The truth of the matter is more nuanced. The National Study of Mental Health and Wellbeing, carried out between 2020 and 2022 by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, tells us that 22 per cent of Australians had a mental disorder in the previous twelve months and 43 per cent within their lifetime. Large numbers, no doubt, but no larger than the 20 per cent and 45 per cent figures obtained when the study was conducted in 2007.

But hidden in these aggregated figures is a worrying trend. Among young people aged sixteen to twenty-four, the twelve-month prevalence of mental disorder rose from 26 per cent to 39 per cent, and that increase was especially steep for young women, up from 30 per cent to 46 per cent. When half of this group has a diagnosable mental illness — an underestimate, because the study only counts a subset of the most prevalent conditions — something is clearly very wrong.

A similar story of age- and gender-biased deterioration is told by the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey. When an index of mental health is tracked across iterations of the survey from 2001 to 2021, older and middle-aged adults hold relatively steady but people aged fifteen to thirty-four, and especially young women, show a relentless decline beginning around 2014. The pandemic, the usual all-purpose explanation for recent social trends, can’t be held responsible for a rise in psychiatric misery that preceded it by several years, so what can?

Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation offers a provocative but compelling answer to this question. Haidt, an American social psychologist known for influential books on well-being (The Happiness Hypothesis), moral psychology and political polarisation (The Righteous Mind) and upheavals on US college campuses (The Coddling of the American Mind, written with Greg Lukianoff), argues that some of the usual explanatory suspects are innocent. They don’t account for why declining mental health disproportionately affects young women, why it is occurring now or why the trendline started to dive in the early 2010s after a period of stability.

The prospect of ecological catastrophe, for example, weighs most heavily on younger people but every generation has experienced existential threats. Wars, natural disasters, and economic crises are conspicuous reasons for distress and despair, but world events have always been terrible. It is not obvious why they should disproportionately make young women anxious and depressed while leaving older and maler people unaffected. The stigma of mental illness may have declined so that people have become more willing to acknowledge it, but increases in the prevalence of mental ill-health among young people are not confined to subjective reports but also found in rates of hospitalisation and suicide.

The chief culprit, Haidt proposes, is technological. Smartphones and social media have rewired young minds to an unprecedented degree, replacing “play-based childhood” with “phone-based childhood.” Portable devices with addictive apps and algorithms engineered to harvest attention and expose children to damaging content have wrought havoc on young people’s mental health. They have done so in ways that are gendered and most severely affect generation Z. Born after 1995, these young people are the first to have gone through puberty in the virtual world.

Haidt marshals high-quality evidence for the decline in young people’s wellbeing over the past decade. Graph upon graph show inflection points in the early 2010s when mental health and related phenomena such as feelings of social connection or meaning in life start to trend downward. These trends are not limited to the United States but occur more or less in lockstep around the Western world. Their timing indicates that it is not the internet or social networking sites themselves that are damaging, but the transformation that resulted from the advent of smartphones, increased interactivity, image posting, likes chasing, algorithmic feeds, front-facing cameras and the proliferation of apps engaged in a race to the bottom to ensnare new users.

Haidt argues that the near-universal use of smartphones in children and especially pre-teens is driving the increase in mental health problems among young people. Coupled with over-protective parenting around physical risks in the real world has been an under-protection around virtual risks that leaves children with near-unfettered access to age-inappropriate sites. Like Big Tobacco, the developers of social media platforms have designed them to be maximally addictive, have known about the harms likely to result, have made bad faith denials of that knowledge, and have dragged their heels when it comes to mitigating known risks that would have commercial consequences.

There are many reasons why phone-based childhood has damaging effects. It facilitates social comparisons around appearance and popularity, enables bullying and exclusion, exposes young children to adult-focused material, and serves individualized content that exploits their vulnerabilities. It fragments attention and disrupts sleep, with implications for schooling as much as for mental health. Smartphones also function as “experience blockers,” reducing unstructured time with friends and the opportunities for developing skills in synchronous social interaction, conflict resolution and everyday independence.

Haidt is emphatic that the problem of phone-based childhood is not just the direct harms it brings but also the opportunity costs: the time not spent acquiring real-world capabilities and connections. Added to a prevailing culture of safetyism that attempts to eradicate risk and prescribes structured activity at the expense of free play and exploration, the outcome is a generation increasingly on the back foot, worried about what could go wrong and feeling ill-equipped to deal with it. Well-documented developmental delays in a range of independent and risky behaviours are one consequence, and the rise of anxiety is another.

When many children and adolescents report that they are almost constantly on their phones we should therefore not be surprised that they feel disconnected, lonely, exhausted, inattentive and overwhelmed. Haidt argues that many of these emotional and social effects are common to young people as a group, but some are gendered. Girls are more likely to be entrapped by image-focused networking sites that promote perfectionist norms, decrease their satisfaction with their bodies, and expose them to bullying, trolling and unwanted attention from older men. Boys are more often drawn into videogames and pornography, which foster social detachment, pessimism and a sense of meaninglessness, sometimes combined with bitter misogyny.

Haidt reminds us not to think of children as miniature adults, but as works in progress whose brains are malleable and developmentally primed for cultural learning. “Rewiring” may be an overstatement — brains never set like plaster and cultural learning continues through life — but the preteen years are a sensitive period for figuring out who and what to look up to, a bias easily hijacked by influencers and algorithm-driven video feeds. Older adults can be moralistic about adolescents who won’t disengage from their phones, but when those phones are where life happens, and when the brain’s executive functions are only half-formed, we should understand why shiny rectangles of metal and glass become prosthetic.

What to do? Haidt has a range of prescriptions for parents, schools, tech firms and governments. Parents should band together to encourage free play, promote real-world and nature-based activities that build a sense of competence and community, limit screen time for younger children, use parental controls, and delay the opening of social media accounts until age sixteen. Schools should ban phones for the entirety of the school day, lengthen recess, encourage unstructured play, renormalise childhood independence and push back against helicopter parenting. There is a social justice imperative here, Haidt observes, as smartphone use seems to disproportionately affect the academic performance of low-income students.

Responsibility for intervening can’t be left to individuals and local institutions alone. Governments and tech firms must recognise their duty of care and come to see the current state of affairs as a public health issue, much like tobacco, seat belts, sun exposure or leaded petrol. Tech firms must get serious about age verification and increasing the age of “internet adulthood” at which young people can make contracts with corporations hell-bent on extracting their time and attention. Governments can legislate these requirements, design more child-friendly public spaces, and remove penalties for healthy forms of child autonomy such as going to a playground without a parent, currently criminalised in the United States as “neglect.”

The Anxious Generation is a passionate book, coming from a place of deep concern, but most of it is written with the cool intonation of social science. The work is accessible and clearly intended for a wide readership, each chapter ending with a bulleted summary of key points. There is a refreshing humility about the empirical claims, which Haidt accepts can be challenged and may sometimes turn out to be wrong, referring the reader on to a website where updates on the state of the evidence will appear.

The part social media plays in mental ill-health is in dispute, for example, although the evidence of a correlation with heavy use is not. Haidt offers up studies supporting the causal interpretation but acknowledges that nothing is straightforward where human behaviour is concerned. Nevertheless, he is justified is arguing that his “Great Rewiring” hypothesis is now the leading account of the origins of the youth mental health crisis. No other contender appears capable of explaining why things seemed to start going wrong around the globe somewhere between 2010 and 2015.

Critics of The Anxious Generation are likely to argue that Haidt’s hypothesis is simplistic or that it amounts to a moral panic. Both charges would be unfair. A single explanatory factor rarely accounts for something as complex as a major social trend, of course, but identifying a dominant cause has the pragmatic benefit of prioritising interventions. If phone-based childhood is the problem then we have a clear target for possible solutions.

As explanations go, Haidt’s isn’t quite as simple as it might seem in any case. The advent of smartphones and all-consuming social media may take centre stage, but earlier cultural shifts that amplified the sense of risk and promote over-protection set the scene and compounded young people’s vulnerability. Haidt’s account of the elements of smartphone use that are most damaging is also highly specified rather than a wholesale rejection of the virtual world.

The mental health field often extols the complexity of its subject matter, which sits at the jumbled intersection of mind, brain and culture, but that recognition can hamper the search for agreed interventions. The usual calls to boost clinical services are understandable, but solutions that address individual distress in the present fail to tackle the collective, institutional and developmental sources of the problem.

Some proposed solutions, such as efforts to build online social connections, may be ineffective because they fail to foster the embodied, real-world connections that matter. Other supposedly compassionate responses, such as accommodating student anxiety with diluted academic requirements and on-demand extensions, may make anxiety worse by enabling and rewarding avoidance. Haidt arguably overlooks how much mental ill-health among young people is being inadvertently made worse by well-meaning attempts to accommodate it and by backfiring efforts to boost awareness and illness-based identities.

The charge of moral panic is equally problematic and doesn’t stick for three reasons. First, evidence for the harmful consequences of phone-based childhood is now documented in a way that past worries about new technologies were not. Second, Haidt’s proposal focuses on the welfare of young people rather than social decay. Although he argues that phone-based life can cause a form of spiritual degradation, his critique is primarily expressed in the register of health rather than morality. Third, although Haidt articulates a significant threat, with the partial exception of social media companies he is not in the business of lashing villains so much as promoting positive, collective responses and a sense of urgency.

The youth mental health crisis is real, and it shows no signs of abating. The human cost is enormous. If rates of mental illness among Australians aged sixteen to twenty-four had remained steady since 2007, around 350,000 fewer young Australians would be experiencing one this year. The Anxious Generation is vital reading for anyone who wants a sense of the scale of the problem and a clear-eyed vision of what it will take to tackle it. •

The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness
By Jonathan Haidt | Penguin | $36.99| 400 pages

The post Virtual anxiety appeared first on Inside Story.

Her causes are many and diverse, but linked by a unifying thread: always, Sylvie sides with the oppressed. For nearly sixty years she has fought for women’s rights, refugee causes, and for anyone whose treatment she deems unfair. Perhaps the best measure of her conviction is that she holds fast to causes, even at risk of personal cost.

Sylvie traces her radical roots to her Jewish paternal grandparents, David Leber and Rivka Szaladajewska, whose motivating creed was social and political change. Rivka was born on 26 September 1896 to an observant Jewish family in the Polish city of Łódź. She would later reject religion, and her family her, but she maintained a cultural and social connection to Judaism, working at the Grosser orphanage for Jewish children in the central Polish city of Piotrków Trybunalski. Her fierce commitment to the politics of the left, at a time when Jews were among the most prominent advocates for social democratic causes in eastern Europe and Russia, was another point of connection to her Jewish heritage.

David Leber was born in Piotrków Trybunalski, Poland, on 10 January 1887. While the details of his early life are sketchy, he was motivated from a young age by the tenets of social democracy. He was schooled first at a yeshiva, but left religious education to embrace Bundism, the influential secular Jewish movement that agitated for social and labour reform.

Bundism led David to Russia, and trouble. The February revolution of 1917 saw Bundists and Mensheviks align in a union of social democratic parties. When the February, or Menshevik, revolution was supplanted in October by the more radical Bolsheviks, the Bundists who supported Menshevism became pariahs, dismissed by the new regime as ineffectual gradualists and enemies of the communist state.

Though not a Menshevik himself, David was damned by association. His link to the Menshevik cause appears to have led to his arrest and deportation to Siberia. An accusation that he had sought to assassinate a public official may have been the pretext for his arrest. Whether or not he escaped from Siberia or was released, he is thought to have been rescued from the Soviet Union on a British ship.

Now back in Poland, David found work as a waiter, and met Rivka. Worsening anti-Semitism prompted them to leave their homeland for France in 1922. Rivka was pregnant when they made their way west, and a son, Samuel, was born in Paris on 3 December 1922. Against Jewish custom he was not circumcised, and David and Rivka didn’t marry until twelve years after his birth, with Rivka keeping her maiden name. Her choice to be known as Rivka Szaladajewska was both a stab at patriarchal custom and an affirmation of identity. Others might have seen the Polish suffix “jewska” as a millstone, but not her.

David and Rivka became part of a Parisian left-wing milieu that included other Jewish émigrés, among them the Russian-born artist Marc Chagall, with whom they became good friends. John-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were part of the same circle. David and Rivka brought their passions with them to Paris: they were united in their dislike of conventions for which they saw no purpose and in their commitment to social democratic principles and secularism. David continued to see these beliefs as inherent in Bundism: his experiences in Russia didn’t dim his enthusiasm for the Bundist approach to social change. A manifestation of his commitment to community and history was his involvement in founding the Medem Library in 1929, which is still the most important site of Yiddish learning in Europe.

David and Rivka were two of the thousands of Jews ensnared in 1942 by Operation Spring Wind, in which officials of the Vichy French state cooperated with the Nazi regime to arrest foreign and stateless Jews living in France. The operation was the first step in a plan to send Jews east to Auschwitz and their deaths. The two of them were arrested on 16 July in the infamous Vél d’Hiv round-up, interned at the Drancy transit camp in Paris, and then deported to Auschwitz on 24 July as part of convoy number 10. They were killed at Auschwitz, probably later in 1942, though when exactly isn’t certain. Rivka is thought to have taken her own life, throwing herself on an electric fence after she learnt that she was to be a victim of one of Josef Mengele’s depraved experiments.

Two years earlier, when the Germans marched on Paris, Rivka and David’s son Sam was a seventeen-year-old school student living with his parents in the 20th arrondissement. His response to the German advance was to cycle to the port of Royan on the Atlantic coast in the hope of finding passage to England. This plan failed and he returned to Paris, where he remained until November 1941, when David and Rivka compelled him to leave the city for Lyon in the zone libre, where he lived with friends.

German occupation of the zone in November 1942 prompted Sam to move to Grenoble, where he worked as a lathe turner before being corralled into the Chantiers de la Jeunesse Française, a national service scheme imposed on French youth by the Vichy state. Released from this obligation in mid 1943, he managed to avoid another, more insidious labour scheme — the Service du Travail Obligatoire, which sent young French men to Germany as indentured labour — by joining the Resistance in late 1943 or early 1944.

For life as a maquisard, Sam chose the stirring alias Serge Rebel, his new surname a testament to his task and heritage: Rebel is the anadrome of Leber. From David and Rivka he had inherited a commitment to the ideals of Bundism and socialism. He had joined the SKIF, the youth wing of the Bundist movement, in 1931, the year he turned nine. A strong anti-communist streak may have been another inheritance, though his opposition was fed also by his own experiences.

During the Spanish civil war of 1936–39, he had travelled to Spain to fight with the Republicans against Franco’s Nationalist forces. He was turned away on account of his youth, but took from the war an understanding that communists had undermined the Republican cause by concerning themselves more with anarchists than fascists.

His dislike of communism hardened when the French Communist Party, echoing Moscow’s line, adopted a neutral position at the start of the second world war, a stance he thought amoral and hopelessly naive. Later, in the Resistance, he objected to the division of the organisation along communist and anti-communist lines as a needless distraction. In his thinking, communists too often missed the point of the fight. And the point of any battle was to act, not to posture.

