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The Whitlam government gave us no-fault divorce, women’s refuges and childcare. Australia needs another feminist revolution

<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> <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 to 43rd in 2022.</p> <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> <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, "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> <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> <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.</p> <p>Fundamental cultural shift was required, "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> <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> <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> <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> <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> <p><em>Image credits: Getty Images</em></p> <p><em>This article originally appeared on <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-whitlam-government-gave-us-no-fault-divorce-womens-refuges-and-childcare-australia-needs-another-feminist-revolution-202238" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Conversation</a>. </em></p>

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Protest is dangerous, but feminists have a long history of using humour, pranks and stunts to promote their message

<p>Protest was dangerous in feminism’s formative years.</p> <p>The <a href="https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/electionsvoting/womenvote/overview/startsuffragette-/">suffragettes</a> in the United Kingdom initially began by trying to persuade and educate to win women the right to vote. </p> <p>When that didn’t work they became frustrated – and, by 1903, radical.</p> <p>By the 1910s, they adopted militant tactics, with women on hunger strikes being force-fed in prison. </p> <p>It climaxed in 1913 when Emily Wilding Davidson, holding the suffragette flag, stepped in front of the horse of King George V at the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qkU_imbFoE">Epsom Derby</a>. </p> <p>Her funeral, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EIFDSb7tWc">reportedly</a> watched by 50,000 people, gave a global profile to the women’s right-to-vote campaign.</p> <p>But while protest was very dangerous for first-wave feminists, subsequent Western activists often adopted pranks.</p> <p>There is an adage that feminists and women aren’t funny. However, the history of activism reveals humour as a successful strategy for change.</p> <p>Here are four great contemporary feminist pranks that demonstrate the power of humour for advocacy.</p> <h2>1. A chain reaction</h2> <p>On March 31 1965, feminist activists Rosalie Bogner and Merle Thornton walked into Brisbane’s Regatta hotel, <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-03-08/curious-brisbane-when-was-the-ban-on-women-drinking-in-public/9518222">chaining themselves</a> to the foot rail of the front bar.</p> <p>They were protesting the exclusion of women from Queensland public bars. </p> <p>The police were called, smashed the padlock, and told them to leave. They refused.</p> <p>After some bemused and sympathetic men gave them glasses of beer, the officer gave up, telling the women to have “a good time” and “don’t drink too much”. </p> <p>They inspired women nationally to do the same. Laws had changed across Australia by the early 1970s. </p> <p><a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-03-08/curious-brisbane-when-was-the-ban-on-women-drinking-in-public/9518222">According to</a> historian Kay Saunders, it was the “beginning of second-wave feminism” in Australia.</p> <h2>2. Guerrilla Girls</h2> <p>In 1985, the New York activist group Guerrilla Girls began their quest to counter the art world’s sexism, racism and inequality. They used gorilla masks to remain anonymous and emphasise that the message was paramount, not the activist. </p> <p>Guerrilla Girls famously erected posters and placed stickers protesting the lack of women in art galleries, asking “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum?”</p> <p><iframe title="YouTube video player" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/8uKg7hb2yoo" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p> <p>Humour and statistics enhanced awareness, got people involved, and illuminated issues such as how few women of colour have their work exhibited. </p> <p>Since the Guerrilla Girls began four decades ago, their messages have continued to spread and hold institutions accountable. They have expanded their mission to important causes such as poverty and war, while continuing to change the art world’s attitudes and to merging art and politics. </p> <p>But the gender imbalance in art galleries is still a global issue. This is currently being countered with initiatives such as the National Gallery of Australia’s <a href="https://nga.gov.au/knowmyname/">Know My Name</a> campaign and efforts to write women <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-11-21/australian-women-artists-national-gallery-of-australia/12890818">back into art history</a>.