Metaphors

There are many ways in which to figure the world of higher education and developments within it. All are metaphors, though often they are so embedded in the language in which we speak every day that we regard them as simply descriptions of ‘how things are’, the discourse of common sense. The pursuit of knowledge is imaged at some times, particularly in the sciences, as colonial exploration and heroic discovery; at others, particularly in such fields as Communications Technology, Computing or Gene Technology, as ingenious invention and manufacture; at yet others — and such metaphors are to be found in such fields as the humanities and social sciences, too — as a boom in a building industry, with foundations being laid and frameworks being constructed. The metaphor most commonly used in the late 1990s about the pursuit of knowledge in any field is that of the identification of commodities which can be sold in an increasingly global market.

In this paper, I want to mobilise a different metaphor, drawn from the field of ecology, an image of an ecosystem in which the pursuit of knowledge will flourish best where there is concern with the preservation of biodiversity in a balanced and interdependent environment.

Since my subject is the state of Women's Studies, and — more broadly — feminist scholarship in Australia at the end of the twentieth century, I want to image three stages of being in ecological terms. The first is an image of luxuriant, if often struggling, growth — a way of figuring Women's Studies in universities in the 1970s and 1980s. The second is an image of a flattened landscape, with whole forests decimated to supply markets in construction, palm oil production and papersupply, hills razed by mining companies, the hole in the ozone layer growing larger while citizens in so-called northern economies fail to modify their use of domestic heating, cooling, or hydrocarbons — an image for Women's Studies in the 1990s, in particular, the mid-to-late 1990s.

Unlike social movements which have formed religious sects or trades unions or political parties, the Women's Movement has not itself become an institution, and it never had a readily identified membership. Rather, it was, and remains, an amorphous, shifting collection of groups and individuals whose objections to aspects of the subordination of women bring them together at particular junctures to argue around particular issues, to campaign for particular goals related to those objections, or to celebrate women's creativity, energy and humour. English feminist journalist Beatrix Campbell had occasion early in 2012 to reflect on what had happened to Women's Liberation. ‘After the 1970s’, she wrote:

As she notes, ‘the academy’ — one of the locations in which Women's Liberation could still be found — was in Women's Studies.

I was employed to teach Women's Studies at the Australian National University from 1978 until the end of 1983, and I was employed to establish and run a Research Centre for Women's Studies at the University of Adelaide from 1983 until 2000. I have written about these activities and reproduce (most of) five of those conference papers, lectures and articles here. They are each a product of the time at which they were written, so there are references specific to those times. I mention the Tertiary Education Assistance Scheme in Chapter Eleven, for instance; issues around fees for students and schemes to assist students have changed mightily over the years. In Chapters Twelve and Thirteen, I give examples of some of the difficulties that I encountered among colleagues and administrators, but I decided not to elaborate on these in this Introduction. Accordingly, all of these pieces need a little historical and autobiographical background. First, though, a general introduction.

Often, when I was asked to explain why we would want Women's Studies in a university, I would tell an abbreviated version of a short story written by the North American, early twentieth-century, Pulitzer-Prize-winning author Susan Keating Glaspell. It is called ‘A Jury of her Peers’; it was published in 1917.

All of our group of sixteen — eleven women and five men — were interested in the position of women in China, though the questions we wanted to ask varied greatly from one individual to the next. One of our number was primarily concerned with sexuality and sexual satisfaction among Chinese women, a matter he gained little information about. Others brought to China questions arising directly from issues concerning the Women's Movement in Australia, issues which assumed somewhat different shapes when translated into a different language and society. But we all wanted to learn how women's lives had changed with the huge changes in Chinese society during this century, and what their lives are like now. We gathered answers to our questions wherever we went: at the Lung Tan neighbourhood in Peking, at the Chiang Chiao people's commune on the outskirts of Shanghai, in conversations with our guides on the bus or train, but principally in a three-hour discussion organised for us with representatives from the Shanghai branch of the All-China Women's Federation.

Our guides had asked us to prepare a list of questions for that discussion before it took place. The discussion then began with a long and beautifully constructed response to our list. The speaker was Mrs Wu, head of one of the departments in the Shanghai branch of the Women's Federation, a stocky woman whose greying hair suggested that she was probably between forty and fifty years old. She took the brunt of our later questioning, too, answering us seriously but not without humour. Parts of her opening reply summarised much of the information that we had been picking up piecemeal.