In the Resistance Sam worked in intelligence and sabotage. He and his fellow maquisards couldn’t spare explosives to destroy railway tracks so prised them out of position, ensuring that carriages travelling the tracks at Grenoble, an important railway junction connecting different parts of France, would tip over. Precious explosives were reserved for attacking factories that sustained the German war effort. In one instance, Sam recalled, bombs were used to kill German soldiers, but more often their targets were objects rather than people, collaborators aside. For traitors, direct violence always seemed justified.

Sam served with the Resistance until the liberation of France. His rewards were the Croix de Guerre, citations for brave conduct and good service, and a bullet wound, sustained during a firefight with German soldiers in March 1944, which led to three months in hospital, a shortened leg and a permanent and painful limp. Several decades on, Sam was diagnosed with motor neurone disease, which doctors linked to spinal damage caused by his limp.

In later years Sam mentioned his war rarely, and usually only when pressed. School students and Holocaust historians sought him out for interviews, seemingly surprised to find a decorated maquisard living in McKinnon in suburban Melbourne. Sam obliged these requests, with humility and a trace of bemusement. He had fought the war against fascism as a solemn and obvious duty, a position that precluded the shaping of recollections as personal achievement. The fact he was speaking in his third language, after Yiddish and French, may also have shaped his responses, which could seem blunt.

“Sometimes an action went wrong and people got killed and things like that,” he told two interviewers in the 1980s. Nazi collaborators, he added, were “interdicted” on their way to or from work. These answers, on first reading dispassionate and perhaps even callous, did not reflect the man. Rather, they hint at Sam’s lifelong and noble belief in the primacy of the collective cause over the claims of the individual.

After the war Sam returned to Paris, a city that had visited both kindness and cruelty on the Lebers. His parents had found blessed sanctuary there in the 1920s; twenty years later, it was the place of their betrayal. He met Madeleine Benczkowski, and they married in 1948. His new wife, also French-born of Polish Jewish heritage, had been born in Paris on 20 January 1926. Her parents, Herschel and Chaya Benczkowski, had emigrated west from Poland in the years after the first world war.

Herschel was murdered at Drancy in 1942. Madeleine, her brother Sam and their mother Chaya survived the war thanks to the people smugglers who spirited them from Paris to Lyon, where they lived under false names and Madeleine was able to earn money as a furrier’s apprentice. In Madeleine’s vocabulary, “people smuggler” could be a term of endearment and a pejorative. She knew three types of people smuggler — humanitarians, money-makers and “bastards” who betrayed Jews to Nazis. The Benczkowskis’ saviour was a humanitarian and a money-maker, having taken payment in jewellery.

Sam and Madeleine began their married life in Paris as tailors, making men’s trousers from home. Their daughter Sylvie was born on 30 May 1950. The next year they resolved to emigrate to Australia, their decision to leave France prompted by the Korean war and the threat of another world war. They considered Canada, but chose Australia on the advice of Rose and Leon Goldblum, Sam’s cousin and her husband, who were living in Melbourne and recommended the city as a good, safe place to raise children. Rose and Leon were Auschwitz survivors. A preference for a warmer climate may also have influenced Sam and Madeleine’s choice. The Lebers sailed on the Italian ship Sydney, arriving at Station Pier, Port Melbourne, in February 1952.

The family settled into Australian life in Grey Street, St Kilda, within a milieu that offered comfort and connections to the world from which they had come. Melbourne in the 1950s, and St Kilda in particular, was home to a community of French-speaking Jews from France and Belgium. In their company Sam and Madeleine found friends with whom they shared a common language and aspects of a common heritage. As for so many other migrants across time and place, such connections to the familiar were a sustaining tonic in difficult years.

Before the war, Madeleine had hoped to be an accountant, Sam an engineer. After the war, steady work and a safe home were aspiration enough. Madeleine sought work as a jewellery shop assistant but was rejected on account of her French accent, so she returned to what she knew, working from home as a seamstress. Sam worked as a toolmaker, and fitter and turner. He joined the Australian Metal Workers’ Union: the union movement, and the postwar Australian Labor Party, reflected some of his Bundist ideals.

For Sylvie, the initial contrast between life in Paris and life in Melbourne was less abrupt than it was for her parents. She spoke French at home and Yiddish at her kindergarten at the Bialystoker Centre at 19 Robe Street, St Kilda, which served also as a hostel for Jewish migrants and refugees from Europe. The Alliance Française, where Sam and Madeleine borrowed French-language books, was on the same street. Such was Sylvie’s immersion in this European milieu that she knew little English when she started at St Kilda Park Primary School. Daniel, her brother, was born in 1959.

***

If Sam, who died in 2011 aged eighty-eight, was an “activist,” he probably didn’t recognise it. His engagement with the political was not a conscious choice but the manifestation of a commitment to social democratic ideals; in his conception, actions gave honour and worth to thoughts. To be political, if that’s what others called it, was simply his way of being.

Sylvie has followed the same path, her activism inseparable from her work and passions. In this regard she is her father’s daughter. Madeleine, who died in 2015, was a quieter social democrat than her husband: she voted Labor and hoped for a society ordered on fairness and merit rather than money and privilege, but was not overtly political.

In 1979 Sylvie and her friend Eve Glenn formed Girl’s Garage Band, a seven-woman punk rock band with Sylvie on bass guitar, Eve on lead guitar, and Fran Kelly, not yet an ABC journalist, on vocals. The band became better known as Toxic Shock, the name a pointed reference to the bacterial syndrome associated with tampon use that at the time was harming and killing many women. The band’s 1981 single “Intoxication,” written by Sylvie, protested at the complicity of tampon manufacturers in the prevalence of the syndrome.

Through Toxic Shock, Sylvie could voice specific protest, rail against the patriarchal nature of the punk and post-punk scenes and the music industry generally, and express her passion for music. Give-Men-a-Pause, a women’s music show she hosted on 3RRR in the early 1980s, offered another stage to voice thoughts on life and music. In a 2015 article about the contemporary Australian popular music scene, she wrote of her enduring love for playing and listening to music, and her dismay at the persistence of the boys’ club that Toxic Shock strove to disrupt.

For Sylvie, music has been a passion, a motivation and, on occasion, a refuge from horror. In Queensland in 1972, some years before forming Toxic Shock, she was raped and very nearly murdered. She has written with compelling honesty of these crimes, the toll they have taken on her mind and body over half a century, and her determination always to fight back lest “the bastards win.”

Her response to the assault might be described as Leberian, for its hallmarks are concern for others and a remarkable and enduring capacity to resist. Initially she sought to shield her parents from the attack, worried that they, as European Jews who had lived through the war, had experienced enough anguish. Later, her understanding of the Lebers’ commitment to social justice motivated her to speak publicly about what she had suffered. A year after she was assaulted, she and a group of friends founded Women Against Rape, Victoria’s first rape crisis centre, housed within the Women’s Health Centre on Johnston Street, Collingwood. Women Against Rape supported victims in every way possible, while advocating simultaneously for legal change and community education.

Sylvie is a passionate advocate for the rights of refugees and asylum seekers, the experiences of her parents and grandparents having taught her something of the pain and indignity of being denied a home. When Arne Rinnan, captain of the infamous MV Tampa, made his last voyage into Australian waters before retirement, Sylvie and other Melbourne members of the Refugee Action Collective took to a small boat so that they might approach his cargo ship and salute him for his role in rescuing imperilled refugees during the Tampa affair of 2001. Rinnan’s moral example elicited an idiosyncratic touch: to signal her admiration, Sylvie fashioned a placard decorated with a love heart. Love, Sylvie believes, “is a revolutionary emotion.”

Sylvie named her daughter Colette Anna — Colette for the pioneering French author and feminist, and Anna for a great aunt who survived Auschwitz. Colette is a social worker, committed to many of the same causes as her mother. She works to prevent violence against women, and argues for the rights of refugees, including protesting their abysmal treatment by Australian governments, Liberal and Labor. Colette is another Leber ratbag, which makes her mother proud. It’s in the blood. •

The post The Lebers, a family of ratbags appeared first on Inside Story.

Her sources are “the papery remains of blighted affection,” the records of the 1000 or so cases involving alleged breaches of promises to marry that were brought before Australian courts between 1788 and 1976. These papery remains are brought to vivid life by her broader research — in archives, museum collections, newspapers, memoirs and genealogies — into the lives of the women and men who were at the centre of these cases. As she promises, she writes “a peopled history, one in which the reader gets an insight into the inner lives of women and men in the past, a feel for the textures, sounds and smells of the world which they inhabited.”

Courting is organised around eleven case studies, in the full sense of the term: eleven breach-of-promise cases divided into four time slots, each focused on a period of change. Her choice of cases is shaped by the themes she wishes to investigate: the use of marriage to civilise the convict colony, when law and love were entangled; the geography of mid-Victorian courting, when bourgeois scripts were not always followed; the social turmoil of turn-of-the-century Australia, most strikingly in terms of racial politics; and the commodification of love in a psychologised, therapeutic society, when law and love went their separate ways.

Along the way the reader meets some fascinating people. Outstanding for me was Sarah Cox, “young, feisty, and possessed of ‘killing beauties,’” a seamstress who in 1825 successfully sued a lover for breach of promise but was then disgraced by bearing an illegitimate daughter fathered by her lawyer. That she later married the lawyer and became Mrs William Charles Wentworth did nothing to restore her to Sydney society.

Though her daughter Timmie married well, Sarah was banned from any contact with her other than by letter. When William died in 1872 she wrote to Timmie: “The light of our dwelling has left us so desolate for he was the one that made our house so very cheerful.”

Then there was James Lucas/Jamesetjee Sorabjee, a South Indian merchant from Hong Kong who won his breach-of-promise case in Sydney in 1892. Simmonds’s research makes Lucas an understandable, sympathetic figure: he was a Parsi, and therefore “raised among people who delighted in going to court.”

In 1916 there was schoolteacher and “flighty flapper” Verona Rodriguez, who claimed £5000 for breach of promise, including £180 for her trousseau, and lost the case. Simmonds take us into the warehouse of the Powerhouse Museum to finger with her “the buttery softness” of silk nightdresses from trousseaux of the period so we can imagine the salacious scene in the courthouse when Miss Rodriguez’s nighties were produced as evidence. This is intimate history indeed.

Together with this close reading of the past, Simmonds offers some broad-reaching readings of historical change. She delights in challenging established truths — those established by historians and those assumed by experts and activists in the past and the present. Lawyers and psychologists, feminists and defenders of human rights — all will find their preconceptions under challenge in this ambitious volume.

Simmonds teaches law at the University of Technology, Sydney, and law students and professionals are one of her intended audiences. The backstory to her trail of breach-of-promise cases tells of an evolving legal practice and profession that became more abstracted over time from ordinary reality. In the earliest years “ordinary people” used the common law as “a set of ancient rights and inherited privileges” and “as successful stories became binding precedents, common people, as much as judges and legislators, made law.” By the end of the nineteenth century civil law was turning away from torts to contract law, privileging material evidence (like nightdresses) and bureaucratic logic. And today, says Simmonds, we live with a “divided legal system” in which the poor “are channelled into the criminal law while the wealthy have the comfort of the civil courts.”

Simmonds’s litigants are not wealthy, and mostly not very respectable, for “working-class people… were the people who went to court.” As a corrective to bourgeois scholarship, she draws on their voices to argue that the rules of nineteenth-century working-class courtship were different from those of middle-class courtship. Women in paid employment were never limited to the private sphere like their middle-class employers, and “they also had more sex.” Sex before marriage was perfectly acceptable so long as marriage followed. Simmonds writes with cheerful bias that the “countervailing working-class romantic culture… was delightfully resistant to respectable mores.”

But Simmonds’s corrective goes further. American and British histories of love mark the 1890s as the period of greatest change, the time when women moved into the public sphere and capitalism moved courtship out of the home. But “Australia tells a different story,” says Simmonds. Capitalist prosperity came early to Australia, and by 1880 Australian city environments were “based more on pleasure than prohibition,” offering cost-free romantic opportunities to lovers of all classes:

Far from being a classic tale of embourgeoisement — of the working classes becoming respectable — what we see by the 1880s is the middle classes gradually taking up more expansive working-class romantic geographies.

Perhaps this reading would apply to all industrialising, city-building societies at the time.

Simmonds’s reading of the decline and eventual abolition of the breach-of-promise action denies — or at least sharply modifies — the understandings of the feminists and equal rights advocates who consigned it to legal oblivion in 1976. Second-wave feminism’s focus on making women economically independent made them understand breach of promise as reactionary, forcing women “back into dependency on men and marriage.” Simmonds recognises that its abolition marked an advance in women’s status, but she is more concerned with what was lost.

Her revision is based on an understanding of common law as privileging a public language of “moral norms and economic responsibility.” Within this frame the action of breach of promise “produced feminist political subjects.” This seems a large claim, and it is based here on the evidence of a single case study.

But Simmonds’s structural analysis is compelling. Breach of promise required women to take a public stage, to stand in judgement of men, to take their own feelings seriously. The action “elevated private pain to a question of public justice,” and “put a price on the unremunerated feminine labours of love.” Its abolition marked the loss of “compensation for psychic and economic injury” and “the individualism of emotional harm.” It was not “the triumph of love over sexist tradition” but “the final chapter in a story of how love… lost many of its ethical and material foundations.”

This is a radical rewriting of legal and emotional history. It will be fascinating to see how historians currently researching these fields choose to engage with it. •

Courting: An Intimate History of Love and the Law
By Alecia Simmonds | La Trobe University Press/Black Inc. | $45 | 448 pages

The post Blighted affections appeared first on Inside Story.

I’ve always found this class fascinating for the intergenerational transfer of ideas it affords, and as a means of tracking changes in students’ approaches to sex and gender. When I began teaching it more than ten years ago, everybody thought that MacKinnon “denied women agency” and nobody identified as a radical feminist, or a feminist at all for that matter, except for the clever girl in Birkenstocks, cargo pants and a women’s collective T-shirt down the front.

By around 2017, after Beyoncé declared herself a feminist and #MeToo swept across the globe, all my students became feminists. Men wrote essays on sexual assault that began with an asterisk next to their name linking to an admission that, yes, they were cis, white, straight, bourgeois men but they had attempted to amplify the voices of the marginalised to compensate for their privileges. MacKinnon was still on the out because this cohort thought women could be empowered by sex work, pornography or kink, and because nobody liked being a victim.

But this year, like last year, I have noticed a distinct change. My students appear to have returned to 1970s radical feminism. It’s not the postmodernist celebration of agency that speaks to this generation but the anger and the structural critiques of patriarchy found in Catharine MacKinnon, Susan Brownmiller and Andrea Dworkin.

Chanel Contos is part of this apparent radical feminist revival, and she has written a book that is erudite, powerful and urgent. I confess I was surprised to enjoy Consent Laid Bare as much as I did: the type is overly large (a friend called it idiot font), it’s aimed at teenagers, and twenty-five-year-old Chanel looks more like a student than a feminist critic.

I was expecting the kind of book we’ve become accustomed to from mainstream feminism: homespun wisdom gleaned from a few popular Netflix series, a few zingers and a rousing call to arms. Instead, Contos’s book is well researched and superbly argued, drawing on radical and postcolonial feminism to widen our understanding of what constitutes sexual violence and to contribute new solutions to a global problem with epidemic proportions.