</p> <h2>3. Switcheroo</h2> <p>In 1993 the Barbie Liberation Organization <a href="https://beautifultrouble.org/">undertook</a> a Christmas prank, swapping the voice boxes of 50 Barbie and G.I. Joe dolls. </p> <p>G.I. Joe now said “I love to shop with you” or “Let’s plan our dream wedding”. Barbie hollered “Dead men tell no lies” or “Attack!”.</p> <p><iframe title="YouTube video player" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/cxiDlJ7nfLo" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p> <p>With an aim to teach children about stereotypes, the <a href="https://beautifultrouble.org/toolbox/tool/barbie-liberation-organization/">spectacle</a>made a huge media splash for the cause.</p> <p>The tactic is known as “shop-dropping”. The activist bought, altered and then dropped the dolls back on the shelves. </p> <p>The organisation arranged for children to comment to the media on gender stereotyping, and the press reported there were hundreds of dolls instead of just 50.</p> <p>Although impact is hard to measure, the prank created unprecedented media attention leading to the visibility of the organisation’s issues based video. It questioned the status quo regarding what girls can do and should think, promoting social change in exposing how toys shape ideology. </p> <p>It revealed the impact of gender stereotypes and their insidious sexism; the way war toys are role models; and the need for playthings to be more inclusive and diverse. </p> <p>Mattel, the company that makes Barbie, did not react, but later released toys indicating it had received the message. These include the <a href="https://creations.mattel.com/collections/barbie-inspiring-women-series#?page=1">Inspiring Women series</a> featuring the likes of Eleanor Roosevelt, Ella Fitzgerald and Jane Goodall.</p> <h2>4. Sausage fest!</h2> <p>At the 2016 Australian Film Institute’s premier event, the AACTA Awards, protesters from Women in Film and Television NSW blocked the red carpet dressed as sausages and chanting “end the sausage party”. </p> <p>The event was <a href="https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?ref=watch_permalink&amp;v=562946123902893">livestreamed on Facebook</a> after security gave them access, thinking they were part of the event.</p> <p>The women <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/dec/07/protesters-gatecrash-aacta-awards-red-carpet-chanting-end-the-sausage-party">were protesting</a> for a quota system to improve the number of women working in the film and television industries. </p> <p><a href="https://www.wiftaustralia.org.au/nsw-advocacy">They wanted</a> to highlight a lack of feature film judging transparency, the low proportion of nominations for women, and how few films were directed and driven by female creatives. </p> <p><a href="https://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/getmedia/1ee452a2-3567-4398-86c3-56535f7d9827/screen-australia-proportion-of-women-in-creative-roles-all-formats-2021-2.jpg?ext=.jpg">Only 20%</a> of Australian-funded feature films have a female director. AACTA does not fund films and it is therefore the broader industry that urgently needs to lift female participation.</p> <p>Since the sausage prank, AACTA entry forms also ask about the diversity of the filmmakers, triggering producers to reflect on inclusion in their films.</p> <p>AACTA has also changed its eligibility rules, engaging with Women in Film and Television to expand eligibility beyond just films that received a theatrical release.</p> <p>This reduced barriers to entry; opportunities for women and diverse filmmakers are more frequently in independent or low-budget sectors, which don’t always attain release in commercial cinemas. This change in eligibility was <a href="https://www.filmink.com.au/public-notice/aacta-feature-film-eligibility-policy-changes-new-online-video-award-announced/">reported</a> as allowing greater inclusion and diversity. </p> <p>Recognition across society has come from a long line of feminist pranksters. But slow progress means there is still a long way to go to achieve equality and equity.</p> <p><em>Image credits: Getty Images</em></p> <p><em>This article originally appeared on <a href="https://theconversation.com/protest-is-dangerous-but-feminists-have-a-long-history-of-using-humour-pranks-and-stunts-to-promote-their-message-199298" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Conversation</a>. </em></p>

