopic captures the power and excitement of women's liberation</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>After moving to Los Angeles, Reddy became involved in the women’s movement. As she recalled in her 2005 memoir, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1596429.The_Woman_I_Am">The Woman I Am</a>, her growing interest in women’s liberation drove her to try to find songs that expressed her pride in being female. </p>
<p>Unable to find one, she “finally realised I was going to have to write the song myself”. While Ray Burton wrote the music, the lyrics to I Am Woman were Reddy’s. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/360733/original/file-20200930-14-gh79l5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/360733/original/file-20200930-14-gh79l5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/360733/original/file-20200930-14-gh79l5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=829&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/360733/original/file-20200930-14-gh79l5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=829&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/360733/original/file-20200930-14-gh79l5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=829&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/360733/original/file-20200930-14-gh79l5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1042&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/360733/original/file-20200930-14-gh79l5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1042&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/360733/original/file-20200930-14-gh79l5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1042&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Helen Reddy wins a Grammy Award for the best female song of the year in 1973.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AP</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>“I am strong, I am invincible,” encapsulates its powerful message of female empowerment. The song found its audience as the women’s liberation movement took off across the world. It went to number one on the US charts in October 1972, and number two on the Australian charts in 1973. </p>
<p>The song made Reddy a star, and a celebrity feminist: one of a small group of women, including Gloria Steinem and Germaine Greer, whose high profile and media savvy helped communicate feminist ideas to wide audiences. </p>
<p>The song became the official theme song of International Women’s Year in 1975. It has been a feature of feminist protests and celebrations ever since. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1311131119232774144"}"></div></p>
<h2>‘She makes everything possible’</h2>
<p>While I Am Woman made Reddy famous, her Grammy acceptance speech in 1973 made her notorious: thanking “God, because she makes everything possible”.</p>
<p>Her win was said by Brisbane’s Courier Mail at the time to have “sent a thrill through the bra-less bosoms of Women’s Liberationists around the world.” </p>
<p>Reddy followed I Am Woman with a string of pop hits over the following five years including Delta Dawn and Ain’t No Way to Treat a Lady.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/afsp7MU-nTI?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>She built a successful career in television, film and theatre, with roles in <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071110/">Airport 1975</a> (1974) and <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076538/?ref_=fn_al_tt_2">Pete’s Dragon</a> (1977), guest appearances in TV series including <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075529/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">The Love Boat</a> (1977–87) and <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077008/?ref_=fn_al_tt_2">Fantasy Island </a> (1977–84), and even had her own variety program, <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069590/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">The Helen Reddy Show</a> in 1973. She was awarded a star on the Hollywood walk of fame the following year.</p>
<p>She performed until the early 2000s, released her memoir in 2005, and was inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame in 2006. </p>
<p>While she kept a lower profile in the last years of her life, she appeared in the 2017 Women’s March in the US. A biopic directed by Unjoo Moon, <a href="https://theconversation.com/i-am-woman-review-helen-reddy-biopic-captures-the-power-and-excitement-of-womens-liberation-143344">I Am Woman</a>, was released on Stan just last month.</p>
<p>Alice Cooper famously dismissed Reddy as the “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2016/feb/02/cult-heroes-helen-reddy-i-am-woman-angie-baby-delta-dawn">queen of housewife rock</a>” in the 1970s. I doubt Helen Reddy saw this as the insult Cooper perhaps intended it to be. </p>
<p>In a male-dominated music industry, and a sexist society where women were routinely discriminated against, Reddy’s music made women feel strong and invincible.</p>
<p>When I <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/08164640701361774">researched</a> the impact I Am Woman had on Australian women, many said the song had helped them through tough times and changed the way they thought about themselves. </p>
<p>One woman, who had endured a long, violent marriage, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/08164640701361774">told me</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I think I Am Woman was a life saver for me, as to play it was my little bit of rebellion. I am sure that it would have been the same for many other women. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>There could be no greater tribute to this extraordinary, trailblazing feminist than that.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1311135824700940289"}"></div></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/147179/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michelle Arrow receives funding from the Australian Research Council.</span></em></p>The icon of women’s liberation has died in Los Angeles, aged 78. Her music shaped a generation of women.Michelle Arrow, Professor of History, Macquarie UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.