Introduction
This paper is an exploration of the feminist movement of the early to mid-70s. Feminist movement? Yes. We described ourselves as feminists. It was a word in common parlance amongst the activists of the time. It was a word with a lineage. One was proud to be a feminist. We were members of the Womenâs Liberation Movement. It is hard to imagine a social movement for the liberation of women in our midst today. Womenâs liberation?
It is impossible to discuss the feminist intellectual history of those times, without a sense of what they were like. I will let Dowse (2015) tell the story:
So, 1970. What was it like here in Australia? âŚ
We women were invisible except as sex objects and homemakers. You never saw a woman driving a bus, let alone piloting a plane. You never saw or heard a woman reading the news, let alone commenting on it. ⌠There were hardly any women CEOs or even managers; they made up only 3% of senior executives, public or private. There was not a single woman in the House of Representatives.
[Only recently had the marriage bar been lifted and married women teachers and public servants allowed to continue in employment.] There were separate newspaper [sections] for womenâs jobs and menâs jobs. ⌠Jobs, like the ads, were rigidly gender specific.
A woman was unable to get a loan without a male guarantor, usually her husband or father. Pubs were segregated. A woman couldnât go into [the bar of] a pub without a male to accompany her. There were taxes on contraceptives and the advertising of them in the ACT was illegal. âŚ
For women who did have jobs the rate of pay was substantially lower than that for men doing the same work or work of equal value. ⌠It was assumed that women were never breadwinners; this was the rationale for pay inequity.
The sixties and seventies were decades of tremendous social movements and the political protests that accompanied themâcivil rights, anti-war, and the womenâs movement, or feminism, or the womenâs liberation movement as we called it then. From within this latter movement, I wrote (Reid 1973, 1â2):1
Our society abounds in 19th century protective and paternalistic attitudes. Women are prohibited from working in the mines, from carrying heavy weights, from carrying arms, from night work (except where required for the smooth running of society); women are discouraged from being garbos, waterside workers, builders labourers, road labourers, surveyors, electricians, wool-classers, shearers, barristers, lawyers and architects. âŚ
⌠Very few registered medical doctors are women and almost all doctors display a dismaying lack of knowledge of womenâs diseases and complaints.
Only 221 aboriginal women have attained educational qualifications of trade or technical level or higher. Over 50% of the aboriginal female work force is concentrated in service and recreational occupations. âŚ
Girls are brought up to be girls and boys are brought up to be boys as if there were two different kinds of people.
Women but not men are identified by their marital status (that is, by the use of Miss and Mrs.). Once married, a woman takes over her husbandâs name, domicile and, often mandatorily, his citizenship.
It is amazing to me now to think that I lived in such a world!
Biff Ward reminded me recently that, at the beginning of the 70s, you would never see a woman alone in a restaurant or cafe, or a group of women, sitting together, without the legitimating presence of men. This was to prove to be a challenge for me later as I travelled alone around Australia.
There were no women-only public spaces. No spaces for women alone, whether lesbian, poly-sexual, or straight women.
Becoming a feminist
How did one become a feminist in those days? Why the 70s, and not the 60s, or 50s? What led one in the beginning of the 70s to seek out and/or to join the Womenâs Liberation Movement, to become a âwomenâs libberâ?
What was it in me that resonated when the notice appeared in the Canberra Times on 31 October 1970 announcing the first public meeting of the Canberra Womenâs Liberation Movement?
I was in my late twenties.
I had lived the silencing, the sexual innuendos, the trivialisation of my thoughts and concerns, the ânoâ means âyesâsâ.
I had studied philosophy and theology. I was a member of a small group of Catholics struggling to develop a theology of sexuality and relationships.
I had dreamed the romantic dream. I dressed for the dream, searched for the knight in shiny white armour, felt I would live happily ever after.
I had become pregnant, married, had a beautiful daughter, and ended the marriage.
All this by the time I attended my first womenâs liberation meeting.
I was hardly unique.
Ahmed (2013), a younger feminist born and raised in Adelaide, has written:
Becoming a feminist might begin with an experience you have that gives you a sense of injustice, a feeling that something is wrong or a feeling of being wronged.
In my own case, I had been brought up with a strong sense of social justice. My parents were courageous activists, concerned with the reform of the Catholic education system, active in the trade union movement and the Labor party. My mother came home from Freedom From Hunger Board meetings outraged by insensitivity in the delivery of development aid.