Caring

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Iran protest at enforced hijab sparks online debate and feminist calls for action across Arab world

<p>Iranian authorities have cracked down on protests which erupted after the death in custody of a 22-year-old woman who was arrested by the morality police for not wearing the hijab appropriately. The <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-62986057" target="_blank" rel="noopener">death of Mahsa Amini</a> who was reportedly beaten after being arrested for wearing her hijab “improperly” sparked street protests.</p> <p>Unrest has spread across the country as women burned their headscarves to protest laws that force women to wear the hijab. Seven people are reported to have been killed, and the government has almost completely <a href="https://twitter.com/netblocks/status/1572651793355603972" target="_blank" rel="noopener">shut down</a> the internet.</p> <p>But in the Arab world – including in Iraq, where I was brought up – the protests have attracted attention and women are <a href="https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1RDGlaVekMMJL/peek" target="_blank" rel="noopener">gathering online</a> to <a href="https://twitter.com/EsraaMAA1/status/1572373663164538882?s=20&amp;t=sP2kn4dJ7RZUSqWT6GDr6w" target="_blank" rel="noopener">offer solidarity</a> to Iranian women struggling under the country’s harsh theocratic regime.</p> <p>The enforcement of the hijab and, by extension, guardianship over women’s bodies and minds, are not exclusive to Iran. They manifest in different forms and degrees in many countries.</p> <p>In Iraq, and unlike the case of Iran, forced wearing of the hijab <a href="https://www.mei.edu/publications/constitutional-and-legal-rights-iraqi-women" target="_blank" rel="noopener">is unconstitutional</a>. However, the ambiguity and contradictions of much of the constitution, particularly <a href="https://www.constituteproject.org/constitution/Iraq_2005.pdf?lang=en" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Article 2</a> about Islam being the primary source of legislation, has enabled the condition of forced hijab.</p> <p>Since the 1990s, when Saddam Hussein launched his <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/jan/24/iraq.rorymccarthy1" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Faith Campaign</a> in response to economic sanctions imposed by the UN security council, pressure on women to wear the hijab has become widespread. Following the US-led invasion of the country, the situation worsened under the rule of Islamist parties, many of whom have close ties to Iran.</p> <p>Contrary to the claim in 2004 by US president <a href="https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2004/03/20040312-5.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">George W. Bush</a> that Iraqi people were “now learning the blessings of freedom”, women have been enduring the heavy hand of patriarchy perpetuated by Islamism, militarisation and tribalism, and exacerbated by the influence of Iran.</p> <p>Going out without a hijab in Baghdad became a daily struggle for me after 2003. I had to put on a headscarf to protect myself wherever I entered a conservative neighbourhood, especially during the years of sectarian violence.</p> <p>Flashbacks of pro-hijab posters and banners hanging around my university in central Baghdad have always haunted me. The situation has remained unchanged over two decades, with the hijab <a href="http://www.idu.net/modblank.php?mod=news&amp;modfile=print&amp;itemid=25626" target="_blank" rel="noopener">reportedly imposed</a> on children and little girls in primary and secondary schools.</p> <p>A <a href="https://www.bbc.com/arabic/trending-62985885" target="_blank" rel="noopener">new campaign</a> against the enforced wearing of the hijab in Iraqi public schools has surfaced on social media. Natheer Isaa, a leading activist in the <a href="https://twitter.com/Nathereisaa" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Women for Women</a> group, which is leading the campaign, told me that hijab is cherished by many conservative or tribal members of society and that backlashes are predictable.</p> <p>Similar campaigns were suspended due to threats and online attacks. Women posting on social media with the campaign hashtag #notocompulsoryhijab, have attracted <a href="https://twitter.com/am_m_zhs/status/1571931577491275782?s=20&amp;t=Y9fneuMxJufMq7RgcRMsSg" target="_blank" rel="noopener">reactionary tweets</a> accusing them of being anti-Islam and anti-society.</p> <p>Similar accusations are levelled at Iranian women who defy the regime by taking off or burning their headscarves. Iraqi Shia cleric, Ayad Jamal al-Dinn <a href="https://twitter.com/hiba_alnnayib/status/1572696301363666944?s=20&amp;t=n1UixEREr2gur81vBChBgA" target="_blank" rel="noopener">lashed out</a> against the protests on his Twitter account, labelling the protesting Iranian women “anti-hijab whores” who are seeking to destroy Islam and culture.</p> <h2>Cyberfeminists and reactionary men</h2> <p>In my <a href="https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/research/projects/internationalrelationssecurity/cyberfeminisms/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">digital ethnographic work</a> on cyberfeminism in Iraq and other countries, I have encountered numerous similar reactions to women who question the hijab or decide to remove it. Women who use their social media accounts to reject the hijab are often met with sexist attacks and threats that attempt to shame and silence them.</p> <p>Those who openly speak about their decision to take off the hijab receive the harshest reaction. The hijab is linked to women’s honour and chastity, so removing it is seen as defiance.</p> <p>Women’s struggle with the forced hijab and the backlash against them challenges the prevailing cultural narrative that says wearing the hijab is a free choice. While many women freely decide whether to wear it or not, others are obliged to wear it.</p> <p>So academics need to revisit the discourse around the hijab and the conditions perpetuating the mandatory wearing of it. In doing so it is important to move away from the false dichotomies of culture versus religion, or the local versus the western, which obscure rather than illuminate the root causes of forced hijab.</p> <p>In her academic <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0141778919849525" target="_blank" rel="noopener">research</a> on gender-based violence in the context of the Middle East, feminist academic Nadje al-Ali emphasises the need to break away from these binaries and recognise the various complex power dynamics involved – both locally and internationally.</p> <p>The issue of forcing women to wear the hijab in conservative societies should be at the heart of any discussion about women’s broader fight for freedom and social justice.</p> <p>Iranian women’s rage against compulsory hijab wearing, despite the security crackdown, is part of a wider women’s struggle against autocratic conservative regimes and societies that deny them agency. The collective outrage in Iran and Iraq invites us to challenge the compulsory hijab and those imposing it on women or perpetuating the conditions enabling it.</p> <p>As one Iraqi female activist told me: “For many of us, hijab is like the gates of a jail, and we are the invisible prisoners.” It is important for the international media and activists to bring their struggle to light, without subscribing to the narrative that Muslim women need saving by the international community.</p> <p><strong>This article originally appeared on <a href="https://theconversation.com/iran-protest-at-enforced-hijab-sparks-online-debate-and-feminist-calls-for-action-across-arab-world-191178" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Conversation</a>.</strong></p> <p><em>Image: Twitter</em></p>

