Feeding the backlash beast
There's a lot of feminist-bashing going on these days. You expect it from the usual quarters — the religious right, the establishment media. But some of the most strident newcomers to backlash rhetoric are women who call themselves feminists. They used to be on our side.
We live in a period referred to as the "backlash". It's after the second wave of feminism and before the third. It's a time when many of the gains of the second wave are being turned around, yet at the same time a new generation of women has grown up taking those gains for granted — the right to education, the right to work, access to child-care, the formal right to equal pay.
However, these gains are being attacked. Enterprise bargaining has made significant inroads into the ability of women workers to achieve equal pay. Fees have been introduced for higher education and more are planned, restricting women's ability to participate.
The contradiction between post-second wave expectations and 1990s real life is being exploited by the backlashers. They need someone to blame. Women expect equal rights, yet they're not getting them. Someone must be at fault. So who can we point the finger at? In a classic case of divide and rule, they blame the "feminists".
Who exactly the "feminists" are varies according to which backlash proponent is wielding the big stick. For some it's an opportunity to stereotype feminists as anti-men, anti-sex, puritanical victims who can't wait to experience another instance of oppression just so they can complain about it and say that proves their theory.
To others, those at fault are the new generation. They are stereotypical '90s women, into individuality and personal ambition, who want to mix designer clothes, lipstick, corporate ambition and their boyfriends with feminism. They don't want to be seen as too radical. They want to have their cake and eat it too.
It's just not fair, cries Anne Summers. Summers has a string of femocrat credentials, and finds it easy to access a wide range of establishment outlets to vent her spleen against those take-it-for-granted-young-things.
They just won't get started, she complains. They haven't got what it takes to fight for women's rights. While US feminists' books stock every airport bookshop (Summers seems to think we all travel as frequently as she does), "Where are the books ... by young Australian women?"
Summers goes further and sets up a model for her version of the politically correct third wave feminist. Young women today "have yet to map out a feminism they think is worth fighting for", she says. "And for that to happen, a young woman somewhere has to write it all down for the others to ponder and debate."
If it were all so easy, then surely we'd be a lot better off by now. One of the problems with Summers' critique is that she is focusing on the wrong enemy. Has she ever wondered why it is that she gets so much airplay from those institutions which otherwise don't go out of their way to propagate feminist literature?
Summers' cynicism feeds the backlash beast. It lends weight to the idea that it is women who have it wrong, women who are to blame for the fact that we still don't have equal rights. That's pure backlash.
It also obscures the real debate. By buying into the backlash, Summers is distorting real concerns about women's lack of equal rights to prop up a system which still depends on the exploitation of women, a system which relies on women's unpaid labour in the home and all the mechanisms which keep that labour docile — including violence, lack of services and economic dependence.
By Kath Gelber