By Rose McCann
SYDNEY — The papers at the "History of Australian Feminisms Conference", held here July 9-11, unavoidably covered only a fraction of the period covered — from around 1890 to the early 1970s. Nevertheless, the gathering of 400, organised by the Sydney University Women's Studies Centre, offered a generous sample of a fascinating range of ideas, activities and personalities.
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 labour, 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 organisations. 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 ism 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 characterised 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 socialisation of domestic labour.
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 labour 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 organisations like Girl Guides, the Anglican Mothers' Union, the Catholic Women's League, the Country Women's Association, the YWCA and women's organisations of bodies like the Red Cross and the Freemasons.
Carey said these women's organisations 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 organisation 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 uld not support), should be the feminist bottom line.
Others said, to the accompaniment of heartfelt applause, that such organisations 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!