Contos also extends radical feminism in clever ways. Where MacKinnon and Dworkin in the 1980s called on the state to prohibit pornography (and soon found queer erotica banned) and where #MeToo activists often have a carceral logic to their campaigns (the ideal end point is a lawsuit, then prison), Contos’s solutions are pedagogical and therapeutic. Thinking only in terms of law, she argues, ignores the fact that many survivors don’t want their attackers to go to prison; many simply want validation and an apology.

Where radical feminists critiqued the contractual origins of consent, Contos expands its meaning into the realm of emotion. The etymology of consent, she reminds us, is con, a bringing together, and sentio, to perceive with the senses. Sexual violence occurs when a man’s sense of entitlement overrides his empathy. To this extent, legal consent is a bare minimum. What we need is sex as a form of empathic communication: don’t treat someone how you want to be treated, treat someone how they want to be treated.

Contos’s journey as a consent activist began with her shock as a high school student when a sex-ed speaker came to her school and described a series of commonplace sexual scenarios but labelled them as sexual assault. It wasn’t just that Contos and most of her female friends could identify with these scenarios; their male friends were often the ones responsible.

In 2021, troubled by the pervasiveness of the problem, Contos decided to obtain solid empirical data by asking people online to share their stories of sexual assault during their school years. Seven thousand people sent in testimonies describing behaviour that would fit legal definitions of rape, also mentioning the good jobs their attackers held in order to show both a lack of accountability and the fact that “normal and functioning” people were typical rapists, not strangers in the park.

Contos then built a website called Teach Us Consent that included a web petition signed by nearly 50,000 Australians demanding mandatory consent education in schools. A year later, state education ministers met and agreed to her demands.

These nationwide changes to our education system have happened around the same time as shifts in consent’s legal definition towards active and ongoing consent. The question is no longer whether the person said no, but whether they said yes. Intoxication now completely vitiates consent.

Consent Laid Bare is divided into ten chapters, each of which is aimed at expanding our narratives of sexual assault, whether they concern what a rapist looks like; what causes rape (specifically how rape culture normalises sexual violence); how women respond to rape; how digital technologies and pornography have created new forms of violence; and how we need to go beyond legal solutions when trying to hold men accountable, and to end sexual violence.

Contos’s arguments about the causes of sexual violence will be familiar to anyone versed in radical feminist literature. Because rape is construed as an expression of masculine power and domination — an act that keeps all women in a state of fear and hypervigilance — education about consent is necessary but not sufficient. The problem is wider and deeper.

Girls are raised to accommodate the desires of others, to evacuate the self, to feel shame around their own sexuality and to feel like they don’t have a right to demand pleasure. Boys, on the other hand, are taught to not take no for an answer, particularly if they’re the entitled private school boys that Contos grew up with. They’ve absorbed the view that their sexuality is biologically irrepressible, hydraulic and ungovernable, and that they can offend without consequence. Where girls receive social rewards for their passivity and self-abnegation, boys are rewarded for acts of physical intimidation or ability, wealth and sexual conquests.

This socialisation is part of what Contos, and the radical feminists before her, term “rape culture.” This is a world where sexual assault is normalised by gendered expectations of men and women, where girls are told that wearing a short skirt is distracting for the boys in the class (who simply won’t be able to contain their sexual urges) or where a victim of sexual assault is immediately disbelieved and socially shamed, while the boy walks off scot-free. This wider context helps us to understand not simply why some men feel entitled to rape, but also why women often put up with sex that is uncomfortable, unwelcome or coercive.

Any person over the age of twenty will likely read sections of Contos’s book in a state of fascinated horror: the chapters on sex and the online world and pornography make for particularly grim reading. I was quite unaware that strangulation had become a normal part of sex, which boys assumed girls enjoyed so much that consent was unnecessary. Given that 84 per cent of men aged between fifteen and twenty-nine watch porn at least once a week, there’s no prizes for guessing where these new sexual scripts might be coming from. I was also shocked to find that a girl might now be sitting on a bus or train and a man could send an unsolicited dick pic by airdrop on to her phone.

In Contos’s experience, girls begin being asked to send nudes to boys around the age of twelve (yes, twelve!) while a 2022 Australian study found that 86 per cent of students aged fourteen to eighteen had received sexual messages or images, and 71 per cent had sent them. By the time Contos, as a consent educator, speaks to high school students aged fourteen and older, she says that many say that they’re “over” the sexting stage. In a digital extension of the centuries-old tradition of slut-shaming, a girl whose nudes get “leaked” faces embarrassment and shame, while the boy doing the leaking usually rises up the social hierarchy, congratulated by his male friends on a new conquest.

In this context, it is entirely understandable that generation Z might be rejecting what Contos calls “modern feminism” and returning to the clear, unambiguous critiques of sexual violence offered by radical feminists. Why are all the things  popular feminists celebrate women “choosing” to do — from watching porn, to shaving legs, to wearing high heels, to engaging in sex work — exactly what patriarchy and capitalism want them to do?

“Modern feminism has framed sex work as sexually liberating and put pornography and sex work in the category of strictly Do Not Debate,” Contos argues. Far from being a “righteous reversal of the gender hierarchy,” sex work is not only the most dangerous job in the world, but it also goes hand in hand with capitalism. Unlike radical feminists before her, however, Contos doesn’t argue for state regulation, simply for a more open debate and for an end to the popular, uncritical equation of sex with empowerment.

I suspect that the predominance of psychological discourse among gen-Zers — their tendency to describe their identities through languages of trauma, fragility or pathology — also makes them less concerned about the elements of radical feminism that see women as victims. This is a generation who accept their vulnerability and woundedness, and for whom the most important question is not how they have agency but how to end sexual violence and gender oppression.

In short, this is a book that you should thrust into the hands of the teenage boys and girls in your life. But you should also read it yourself first, both as a fascinating document that signals what might be a historic shift in discourse away from poststructuralism towards radical feminism, and also because Chanel Contos, with her well-researched, well-reasoned and well-written arguments, is smart and inspirational. •

Consent Laid Bare: Sex, Entitlement & the Distortion of Desire
By Chanel Contos | Macmillan Australia | $36.99 | 368 pages

The post Active and ongoing appeared first on Inside Story.

Walter, a British feminist writer and activist, has written an evocative book, Before the Light Fades, that begins as an exploration of the emotional aftermath and turns into an examination of the lives of Ruth and her refugee parents. At first her grief is raw, turning her into “a little scuttling mollusc without armour.” It is compounded by the lingering stigma of suicide, which somehow coexists with a new cultural openness to talking about it.

Walter struggles against the view that her mother had the worst kind of death and that her suicide could only be attributed to mental illness. She bristles at the modern tendency to see all dark emotions through a psychiatric lens, but also worries that towards the end Ruth was in a state of despair rather than Socratic composure.

Friends who use the well-meaning but “off the shelf” language of self-care to comfort her provoke the same irritation. She tries out a range of healing distractions — yoga, swimming, running, gardening — but the idea that we should soothe and coddle ourselves in times of loss seems to her self-absorbed and alien to the generation that is being lost.

The book’s account of the changing seasons of grief is intense and unsparing. Walter has tears, self-reproach and regret, as our current bereavement script leads us to expect, but also times of anger, bitterness and misanthropy. Mourning does not always deepen or ennoble. At times it leads her to resent the living and become hardened, cauterising her empathy to stem the flow of pain. “I am becoming less human, the more I grieve.”

Walter captures the experience of having an ageing parent beautifully. Her relationship with Ruth is about as solid and unambivalent as two strong personalities can have, but she confesses to having experienced a growing annoyance with her mother’s growing vulnerability. Ruth’s preoccupation with dementia, amplified by experiencing her own father’s illness and her work in aged care, seemed out of proportion. Walter is saddened by the loss of Ruth’s independence, fearlessness and rebellious spirit, but her sadness is mingled with an implied criticism of her slide into weakness, as if Ruth should have tried harder to embody the maternal ideal she represented as a younger woman.

Walter reclaims that younger self in a compelling retelling of Ruth’s past, from the horror of her parents’ early life as Jews in Nazi Germany, to their circuitous escape into an unwelcoming England that sent them to internment camps, their shrinking into postwar suburban anonymity, and their upset when the young Ruth resurrects her father’s abandoned radicalism in the fight for nuclear disarmament in the 1960s. Georg knew where dissent could lead.

Ruth’s involvement in Bertrand Russell’s Committee of 100 is a mix of clerical tedium — so much typing, copying and mailing — and daring escapades, peaking when she helps uncover evidence that the British government had built bunkers to house the great and good in the event of nuclear apocalypse.

Ruth’s politics extended beyond the nuclear issue, leading her into a brand of feminism that would later conflict with her daughter’s. Walter recounts how the power feminism she embraced in the 1980s rejected Ruth’s critique of femininity. She believed she could remain glamorous while the last few glass ceilings were quickly shattered. That former self was naive, Walter writes, failing to anticipate that “objectification would be sold back to us as an empty mirage of empowerment.”

This realisation becomes part of a broader and more sympathetic re-evaluation of Ruth’s unorthodox and sometimes puzzling life choices. Even the suicide becomes intelligible, “like leaving a party when you’ve had enough.”

Before the Light Fades reveals not only the courage and creativity of Ruth’s generation of protesters, but also how the disarmament movement’s mission to avert global disaster is echoed in the climate emergency movement of today. Ruth herself comes across as a free spirit who retained her own parents’ sense of displacement and never became entirely settled. Marriage to a fellow activist burns brightly for a while but ends badly. She throws herself into study, social work with refugees, and being a mother and grandmother: “the myth maker of the family, the one who told us who we were.”

Walter’s writerly voice is distinctive without being showy: she is humane, curious and allergic to cliché, but also sceptical, half in the world and half on the sidelines looking askance. She is a deep thinker but not a wallower or a theorist. As her grief starts to lift, she recommits to political action as if carrying forward a family tradition. Her book is a moving meditation on ageing and loss, the persistence of the past, and the necessity of hope in spite of it all.

It’s a funny kind of hope, peeking through a cloud of pessimism, but it seems a fitting tribute to Walter’s lineage of brave and beleaguered radicals. •

Before the Light Fades: A Memoir of Grief and Resistance
By Natasha Walter | Hachette | $32.99 | 256 pages

The post The one who told them who they were appeared first on Inside Story.

Khrushchev’s eyes slid across the appliance, deadpan. “We have such things,” he replied.

Nixon tried again: “This is our newest model. This is the kind which is built in thousands of units for direct installations in the houses. In America, we like to make life easier for women.” Khrushchev bristled, perhaps at the assumptions about gendered work. “Your capitalistic attitude to women does not exist under communism,” he said.

Apparently missing why his praise of a dishwasher might have drawn such a reaction, Nixon barrelled on: “I think that this attitude towards women is universal. What we want to do, is make life more easy for our housewives.” The “American system” gave consumers “new inventions and new techniques” so rapidly, he said, that this very kitchen — currently so up to date — would itself be obsolete in twenty years.

“In Russia,” said Khrushchev, “all you have to do to get a house is to be born in the Soviet Union. You are entitled to housing… In America, if you don’t have a dollar you have a right to choose… sleeping… on the pavement. Yet you say we are the slave to communism.”

It was the mention of this exchange in Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek’s new book, After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time, that prompted me to watch Nixon and Khrushchev talking past each other. It is good viewing, if only for the unintentional cringecore. Squirm as Nixon digs himself deeper; behold two different views of the world butting up against one another. It’s obvious that the US president didn’t understand Khrushchev, but did he also feel that he was being laughed at, outsmarted or outwitted by one to whom he felt a natural superiority?

I happened to watch the video in Laos, just one of the countries Nixon ordered to be bombed in the name of crushing communism, but one particularly devastated by that crusade. I wondered if humiliations like this kitchen debate partly motivated his inhuman insistence on bombing this country “back to the Stone Age” (in the words used during the Indochinese war by General Curtis LeMay) a decade later.

Sitting on the banks of the Mekong River, I could see traces of the poverty, grief and physical devastation left by the war. Amid all this, it seemed indecent to be ruminating on the difficulties of the life I lead at home in Australia. My life, and presumably Hester’s and Srnicek’s, is the kind common across what they call the “rich world”: chronic overwork, real or imagined precarity, a constant feeling of being harried, kids I adore but can’t be with enough, and endless domestic chores at the end of a long week.

This crisis of work in and out of the home has been building for some time, but, as writer Angela Garbes says, “Over the course of the pandemic, many people came to understand — for the first time, deeply, or with renewed agency — that American life is not working for families.” It is easy to dismiss these as “First World problems.” But they are real all the same.

After Work fuses visions for a post-work world with calls to recognise and tackle the crisis in care. Reading it in Laos forced me to see the history of coercion behind the crisis Hester and Srnicek describe. It is not that we “find ourselves” in isolated nuclear families and impossible work–life imbalances. And not everyone lives that way today. But everyone is affected by the struggle over how to live. The fight for free time might not have drawn bombs and bloodshed in Australia and the rest of the rich world, but in other theatres it was violent and prolonged.

Understanding how we got into this mess is surely an important step towards finding a way out. That said, After Work is not really a history book. Perhaps a librarian would place it in the critical sociology section. I read it as myth.

It reminds me of a myth told by the ethnic Katu I work with in Laos. Before the flood, they say, everything was different. The stars were people and the people were stars. Animals were people and people were animals. With the flood, everything swapped places. Those who were rats turned into people, which is why today some people have a lot of hair and others are bald — the bald ones were rats that had been captured and plucked for eating when the flood came. And so on: every element of the current world is explained by how different things were before the flood, and how everything changed and bore the stamp of that change.

Hester and Srnicek describe the Industrial Revolution as an “unprecedented change” that “utterly transformed” domestic life: “Prior to this transformation, housework was exhaustingly laborious.” Heating was apparently a large part of this labour, but not cooling: so by implication they are describing life in a cold climate. We are also in a dystopian world: the authors tell us that children were usually put to work and demands for elder care were few because “working to death was standard.”

We are in a city, probably somewhere in Europe or America, because running water, electricity and gas appeared “as the twentieth century dawned” in this everywhere–nowhere home. The authors briefly mention “the Western household” but this is not a frequent phrase: most of the first half of the book describes an unspecified location.

Then came the flood. The “industrialisation of the home,” a “radical” change, “significantly reduced the burdens of domestic labour” and ushered in “peak family.” Labour was split between a male breadwinner and a female homemaker, producing the image of the nuclear family.

The “second key phase” in this history is the neoliberal stagnation of the 1970s through to the 1990s. The floodwaters receded, leaving a detritus of expectations about the home (for instance, as the key site of almost all unpaid care work); at the same time, anyone who could work for money was expected to do so. These demands bred “a universal sense of growing time pressures.” Today, say the authors, “We remain enmeshed in a world of domestic technologies whose potential to reduce work has gone largely unfulfilled.”

Hester and Srnicek take issue with Joel Salatin, the advocate of whole foods and farming, for evoking a mythical past. But here they offer another myth: that “most” of our great-grandparents “were more likely to be eating stale and monotonous food, plagued by scarcity.” If Salatin’s myth is a classic Garden of Eden story of paradise lost, Hester and Srnicek’s is of the Katu flood variety: everything swapped places, one dystopia replaced another.