I was aware of injustice in the world and the need to act to address it. But how did I become aware of injustices to my person, inscribed on my body, distorting my view of myself?
Becoming a feminist helps us understand how shame enters our lives, how we become ashamed of our bodies. My own individual experience of shame or injustice may be repeated time and time again but it remains my experience until I realise that what happens to me happens also to others. Once this happens, one can never see social relations in the same way again.
Jagger (1989, 145), in her exploration of how feminists are able to perceive the world differently from others, describes the process thus:
Only when we reflect on our initial puzzling irritability, revulsion, anger, or fear, may we bring to consciousness our âgut-levelâ awareness that we are in a situation of coercion, cruelty, injustice or danger. ⌠This may help us realize that what are taken generally to be facts have been constructed in a way that obscures the reality of subordinated people, especially womenâs reality.
These social constructs, these assumptions about the way the world should be, obscured the reality of womenâs lives, obscured the silencing, the violence, the indignities, and more, which made up this reality.
What was it that helped us to begin the process of reflection, to take notice of our âgutsâ? For some it may have been attending a meeting or joining a consciousness-raising group, for others the reading of a book, or talking with friends, or just experiencing the feeling that something is amiss.
Feminism enabled us to make sense of our feelings, our emotions, our memories, of our âgutâ reactions to situations. It opened for us a world that was partially hidden from us, obscured by assumptions, conventions, norms, values, obscured by patriarchy. It was what enabled us to see our femininity, sexuality and emotions as social constructs.
This was the first sense in which the personal became political2 in these times: through a process of reflection on our own individual experiences and feelings, which then became a shared reflection.
Feminism and the structures of sexism
Becoming feminist is beginning to identify how what happens to me happens to others, and that this happening is part of a social structure; that it is a manifestation of sexism.
Sexism is what causes women to feel confined and constricted. It is what, in women, causes feelings of shame, a pervasive sense of personal inadequacy, the distressed apprehension of the self as inadequate or diminished (Bartky 1990).
Listen to Marge Piercyâs voice (1994, 56â57):
A strong woman is a woman in whose head
a voice is repeating, I told you so,
ugly, bad girl, bitch, nag, shrill, witch,
ballbuster, nobody will ever love you back,
why arenât you feminine, why arenât
you soft, why arenât you quiet, why
arenât you dead?
The feeling of shame does not arise just from women being so thoroughly objectified, so continually on display. Sexism is internalised. One becomes crippled by the surrounding cultures of violence and violation, neglect and indifference, of reproach and scorn, by the silencing of our voices, the contempt for our strengths.
This disempowering attunement of women to their social environment, this fitting of oneself into a smaller space, an enfeebling space, cannot be captured in a gender analysis (Reid 1995, 114â118), or through a âdiversity and equalityâ initiative (Ahmed 2012). Sexism is a constant and crippling quality in our lives which works against the emergence of a sense of self in solidarity.
Reforms such as access to education, health, or employment do not necessarily, or even often, reduce this feeling of shame. A politics of access does not reach anywhere near the social and psychological condition that marks the lives of women more profoundly that those of men.
If a woman is called âcuntâ, âbitchâ, or âball-busterâ, there is a social structure that makes this possible, encourages it.
If what we say remains ignored until said by a man, there is a structure that makes this highly likely.
If we are sexually harassed, there is a social structure encouraging the men.
If I am raped, there is a structure that makes men feel entitled to use my body for their ends.
If I am violently assaulted, time and time again, by my husband, by my father, by any man, there is a structure that makes him feel entitled to do it.
A structure is a norm, a value, a sense of entitlement. It is a convention, an assumption, an artificial ascription, a division of the world into ranked opposites.
In patriarchy, structures function to reproduce and reinforce the hierarchised relations between the sexes. This is what we called sexism.
This is the lived experience of women. Feminism was its response. Ahmed (2015, 4) sees it this way:
Feminism can allow you to reinhabit not only your own past but also your own body. You might over time in becoming aware of how you have lessened your own space give yourself permission to take up more space; to expand your own reach. ⌠It does take time. To reinhabit the body, to become less wary, to acquire confidence. Feminism involves a process of finding another way to liv...