Before the liberation of 1949, she told us, all China had been oppressed by foreign imperialists and Chinese bureaucrats. But women had led a particularly bitter life, for as Mao noted as early as 1927, they were oppressed not only by the political, religious, and class authority systems which oppressed everyone, but also by the authority of men. There were limitations imposed on the employment of women, so that only 180 000 were employed in productive (as distinct from domestic) labour, and they — like children — were cheap labour, paid lower wages than men.

At the beginning of May 1979, four women appeared in a magistrate's court in Sydney, charged with having shot and killed a man. One of the women, aged fortynine, was the man's wife. The other three, aged variously nineteen, seventeen and sixteen, were his daughters.

Neighbours gave evidence at the hearing: one said that she had seen the man beating his wife, sometimes as often as three times in one day; another said that he had seen the man knock his wife down and kick her. He had been present once, said this witness, when the man told his family, ‘If I killed you all I would only have to go to jail once’. A detective told the court of the women's attempt to escape the repeated assaults by fleeing to a country town: the man followed them, armed with a rifle, and forced them to return home. He kept a loaded rifle in the bedroom, iron bars behind doors throughout the house, and threatened that he would be the first to sleep with his daughters.

The women did not complain to the police because they feared that any investigation would bring immediate retribution at home. Instead, one evening in January, when the man had beaten one of his daughters and thrown a glass at her, the wife mixed two crushed sleeping tablets into his food. Then, when he was snoring in front of the television, the four women resolved to kill him. The sixteen-year-old fired the shot. Afterwards, one of the daughters put her arm around her mother and said: 'It's all right, mum, we don't have to get belted any more'.

Such violence was not unique to that family. The defence cited as a precedent the decision made about a similar case in Victoria in the previous year. And information about a variety of forms of brutality, in the most private of our social institutions — the family — is beginning to weigh upon the shelves of public libraries, upon the desks of public servants, and upon the minds of public welfare workers.

The first section of this book is concerned with the history of the Women's Liberation Movement in Australia. These chapters are about sex, politics, joy and anguish. They are not in the order in which I wrote them, but, instead, in an order approximating a chronology of the Women's Liberation Movement. Chapter One is concerned with the pre-history of the upsurge of activist feminism at the beginning of the 1970s, and argues against the widespread contention that its single cause was the appearance of the contraceptive pill on the mass market. Causes are, I would argue, usually plural. What about Ann Curthoys's conviction that the new movement originated in ‘radical New Left politics’? ‘The early Women's Liberation Movement’, she contended,

Others’ experiences brought other explanations to the fore. One focused on the women of the post-World War II baby boom gaining access to tertiary education in far greater numbers than ever before, learning about societies absolutely different in time, place or kinds of relationships from our own, and thence being able to contemplate changes to our own. Sara Dowse begins the memoir of her marriage titled ‘Bride Price — 1958’ with brief accounts of the marriage of a young Gogo woman of central Tanzania, and of Princess Sophie Augusta Frederika Anhalt-Zerbst of Stettin, married to the unlovely and incapable Grand Duke Peter Feodorovich, who would eventually sit at her side as she occupied the throne of All the Russias as Catherine the Great. Sara learned about these two, she tells us, in tiered lecture theatres at the University of Sydney, ‘enrolling in the last stages of pregnancy and taking night classes for the first year while my mother-in-law looked after my baby boy in her pub’. That mother-in-law, Sara decided, was her father-in-law's slave: ‘She still did most of the cleaning, much of the cooking, and most of the accounts; my father-in-law went out every morning to one of his buildings, came back for his lunch, and spent the rest of the afternoon either at bowls or with his cronies at the bar’.

In November 1997, the Research Centre for Women's Studies [RCWS] at Adelaide University celebrated its fourteenth birthday. Structurally, it is now affiliated with the new Adelaide Research Centre for Humanities and Social Sciences in a recently created Division of Humanities and Social Sciences. It seems to have established its intellectual respectability by winning large grants from the Australian Research Council [ARC], by producing a fully refereed international journal, Australian Feminist Studies, by running a regular seminar series to which an array of international, interstate and local feminist scholars have contributed, and by organising a succession of conferences and workshops, some supported by no less a body than UNESCO. None of these factors guarantees its continued existence, though. Restructuring within institutions of higher learning continues to effect major change with increasing frequency; ARC grants run out; memories of seminars and conferences fade. But, for the moment, the oldest Research Centre for Women's Studies in Australia seems to be secure, more secure than at any other moment in its fourteen years. In this article, I'm concerned only with its first three years, 1983-86, possibly — as with most infancies — the time of its greatest insecurity. I will outline these under three headings.