The book’s discussion of bathing shows the limits such a view places on imagination. They write that “when bathing meant lugging water into the home, warming it up, and removing waste afterwards, the sheer amount of work required limited how often baths could be taken.” It is as if the only alternative the authors can imagine to a hot bath in a nuclear family’s bathroom is one where hapless family members create the conditions for such a bath using sheer manual labour.

Looking at bathing across cultures and times shows that we (and I use this word in its most inclusive sense) can and do bathe in many ways. We have bathed daily in the Mekong River as the sun set red over the rushing current. We have bathed in water captured from a mountain stream in bamboo pipes and fed across the village fence. We have bathed in Japanese sentō. We have bathed in Minoan palatial throne-room “lustration basins” under paintings depicting menstruation.

Following anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow, we can see that “we” have a capacity for imagining new ways of living and bringing those imaginations into being. Innumerable experiments in living are evident across the anthropological, archaeological and historical record. There is not just one “before” and one “after” in the human story. This diversity is key to the thinking the way out that Hester and Srnicek so rightly seek.

Hester and Srnicek envision a post-scarcity world. By this they mean not an overabundance of consumer goods but a world in which selling one’s labour is not a prerequisite for remaining alive. They propose reducing necessary labour (“work”) as much as possible by improving domestic technologies, accepting lower standards (messier homes, wilder childhoods), and making care work more efficient by removing it where possible from private homes (think: kitchen-less apartments, laundry services). The goal is to expand freedom — defined as time spent in autonomously chosen activities — as much as possible.

The second part of After Work introduces historically grounded alternatives as inspiration: the Russian commune in the early twentieth century; social housing in Vienna; the hippie movement in North America. It is a relief to be grounded after the nowhere–everywhere of the previous chapters.

Hester and Srnicek dutifully mention the well-known shortcomings of each of these “missed futures.” They do include among their inspirations Cuba’s recent family code, which defines a family as “a union of people linked by an affective, psychological and sentimental bond, who commit themselves to sharing life such that they support each other.” But Cuba is not treated as an extended example and nor are criticisms identified. Uncomfortably, all the significant inspirations described in After Work are decidedly white.

“Even in the most gender-equal countries, such as Norway and Denmark, women continue to do nearly 1.5 times as much” unpaid domestic labour as men, Hester and Srnicek write. This is considerably less than the world average, in which women do 3.2 times more unpaid work than men. Here in Laos, though, women do only 1.4 times more such work than men. On this count, Laos outshines Norway and Denmark: by a tiny margin, true, but I still wonder why Laos was left out of the praise granted the Nordic countries.

Of course, I don’t expect all authors to write from a Laos-centric perspective. But living here and being part of a Lao extended family means I read from that perspective. I share Hester and Srnicek’s frustrations with work in the rich world: reading After Work felt like having a sociologist explain a typical week in my Australian life. But I also know that my typical is very strange from the perspective of my Lao family.

Khrushchev and Nixon’s kitchen debate shows how wild the misunderstandings can be when one way of life is perceived from the perspective of another. The mistake Nixon made was assuming that his vision of domestic labour and technology represented progress, and thus assuming that the Soviets were behind. Khrushchev, too, indulged in teleological visions.

Students of conflict in the twentieth century know the violence of such one-track stories. Hester and Srnicek speak truly when they say that typical lives in “the rich world” are now untenable. I agree. Better lives are possible. In building these, let’s not narrow our vision needlessly. The sparks of yet-to-be-realised futures may be hiding in plain sight. •

After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time
By Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek | Verso | $29.99 | 208 pages

The post How should we live? appeared first on Inside Story.

Since the US-supported president Ashraf Ghani fled the capital, the economy has shrunk by 20 per cent or more. Around twenty million people are short of food, and an estimated 3.2 million children are malnourished. Some rural people are reportedly selling organs or even children for cash to survive. Others have streamed into relief camps near provincial capitals for meagre rations.

For its part, the Taliban leadership seems less focused on dealing with this crisis than applying its interpretation of sharia law to social behaviour. It bears down chiefly on women and girls, restricting or even stopping their access to work and education or movement outside the home.

Behaviour like this is the reason the world hangs back from helping the country recover from war. Pakistan, China, Russia, Iran and Qatar have kept their embassies running in Kabul, and India rejoined them in August last year. But none of those countries has formally recognised the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate, and nor has any other Muslim-majority country. Australia and other Western countries maintain cautious communication with the Taliban through diplomatic posts in Qatar, and in the United States’ case through occasional fly-ins or third-country meetings.

Around US$9 billion of the former regime’s foreign funds have been frozen by the United States, several European countries and the United Arab Emirates. After seventy top economists, including Nobel prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, urged president Joe Biden last August to let the Afghan central bank tap the reserves — and stop the “collective punishment” of the Afghan people — the United States set up a foundation in Switzerland to allocate half of the reserves in American banks (US$3.5 billion) to pay for humanitarian supplies and electricity from Central Asian neighbours.

But what more can and should the outside world do to alleviate the suffering and starvation of the Afghan people — and beyond that, influence the Taliban towards the more inclusive interpretations of Islam, especially in the treatment of women and religious minorities, that apply in so many other Muslim nations?

In The Return of the Taliban: Afghanistan after the Americans Left Pakistani-American scholar Hassan Abbas suggests that the immediate prospects for reform in Afghanistan are not great, but that the West must try anyway.

He opens his book by describing how contact between the Taliban and the United States in Qatar from 2012 first acquainted Western officials with some of the figures who were destined to emerge in top positions in the new emirate. After Donald Trump became president in early 2017, this contact developed into negotiations for a US withdrawal.

Zalmay Khalilzad, a seasoned diplomat of Afghan origin, was appointed leader of the American team, and in January 2019 he was cleared by secretary of state Mike Pompeo to offer a drawdown of US forces to zero. In July that year, Trump imposed a nine-month deadline for an agreement. With no gains to show from pulling out of the Iran nuclear pact and talking to North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, Trump needed a deal before the 2020 election.

The Taliban persuaded the Americans to agree on a complete pull-out, including from the huge Bagram air base near Kabul. In return they promised that Afghanistan would not become a base for terrorist attacks on the United States or its allies, and that US forces and their local helpers could withdraw without harassment. Rather less firmly, they also pledged to enter power-sharing dialogue with Ashraf Ghani, and to look after Shia and Hazara minorities and allow female education.

Trump got his peace deal in February 2020, though it was signed in Doha rather than, as he’d hoped, at Camp David near Washington. He overruled Ghani’s objection to the release of 5000 Taliban prisoners as part of the deal. With withdrawal by May 2021 pledged, the Taliban suspended action against American forces and concentrated instead on attacking Kabul’s army. By the time Biden formed his administration, Taliban fighters controlled most of the provinces and were closing in on Kabul. Ghani dithered and postured, losing any opportunity to bargain.

Biden decided not to abandon Trump’s agreement, though he shifted the final departure date to 11 September 2021, exactly two decades after the 9/11 attacks by Afghanistan-based al Qaeda. After a trillion dollars, 2448 Americans killed, 20,722 wounded and many more traumatised, Biden said, a changed outcome was highly unlikely even if America stayed another hundred years.

The reality, says Abbas, is that “the Taliban outlasted the Americans.” Afghans were disabused of any faith that the West and their favoured Kabul politicians would save them. “The glorious myth of the ability of foreign intervention to install a democratic order” was comprehensively debunked.

Parallel with the negotiations in Doha, the Taliban were undergoing successive leadership changes. In tracking these shifts, Abbas give us important insight into the make-up and views of the men now in charge of Afghanistan.

Mullah Mohammed Omar, the secretive but charismatic Ameer ul-Momineen (Leader of the Faithful) during the Taliban’s first spell of government in the 1990s, resurrected the movement after it was ousted by the Americans and the Northern Alliance in late 2001. Around 1995, he had boldly entered a museum in Kandahar, the country’s second city, taken out a rarely seen cloak said to have been worn by the Prophet Muhammad, and put it on before an amazed and adoring crowd.

In 2013, a little over a decade into the new insurgency, Omar became ill and died in a Karachi hospital. His death was kept secret by the Taliban and their mentors in Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency, the ISI, while succession plans proceeded. The natural successor might have been Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, Omar’s young brother-in-law, but he was viewed with suspicion by the ISI because he’d opened contact with a brother of Mohammed Karzai, the then US-backed president in Kabul. He was also out of the picture: the ISI had arrested and jailed him in 2010.

In his absence, Mullah Akhtar Mansour was proclaimed the new emir in 2015. A mullah though he was, he was known for his worldly appetites, heading frequently to the Gulf to “buy perfume” — in other words, enjoy Russian sex workers — and hosting Gulf sheikhs for falcon-hunting. It was under his leadership that the Taliban made their first breakthrough in Afghanistan’s north, seizing the city of Kunduz.

Mansour’s term as emir ended when an American drone strike killed him on the road back to Quetta, his Pakistani hideout, after a stay in Iran. The ISI helped target him, Abbas says, so that US forces struck him on the road, rather than at a tea-stand halt, to avoid civilian casualties. With this “help” from the ISI the United States may have lost an emir more inclined to deal with Kabul.

Succession came down to one of Mansour’s two appointed deputies. The victor, Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada, then fifty-five, was one of the few mullahs who actually knew the Qur’an and hadiths (sayings of the Prophet), though his interpretations diverged from those of most Muslims elsewhere. Apparently strict and calm, Abbas reports, even now he doesn’t know how to use a mobile phone.

Hibatullah retained Mansour’s other deputy, Sirajuddin (or Siraj) Haqqani, a military commander regarded by US intelligence as an ISI asset, who to this day has a US$10 million bounty on his head. One of Omar’s sons, twenty-six-year-old Mullah Yaqoob, was added as second deputy. Baradar, added as a third deputy in 2018 after his release by the Pakistanis at Washington’s request, was soon assigned to the Doha negotiations.

Two years after its return to Kabul, the new Taliban emirate has two centres of power. Hibatullah resides in Kandahar, surrounded by equally conservative mullahs in a council known as the Rahbari Shura. This is the ultimate power centre, akin to the supreme theocratic figure in Iran.

The other centre is the government in Kabul. Unlike its counterpart in Tehran, it isn’t the product of any form of popular election. Its most powerful figures are Siraj Haqqani and Yaqoob, who seized the interior and defence ministries respectively in August 2021 and remain entrenched there.

The prime ministership went to a seventy-year-old mullah, Mohammad Hassan Akhund, regarded as safe hands by Hibatullah. The important qualifications for the job, according to Abbas, were being in Pakistan’s good books, having been in the Taliban councils in Peshawar or Quetta shura and, having studied at the Darul Uloom Haqqania seminary, being of like mind with Hibatullah.

Akhund heads a cabinet of mostly Pushtun conservatives, nearly half of whom are on a UN terrorism blacklist. His government did become a little more diverse when deputy ministers were added, notably deputy economics minister Abdul Latif Nazari, a member of the Hazara ethnic minority who holds a PhD in political science, and deputy health minister Hassan Ghyasi, a medical doctor who is also Hazara.

From the time of the Doha peace agreement until their first weeks after entering Kabul, the Taliban purported to have changed since the 1990s, when women were forced into the all-enveloping burqa, and executions and amputations conducted in public were substituted for sport. Siraj Haqqani even told readers of the New York Times in February 2020 that “killing and maiming must stop,” that the Taliban would work for a new inclusive political system, and that women would have the “right to work” and the “right to education.”

There have been glimmers of progress since the takeover. Taliban fighters guard the Shia minority’s mosques and festivals. Women in the cities wear headscarves, as they would anyway, rather than the burqa, and women have been appointed heads of maternity hospitals and gynaecological schools. A contest to head the Afghan Cricket Board became a “fistfight,” suggesting that attitudes towards sport had changed from when the first Taliban regime expelled the Pakistan soccer team with shaven heads for wearing shorts on the field. Hibatullah has also issued a fatwa against forced marriage and the disinheritance of widows.

Mobile phones and social media are allowed. Indeed, Taliban spokesmen have hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers. With seven million Afghans using the internet — “a necessity of the people,” one minister has said — the regime accepts that this particular tide of modernity can’t be ordered back. A new 100,000-strong regular army and a 140,000-strong police force, many with shaven faces, have been formed. Foreign correspondents are allowed to stay in Kabul, and often get interviews with government figures.

Yet if the promises on taking Kabul seemed too good to be true, that’s because they were, according to Abbas. In December 2021 women were told they must be accompanied by a male relative when travelling medium to long distances. Girls’ schools for grade six (age eleven) and above were subsequently closed.

In June last year, a book by chief justice Mullah Abdul Hakim (with a foreword by ) emphasised the absolute authority of the emir, and entertains no notion of a representative mechanism. Modern (non-religious) education was causing all the country’s problems, he wrote, so education had to be inherently religious. Women could only be wives and mothers, and their intellectual inferiority meant they could never be the emir. They had to be taught at home by family members, and must never study alongside men; if they had to leave the house, the teacher must be a woman.

In October, a government guidance said girls shouldn’t take college entrance exams for subjects like economics, engineering, agriculture, geology and journalism, which were deemed “too difficult.”

Abbas sees two minds at war here, with the conservative clerics advising so far prevailing, to the dismay of more progressive elements. It doesn’t help that some Western media call this “a return to traditional Islam” — it isn’t, he says. The Taliban “routinely mix up their tribal norms with Islam” instead of following sayings of the Prophet such as “Education is incumbent on every boy and girl.” Once again, women are the victims of war, Abbas writes. “They have become the bargaining chip, their liberties the sacrifice.”

And what of the Taliban’s other promises?

On security, the main terror threat comes from the regional branch of ISIS, known as the Islamic State in Khorasan. Its suicide bombing amid the crowds outside Kabul’s airport on 26 August 2021 killed 170 Afghans and thirteen American soldiers, and it has also targeted the Shia and Hazara minorities where it can. The Taliban are said to be seeking aid from the Americans, including signals intelligence, to fight the ISK; outflanked in extremism, it worries that its now-idle fighters might gravitate to the radical group.

But old Taliban friendships persist. In July last year, a CIA drone strike killed the visiting al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in a Kabul residence where he was apparently a guest of interior minister Siraj Haqqani. The muted response of the government showed its embarrassment.

While the ISK, with its many foreign members, might struggle in Afghanistan, a worsening security problem is blowing back on the Taliban’s old puppet-masters in Pakistan. A wave of terror bombings by the Taliban’s counterpart, Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, is aiming to establish an even purer (to its mind) form of Islamic rule in the country whose name means “Land of the Pure.”

As for inclusion, the Taliban resisted bringing figures from the former US-backed government into even symbolic roles. But Hamid Karzai, the former president, and Abdullah Abdullah, a former chief minister, continue to live in Kabul. The Hazara ethnic minority fares better than during the first Taliban period, when they were victims of a genocide that saw desperate journeys to foreign asylum — some to Australia by boat — but Abbas notes Hazara lands reportedly being taken by Pashtuns and Hazara being excluded from relief supplies.

Economic stringency is affecting the Taliban as well, and helping moderate figures. Baradar has come back into the picture as head of economic policy with oversight of the finance ministry. Though not an economist, his Doha background makes him best suited to approach foreign partners and donors.

