For four days in November 1991 I attended an international seminar in Moscow. The letter inviting me to present a paper had arrived in July on the letterhead of the Academy of the Social Sciences of the USSR. That institution had been renamed by November: it is now called the Russian Academy of Management.

Speeches made at a small lunch on the first day, hosted by the Academy's new head and attended by one of the women in the People's Congress of Deputies, indicated that there was a struggle in process over who would control the Academy, now that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union [CPSU] had been banned. They suggested, too, that our seminar would play a major part in determining the outcome of such a struggle. What was less immediately clear, though, was why this seminar might have such determining power. Its subject was ‘Gender Studies: Issues and Perspectives’.

We had been given a definition of ‘Gender Studies’ during the first morning. Dr Anastasiya Posadskaya, Director of the new Gender Studies Centre established in the Institute of Social and Economic Problems of Population in a different academy, the Academy of Science, told us that the Centre had introduced the term into the Russian vocabulary in a discussion that it had organised in 1989 under the heading ‘How to Solve the Woman Question?’ The principal social divisions between women and men are not ‘natural’, she reminded us. They are socially constructed. ‘Gender’ refers to the social construction of the feminine and the masculine, and the allocation of socially differentiated kinds of work as part of such a construction. ‘No single phenomenon can be genderneutral’, she declared. ‘If gender is concealed, the task of the researcher is to discover and analyse it.’ And this was particularly important in the USSR at present, she said. It would not have been possible to hold a seminar like this one in the USSR even as recently as two years ago.

Did this mean that perestroika, and moves toward a market economy — so celebrated as liberalising progress in the Western media — were improving conditions for women? Was there an upsurge of activist feminism across what was still, then, being called the USSR? If there was, what forms was it taking?

I used to describe my life as ‘ambivalent, ambidextrous, ambiguous, androgynous, ironic’. This book is similarly unorthodox: plural, haphazard and conjectural. It is a memoir, a — highly selective — curriculum vitae, and a history. However, there is some order in it. Each element is focused on the history and politics of the Women's Liberation Movement in Australia, on some of what we learned and thought in Women's Studies, and on some of what I learned about women and the conditions of their lives around the world during the last thirty years or so, partly in the course of editing a feminist journal. These are serious matters; they are about how people's lives and ideas changed, too little remembered or understood any longer, worth recalling for that reason alone. These ideas might well not seem dangerous any longer, but they certainly did when we first formulated them. They can be great fun, too — as I hope you will agree.

Looking into the rear-vision mirror at the roads that my life has travelled, I think I can spot the crossroads where I first encountered the possibility of such changes. I was walking along a corridor at the Australian National University past the offices that housed the people who taught history. I met Daphne Gollan, coming towards me. I had been so inspired by her teaching of Russian history, to say nothing of her wit and charm, that I had undertaken a research paper on the collapse of the western front during the First World War, a subject that allowed me to read about the Russian revolutions of 1917 in English-language sources. Subsequently, though, I had embarked on research on an Australian subject, the nineteenth-century Scottish South Australian, Catherine Helen Spence. I wasn't liking Miss Spence very much, at that time, and doing Australian historical research did not bring me into contact with Mrs Gollan much, either. So, that day in the passage in the middle of 1970, I greeted her enthusiastically. (Daphne was to say that I was like a big waggy dog who would bound up to you saying pat me, pat me.) She said, ‘There's a meeting that I think you should come to'.

Feminist research and Women's Studies courses have become a flourishing growth in Australia's academic jungle. This has occurred during a period of financial contraction and fierce competition for resources in universities. They probably owe something to the enactment of legislation outlawing discrimination on the grounds of sex, even if that something is no more than a few token gestures. They certainly owe a great deal, as does that legislation, to the continuing vitality and diversification of the Women's Movement throughout Australia. As they would suggest that the academic arm of the Women's Movement is making at least some impact on the world of knowledge.