Intellectual erasure

When I moved to Adelaide at the end of 1983, I found it a very different environment from the one in which I had become a feminist and an academic. Just as the Women's Movement in a city of around a million people had markedly different complexions from that in Canberra, a city of around 250 000 with an exceptionally high proportion of university-educated women, so the established sandstone Adelaide University was a very different institution from the ANU. There were students wanting Honours-level courses that would teach them something about feminism, and students wanting supervision for feminist topics for both Honours and postgraduate theses. There was a small core of committed academics, chaired by Jean Blackburn who was then attached to the Education Department in the university, who had conducted the campaign to secure the funding for the post to which I came.

Dedicated to the memory of Kay Daniels

It could be expected that food and feeding would have been central concerns for the resurgent feminism of the 1970s. Housework certainly was. And child care. Food and feeding are integral to both. Moreover, men's resistance to sharing equally in either housework or child care has proved one of the more intransigent of the shifting imbalances in power between women and men. So it would seem axiomatic that feminists would evince a major preoccupation with cooking and eating (and drinking), and welcome any signs of men engaging in anything beyond the glamorous and elite, or the consumerist, dimensions of the food world.

Not so, however. In most of the research carried out for the history of the Women's Liberation Movement that I am trying to write, there is almost no sign of any such concern; the exception is an issue of MeJane in 1974, announcing that food is a feminist issue. Further, I recall, myself, the outrage among feminists in the early 1970s when Colonel Sanders began advertising its wares with the slogan ‘Liberate Mum: take home some Kentucky Fried Chicken today’. For Women's Liberation it was the power-relations in the kitchen that mattered, and they were seen as entirely separate from what was cooked, presented and eaten. And the overlap of Women's Liberation with various fragments of socialism meant that food was fuel, not a subject of investigation in public hostelries or experimentation at home.

It came as a pleasant surprise, then, to encounter consistent attention to food, to wine, and to dining out, in the pages of Liberaction, the monthly paper that the Hobart Women's Action Group produced from April 1972 until December 1975.

The Hobart Women's Action Group (HWAG) was small and most of its members were connected with the University of Tasmania. It consisted of Kay Daniels, a lecturer in the History Department; Shirley Castley, a social worker in the Tasmanian bureaucracy, and Kay's partner; Frances Bonner, a postgraduate student in Political Science; Lorraine Miller, a postgraduate student in English; Anne Picot, a postgraduate student in Classics; and Rosemary Pringle, a tutor in History.

Introduction

'We have lived our lives as if there was something intrinsically inferior about us', wrote the Boston Women's Health Book Collective in the justly famous work, Our Bodies, Ourselves, first published in 1971. The problem was — as it continues to be — differences in power between women and men: ‘power is unequally distributed in our society; men, having the power, are considered superior and we, having less power, are considered inferior’. ‘What we have to change’, they continued, ‘are the power relationships between the sexes’. That might not be easy, but ‘at least the situation is changeable’, they believed, ‘since it is not based on biological facts’.

Feminism is always multiple and various, fluid and changing, defying efforts at definition, characterisation, periodisation. Nevertheless, there was a moment when, for some, late twentieth-century feminism's determination to alter differences in power between women and men depended on a rejection of biology. Feminist sociologist Ann Oakley encapsulated this moment when, in 1972, she asked, ‘Does the source of the many differences between the sexes lie in biology or culture? If biology determines male and female roles, how does it determine them? How much influence does culture have?’ Technology had altered the relationships between biology and society, she noted, but there had been no corresponding shift in the relationships between society and culture. For that to occur, it would be necessary to draw a distinction between ‘male and female roles’ — a distinction between sex and gender.