Travel Trouble

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Politics, pioneers, performance: 50 years of Australian women’s art and feminist ideas

<p>In the first century of the third millennium, art by women is finally being regarded with the seriousness it deserves. Last year the National Gallery of Australia presented <a href="https://knowmyname.nga.gov.au/">Know My Name</a>, a mammoth exhibition in two parts. Anne Marsh covers similar territory in <a href="https://www.mup.com.au/books/doing-feminism-hardback">Doing Feminism</a>, her compilation of women’s art and feminist ideas made, for the most part, in the last 50 years.</p> <p>She describes her book as “the history of the relationship between avant-garde positions and feminism as it emerged in the visual arts in Australia”. Marsh does not claim to have written an all encompassing history of the complex nature of art by women, which was <a href="https://www.daao.org.au/bio/joan-kerr-2/biography/">Joan Kerr</a>’s great undertaking in <a href="https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/2011519">Heritage</a>(1995).</p> <p>Nor does the book seek to retrieve forgotten women artists hidden away in storage rooms of public galleries, which was <a href="https://sites.research.unimelb.edu.au/cova/home/people/centre-fellows/janine-burke">Janine Burke</a>’s achievement in the 1970s. Rather Marsh is tracking the contribution of her own generation of artists and writers to feminist avant-garde art and ideas.</p> <p>Those who doubt the extent of the change that has swept through our culture need only look at <a href="https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/exhibition/the-field-revisited/">The Field</a>, the exhibition that opened the 1968 National Gallery of Victoria building. Of the 40 artists shown in this celebration of colour field abstraction, only three were women. </p> <p>It is unfortunate that Marsh has made a significant error in her description of The Field, which implies that it came from the curatorial vision of <a href="https://about.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/file/0029/15788/mccaughey.pdf">Patrick McCaughey</a>, author of one of the catalogue essays. The exhibition curators, who are not named, were Brian Finemore and John Stringer. She also writes that McCaughey was then the gallery director. McCaughey did become director of the NGV, but that happened in 1981, not 1968.</p> <p>In 1973, five years after The Field, the Art Gallery of NSW celebrated the opening of the Sydney Opera House with a large survey exhibition <a href="https://www.daao.org.au/bio/event/recent-australian-art/">Recent Australian Art</a>. The only work by a woman was Ewa Pachucka’s <a href="https://searchthecollection.nga.gov.au/object?keyword=Ewa%20Pachucka&amp;searchIn=artistOrCulture&amp;searchIn=title&amp;searchIn=medium&amp;uniqueId=14870">Landscape and Bodies</a>. The catalogue misspelt her name.</p> <p>Neither of these exhibitions included work by Aboriginal artists, nor artists of non-European descent. The world, including the world of art, has indeed changed. </p> <p>While Marsh maps these changes as they concern women artists, she does not ignore the other changes swirling in Australian culture concerning women. Significantly she charts the importance of those Aboriginal artists including Brenda L. Croft, Fiona Foley Judy Watson and Julie Gough whose art also makes them visual historians, recovering the past through art.</p> <h2>Walking and chewing gum</h2> <p>The 1975 visit to Australia of the American critic <a href="https://www.theartstory.org/critic/lippard-lucy/">Lucy Lippard</a> is sometimes claimed to be the “official” beginning of the Australian feminist art movement. Marsh rightly refutes this. </p> <p>Second wave feminism in Australia emerged during the 1960s within a culture that also saw opposition to the war in Vietnam, conscription of young men to fight that war, sexual liberation and access by women to contraception and abortion.