Another frontman is a foreign ministry spokesman, Abdul Qahar Balkhi, who grew up in New Zealand, speaks fluent English and may be a son-in-law of the late emir Mansour. As part of this effort to improve their image abroad, the Taliban have invited foreign correspondents to witness the drive against opium cultivation.

Overall, Abbas says it’s too early to declare that anything resembling a “New Taliban” has arrived. The regime is a toxic mix of “religion gone sour,” patriarchy, tribalism, nationalism and ethnic rivalry — all surrounded by baleful geopolitical rivalries: Saudi Arabia vs Turkey vs Iran; India vs Pakistan; the United Arab Emirates vs Qatar. But change might happen over the next five years as the Omar-era old guard retires.

This is very much an interim book, breezily written, more journalistic than academic, with necessarily vague attributions to the Taliban, diplomatic, intelligence and army figures whom Abbas quotes. It is strong on the who, how and where, less so on the “why.” The explanation of the Taliban’s theology derived from the Deoband school in Northern India could be a lot clearer: Abbas assumes a knowledge of the Salafi and Wahhabi purist schools originating in the Arab world in making a distinction about the Taliban.

But Abbas does buttress his contention that holding back doesn’t help anyone. The Taliban are the de facto government, and the West recognises regimes with equally atrocious human rights records elsewhere. Distinguishing between engagement and endorsement, Abbas argues that only through “creative engagement” can the Taliban be influenced effectively. He concludes: “Not engaging is going to support the view of hardliners that the world is against them — and consequently they will rise further within the organisation.” •

The Return of the Taliban: Afghanistan after the Americans Left
By Hassan Abbas | Yale University Press | $34.95 | 305 pages

The post Enigmatic pariah appeared first on Inside Story.

The interesting addendum to this parade of facts is the covert nature of abortion procedures. The number performed in Australia is nearly impossible to accurately calculate because no specific Medicare item number exists (the rebate is shared with that for miscarriage curettage) and only South Australia collects data on pregnancy outcomes. Medical abortions are even more difficult to numerically assay.

Think about those facts for a minute: it’s the third most commonly performed surgical procedure in Australia but nobody, anywhere, is analysing or even supplying accurate statistical information as to numbers, types or reasons.

I am a women’s health services provider, and we professionals are all in agreement: the most fundamental right of those with uteri is to have agency over their bodies, their lives, and the means and methods of personal choice in reproductive health. And yet a procedure that is swift and accessible has been legalised in Australia on a piecemeal, state-by-state basis, influenced by differing standards of acceptability based on geography and local attitudes.

Abortion is the secret obverse of motherhood, a choice rather than a sacrifice, and that makes people, especially right-wing male Christian politicians, uncomfortable. You could say that Australia’s abortion policy comes down to this: you’re welcome to have one as long as you promise not to talk about it.

Madison Griffiths’s memoir Tissue positions her squarely in the eye of the abortion discourse storm. She is a feminist, a vegan, a cis-queer artist and published essayist, a podcaster and a domestic violence campaigner. In the middle of the Covid lockdowns in 2021 she was confronted with a pink line on a test strip, undeniable evidence of her own pregnancy. What action she chose to take is, of course, at the centre of this narrative. Griffiths decided to have a medical abortion.

There are things we never find out about Griffiths’s choice. We do find out about her problematic relationship with her own mother and her mother’s anorexia, about the love between the pair, and about Griffiths’s considered intention to become the opposite daughter to the child her mother asked for and expected.

Griffiths puzzles her conservative mother, with her unshaven underarms and legs, her non-conforming clothing, her same-sex relationships and her drug use. “[W]hen I consider my own connection to my mother,” she writes, “there has always been, injected into every goodnight kiss, every tense phone call, a complex thread of guilt; the feeling of having failed, having committed a grievous wrong against her, having let her down.”

Griffiths accepts her mother’s anorexia without qualification, and there is a moment in Tissue that made me catch my breath in wonder: the comparison between the fat-melting cling wrap encasing her mother’s abdomen and the condom Griffiths’s lover refused to wear. Her lover “felt suffocated once fitted in a clear casing, their body robbed of glee. They too, were hungry. But unlike my mother or myself, their hunger mattered.”

Griffiths’s central and complicated relationship with her mother is never completely resolved, although ultimately she implies that the choice to pursue termination, to opt out of parenthood, has given their dyad a degree of resolution. She describes her mother’s love after the abortion as “urgent and keen to shelter me from scorn, determined that I not become her parody, for she is my mother, and I am hers to protect.”

Abortion is, at the core of it, about choosing or denying motherhood, a choice formed from past experiences that will echo into the future: the branch in the path, one course taken and the other unseen, unknown, unknowable. Implicit in Griffiths’s decision-making is the knowledge that she may well experience premature menopause, an inherited condition that heightens the chance this will be her only pregnancy.

But we learn more about her thoughts after the abortion than before, once the termination has been given personhood in its own right and discussed like a breathing individual, both in the abstract and the concrete. Ironically, though, by discussing the effacement of her body by the unwilling nourishment of a being whose existence she considers complete and separate, Griffiths avoids a journey to the latest frontier in the war against women’s bodies.

The battlefield is shifting from women’s reproductive rights to the joyless self-effacement of modern motherhood, misogyny’s newest and most sinister gift. It is no longer considered acceptable to mother in any other way than by the most arduous of labour. Griffiths mentions the Instagram moments of parenthood, a newborn suckling its mother’s breast, a proud father in the background. But modern motherhood is now a matter of continuous soul-obliterating attention to each child, broken sleep for years at a time, an insistence that a crying baby or toddler risks severe psychological harm.

Where Griffiths’s mother’s abdomen was “ripped open” by childbirth, Griffiths spared herself the agonies of parenthood, describing her abortion as “a celebration of my vibrant, colourful, beautiful life. A homage to my joy.” And yet, and yet… Abortion is seldom chosen lightly. Of the aftermath of my own abortion, I once wrote, “I was unbalanced I knew, filled to the brim and over with rage — pure, white, volcanic anger. What tiny chinks remaining were stuffed with grief.”

We never really get to see any great ambivalence in Griffiths’s account of her feelings and motives. It is possible that she genuinely saw her abortion as an unmixed blessing, but she describes an episode of short-lived sobriety afterwards, the creation of a Spotify playlist that reflected her decision, a playlist in which the word “baby” featured in the titles of a third of the songs, which seems to suggest that the impact was greater than she had expected, perhaps more than she was easily able to accept.

Griffiths’s words can seem like they were carefully selected to obscure rather than clarify, as though within the 200-odd pages of her narrative we are given Griffiths only in glimpses, a minnow in a deep, still pool seen in flashes and fragments rather than as a discrete and integrated whole.

This left me musing on the obligations intrinsic to publishing a deeply personal narrative. What portion of the author’s life and experiences do we have a right to expect? Can we find a way of listening without considering ourselves entitled to the whole gory story?

But there are moments that invite elucidation in this book: the incident, for example, in which Griffiths smeared the blood of her abortion over the toilet in her boyfriend’s share house then motioned to him: that’s your problem, clean it up. We never learn what was going through her mind, what her boyfriend’s response was. Her actions are left hanging, without expansion, without analysis. It seems a strange place to exercise coyness.

In rebuttal, one could argue that memoir is selective by its very nature. The author weaves a story from a series of small but significant incidents, moments that, taken together, illustrate and unpack a greater whole. But Griffiths has opened up only part of her tale, and this causes her book’s straddling of the divide between the personal and the polemic — both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness — to be uneasy.

Truly, in its looping, discursive, sometimes unfocused and repetitive recitations, Tissue parallels the conflicting thoughts and emotions Griffiths must have felt when attempting to make sense of the event during three months of late-night sessions in front of the screen: the real-time processing necessary to place a life, unlived by choice, into the past. As a reader, however, it made me wish that Griffiths had spent more time with an editor.

There were also prolonged discussions of the impact of Roe v. Wade in America, but conspicuous in its absence was any reference to Griffiths’s home in Australia, a country in which abortion is legal and the tablets Griffiths took to procure her abortion easily obtained. Again, I wondered where this discussion would fit into the range of Australian experiences, and whether her narrative could be considered as representative. Australia is filled to the brim with stories, other women, other men, other lives.

Perhaps the strongest of Griffiths’s themes comes in her chapter on queerness and unplanned pregnancy. While it is a fact that very few trans men or lesbians will ever require an abortion, perhaps the marginalisation of that tiny minority means a genuinely queer-centred discussion is long overdue, and Griffiths is ideally placed to begin that process. I found myself impressed by the chapter and, later, thinking hard about the issues it raises.

I have provided abortions; I have had an abortion. My daily working life is a study in abortion and its consequences, in foetal abnormalities, terminations after the most bitter and agonising of discussions, sleepless nights and tears blotted by tissues drawn from the box that sits always on my desk.

I have needed to face my anger and grief honestly, head on, and acknowledge that my choice to prioritise myself — the right decision then and afterwards — came at a significant cost. I have subsumed my pain, transformed it into a crucible, a map to something new, something better. The consequences of my loss have made me a more feeling person, tougher and more aware. Perhaps because of that, I am strongly inclined to respect abortion narratives, and I found much to respect in this flawed but energetic book.

Griffiths recites her feelings over and over, each iteration varying only in its minutiae, creating a strange and tangled web of deliberation, her body a citadel invaded by a barbarian horde, the cells of her unplanned pregnancy. She reads widely; she quotes impressively; and many of those quotes made my heart sing.

Though her story ultimately feels to me like a delta — more breadth than depth — Tissue contains moments of great beauty and clarity, sentences that had me gasping, hand over mouth, in which I felt seen. This book has a tremendous heft, a combination of muscularity and verve, and I came away from it with benefits that are likely to increase with time. •

Tissue
By Madison Griffiths | Ultimo Press | $34.99 | 320 pages

The post Eye of the storm appeared first on Inside Story.

There is no dearth of biographies of George Eliot. From markedly unpromising beginnings, the woman who was born Mary Anne Evans became one of the nineteenth century’s most successful authors. Carlisle lists more than half a dozen full-length lives in her endnotes, in addition to the published journals and letters — much of them digitised in the enormous George Eliot Archive — and the books about George Henry Lewes, her spouse of twenty-five years, and by their many associates, all of whom took part in the century’s intellectual ferment.

But although scholarly interest keeps growing, as far as I can tell no other philosopher has been moved to write a book about Eliot. Here, in her preface, Carlisle tells us why:

When I studied philosophy at university, most of the authors I read were unmarried men: Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein. Did they regard marriage as a hindrance to the serious work of philosophy, rather than a spur to thought? My friends and I were constantly analysing relationships — our own and other people’s…

Beneath its conventional surface, marriage simmers with tensions between self and other, body and soul, passion and restraint, the poetry of romantic love and the prose of domestic routine… For better or worse, the answers we find to our marriage questions — whether to marry, how to live in a marriage, whether to remain married — are often close to the heart of our life’s meaning. Over centuries these questions have shaped religious, political and social histories.

We could ask why Carlisle chose to embed her discourse in a study of the life and works of the author we have come to know as George Eliot, and not, say, Jane Austen, whose specialty was dissecting unhappy unions with wit and style and guiding her heroines towards happier ones. Eliot read Austen and couldn’t have failed to have been influenced by her. Yet when she did turn her hand to fiction her approach was darker and broader.

Like Charlotte Brontë, whose work impressed her deeply, Eliot was less concerned with finding the right husbands for her protagonists than with what came after the nuptial knots were tied. And it was the complexity and contradictions in Eliot’s own life and work that Carlisle found particularly useful for exploring the enigma of marriage itself.

George Eliot — variously, Mary Anne Evans, Mary Ann Evans, Marianne Evans, Marian Evans, Marian Lewes, Mary Ann Evans Lewes and finally Mary Ann Cross — was born on 22 November 1819 in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, the third child of Robert Evans, an estate manager. Her father saw that she was formally educated until she was sixteen, when he lost his wife and the children their mother.

At that point, as Mary Ann, she became her father’s housekeeper. She still had access to the library at Albury Hall, where he worked, and quickly plunged into a course of self-education, principally in the classics. After the family moved to Coventry she was introduced by a wealthy couple, Charles and Cara Bray, to England’s radical intelligentsia. Then, after her father’s death, she went to Geneva, boarding with an artist and his wife, and after that to London, where her talents expanded and her circle of connections grew.

It’s hard to imagine a better instance of landing in the right place at the right time. It was as though fate had taken her by the hand and led her to milieus where her intellect could thrive. It also, admittedly, reflected her own determination, her lifelong need to define her identity and, not the least of it, her longing for intimacy. Carlisle, like other biographers, traces her failed relationships (the philosopher Herbert Spencer was one) before she found love and the stability she needed with the journalist-cum-philosopher George Henry Lewes.

The Marriage Question opens with the couple eloping in July 1854. She was thirty-four and had established herself in literary circles by her editorial work, now signing herself Marian Evans, at the prestigious Westminster Review and by her own essays, criticism and translation. But she was not a marriage prospect; her age and prodigious intelligence put off duller men than Lewes, and throughout her life people felt free to comment on what were perceived to be her physical deficits. An overlarge chin was the chief problem, if compensated by a surprisingly beautiful voice.

Nor was Lewes — “slight, short,” his face scarred by smallpox — an oil painting; one contemporary uncharitably remarked on his “immense ugliness,” though photographs show him in a better light. Whatever his physical drawbacks, though, they were more than overcome by a lively, gregarious personality combined with the seriousness of his pursuits.

A perfect match? Not entirely, and more on that later. For now it’s important to note that Lewes also came with baggage — namely, a wife and four children, so Marian Evans was taking a huge risk running off with him. But by the time they boarded the train to Weimar, they were passing themselves off as man and wife, and from that moment she discarded the Evans for Lewes. Throughout their twenty-five years together her husband who was not her husband referred to her affectionately as Polly.

The dash to Weimar was a momentary escape from the scandal that would dog her in Victorian England, but also served to widen her horizons further. Lewes and she were following the path “trodden by other intellectual pilgrims — Romantic radicals who worshipped… the miracle of Genius.” The genius in question was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the Frankfurt-born polymath poet, novelist and scientist who had settled in Weimar as a young man and remained there until his death in 1832. The couple had learned of him by reading Madame de Staël, who had taken the pilgrimage when Goethe was still alive.

With a letter of introduction from Thomas Carlyle, they attended the salon of Goethe’s daughter-in-law, befriending the composer Franz Liszt and other members of Weimar’s creative society. Lewes was halfway through his Life of Goethe, but Marian, Carlisle writes, was particularly ripe for inspiration. Moving among free-thinking artists and intellectuals in Weimar led her to wonder if she could match them.

Into the biography Carlisle weaves many influences of the time. Chief among these was the seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza, whose writings were gaining serious attention some hundred and fifty years after his death. Marian began translating his Ethics into English in 1855. The translation languished for a publisher as Spinoza’s works had, and like his only appeared well after its creator’s death. (Carlisle has edited the 2020 edition.) But the undertaking was a clear indication of the strength of Marian’s ambition and the depth of her intellectual capacity.