There is other evidence that would support such a view, even if only negatively. The new science of socio-biology, scarcely ten years old, can be seen as having developed in reaction against questions raised by feminism; Janet Sayer's book Biological Politics has contributed to that perception. Among psychologists, attention to gender differences and to questions about how gender is inscribed in individuals now occupies a place in teaching and research undreamed of twenty years ago. There is revived debate around psychoanalytic theory, and theories of gender formation; Juliet Mitchell's Psychoanalysis and Feminism and Nancy Chodorow's The Reproduction of Mothering are only two in those rapidly growing fields. Scholars in disciplines as apparently distinct as Anthropology, Demography, History, Law, Sociology and Urban Planning have been exploring changes in the shapes, sizes and impetus towards coherence or disintegration of domestic units — households and families — and the connections between those changes and others in the social order that they constitute. The collection called Families in Colonial Australia edited by Patricia Grimshaw and her colleagues, Kerreen Reiger's book, The Disenchantment of the Home, and the papers given at the national Women and Housing conference held in March 1985 all add Australian examples to a field of enquiry already burgeoning in other places.

'Women's Rights are Human Rights!’ we shouted in chorus with the woman with the megaphone in the van, ‘Stop Violence Against Women!’ One of the placards condemned the rape of women in Bosnia. Others called on the United States to ratify the United Nations Convention to Eliminate Discrimination Against Women.

Not the usual fare of an academic conference. But this was not a usual academic conference. It was the Fifth International Interdisciplinary Congress on Women. Most of the placards were in Spanish, because it was held at the University of Costa Rica. The main banner read ‘La No Agresion Contra La Mujer es Tambien un Derecho Humano’. And the march from the university to the Plaza de la Democrazia in downtown San José (the capital of Costa Rica), which filled the streets with the 2000 participants from 43 different countries, was part of the program.

Other aspects of this congress gave it a flavour more like that of a United Nations gathering than the dusty scholasticism that can be associated with universities. Charlotte Bunch, of the Centre for Women's Global Leadership at Douglass College, Rutgers University, for instance, spoke of a current campaign to persuade participants at the UN Conference on Human Rights to take place in June this year that rape is torture (the UN has already outlawed torture, but not rape). Kazuko Watanabe, of the Kyoto Sangyo University, presented a chilling analysis of the continuum between the ‘sex tours’ that Japanese businessmen take in Asia today, and the ‘comfort women’ recruited in Southeast Asian countries to provide sexual services to the Japanese Imperial Army during the Second World War, information brought to international attention by a lawsuit that three Korean women brought against the Japanese government in 1992. Peggy Antrobus, of the Women and Development Unit in Barbados, speaking on Ecology to a packed lecture theatre, said that women in the developing world are sceptical of ways in which the feminist agenda had been ‘mainstreamed’ and thereby neutralised. She argued, too, that women are highly suspicious of the language and actions of government agencies: ‘We are not talking about “sustainable profits”’, she noted, ‘but that is what governments mean when they talk about “sustainable development”', an announcement which brought thunderous applause.

Foreplay

Some years ago, the Australian Research Council funded research towards a history of the Women's Liberation Movement in Australia. Other projects interrupted what had initially been designed to be a smooth transition from research to writing. However, I am now engaged in writing that history, and, herewith, its beginning. I had expected that my story of the resurgence of feminism in Australia in the late 1960s and early 1970s would start by linking the origins of Women's Liberation with the sexual revolution that followed from the appearance of the Pill on the mass market in Australia in 1961. But I have now decided that the connection between the Pill, the sexual revolution and Women's Liberation was not so simple. First, the sexual revolution had been brewing for longer than the few years between 1961 and, say, 1968. Second, there were two kinds of uneven development: the Pill did not simply 'appear’ on the mass market: its dissemination occasioned controversy and conflict and took some time; and its distribution was patchy. Let me elaborate, briefly.