</p> <p>Vivienne Binns’ 1967 solo exhibition at Sydney’s Watters Gallery was the first exhibition by a woman artist to fully enrage the art critics, all of whom were male. </p> <p>Binns’ works <a href="https://searchthecollection.nga.gov.au/object?keyword=Vivienne%20Binns&amp;searchIn=artistOrCulture&amp;searchIn=title&amp;searchIn=medium&amp;uniqueId=177495">Phallic Monument</a>, <a href="https://searchthecollection.nga.gov.au/object?keyword=Binns&amp;searchIn=artistOrCulture&amp;uniqueId=116421">Vag Dens</a> and <a href="https://searchthecollection.nga.gov.au/object?keyword=Binns&amp;searchIn=artistOrCulture&amp;uniqueId=40748">Suggon</a>threatened their fragile egos. While Marsh notes that Binns was close to fellow Pop artist <a href="https://www.portrait.gov.au/people/mike-brown-1938">Mike Brown</a>, sadly there is no mention of <a href="https://www.daao.org.au/bio/pat-larter/personal_details/">Pat Larter</a>, another friend of Binns who operated in the same context and whose own performance art was even more anarchic. Larter was a <a href="https://www.wikiart.org/en/artists-by-art-movement/mail-art#!#resultType:masonry">mail artist</a>, who coined the term “Femail art” for her postal adventures.</p> <p>Marsh concludes that Binns was “more clearly a pioneer of the pop avant-garde” than a feminist pioneer. Bearing in mind the range of other artists celebrated throughout the book, this is a tricky argument.</p> <p>Feminism has always flourished alongside other concerns – including politics and the environment. Some of the most interesting images in Marsh’s book come from those women artists who protested against the US intelligence gathering installation at Pine Gap.</p> <p>The ability of women artists to walk and chew gum at the same time is described in Lippard’s 1997 essay on the late feminist activist <a href="https://theconversation.com/australian-art-has-lost-two-of-its-greats-vale-ann-newmarch-and-hossein-valamanesh-175435">Ann Newmarch</a>, which is reprinted in full. The feminism of this generation of women artists was never separate from either rigorous philosophical debate or activism in other fields.</p> <p>By moving the bulk of her concerns to the period after 1975, Marsh is able to focus on artists whose careers coincide with the time-frame of her own professional life. Even so it is a huge task to map both feminist art and feminist writers over such a long period, at time when the world changed and the once marginal became mainstream.</p> <p>Marsh’s research methodology is best described as organic, reaching out through known networks and associations to collate records of art, events and ideas. This could reasonably be described as an academic incarnation of the approach used by the collectives that were the driving forces in 1970s feminist movements.</p> <p>At times the material is so rich in content that it threatens to overwhelm. Because of her history as an activist both in the Women’s Art Movement in Adelaide and later as a part of the Lip collective in Melbourne, Marsh has a long association with many of the artists and writers included. A number of archival photographs place her at some of the more interesting events in women’s art activities in both cities during the 1970s and 80s. </p> <p>In order to correct this bias towards the personal, Marsh has made a conscious effort to include artists from Tasmania, Fremantle, Perth and Brisbane. Some of these inclusions are uneven. </p> <p>While political poster art as nurtured by artists at Sydney’s Tin Sheds, is given due prominence, there is no mention of the very lively poster art fostered by Griffith University’s Margaret Bonnin. Yet the Brisbane political posters were a crucial part of the creative response to Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s oppressive political regime.</p> <p>Marsh rightly identifies the significance of Ngurra (camp/home/country), a collaboration between Dolly Nampijinpa Daniels and Anne Mosey. This is listed as being exhibited at the Biennale of Sydney and the University of South Australia. Yet the work was first developed when the two artists worked together at Yuendumu’s Night Patrol and was exhibited at Alice Spring’s very lively women’s collective, <a href="https://www.wts.org.au/">Watch This Space</a>.</p> <h2>Old friends and absences</h2> <p>Readers who visited the NGA’s Know My Name exhibitions will recognise many old friends on the pages. <a href="https://knowmyname.nga.gov.au/artists/frances-budden-phoenix/">Frances Phoenix</a>, who spent most of her life in relative obscurity, is again recognised as the pioneering feminist of sexual and political activism that she was. </p> <p>Ann Newmarch’s iconic poster Women Hold Up Half the Sky is once more reproduced – this time matched with a photographic record of Nat Thomas’s tribute performance, mimicking the subject matter.