It was also a measure of Lewes’s support. Knowing what we do of many couples in which the woman’s aspirations take a back seat, the extent of his interest was rare. Aside from the demands of his own work, he was both her critic and agent, assuming control of her business transactions, eventually  leaving her free to concentrate on her writing. It turned out to be a wise investment. With the success of her first novel, Adam Bede, she was making more than he did, and she turned it all over to him in accordance with the rules of marriage at the time.

More importantly perhaps, she found that, more than poetry or essays, fiction was her true metier. Here she would combine her prodigious capacity for thought with the heightened emotional sensitivity that was equally part of her nature. Like the Brontës before her, and for the same reasons, she adopted a male pseudonym (George being Lewes’s given name, Eliot the most English surname she could think of) for her collection of stories, Scenes of Clerical Life, but with Adam Bede the author’s identity became an open secret.

Then, in 1859, while researching for what would become The Mill on the Floss, she produced “The Lifted Veil,” a short story along the lines of Edgar Allan Poe’s science fictions. The clairvoyant protagonist describes his gift as a form of “double consciousness” — a term, Carlisle tells us, that Eliot used to describe “her own self-doubting, self-critical inner voice.”

It’s telling how often the phrases “lifted veil” or “lifting a veil” recur in this biography, acting as a key to other kinds of double consciousness, and how suited the words are for interrogating the questions about marriage that Carlisle has chosen as her theme. Almost to a woman, Eliot’s heroines, unlike Austen’s, make poor choices and suffer terribly for them before they find happiness, if they ever do. Domestic violence, sometimes in the extreme, is a constant in Eliot’s fiction, and Carlisle’s examination of her partnership with Lewes does raise questions about what today we might call coercive control.

Yet that didn’t seem to put Eliot off marrying. Fifteen months after Lewes died Eliot wed John Cross, a man twenty years younger than she was, as devoted to her as Lewes had been, and who authored the first of her posthumous biographies. She also changed her name to Mary Ann Cross, which appears on the headstone of the grave where she was buried, near Lewes, in Hampstead. It’s not too farfetched to take this as yet more evidence of her deep need for the stability and companionship marriage can offer and how much she must have missed the one she had with Lewes, however irregular and scandalous for the times it was.

I make no claim to Eliot scholarship. Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda are the only two works of hers I remember having read. But if one of the aims of literary biography is to rekindle interest in an author’s work, Carlisle has certainly succeeded with me. Everything Eliot wrote is examined in the round as the life and thought that nurtured them unfold — an approach I found as illuminating as it is thorough.

As for myself, I’ll be reading whatever of George Eliot’s I can lay my hands on, and rereading what I have read with renewed understanding and attention — how the gambling scene that opens Daniel Deronda, for example, is not just a clue to Gwendolen Harleth’s character but can also be read as a metaphor for marriage itself and the risks it inevitably entails.

Did I pick that up on my first reading? Possibly unconsciously, but probably not, because my interest in the book began with Eliot’s philosemitism and that’s largely where it stayed. But The Marriage Question chronicles Eliot’s wide, encompassing vision, her impeccable research, the complexity of her fiction and, as a sidelight, her exasperation that the reviews of her books were generally restricted to commenting on the development of character and plot.

Carlisle, a philosopher, has shown literature to be much more than that. A lot has changed in the world and in the world of letters since Marian Lewes starting writing fiction, but how surprising it is to learn that on the whole reviewing hasn’t changed much at all. That said, I hope I’ve given you in the space I’ve had some idea of the level of Carlisle’s achievement. •

The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life
By Clare Carlisle | Allen Lane | $45 | 367 pages

The post Sense and sensibility appeared first on Inside Story.

In Wifedom, Anna Funder — award-winning writer of the non-fiction Stasiland (2003) and novel All That I Am (2011) — strips everything from the edifice on which George Orwell’s reputation has stood and finds beneath it his first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy: unthanked, unloved, neglected and certainly exhausted. She was also, as Funder relates, an intelligent and discerning woman whose energy and promise were fed upon and ultimately drained by her husband.

A graduate of Oxford who started her own typing agency while studying for a master’s degree in psychology at University College London, Eileen married a moth-eaten and prematurely aged Orwell in 1936 after they met at a party at a friend’s house. For the next nine turbulent years, she worked to financially support his writing while keeping house for him and directly aiding his work by editing, typing and advising.

While doing so, she bore an enormous number of indignities. Almost without exception, Orwell gave his needs and desires higher priority than hers. He rarely lifted a finger around the house and his work kept them on the edge of penury. He was repeatedly, callously, unfaithful. He also persistently erased her contributions.

Much of this was evident from the earliest days of their marriage when they settled in a damp, cramped cottage in rural Hertfordshire. In the seclusion of a room upstairs, Orwell wrote and wrote and wrote, and Eileen — despite having a thesis to finish — was kept on her feet from dawn to dusk, cooking, cleaning, attending to the shop they purported to run, and editing her husband’s work at night — by candlelight — while he, upstairs, made use of the only paraffin lamp.

Then Orwell decided to go to Spain to join the socialists in their bitter civil war against the fascists. His experience as a soldier provided a hideous scar for his neck and the material for Homage to Catalonia, and also became another conspicuous occasion on which Orwell wrote Eileen out of history. Bored by the prospect and dreading the back-breaking labour required to keep the Hertfordshire home running, Eileen followed him to Spain.

Formally she was a lowly typist in the offices of the Independent Labour Party; in reality, her duties required her to lift her eyes much higher than the keys of her Olivetti. She worked variously as an organiser, banker, logistics manager, newspaper and radio editor, writer, producer and more besides. It was work every bit as dangerous — if not more — as Orwell’s, particularly as the tide of the civil war changed; quite likely it was more important work than his, too. Nonetheless, despite her saving Orwell’s life and enabling their escape from Spain, Eileen’s presence and contribution were all but expunged in Homage.

Back in England, Eileen worked at all manner of jobs to make ends meet, including a lengthy stint at the information ministry during the second world war. She continued to keep the house, and she continued to carry the load of her husband’s whims and sometimes callous wishes, including his affairs with her friends and the couple’s adoption of a child, Richard, in 1944. She provided invaluable advice on her husband’s writing during the period when he produced Animal Farm and a succession of essays that became classics, while suffering from tumours that caused her to bleed and faint at disturbingly frequent intervals. During an operation to remove those tumours, she died, aged thirty-nine.

Orwell, who was in Europe reporting on the war, quickly cast about for a new wife — or, really, a replacement live-in servant. He proposed to at least four women and began writing Nineteen Eighty-Four in the Jura house that Eileen, in one of her last acts, had arranged to rent for them. That book was the death of him but the birth of his enormous reputation: seven months after it was published, he died, aged forty-six.

Most of the facts of Eileen’s life make for grim reading, and they are of a kind with the lives of other women with famous writer spouses. The question Funder poses about Eileen is one that could apply just as easily to Jane Welsh (wife of Thomas Carlyle), Catherine Hogarth (wife of Charles Dickens) and Elizabeth Howard (second wife of Kingsley Amis), among others: why did an intelligent, brave and insightful woman become so ground down? In crude terms, how did Eileen not tell Orwell to take his aspidistra and fuck off to Wigan Pier?

Funder’s answer, in short, is patriarchy. It is her awareness of its insidious influence in her own marriage — in how the equal share of the work of life and love has become unbalanced, with the result that her sense of self was being crushed — that prompts her to turn to Orwell’s writing in the first place. She admires his work, the way he illuminates power and its dynamics, servants and masters. “I would read Orwell on the tyrannies, the ‘smelly little orthodoxies’ of his time,” she writes, “and I would use him to liberate myself from mine.”

But that reading of Orwell is not so freeing. She is disconcerted by a stray passage on the dirtiness of women and their “terrible, devouring sexuality.” That it appears to have been written about Eileen troubles her. That the six biographies of Orwell produced between 1972 and 2003 neither explain it nor even really explain Eileen causes Funder’s concern to harden into something approaching suspicion. She begins to wonder about why this woman has been pushed to the periphery. “In the end,” she writes, “the biographies started to seem like fictions of omission.” To what extent, she asks, are these biographies influenced by patriarchy?

With this question in mind, Funder uses these works, Eileen’s letters, and Sylvia Topp’s 2020 biography of Eileen to guide a new reading of her life and her marriage to Orwell. Funder studies how the weft of the facts — as they have been established, and can be established — combine with the warp of those Orwell biographies: what is left in, what is taken out, what the biographies disguise and downplay. Funder reads to see the gaps where Eileen might be apparent: “The way the text buckles and strains to avoid her is the way I can see the shape she left.”

The buckles and strains she notices are striking. Funder spotlights passages and techniques by which Orwell’s biographers portray a great man doing everything alone and women as little more than nursemaids or helpless victims, if they are acknowledged at all. Omission is one method; another is the manipulation of chronology, so that cause and effect are separated and the credit for action is denied to the women who act. The most pervasive — ironically, considering Orwell’s famous injunction on it — is the use of the passive voice. In Orwell’s biographies, this is frequently wielded to erase Eileen’s financial and domestic labour, which created the conditions in which Orwell could write, as well as her courageous actions. As Funder writes, “Manuscripts are typed without typists, idyllic circumstances exist without their creators, an escape from Stalinist pursuers is achieved.”

The outrageousness of Eileen’s erasure is compounded by the biographers’ apparent over-reliance on Orwell’s versions of events, most notably in his claim to have had an open marriage. Funder espies a convenient fiction that Orwell told and his biographers swallowed because it preserved an untroubled decency that they projected onto his character. The claim that Eileen also had extramarital affairs is another convenient story, Funder argues: “One revolutionary tryst would transform the Orwells’ marriage to an ‘open’ one in which infidelity was the deal. It wasn’t.”

For these reasons (and more), readers with only a casual acquaintance with Orwell’s life will find in Wifedom a brutal dispelling of any image of a virtuous and decent Orwell, a wizened Saint George whose “wintry voice of conscience” is still heard in debates over totalitarianism, bureaucratic obfuscation, social oppression and colonialism. It will, for those readers, be a harrowing account — yet another, to go up there with Carmela Ciuraru’s Lives of the Wives or Phyllis Rose’s Parallel Lives — of how a monstrous and entitled man took from a woman everything that he should not have. Deepening this tragedy will be the apparent complicity of Orwell’s biographers, and their willingness to consign Eileen to the periphery, if not the shadow, of the biographical spotlight.

Wifedom is a forceful and powerful book, relentless in its advocacy for Eileen and the horrifying injustices done to her. It is also salutary for biographers — a thumping reminder to broaden the spotlight of their inquiry, to peer more closely at the forces at work on their subjects and themselves, and to be ever more careful about the implications of their prose and the benefits they grant their subjects.

Yet for all its close reading, Wifedom is also curiously uninterested in what makes biography a uniquely charged genre to work in. While a biography is concerned with a single subject there is a tension in the simultaneous need to take in the people, institutions and forces that shape the life. A biographer’s sources are much less than everything and they can only work with what they can get, yet they must at some point decide they have enough source material to make a judgement.

Biography, for all its empiricism and evidential rigour, is subjective in nature. While there is a narrative tug to assume a god-like omniscience, there is also an ethical tug to admit to gaps, ambiguities and possibilities. It is axiomatic that no biography is ever definitive, yet it is less well understood that biographies have a shelf life which, if not quite as short as a carton of milk’s, certainly gives the same sour smell when it is exceeded.

Wifedom ignores much of this in its treatment of the Orwell biographies. After their first mention, Funder never again identifies the books or their authors by name except in her endnotes. In anonymising the biographies in the text of her book, she plasters them with a homogeneity that erases how their authors contended with the inevitable tensions and imperatives. One effect is to suggest that the biographers were entirely of the same mind and view and all had the same evidence to hand.

While the biographies are all written by men, and may treat Eileen with less than her due, they are also profoundly different in focus, depth and outlook, and deal with very different ranges of sources. They make for conflicting accounts, and indeed the writers have conflicted with one another. When Peter Stansky, the co-author of the first Orwell biography (1972 and 1979), was once approached at a conference by Bernard Crick, author of a 1980 biography of Orwell, he briefly wondered whether they would come to blows. Crick, however, pointed out that another Orwell biographer was soon scheduled to speak. “Shall we bury our hatchets,” he began, and paused, “… in Jeffrey Meyers’s skull?”

All these men had hatchets. None had an interest in upholding the Saint George figure canonised in Christopher Hollis’s enormously influential Study of George Orwell: The Man and His Works (which goes uncited by Funder). That figure took root and went without an advocatus diaboli for a considerable period because of the unwillingness of anyone to challenge Orwell’s deathbed opposition to any biography at all and his second wife Sonia’s determination to uphold that wish.

Yet palpable across the six biographies published between 1972 and 2023 is a willingness to assail the saintly halo and draw attention to Orwell’s myriad flaws. None of the six biographers is reticent about Orwell’s infidelity, his potential repressed homosexuality, his chauvinism and his racism, among other matters, yet the strength of the criticism for him on these and other fronts increases noticeably in volumes closer to the present day. This reflects, I think, both the increasing size of the Orwell archive — which has just resulted in a new, expanded edition of D.J. Taylor’s biography (reviewed by Peter Marks for Inside Story) — and the new questions biographers have been spurred to ask by societal changes. If these biographies have not wholly dispelled the popular image of Orwell, it has not been for lack of trying.

They certainly have their blind spots, but they are not wholly blind to Eileen’s significance and Orwell’s treatment of her; nor are they uniform in what they do perceive. Funder admits this in a comment she consigns to her endnotes: “[Jeffrey] Meyers is the only biographer to address directly who did the work.” She quotes him, too: “Orwell enjoyed this hairshirt existence [in Hertfordshire], but Eileen, who did most of the work, suffered terribly.” Crick points to how friends and acquaintances understood Eileen:

Her friends are vehement that she understood people far better than George, and that her range of interests was almost as wide. They were not to be perfect together, but always a good match. She fought his fights and looked after him as well as he would allow — although she was a woman careless of creature comforts herself. She indulged, even enjoyed, his eccentricities. Brenda Salkeld thought well of her, believed her to be the kind of woman George needed. Some of Eileen’s friends, however, were not so sure that George was the right man for her, and were puzzled that such an emancipated and forceful woman was so willing to play second fiddle to what appeared to be a rather self-absorbed and gawky minor novelist.

In his 2003 biography, meanwhile, D.J. Taylor points out that Orwell obscured Eileen’s presence in their life: “One could read Orwell’s account of the time they spent together in Morocco — sedulous nature notes and climatic observation — without ever realising that another person was there.” Taylor was also aware enough to write that, in the retrospective glare of Orwell’s reputation, Eileen “never quite exists in her own right.”

One way that Funder has Eileen exist again is by extensively quoting a batch of letters, discovered in 2005, that Eileen posted to a friend during her nine years of marriage. Those letters formed the core of Sylvia Topp’s 2020 biography of Eileen (which reaches very different conclusions from Funder’s) and were also critical to Funder’s decision to eschew a novel about Eileen. “A novel was impossible now, because it would devour the letters as ‘material’ and privilege my voice over hers,” she writes. The solution was to have it both ways: to “make her [Eileen] live and at the same time reveal the wicked magic trick that had erased her.”

