NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #18/NN_1992_18.iso/spool/misc/activism/progress/5807

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Subject: IF: Creative Diversity at Australian Women's Conference
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/** nfd.ifeatures: 31.5 **/
** Written  8:55 am  Jul 25, 1992 by ihandler in cdp:nfd.ifeatures **
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News Report / 950 Words

Reviwing Feminism's Left, Center and Right:
Creative Diversity
at Australian
Women's Conference

By Rose McCann
Insight Features

   SYDNEY - The papers at the "History of Australian Feminisms
Conference", held here July 9-11, unavoidably treated only a
fraction of the period covered - from around 1890 to the early
1970s. Nevertheless, the gathering of 400, organized by the Sydney
University Women's Studies Center, offered a generous sample of a
fascinating range of ideas, activities and personalities of the
Australian women's movement.

   For many "first wave" working-class feminists, motherhood was
seen as providing women with the possibility of individual
liberation via being a paid servant of the state, said Marilyn Lake
in her paper, "A Revolution in the Family".

   Jean Daly, a Confectioners' Union activist in the early 1900s,
was of the opinion that, given the employment alternatives for
working-class women (mainly domestics, waitresses or factory
hands), they should be able to choose motherhood as their career,
and be paid for it by the state. In comparison to the alternatives,
she considered motherhood creative, empowering and far more useful.
"One woman, one job" was a frequent demand in this context.

   Feminist writings from this time by women like Louisa Lawson and
Maree Pitt often concerned women's economic dependence and their
"sex slavery" within marriage. The falling birth rate in the early
1900s was applauded by the socialist journalist and poet Maree
Pitt, who described it as a "strike by sex slaves", by women who
were fed up with being cast as "insensible machines". Domestic
labor, she said, was the "most thankless, relentless, and exploited
job in the world".

   Other socialist women, like Muriel Heagney, argued for the
emancipatory potential of paid work for women and opposed
enshrining motherhood through measures such as motherhood
endowment. Debates on such topics between feminists were often held
in front of large audiences in town halls in the pre-war period,
said Lake.

   Pat Grimshaw's talk, "The Churches and Feminism 1880-1910",
traced an earlier round of debate on equality for women in church
organizations. The archbishop of Melbourne at this time was noted
for his public diatribes against "fanaticism", his word for the
women's suffrage movement - which all the churches opposed.

   In 1860, there was big debate in the Church of England about
whether women in church choirs should be allowed, like the males,
to wear surplices. The male hierarchy opposed this because they
said it would visibly make women part of the actual service.

   There were several papers on the theory and practice of the
Communist Party of Australia from 1920 to 1950. Joy Damousi's and
Lyn Finch's papers traced the evolution of the CPA from its more
radical feminist positions in the early 1920s to the conservative
bourgeois moralism and anti-feminism of the Stalinist phase from
the 1930s onwards.

   Both speakers took up the inherent contradiction in the
Stalinist view of women as a necessary part of the proletariat but
whose primary role was as mothers. The language of class was the
only way in which differences between women, and between men and
women, were acknowledged or addressed, which had the effect of
linking women's political activity solely to traditional views of
"women's work".

   A 1947 party document purporting to detail how socialism would
be liberating for women was characterized by "a conservative
familial scenario", with even a touch of fantasy: that there would
be painless childbirth. This document did not mention abortion
rights, or any vision of the socialization of domestic labor.

   Joy Damousi said the experience of women in the CPA was diverse.
Many active members from this time said they didn't experience
sexism in the party, either in theory or practice, while others
said "the men drove out the feminists".

   "White Women's Activism in Queensland in the 1930s", by Joanne
Scutt, looked at an underexplored area of labor history. Women were
not just passive victims of the depression, she said. For example,
they were centrally involved in support work for important
shearers' and sugar, railway and brewery workers' strikes.

   Working-class women were also heavily involved in unemployed
relief work. They were prominent in the 1938 campaign against the
abolition of relief work for men. In Brisbane in 1931 there were
two major demonstrations by unemployed women, and big anti-eviction
protests, including pitched battles with mounted police.

   The only paper that aroused a widespread negative response was
Hilary Carey's, "Conservative Feminism", which argued that from a
"post-structuralist" perspective, we should welcome into the
feminist club "conservative feminists": women belonging to
traditional organizations like Girl Guides, the Anglican Mothers'
Union, the Catholic Women's League, the Country Women's
Association, the YWCA and women's organizations of bodies like the
Red Cross and the Freemasons.

   Carey said these women's organizations represented the dominant
women's voice in Australia since the suffrage campaigns. "While
they don't agree with the radical elements of the equal rights
agenda, they promote a solidarity among women and speak out on
women's issues as they see them ... Many of these traditional women
deserve to be called feminist. What is a feminist anyway? All
ideology in these post-feminist, post-modern times is fragile."

   A range of women forcefully pointed out that many aims of such
organization weren't profoundly different from those of groups like
Women Who Want To Be Women. One speaker suggested that support for
the right to control over one's body, ie abortion rights (which
most of these women's groups would not support), should be the
feminist bottom line.

   Others said, to the accompaniment of heartfelt applause, that
such organizations are not feminist and that to say they were was
to "take the politics out of feminism" and "negate everything we
stand for". For most, fortunately, there are limits to the
usefulness of post-modernist deconstructionism!

                            -- 30 --

   Rose McCann writes for Australia's Green Left Weekly, where this
article first appeared July 21, 1992.
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