</p> <p>There are some great photographic records of past events and performances, including Jo Darbyshire and Michelle Elliot’s Chile’s Art Stains Bond’s Art: Guerrilla Girls Say Boycott, a record of the 1989 protest against Alan Bond’s links to Chile’s Pinochet regime. <a href="http://www.barbaracleveland.com.au/">Barbara Cleveland</a>, from a later generation of activist performance artists, continues to show how the personal can become political.</p> <p>Because of the range and variety of artists and writers whose work is discussed, the book presents an organisational challenge. The chosen solution has been to divide it into two parts, listing all names at the beginning of each section, then subdividing further by decade and theme. Sometimes this works, as with the Bad Mothers’ Collective of the 1980s who happily contest any sentiment concerning mother and child relationships in the chapter “Mother and child: discourse and dialogue since 1979”.</p> <p>Other sections are less satisfactory, especially as most art movements don’t easily divide by gender. The section on murals privileges Geoff Hodge’s 1981 Parkville community based mural projects, rightly seeing the way such events could evolve into projects breaking down barriers of gender and culture.</p> <p>Yet there is no mention of some of Australia’s most interesting urban community based murals, those made by Merilyn Fairskye and Michiel Dolk in consultation with the people of <a href="https://www.cityartsydney.com.au/artwork/15-women-woolloomooloo/">Woolloomooloo</a>, planned in 1979 and finally completed in 1982. These tributes to the ordinary people of what was once a slum, who fought to save their suburb from the developers – and won, are so well known as public works of art that their omission is surprising.</p> <p>It is however understandable that oversights will occur when dealing with such a mass of material, and there are pleasures to be found within these pages. </p> <p>Works illustrated are discussed either by the artists themselves or by the critics who have written most memorably on them. But despite a rough division of chapters into chronological and theoretical frames, the experience of reading is a bit like viewing a kaleidoscope. There are many possible patterns and no easily identifiable path.</p> <p>The second section consists mainly of extended extracts from archival texts. Some of these key critiques, first published many years ago, make this book a very useful research tool.</p> <p>Marsh is not dogmatic in her feminism, and where they make a contribution, men’s voices also discuss the women who have reshaped our culture. Scott Mitchell’s account of the women from <a href="https://warlu.com/">Yuendumu</a> who visited Sydney in 1982 describes how they came to understand the western art market could work for their community.</p> <p>The radicalism of the late 1970s is beautifully encapsulated by “White Elephant or Red Herring?” Ian Milliss and Vivienne Binns’ account of the artists revolt against the international focus and gender bias in the 1979 Biennale of Sydney. It is a reminder that activism can work. </p> <p>Then there is the extract from an article by Julie Ewington, that erudite curator and critic, whose career has spanned the 1970s to the 2020s. Present in the first 1977 Adelaide Women’s Show, held at the Experimental Art Foundation, she wrote that the "collective was so huge, so large in fact that there was every possibility that it might collapse under its own weight; yet in some ways it was one of the best and most rewarding collectives."</p> <p>It is a description that could also fit this book, which has so much rich content, yet often fails in details, including the spelling of people’s names. There are many people listed in the acknowledgements, but no mention of a copy editor. This is not a surprise.</p> <p><em>Image credits: Getty Images </em></p> <p><em>This article originally appeared on <a href="https://theconversation.com/politics-pioneers-performance-50-years-of-australian-womens-art-and-feminist-ideas-175840" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Conversation</a>.</em></p>