Explanations for all manifestations of what has been called the cultural revolution of the West — from the student movement to new concerns with ecology, including the sexual revolution and Women's Liberation — usually have three elements. One is economic growth and an associated expansion of domestic markets as, to quote Stella Lees and June Senyard, ‘Australia became a modern society and everyone got a house and car’. A second is the beginnings of a new communications revolution with the appearance of television. The third is expanding education, especially tertiary education. I have written such explanations myself. Now, I would like to add to that mix two other factors.

One comes from the work of sociologists Ann Game and Rosemary Pringle. Considering the making of the Australian family, focused on sex and the suburban dream, they argued that the 1950s and ‘60s saw not only an expansion of consumption but also its sexualisation, targeted specifically at women. Advertisers, journalists and educators developed and spread the view that women — housewives — were to form love relationships with their homes, to have an emotional investment in the wellbeing of their furnishings.

It wasn't actually in Athens, this gathering of scholars from parts of the globe as distant as Zimbabwe and the United States, China and the Caribbean, Canada and the Netherlands, Bulgaria and Brazil. Perhaps we were supposed to think that this was just as well. One of the conference-organisers told us — as she drove us southsouth- east from Athens airport down the Sounion Peninsula — that the pollution levels in the city were now so high that the government had decreed that cars being driven into the city had to be rationed. Only cars with number-plates ending in odd numbers are allowed in the city on one set of alternate days; only cars with numberplates ending in even numbers on the other alternate days. (Of course, she said, this meant that most families kept two cars and made sure that their number-plates ended in alternate numbers — those families who could afford two cars, that is.)

We did go into Athens, though, for a reception at the Town Hall. And as the bus taking us back to the conference-locale rounded a corner, we were treated to the spectacle of a full moon above the Acropolis!

The conference, sponsored by UNESCO, and organised by Ketty Lazaris, the president of the Gender Studies Association of the Mediterranean [KEGME], was held in the Hotel Ilios, roughly twenty kilometres south of Athens. This hotel perches on a headland above the Mediterranean; it is a mere three minutes’ scamper past the bougainvillea (and the trenches being dug for new plumbing) to the beach. It is a tribute to the program of papers that we were to hear — in a lecture theatre without windows, and with desks so distant from the seats that anyone wishing to take notes had to do so on her knee or risk rupture — that most of us attended most of the papers, rather than playing truant at the beach. But, then, this was also a conference about Gender Studies and its place in shaping a future world. (It was also a comment on the dirtiness of Greek beaches: potato-chip bags blew across bodies attempting an English version of sunbaking; a plastic chair rested upside down, in the rocks, just below the hotel's terraces.

Nearly ten years ago I visited the People's Republic of China for a three-week tour guided by Luxingshe, the China International Travel Service. China-watchers among my friends told me that such a trip was called a ‘milkrun’. That term, with all its associations of haste, passing glimpses, picking up and dropping off bits and pieces, also seems the only appropriate description of the month that I spent in a very different society, the United States of America, in September-October 1986.

Any feminist going to the USA would have high expectations. North American feminism contributed so much to the formation of ideas and practices in the Australian Women's Liberation Movement, and continues to contribute to debates and strategies being explored by feminists in this country. Nevertheless, a feminist whose politics began forming in the Australian opposition to the USA's war against the Vietnamese people could hardly avoid being apprehensive as well. In December 1985 these politics had taken me to the Women's Peace Camp at Cockburn Sound to join the protest against the presence there of US warships and nuclear warheads. The contradiction between commitment of that kind and going to the USA as a guest of the US government was not lost on my friends who were making jokes before I left about ‘Susan's CIA trip’.

I don't know what informal connections might exist between the CIA and the State Department. And, in spite of the horrific, and — in retrospect — comic possibilities with which I tormented myself before leaving for America, I did not personally encounter any such connections. Some North American feminists even responded with a combination of irritation and indignation to the suggestion that I might. ‘The United States Information Agency [USIA] is the cultural exchange arm of the State Department’, they informed me, ‘and nothing to do with espionage and Irangate arms deals’. For those of us on the other end of an imperialism which has both cultural and armaments dimensions, the distinction between two sections of the US administration can seem less important than their combined effects. A major cultural event in Sydney while I was away was centred upon the US navy.