The Women's Movement reached Canberra six years ago, when a Women's Liberation group was formed in June 1970. The first Women's Liberation Newsletter appeared in October that year. The group, varying in size from about six to about fifty, continued to meet and to issue a monthly newsletter for the following five years. For three years, from February 1972 until January 1975, our centre of activities was the Women's Liberation House in Bremer Street, Griffith and participants in the group later secured the present Women's Centre in Lobelia Street. This now houses the Women's Information Service, the Abortion Counselling Service, and a feminist bookshop; it provides meeting and office facilities (telephone, typewriter, duplicator and filing cabinets) for Women's Electoral Lobby, the Women's Refuge, and the Rape Crisis Centre; it is the place at which we celebrate the publication of Beryl Henderson's translation Abortion: The Bobigny Affair, for instance, or the achievement of a national Women and Politics conference, or the arrival of a barrel of wine and some cases of empty bottles. The movement has grown large. It has diversified. It has become a vital necessity to a number of women in this city. Yet the predominant temper in the Women's Movement in Canberra during 1976 has reflected neither complacency about this state of affairs, nor the excitement, anger, and sense of urgency which contributed to achieving it. Rather, the prevailing mood has been bewildered, irritated, and weary. And the Canberra Women's Liberation group has disappeared. Its last Newsletter, Number 57, appeared in June 1976. The last meeting recorded in its minute book was held on 12 November 1975.

'Women's Liberation’ was a label which implied a particular cluster of expectations and commitments within the Women's Movement. Its disappearance from our groups, activities and writings is not simply a shift in semantic fashion. Nor is it merely the absorption of one group into the far larger community formed by the Women's Movement. On the contrary, it represents the loss of those expectations and commitments which were essential for many of us to our continuing engagement in the feminist struggle.

In Women's Liberation and in Women's Studies, both, we were always conscious of being part of a global scholarly community as well as a local polity. Making up my job at Adelaide University allowed me to foster both. International visitors rolled in like waves on an incoming tide, from the United States, Britain, The Philippines, New Zealand, Sweden, Canada, Germany, and that was only those who came to give seminars. We organised conferences and workshops, a major conference every two years, on average, ranging from one in 1986 organised in conjunction with the Humanities Research Centre at ANU, to a workshop on Women's Studies in Asia and the Pacific organised in conjunction with UNESCO in 1991, to another workshop, this one in 1992, in conjunction with the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia on Women and Restructuring: Work and Welfare, and a major conference, the Sixth International Interdisciplinary Congress on Women in 1996 at which we hosted almost 1000 participants from 57 countries. Local participants came from all over Australia, and in Adelaide the Research Centre was involved with the Working Women's Centre, the Women's History Task Force, the government's Tertiary Education Authority, and a conference on Women and Housing. In Chapter Twelve I have a footnote listing all the conferences that the Research Centre for Women's Studies at Adelaide University organised between 1985 and 1996. The reasons for such boasting are that these conferences were an immense amount of administrative, as well as intellectual, work (and such work included applications for funds), and these were times when we undertook that work ourselves — we did not have recourse to professional conference-organisers then, any more than we had access to email (still to reach us).

However, the achievement of which I am still proudest is the establishment of the journal Australian Feminist Studies, which I edited from 1985 until 2005.

I would like to begin with two quotations. The speaker in each is the same: a young man who had gained esteem at his university by making improvements to some chemical instruments. In the first quotation he is speaking about his discoveries in a subsequent piece of research; in the second quotation he is speaking about the object that he made as a result of those discoveries. Here is the first.

Here is the second quotation, from two years later in the narrative.

'Truly, it felt like Year One', wrote English novelist Angela Carter; ‘towards the end of the sixties it started to feel like living on a demolition site — one felt one was living on the edge of the unimaginable’. There was ‘a yeastiness in the air that was due to a great deal of unrestrained and irreverent frivolity’, and ‘an air of continuous improvisation’. ‘I can’, she wrote, ‘date to that time and to that sense of heightened awareness of the society around me in the summer of 1968 my own questioning of the nature of my reality as a woman. How that social fiction of my “femininity” was created and palmed off on me as the real thing’.

To begin what is predominantly — but not exclusively — a white story: in January 1971, at Australia's first Women's Liberation conference in Sydney, postgraduate students Ann Curthoys and Lyndall Ryan spoke of forms of ‘cultural oppression’: ‘[I]t is here’, they proclaimed,

The language was that of the new New Left and the popular movement against Australia's participation in the United States’ war against the Vietnamese people — except for its emphasis on 'culture'. That emphasis pointed to a dimension of the movement for the liberation of women that is seldom recognised. Look at Chris Westwood and Sue Williams: they've abandoned their skirts and stockings, not to make coffee for men at the anti-war meeting, but rather to sing — and on stage, not at home in the bathroom — in drag. Young singer/songwriter, Robyn Archer sang on a subject previously unmentionable in public, ‘The menstruation blues’. Ann Curthoys made more than speeches; she made a spectacle of herself swinging from a tree on the cover of MeJane, volume 1, number 1.