The latter half of this sentence accounts for the close readings of Orwell’s biographies and for the sections of first-person memoir-cum-travelogue-cum-polemic; the first half accounts for what Funder calls “a fiction that tries not to lie.” These are scenes, or vignettes, for the most part centred on the letters Eileen sent, quoting the letters and surrounding them with novelistic texture and evocation. Funder suggests that the imagination informing this — the flesh she adds to fact’s bones — is modest, built on factual knowledge of what was happening. “Mostly,” she explains, “I supply only what a film director would, directing an actor on set — the wiping of spectacles, the ash on the carpet, a cat pouring itself off her lap.”

One such scene has Eileen and Orwell sitting in an inn in the Atlas Mountains in 1938, eating stew and drinking tea. Orwell eyes some young Moroccan women outside, and then tells Eileen that he has been working so hard:

“I deserve a treat,” he says, blowing a thin stream of smoke away from her.

A small thing inside her turns to stone. He doesn’t mean her. She forgets to breathe, then does. Closes her mouth. He says he wants one of these Berber girls, “just one.”

“And from me you want?” she says.

“I just thought I should tell you.”

At this, I had a shudder of disgust so strong I had to close the book. The scene is excruciating — in the torment it evokes in Eileen, in the gross and dehumanised entitlement Orwell claims, and in the leaden weight it settles on Eileen while she waits for Orwell’s return afterward. It is an apt example of Funder’s power and formidable talent as a writer.

But this scene is also troubling for precisely that reason. It includes more than just some modest filmic details. The dialogue and Eileen’s reaction are all made up. Its power, especially in that dialogue and imagined reaction, is so enormous that it easily withstands the disclaimer that Funder immediately follows it with: “I am imagining these details, but because this is what happened, there must have been some kind of scene.”

Is it what happened, though?

Funder cites two sources. First are the 1982 memoirs of Tosco Fyvel, who wrote of Orwell telling his wife during the second world war of his attraction for “young Arab girls” and Eileen’s permission for him to “have one of these girls on just one occasion.” Second are the 1970 memoirs of Harold Acton, which recounted, in paraphrased terms, a conversation with Orwell in 1945 in which Orwell had spoken about the beauty of Burmese and Moroccan women and then “admitted that he had seldom tasted such bliss as with certain Moroccan girls.”

This is the sum of it: two recollections independently made twenty-five years after the event of paraphrased conversations about events taking place a minimum of five years before that. Only Fyvel’s makes a specific mention of the incident; the other alludes to something like it only. Fyvel’s also suggests some ambiguity: “True or imagined? It hardly mattered.”

Funder is scathing of that (“I bet it mattered to her,” she writes of Eileen’s reaction), yet there is a very real question to be asked: are these recollections strong enough to support the scene Funder writes? Are these strong enough to declare, as Funder does, that “this is what happened,” that this is “fact”?

Certainly they are strong enough, and of sufficiently grave import, to warrant inclusion and discussion in a biography, with evaluation from the biographer about how the reader can understand them one way or the other. And this is indeed the approach largely adopted by Orwell biographers Stansky and Abrahams (1972 and 1979) and Crick (1980), who had only Acton’s recollection to work with. All are sceptical, but don’t cast the matter wholly aside. Nor is Stansky and Abrahams’s “8-pt footnote,” as Funder calls it, quite as far banished and hidden as she implies: it is printed in the body text of the book.

What is also not noted by Funder is that the biographers after 1980, working with the benefit of Fyvel’s memoir, give the claim more credence. Meyers (2000) implicitly accepts that it happened, offers a rejoinder to Stansky and Abrahams’s caution, and grants an expansive ambiguity about Eileen’s reaction. “Eileen may have allowed Orwell to go with a prostitute,” he writes, “but it must have made her unhappy and hurt their marriage.” Gordon Bowker (2003) and Taylor (2003) implicitly accept it too, though Taylor suggests that Orwell’s disclosure to Fyvel gave “an odd gloss to an otherwise conventional relationship, the thought of shadowy, secret recesses stretching away beneath the surface of their public lives.” Funder is critical of this sentence, seeing it as an unwarranted attribution to Eileen of secret recesses, yet a plainer reading is that Taylor is merely relaying Fyvel’s projection of those recesses.

None of the Orwell biographers declares emphatically that it happened. None of them denies with the same feeling that it did. Nonetheless, Funder finds their treatment wanting, accusing them of trying to “excuse Orwell’s behaviour” and “transmute fact to a rumour.”

“Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent,” Orwell once wrote. Wifedom follows that advice to a tee. In its exploration of Orwell and Eileen it finds considerable evidence for a man undeserving of the pedestal on which he has been placed and a woman who has been unfairly cast aside. It will prompt a better reckoning for Orwell scholars and it will be salutary for writers working with other subjects. But, in time, it too will be seen as an instalment in an arc that ultimately bends towards greater illumination. •

Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life
By Anna Funder | Hamish Hamilton | $36.99 | 464 pages

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With its focus on domestic politics, Netflix’s new hit series Wave Makers is a reminder that Taiwan is something more than a flashpoint. It’s a lively democracy dealing with a familiar range of modern problems. The series is a mini West Wing, Taiwan-style, with a #MeToo story at its heart — and, in a remarkable case of art informing life, it has made #MeToo an actual domestic political issue. At a moment of high tensions in the Taiwan Strait, this is the issue making news.

Wave Makers is one of several Taiwanese productions from the Netflix stable available in Australia. Internationally, Taiwanese television drama is less popular than Korean, but this series is rating well. Strong performances from a star-studded cast do credit to a script written by two women (Chien Li-ying and Yen Shih-chi) who have real-life experience of party politics.

The series follows media staffers of an out-of-office political party as they deal with political graft, the status of migrants, marriage equality, the death penalty and other politically sensitive issues through ten months of an election campaign. But the political becomes personal when a #MeToo story emerges, slowly becomes the dominant thread, and changes the course of the election.

Reviewers have remarked on the absence from the series of any mention of cross-strait relations, the elephant in the room of East Asian politics. In fact, this elephant is not easily bypassed. Banned in the People’s Republic of China, “harmonised” (censored, that is) on Douban, the main Chinese website for entertainment and culture, the series has inevitably ended up in the cross-strait space.

As an exercise in soft power, Wave Makers functions like Taiwan’s planned porcupine defence, covering “a large number of small things” instead of one big one. Chat on the mainland microblog site Weibo shows that viewers in China, breaching the great firewall to watch the series, are fascinated by the multifaceted portrayal of a thriving Chinese-speaking democracy.

In Taiwan itself, the series has gone to air at a sensitive time in the political cycle. Campaigning is under way for the presidential election on 13 January next year, and so far it’s a men’s race. The redoubtable President Tsai Ing-wen is coming to the end of her second term of office and (unlike her counterpart in China) is stepping down in accordance with the constitution. Her successor may be vice-president Lai Ching-te, whose election would extend the tenure of the Democratic Progressive Party, or DPP, into a third term. With Hou Yu-ih, the candidate for the old establishment KMT party, performing poorly in the polls, Lai’s main competitor looks like being a former mayor of Taipei, Ko Wen-je, who founded the Taiwan People’s Party in 2019.

As if they didn’t have enough to worry about (opinion polls, economic contraction, Chinese fighter jets, Russian frigates), these men are now likely to be reviewing their personal histories.

The #MeToo story in Wave Makers is firmly located in the political world. As early as episode two, rookie staffer Chang Ya-ching is having to deal with the office sleaze. An internal hearing leads nowhere: sexual harassment within the party is too delicate an issue to handle in the course of an election campaign.

As it happens, Ya-ching is also suffering at the hands of her former lover, who is running for election as vice-president on the other party ticket. Handsome, sophisticated and predatory, the aspirational VP has in his possession intimate photos of Ya-ching that he is refusing either to return or to destroy. A sensitive performance by twenty-five-year-old Gingle Wang shows a younger, happier Ya-ching in flashback, falling in love and embarking on a disastrous relationship that blights her job prospects and destroys her peace of mind.

The series reaches its climax with her revelation of the abuse on public television, the inevitable impact on her former lover’s family, and the eventual reverberations for the presidential campaign. Australians who watched Rachelle Miller’s exposé on Four Corners of her treatment at the hands of MP Alan Tudge will be struck by the parallel.

In Taiwan, the series was triggering. Among those who watched it was a former staffer for the DPP. “The first thing that happened,” she later related, was that she had “a good, big cry.” The next was that she went on Facebook to report on her own experience of sexual harassment at work.

Soon afterwards, a second female party worker came forward with an allegation of harassment by a fellow staffer. DPP youth affairs department head Tsai Mu-lin was criticised in both cases; according to the second complainant, he had not only failed to take her accusation seriously but had forced her to apologise.

The DPP moved swiftly to repair its reputation, holding a press conference on the afternoon of 2 June, issuing apologies and forcing resignations, including Tsai Mu-lin’s. But the damage had been done. One website began keeping a running tally of complaints after the style of Covid statistics. In the space of two weeks more than thirty women from various spheres had come forward with complaints. In China, where the DPP is synonymous with abandonment of One China policy, the official media greeted the party’s discomfit with schadenfreude.

What initially looked like a DPP problem quickly turned out to be a general one. A sexual harassment case was already running against a KMT legislator, and incidents involving other party members quickly came to light. Outside the political arena, the entertainment industry has been hit the hardest, with allegations of sexual abuse on the part of actors and television personalities continuing to surface at the time of writing.

Among the accused are Wave Makers star Huang Chien-wei, whose performance as the amiable head of the party’s media department and muddle-headed husband of a long-suffering wife won him hearts all over Taiwan. Prominent political dissidents of the 1989 generation have also been named, including by Wave Makers scriptwriter Chien Li-ying, who alleges that dissident poet Bei Ling groped her during a meeting about a play production.

For political parties, allegations concerning their own party members are hugely embarrassing. On 6 June, President Tsai herself went on Facebook with a strong statement on the duty of society to protect victims. The DPP is currently moving to improve legislation on sexual harassment. In both politics and the entertainment industry, resignations and apologies, and in some cases strong denials, have become frequent.

The impact on the election is hard to predict. On 30 June, at the end of a month’s wall-to-wall coverage of #MeToo, China intensified military exercises in the Taiwan Strait. The following day, Singaporean journalist Woon Wei Jong spoke with seven young Taiwanese about their voting intentions. The conversations were dominated by the cross-strait relationship and the different parties’ stance in relation to the mainland. Is #MeToo at all relevant in this context?

According to mainland emigrant Shangguan Luan, the answer is yes, although the effects are more likely to be seen in an impact on voting patterns than in #MeToo’s becoming an openly debated election issue. Among younger voters, she writes, a sensitivity to gender issues overlaps with the “naturally independent” sensibility characteristic of people born since the 1980s. This generation has grown up in an era when democracy has fostered a sense of self-determination while time has attenuated ancestral links with the mainland. The effect of #MeToo should be to hasten the drift away from the older, more conservative, and essentially more Chinese, attitudes that form the bedrock of the One China policy.

Among mainland viewers, as the same commentator remarks, responses to Wave Makers have varied from sneers about Taiwanese democracy to frank envy. The series’ themes necessarily highlight Taiwan’s political differences from the People’s Republic: the participation of women in political life at the highest levels, a multiparty system, political accountability, freedom of association, freedom of expression, and same-sex marriage (legalised in Taiwan in 2019). The #MeToo movement itself, now surging in Taiwan, has been met in China with arrests of activists instead of perpetrators. A pallid civil rights code introduced in 2022 passes responsibility for infractions ever further down the line of management.

These differences have yielded Taiwan a human rights dividend that is complicating international relations, especially vis-à-vis China. A highly self-conscious Taiwanese series like Wave Makers can hardly avoid being entangled in the resulting complex of issues. The opening scene of the series, a rally on election night, amounts to a call for recognition. The wave makers are warming up the party faithful: “You have voted for hope for Taiwan’s future!” “Let’s change Taiwan’s future together!” The crowd cheers. The name of the candidate flashes up on the screen: “Lin Yueh-chen!” The crowd roars: “Frozen garlic!”

“Frozen garlic” is a pun on the Mandarin word for “elect.” Cheeky and assertive, it captures something about Taiwan at this moment in history. If it joins the lexicon of terms banned by the Chinese government, no one will be surprised. •

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To a man, the officers nod or voice their agreement. It is not until the meeting is about to close that the lone woman in the room musters the courage to speak. Her statement comes in the form of a question, the standard gendered inflection of women in her day. “Isn’t the economy supposed to serve society,” she asks, “rather than the other way around?”

It has been nearly half a century since I drafted a minute, a ministerial or a cabinet submission, but that single interrogative sentence has been forever imprinted on my brain. Since resigning from the service, I have stood outside the arena, taking another direction in my own life as governance in Australia followed the trajectory outlined in that brief senior officers’ meeting.

It may surprise some to be told that the meeting took place while Labor’s Gough Whitlam was still prime minister, and that his government was adopting a tighter approach to fiscal expenditure. This is not the general view of things, but the truth is that the government, under the extreme pressure it was subjected to during that year, accepted it was time to pull up its socks and conform to more stringent fiscal expectations. If the Dismissal had not intervened and the government had been permitted to continue, the received wisdom about its economic capability would be substantially different.

That said, the Whitlam government — and that of its Coalition successor under Malcolm Fraser, whose election later that year was so ignobly prosecuted — was still imbued with a fundamentally Keynesian outlook, the legacy of our postwar reconstruction. The Coalition certainly introduced stringent cost-cutting, but the Country Party’s influence combined with Fraser’s reversion to stimulus measures in the 1982 budget indicated that it hadn’t subscribed to demands for wholesale economic reform.

Indeed, the Fraser government took back responsibility in 1977 for women’s refuges, which had previously devolved to the states, and doubled the allocation for them. It also continued funding childcare and resisted subsidising commercial centres. It was the Hawke Labor government, elected in 1983, that was wholly committed to what was variously called Reaganomics, Rogernomics or economical rationalism, albeit a tempered version. We know it now as neoliberalism, the basic idea of which is that governments should get out of the way and let the market take over.

This change, though focused on economics and couched in its language, has ultimately been a cultural one, and it has been profound. It is perfectly acceptable even today for professionals of all stripes to speak of “the market” in quasi-deistic terms. A spate of articles appearing in the 1980s — in ostensibly progressive media like the National Times as well as in business journals — valorised the pursuit of riches and those who pursued them in gushing terms. I used to keep score of the number of times the word “success” was used, meaning getting ahead in some sort of business.

By the time Howard came along, we were all businesses. Even freelance writers like me were sending out invoices to our editors, and the more fortunate among us were filing quarterly business statements and charging GST. The practice continues to this day, and no one bats an eyelash over the paperwork involved in what was supposed to be a development to rid us of red tape.

And I’m not the first to note that in our dealings with government suddenly we were “clients” and “customers” but never citizens. Gradually, many began to see themselves as lone actors instead of members of communities or collectives. Union membership declined, as did that of political parties. Politics too became a profession rather than a calling.

How have women fared under these developments? Before addressing the question, let me say a few words about myself. I was born in the United States during the Great Depression, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president until I was six. It’s hard to explain how a child that young could absorb the zeitgeist of his New Deal, the relief of knowing that a government was there to help, that people who had been at risk of starvation were given work, even artists and writers and actors like my mother, but I did. And it would be years before I would find myself with a government resembling it.