This is an exciting time in the deliberations which may set up a Women's Studies Centre at Melbourne University, and I am glad to be able to contribute to them. What I want to spend most of my time talking about now are answers to the question, why have a Women's Studies Centre?

I would like to assume that, in 1987, it is no longer necessary to argue the prior question, why have Women's Studies at all? But I will pause over it for just a moment, because it is a question I am still called upon to answer from time to time at Adelaide University. Earlier this year, I was asked to give a seminar paper to the Botany Department on what Women's Studies is and does. Last year I had to perform a similar exercise for the Department of Plant Pathology at the Waite Institute of Agricultural Research. In both, it emerged that there was a previously formed expectation that Women's Studies must either be about ensuring more jobs for women in universities, or be concerned solely with — in their view — 'soft’ humanities waffle about representations of women in literature. On the first count, the Botany Department had hoped to demonstrate that there was no need for Women's Studies at Adelaide because they already employed several women —though, as usual, clustered in the lowest paid and least secure jobs. On the second, the Plant Pathologists simply could not believe that questions about gender could have anything to do with their research. One of them, who had listened to me talking about the masculinity of the work culture established in some laboratories and classrooms (to say nothing of industries) with care and, I think, no special lack of sympathy, finally said:

'Hail the Convocation in China the Fourth Non-Government Organisation [NGO] Forum on Women!’ reads the huge red banner, beside the road to Huairou, about an hour's drive from downtown Beijing. Others, all written in both Chinese and English, wish ‘A Complete Success to FWCW ‘95!’, exhort the Chinese people to ‘Be a Worthy Host’ to the forum, and repeat the slogan ‘Equality, Development and Peace!’

It is 31 August, and we are in a bus that left our Beijing hotel at 7.30 am, wearing our laminated registration cards on little chains round our necks. We are poring over the 28-page plenary program book, and another of no fewer than 200 pages, each divided into three columns, listing the workshops that will fill the next ten days. They are divided into thirteen themes: Economy; Governance & Politics, Human/Legal Rights; Peace & Human Security; Education; Health; Environment; Spirituality & Religion; Science & Technology; Media; Arts & Culture; Race & Ethnicity; and Youth. They begin at 9 am, finish at 9 pm, and we must choose between the plenary sessions and as many as 132 concurrent workshops at any one time. This will clearly be a marathon.

Since the maps inside the back covers of our books tell us that they are not drawn to scale, the marathon begins with everyone's efforts to find their workshops, in locations ranging from air-conditioned halls in hotels where some of the participants are staying, through circles of metal chairs in a huge, multistoreyed but unfinished (roofless) concrete building labelled ‘Willow Recreation Club (Plenary Hall)’ on the maps, to the huge marquee (borrowed from the Malaysians) called the ‘Golden Pavilion’, an array of smaller marquees and tents set up between the buildings and linked by paths of concrete blocks laid on the ground, and several acres called ‘The Sports Ground’ studded with small round tables and chairs shaded by umbrellas. Chinese students wearing yellow t-shirts marked ‘Translator’ try to help read the maps at the chief access points to each area.

Everywhere there are women, in every variety of national dress, talking, pointing, laughing, hugging, hanging up banners on fences, posting notices on walls — at least 30 000 of us, from 180 countries, and representing more than 3000 NGOs, reports the Independent Daily of the NGO Forum on 8 September.

'The challenge', wrote Marilyn Lake — describing Women's Liberation as ‘The Great Awakening’ — ‘was to invent new frames of reference, new forms of knowledge, new modes of living’. Late twentieth-century feminists could, and did, readily produce critiques of the current positioning of women, of ways of thinking about women, of relations between women and men. But at least some of the most compelling emotional potency of such critiques emerged when they were positioned in contrast with a vision of an entirely different cultural, political and social order, an imagined ideal, a utopia.