Art

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Guide to the classics: A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf’s feminist call to arms

<p>I sit at my kitchen table to write this essay, as hundreds of thousands of women have done before me. It is not my own room, but such things are still a luxury for most women today. The table will do. I am fortunate I can make a living “by my wits,” as Virginia Woolf puts it in her famous feminist treatise, A Room of One’s Own (1929).</p> <p>That living enabled me to buy not only the room, but the house in which I sit at this table. It also enables me to pay for safe, reliable childcare so I can have time to write.<br />It is as true today, therefore, as it was almost a century ago when Woolf wrote it, that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” — indeed, write anything at all.</p> <p>Still, Woolf’s argument, as powerful and influential as it was then — and continues to be — is limited by certain assumptions when considered from a contemporary feminist perspective.</p> <p>Woolf’s book-length essay began as a series of lectures delivered to female students at the University of Cambridge in 1928. Its central feminist premise — that women writer’s voices have been silenced through history and they need to fight for economic equality to be fully heard — has become so culturally pervasive as to enter the popular lexicon.</p> <p>Julia Gillard’s A Podcast of One’s Own, takes its lead from the essay, as does Anonymous Was a Woman, a prominent arts funding body based in New York.</p> <p>Even the Bechdel-Wallace test, measuring the success of a narrative according to whether it features at least two named women conversing about something other than a man, can be seen to descend from the “Chloe liked Olivia” section of Woolf’s book. In this section, the hypothetical characters of Chloe and Olivia share a laboratory, care for their children, and have conversations about their work, rather than about a man.</p> <p>Woolf’s identification of women as a poorly paid underclass still holds relevance today, given the gender pay gap. As does her emphasis on the hierarchy of value placed on men’s writing compared to women’s (which has led to the establishment of awards such as the Stella Prize).</p> <p><strong>Invisible women</strong><br />In her book, Woolf surveys the history of literature, identifying a range of important and forgotten women writers, including novelists Jane Austen, George Eliot and the Brontes, and playwright Aphra Behn.</p> <p>In doing so, she establishes a new model of literary heritage that acknowledges not only those women who succeeded, but those who were made invisible: either prevented from working due to their sex, or simply cast aside by the value systems of patriarchal culture.</p> <p>To illustrate her point, she creates Judith, an imaginary sister of the playwright Shakespeare.<br />What if such a woman had shared her brother’s talents and was as adventurous, “as agog to see the world” as he was? Would she have had the freedom, support and confidence to write plays? Tragically, she argues, such a woman would likely have been silenced — ultimately choosing suicide over an unfulfilled life of domestic servitude and abuse.<br />In her short, passionate book, Woolf examines women’s letter writing, showing how it can illustrate women’s aptitude for writing, yet also the way in which women were cramped and suppressed by social expectations.</p> <p>She also makes clear that the lack of an identifiable matrilineal literary heritage works to impede women’s ability to write.</p> <p>Indeed, the establishment of those major women writers in the 18th and 19th centuries (George Eliot, the Brontes et al), when “the middle-class woman began to write” is, Woolf argues, a moment in history “of greater importance than the Crusades or the War of the Roses”.</p> <p>Male critics such as T.S. Eliot and Harold Bloom have identified a (male) writer’s relation to his precursors as necessary for his own literary production. But how, Woolf asks, is a woman to write if she has no model to look back on or respond to? If we are women, she wrote, “we think back through our mothers”.</p> <p>Her argument inspired later feminist revisionist work of literary critics like Elaine Showalter, Sandra K. Gilbert and Susan Gubar who sought to restore the reputation of forgotten women writers and turn critical attention to women’s writing as a field worthy of dedicated study.</p> <p>All too often in history, Woolf asserts, “Woman” is simply the object of the literary text — either the adored, voiceless beauty to whom the sonnet is dedicated or reflecting back the glow of man himself.</p> <p><em>Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.</em></p> <p>A Room of One’s Own returns that authority to both the woman writer and the imagined female reader whom she addresses.</p> <p><strong>Stream of consciousness</strong></p> <p>A Room of One’s Own also demonstrates several aspects of Woolf’s modernism. The early sections demonstrate her virtuoso stream of consciousness technique. She ruminates on women’s position in, and relation to, fiction while wandering through the university campus, driving through country lanes, and dawdling over a leisurely, solo lunch.</p> <p>Critically, she employs telling patriarchal interruptions to that flow of thought.<br />A beadle waves his arms in exasperation as she walks on a private patch of grass. A less-than-satisfactory dinner is served to the women’s college. A “deprecating, silvery, kindly gentleman” turns her away from the library. These interruptions show the frequent disruption to the work of a woman without a room.</p> <p>This is the lesson also imparted in Woolf’s 1927 novel To the Lighthouse where artist Lily Briscoe must shed the overbearing influence of Mr and Mrs Ramsay, a couple who symbolise Victorian culture, if she is to “have her vision”. The flights and flow of modernist technique are not possible without the time and space to write and think for herself.<br />A Room of One’s Own has been crucial to the feminist movement and women’s literary studies. But it is not without problems. Woolf admits her good fortune in inheriting £500 a year from an aunt.<br />Indeed her purse now “breed(s) ten-shilling notes automatically”.</p> <p>Part of the purpose of the essay is to encourage women to make their living through writing.</p> <p>But Woolf seems to lack an awareness of her own privilege and how much harder it is for most women to fund their own artistic freedom. It is easy for her to advise against “doing work that one did not wish to do, and to do it like a slave, flattering and fawning”.</p> <p>In her book, Woolf also criticises the “awkward break” in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847), in which Bronte’s own voice interrupts the narrator’s in a passionate protest against the treatment of women.</p> <p>Here, Woolf shows little tolerance for emotion, which has historically often been dismissed as hysteria when it comes to women discussing politics.</p> <p>A Room of One’s Own ends with an injunction to work for the coming of Shakespeare’s sister, that woman forgotten by history. “So to work, even in poverty and obscurity, is worthwhile”.</p> <p>Such a woman author must have her vision, even if her work will be “stored in attics” rather than publicly exhibited.<br />The room and the money are the ideal, we come to see, but even without them the woman writer must write, must think, in anticipation of a future for her daughter-artists to come.</p> <p><em>An adaptation of </em><a href="https://belvoir.com.au/productions/a-room-of-ones-own/#CjnymqycvMw"><em>A Room of One’s Own</em></a><em> is currently at Sydney’s Belvoir Theatre. This article appeared on <a href="https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-a-room-of-ones-own-virginia-woolfs-feminist-call-to-arms-145398">The Conversation</a>. </em></p>

Books

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Frozen was our most important feminist film: Why the sequel won’t have the same impact