Activist feminists from a century earlier in Australia understood this well. Henrietta Dugdale, for instance, elected president of the Victorian Women's Suffrage Society in 1885, was also the author of a short novel titled A Few Hours in a Far- Off Age. It depicts a society called Alethia, several centuries in the future, that vantage point providing a position for perception and analysis of the evils of the late nineteenth-century present. Most of the action takes place in a city of clusters of huge buildings that are ‘truly works of art’. Dugdale held that the key to women's emancipation was education, so, not surprisingly, these buildings are Instruction Galleries, each alcove equipped with a display cabinet and books demonstrating some aspect of past life among humans. There, young people of both sexes from the age of seven to early adulthood are taught by their parents for two mornings a week. The substance of that education, which occupies most of the novel, involves a thoroughgoing critique of ‘what was once called the “Christian Era,” subsequently designated by historians as “The Age of Blood and Malevolence”’, lasting — presciently if over-optimistically — until the twenty-first century.

The principal target in the present that Alethia's future perspective identifies was, Mrs Dugdale declared, ‘what has been, during all the ages, the greatest obstacle to human advancement; the most irrational, fiercest and most powerful of our world's monsters — the only devil — MALE IGNORANCE'. The work illustrates this dictum, encapsulating Dugdale's conviction that women were more morally and emotionally intelligent than men, as well as more technologically competent, in its account of a kind of technological innovation that would come to be considered characteristic of twentieth-century science fiction.

In 1983 we are drawing close to the end of the ten years which the United Nations designated the Decade for Women. Halfway through that decade, in 1980, in Australia, the proportion of women in the population involved in some kind of post-secondary education had equalled the proportion of men. Only a year earlier it was possible to claim that ‘Women's studies courses are at present offered at most Australian universities'.

However, all the gains made by Women's Studies courses are affected by their relationships with the institutions in which they are offered. When funding, staffing, resources, requirements and procedures for enrolment and assessment are controlled by academic bureaucracies, the shape and nature of courses are inevitably affected by the attitudes of those bureaucracies. In general they have been, as Ann Curthoys observed in 1975, ‘essentially conservative’. ‘Universities’, she went on,

In a social formation whose government is prepared to concede equal pay for equal work in a gender-differentiated workforce, the universities follow suit by allowing Women's Studies courses to be established, but ensuring, or trying to ensure, that they are adequately contained within the established structure of the institution.

Courses which have conceded to the academic bureaucracies a broad conformity over enrolment and assessment requirements in return for their very existence can meet a far blunter containment.

Made in America: two moments of origin

In 1969, Martha Ansara, an American, was in her early twenties, living in Boston with her three-year-old son, and splitting up with her husband. 1969 was a big year for Ansara. She moved first to California with her new Australian boyfriend, and then, with the same boyfriend, to Australia. In Sydney, she made left-wing friends through Bob Gould's Third World Bookshop, in particular with Sandra Hawker and with two Australians who had recently returned from the United States: Margaret Elliot and Coonie Sandford. Together they formed a group and discussed the pamphlets that Ansara had brought with her and their own experiences. Towards the end of that year they decided to hold an open meeting about Women's Liberation. The official story is that those three women composed a leaflet headed Only the Chains Have Changed to distribute during a protest march against the war in Vietnam on 14 December 1969, calling a meeting about Women's Liberation for January 1970. Many years later, Ansara confessed that, being a young mother, she had been exhausted and had fallen asleep, so the leaflet was the work of Hawker and Sandford and Ansara's film-making journalist boyfriend.

The meeting should have been a failure, Ansara was to recall: ‘Nobody in their right mind holds meetings in January. I knew nothing, you know’. But even though it was January — when everyone goes to the beach — the meeting was packed. This was, Ansara remembered, a ‘new phenomenon’: ‘we were swept up, I guess, in the sort of new wave of interest in this imported phenomenon’.

Early in 1969, Warren Osmond, a tutor in Politics at the University of Adelaide, had been reading anti-war publications which made a great fuss over the Miss America Protest of 7 September 1968.