<p>“Elsa, the past is not what it seems.” The opening line from the latest Frozen II trailer invites us to revisit not only the original world of the film but to re-think its meaning.</p> <p>Of course, this is a well-worn technique with most sequels – a deeper dive into the mythology, sometimes deepening the experience (The Empire Strikes Back), sometimes complicating it to catastrophic effect (The Phantom Menace).</p> <p>However, it’s also an important time to reflect on what the original Frozen meant to our world, a very different time in 2013, and to make a bold claim: I think that Frozen is perhaps the most important feminist film ever made.</p> <p>It is still the most successful animated musical of all time, having made <a href="https://www.boxofficemojo.com/alltime/world/">over $1.2 billion</a> in the cinema alone, not including the merchandising that permeates children’s bedrooms all over the world.</p> <p>To set the scene, in 2013 Obama was still president and Harvey Weinstein still respected, if not awed, as a film producer. No #metoo, little significant dialogue in the screen world on gender equality (although Geena Davis was making increasing impact with her <a href="https://www.facebook.com/GDIGM/">Institute on Gender in Media</a>, founded back in 2004), and even less on racial diversity and gender fluidity.</p> <p>Frozen, a Disney animation about two princess sisters, one with the power to manipulate ice and snow, had been in development for decades, based on the Hans Christian Andersen Snow Queen story. Elsa was the villain. The film that audiences finally saw was somewhat of a happy accident: when one of the directors heard Let It Go for the first time (the now-forever-torch-song-of-self-acceptance), it inspired her to completely re-think the story and reshape it around sisterly love.</p> <p>The overriding messages of the film are almost embarrassingly simple: suppressing your authentic self is hugely damaging; fear is negative; love is positive. But here’s the meta-level kicker: it’s a fairytale (and a Disney one, at that) that tells us that princesses-in-jeopardy do not need a male to save them, thank you very much.</p> <p><strong>The Nevermind of this screen generation?</strong></p> <p>The take-home is clear: Women no longer need to be defined by their relationships to men. Here even romantic love is presented as problematic for the female characters, instead of a solution (opposite to the tradition of female love being the complication to the male hero’s journey). When Anna rejects her “true” love Kristoff to sacrifice herself for her sister, it is a deliberately symbolic meta-gesture, that had a far bigger impact than the filmmakers could have genuinely expected.</p> <p>It’s important to note here, that the problem (women always presented as objects-to-be-saved – especially princesses) was largely one created by Disney, although they should be given kudos for also being the one to eventually smash the trope. But it is also absurd that in 2013 the idea that women could have agency (and stories) independent of men should have been so culturally significant.</p> <p>Still, the fact that a Disney blockbuster overturned this trope was key. The huge commercial success of Frozen proved that these stories make money, influencing the mainstream to generate similar tales. Just look at the current output of Marvel and DC. The idea of women not defined by men has become a given, part of the intellectual fabric of an entire generation of girls and boys, something a challenging indie or art-house film could never hope or expect to achieve.</p> <p>And Frozen did something even more rare, it closed the door on those old damsel-in-distress characterisations, perhaps forever, in the same way that Dances with Wolves forever closed the door on the representation of American Indians as one-dimensional savages (noble or otherwise).</p> <p>In fact, I think Frozen has become the Nevermind of this screen generation; just as the seminal Nirvana album instantly dated all rock that come before it, Frozen magically made all previous fairy tales hopelessly old-fashioned.</p> <p><strong>A different world</strong></p> <p>So what for Frozen II (which will open in <a href="https://www.disney.com.au/movies">Australian cinemas</a> on November 28)? It’s arriving in a very different world from its predecessor. Story-wise, from the “autumnal” feel to the trailer, it’s clear that the film is going to be the second of four movies/seasons (no points for that one), and the “past is not what it seems” theme, combined with lots of Elsa in the sea does indicate (but I hope it doesn’t go there) that her dead parents might somehow be brought back to life.</p> <p>But will it have the same cultural impact? Absolutely not. And nor should it. Frozen was a lightening-rod moment in the zeitgeist, but to try to make it to strike twice would be disastrous, both creatively and financially. I am keen to see what happens to Elsa and Anna, but would worry if the film attempts to up the thematic stakes to extend the cultural conversation.</p> <p>Don’t get me wrong, I would love Disney and other studios to make films that better represented our ethnically, sexually and gender diverse populations (intersectional feminism, anyone?), but I think that might just be too much pressure on one narrative, even with all of Elsa’s magical powers.</p> <p><em>Written by Darren Paul Fisher. Republished with permission of </em><a href="https://theconversation.com/frozen-was-our-most-important-feminist-film-but-the-sequel-wont-have-the-same-impact-118915"><em>The Conversation</em></a><em>. </em></p>

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