I left the United States when the scourge of McCarthyism had only just begun to subside. We were now in the grip of a cold war and the repudiation of anything smacking of socialism. Though the Australia I came to in 1958 was also enmeshed in cold war politics, and I was shocked by the blatant racism and what we would come to know as sexism, the attitude towards government I found here was markedly different. To paraphrase the historian Keith Hancock, Australians expected their governments, state and federal, to be at the service of their citizens.

Even for an American scarified by those McCarthy years, the easy Australian attitude towards government took some getting used to. It wasn’t until 1972 that I felt I could let my guard down — that I was once again experiencing a government whose progressive flavour and sweeping reforms for improving society resembled those of the war years of my youth.

Yet less than three years later the seeds of neoliberalism had been planted, the hope and excitement of the Whitlam experiment came crashing down, and though it would take another eight years for the seeds to ripen, the tenor of the previous contract between government and its citizens was transformed.

Is the purpose of an economy to serve a society, or is it indeed the other way around? Most particularly, how have women accommodated this profound change in economic understanding, and its consequent changes in governance?

For an answer I have to go back to those Whitlam years again, during which some groundbreaking reforms were initiated. Women’s reproductive freedoms were enhanced, financial support for single mothers was introduced, and advances in employment were set in train, with the government backing equal pay for equal work and the extension of the minimum wage to women. Discrimination committees were established, part-time work encouraged and, most importantly, a wide-ranging, substantially funded childcare program was introduced.

Free tertiary education, arguably the most significant reform, was not specifically designed for women but did most to expand our horizons. All this required an expansion of the federal public service and the public sector in general. But under the changed zeitgeist, and as time has passed, both have been systematically whittled back, to the point where today we are subjected in every conceivable sphere to the signs of a seriously fractured social order.

Climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic have accentuated these fault lines. The accelerated appearance of extreme weather events predicted by climate scientists decades ago has been met with increasingly woeful federal government policy, the Gillard government’s short-lived emissions trading scheme being the sole exception.

After more than twenty drought years since the turn of the century, whole towns have been left without water and rivers turned dry. The bushfire season has extended, and resources for fighting the growing number of fires and their increased spread and ferocity have been seriously overstretched. What’s more, the very means for fighting them – the planes, the water, the fire retardants – add to the carbon discharged into the atmosphere, itself the cause of the heat enveloping the planet.

As the planet struggles to adapt, the weather volatility grows. Floods ruin homes and vital infrastructure, damage crops and spread disease, and again the tools at our disposal for saving lives and rebuilding the damage escalate their cause. The sad truth is that almost every facet of human existence, as contemporary Australians have known it, contributes to this spiral effect.

One of neoliberalism’s central tenets is that by reducing the size of the public sector the more efficient markets will stimulate trade and a concomitant growth in wealth. Beginning with the Whitlam government’s 25 per cent across-the-board tariff reduction in 1974, the edifice of tariff protection that characterised our postwar years was dismantled, with serious inroads on our manufacturing sector, which had grown substantially out of the import substitution policies adopted after the war.

I’m not arguing that freeing up trade has been wholly bad for this country, but we have seen how the neoliberal approach, being more an ideology than sound economics, has seriously distorted our economy, made all the more evident in a crisis like the Covid pandemic when supply of vital imports is disrupted. Moreover, the globalisation of assets and the ceaseless movement of goods and people around the planet have all contributed, along with the effects of climate change, to the emergence of pandemic viruses like SARS, of which Covid-19 is but the latest manifestation.

And where has this led for women? Childcare has become prohibitively expensive, and the effective marginal tax rate on married women with children has acted as another disincentive to their participating in the workforce. The safety nets that formed part of the social contract when the Hawke–Keating government signed up to Reagan and Thatcher’s economics have either shrunk or are punitively applied; with deregulation, the weakening of unions and galloping casualisation, working life is transformed.

It’s arguable whether these changes were deliberately designed to frustrate women’s advancement; some were, most weren’t. Despite the general increase in female workplace participation over the past forty years, its predominance of part-time and casual work has resulted in an associated reduction in women’s earning power and superannuation, so much so that women in their fifties today have become the fastest-growing group among the homeless.

At the same time, the one lasting legacy of the seventies women’s movement and its involvement in the Whitlam government has been women’s view of ourselves, and the aspirations we have held for our futures. As Whitlam’s first women’s adviser, Elizabeth Reid, once put it, what had been a women’s movement had become a movement of women, as women became a visible presence in all walks of life.

I marvel that for years after my arrival in Australia in 1958 I never saw or heard a woman reading the news or anchoring a current affairs program, let alone driving a bus or piloting a commercial aircraft. Women held a tiny minority of management positions, in the order of 3 per cent, and these were mostly in the public sector or gender-segregated occupations. It is salutary to be reminded, too, that when Whitlam came to office not a single woman held a seat in the House of Representatives. All that has changed, and dramatically so.

Yet somewhere along the way the egalitarian ethos of the earlier movement was abandoned, with class divisions evident in the seventies substantially deepened today. It’s true that we feminists of the second wave were predominantly middle class, with many having benefited from the expanded education and tertiary scholarships initiated under Menzies.

Yet not all the women who participated were products of middle-class privilege, and the socialist bent of women’s liberationists in particular made us acutely aware of the entrenched inequalities in what was all too often touted as Australia’s classless society. So while it can be said that the movement’s composition was largely middle-class, it would be wrong to characterise it as such. That feminists didn’t always succeed in erasing unexamined, often racist assumptions about Aboriginal women, for example, doesn’t mean we didn’t try.

But it is also true that women did advance even as neoliberalism permeated all aspects of society. There’s no denying that many of us did well. Women began to be taken seriously in the media. A fair few became professors, a scarcely imaginable trajectory when the movement began, even if the prospects for young female scholars today are considerably less rosy. Casualisation was well under way with the corporatisation of universities, but the future for current untenured academics, particularly in the humanities, has dimmed altogether with the pandemic.

Women have succeeded in getting themselves elected in increasing numbers, and despite the setbacks, especially on the Coalition side, many more have been ministers. A woman heading a public service department is nothing to marvel at; that there are female chief executive officers in both public and private sectors is barely worthy of comment, yet a whole generation of women in their twenties and thirties are precariously employed, paying high rents and excluded from the ever-escalating housing market. Their day-to-day struggles to keep afloat financially have made it harder for them to organise politically than it was for us back in the 1970s. And although there are signs — with #MeToo and the 2021 March4Justice — that this may be changing, social inequality is deepening and democracy itself is threatened.

It’s been forty-four years since I left the public service determined to become a writer, and thirty-eight years since my first novel, based on my experience in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, appeared. West Block begins two years after the Dismissal, and opens with the teenage daughter of the central character discovering her mother’s diary and reading the last entry, dated 9 December 1977.

“Two years have passed since it happened,” writes Cassie Armstrong, “when with a shock the trunk imploded. Leaves withered and dropped. We were dazed, stunned with it, and I found myself a conservative.” In writing these lines through my alter ego, the wording was not only to convey the sudden, brutally executed change of government, when those in the department found themselves serving conservative masters, but also to express my dismay that basic Australian traditions — traditions that had become precious to me, and that my heroine, likewise, hoped to conserve — were being dismantled.

Although it would take a few more years for the neoliberal revolution to take hold, we were standing on the brink of it in 1975, and looking back, we can see it for the revolution it was. There is no little irony, then, that the truly radical revolutionaries of the Anglosphere have not been those on the left of the spectrum, but those on the right.

As Cassie Armstrong, head of the department’s Women’s Equality Branch, or WEB, went on to say in the novel, not all change is good. It is up to us now to do what we can to restore the democratic traditions of fair play and social equality that have been so comprehensively repudiated. But how?

The radical changes ushered in by the moneyed ascendancy have been so pervasive and become so entrenched that it would be dishonest to suggest they could be undone easily. But it would be equally mistaken not to take heart from some changes for the better since those palmier days. Australians generally are more attuned to feminist aims than they once were, more aware of Indigenous achievement and the appalling racism Indigenous people have endured, and more accepting of differing sexual orientations and gender fluidity.

For all that, it’s next to impossible for any leader today to argue the simple proposition that taxes are not only needed but beneficial if the revenue raised is directed towards restoring good government and a fairer, more productive society. Tax and what its purpose is in a democracy remain so far a no-go area in the dominant political discourse.

Having participated in the 2019 campaign to elect an independent in the federal Sydney seat of Warringah, I was acutely aware that there was no chance of Zali Steggall’s winning it if she didn’t openly reject Labor’s 2019 policies to remove negative gearing and franking credits. And though I’ve been heartened by Steggall’s re-election in 2022 and the striking success of other independent candidates, the vast majority of whom are women, I’ve yet to hear them make taxation an issue, though most would seem in favour of reversing the Morrison government’s highly regressive stage three tax cuts that the Labor government has insisted — at least so far — on keeping. Some have also supported needed changes in superannuation taxes.

At this point it’s worth recalling not only that the 1970s women’s movement involved numbers of tertiary-educated women, but also that many of us, owing to the effects of sexism, were out of work at the time. In this we could be said to have been repeating the part intelligentsias with grievances have historically played in revolutionary movements.

Given the casualisation and precarity of university teaching today, we might also consider organising groups by enlisting redundant or precariously employed academics to study the new economics developed by women like Mariana Mazzucato. This could be influential in gaining greater community understanding of the crucial role governments can and have played, in both directing economic development and providing basic services, and the vital role played by progressive taxation.

Women’s policy developed in the Whitlam government was predicated in large part on the need for women to be more strongly represented in all aspects of political life. The government’s 1975 Women and Politics Conference was excoriated in the media, but its long-term effect is undeniable. No matter the barriers they continue to face, female politicians are no longer the isolated oddities they were when that conference was held. We’ve had a female prime minister, female premiers, and female senators and members of parliament, many of whom have reached the rank of minister. But not all of them, particularly on the Coalition side, have delivered what the community has needed, or indeed what has been expected of them.

The 2019–20 bushfires and the Covid pandemic necessitated growth in government spending, but it was reluctantly and inefficiently delivered, with too many sectors rendered ineligible for the Coalition’s largesse, while the waves of new variants disrupted the economy further just as it was tightening its purse strings. That female politicians were enlisted in its retrograde parsimony is regrettable.

While advocacy groups such as the Women’s Electoral Lobby and the National Foundation of Women continue to foster excellent research in the growth of inequality and other matters important to women, the Morrison government paid next to no attention, and members of their National Women’s Alliance faced being defunded if they proved too critical of government policy and practice. The Women’s Office in its various permutations had been sidelined.

In a sense, then, our success in making women’s concerns mainstream political issues has sown the seeds of our failure. In the old days we called that co-option, and my mission once I’d joined the bureaucracy was trying to explain to hardline radical and social feminists fired by anti-establishment sentiment how necessary working within government was.

Today, the positions seem dramatically reversed, even though the nomenclature has changed. We have no shortage of groups tackling specific issues of concern to women or their echoes within the bureaucracies, academia and parliaments. What’s missing, for the moment anyway, is a widespread, radical, community-based movement engaged in fundamental questions such as what constitutes social value, how it can be measured, and how a more equal society that best serves its citizens should be funded.

Climate change and the pandemic have thrown these questions into high relief, and there are glimmers appearing here and there that such a movement’s time may be near.

What I’ve been suggesting is a conscious effort in developing what was once called a double strategy. Yes, we will always need progressive thinkers in government bureaucracies, on government benches and in local and state governments, but the lesson I took from my experience in government is that without the strong, coordinated pressure from within civil society, such penetration can be redirected to regressive aims (for example, greenwashing) or rendered useless altogether.

The neoliberal revolution of the past half-century measures every public service in terms of cost, thus forcing advocates to couch almost every proposal in terms of its economic benefit or detriment rather than its social value. While enriching some and impoverishing many, this cultural revolution has penetrated our thinking and transformed Australia, with a particular impact on women.

To reverse these developments, along with meaningful action on climate change, is the challenge of our century. To steer us through it, the basic question to ask remains: isn’t the economy meant to support society? And seeing the result of the opposite viewpoint all around us, how were we ever persuaded to switch the two around? •

This is Sara Dowse’s contribution to the new book Women and Whitlam: Revisiting the Revolution, edited by Michelle Arrow and published by NewSouth.

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Stumm, who flew over Hiroshima with a group of correspondents, later wrote of the experience: “The usual journalists’ banter in the aircraft stopped as we neared the city, we were all so silent. I will never forget what it was like. I had expected rubble and the devastation, but nothing prepared me for the piles of bodies, clearly recognisable, and the bitter desolation of a once prosperous community. This [silence] continued even when we touched down. No one said a word.”

But it was Stumm’s interview with Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge as he lay in his hospital bed suffering from radiation poisoning that gave her readers the first real insight into what had taken place.

“Father Kleinsorge described walking barefoot through devastated Hiroshima for hours after the bombing,” Stumm filed. He had been reading at his presbytery, just 500 metres from ground zero, when he saw a flash. “I don’t remember hearing any explosion or how I came from the second floor to the ground floor, but when I did, I found that our house was the only one left standing as far as I could see,” Stumm quoted Kleinsorge as saying:

It was black as night. Six people, four brother priests, one student and one servant collected together, and we dug out the wife and daughter of the caretaker from under the wreckage. Fires had broken out all over Hiroshima. They raged at us from every direction. We had small splinter-like wounds all over our bodies. In the afternoon a whirlwind sprang up which made the sky pitch black and drove many people into the river, where they drowned. People were wandering about with their whole faces one large blister from the searing effect of the bomb. Only forty out of six hundred schoolgirls at the Methodist college survived; three hundred little girls at the government school were killed instantly. Thousands of young soldiers in training at barracks were slaughtered. I walked for two hours and only saw two hundred people alive.

“Two days after the bombing,” Stumm reported, “Japanese military forces entered Hiroshima and collected 200,000 bodies for cremation. In addition to those killed outright, many more died through lack of medical attention as every hospital had been destroyed.”

Ten years earlier, with a bachelor of arts, a diploma of journalism and some casual sports reporting experience at the Brisbane Telegraph under her belt, Stumm had followed her boyfriend, Harley, to London, where he was training to become an airforce pilot and she aimed to be a reporter.

But it was “harder to get into Fleet Street than to rob the bank of England,” as she would later write in her autobiography, I Saw Too Much. So, in 1936, she “crashed” into the night editor’s office at the Daily Mirror and plied him with a judicious mix of charm, truths and falsehoods.

“He asked me, can you do interviews? Never having done such a thing in my life, I promptly replied, yes.” To her amazement, he gave her a month’s trial, which would end up taking her across the world to cover the story of the century:

I was as green as grass for I’d never known what real work was like until I joined the Daily Mirror. However, it didn’t take long to realise that my job was one that demanded the qualifications of a Scotland Yard sleuth, combined with the acumen of an astute lawyer and the bright ideas of a crack advertising agency.

In the beginning I had no technical knowledge of how a newspaper operated. What I did have, I quickly discovered, was an instinctive news sense, something I believe you cannot learn: you either have it, or you don’t. In some instinctual way, I could scent, or feel my way into an important interview or recognise a good angle for a story.

And her angle was firmly tabloid. She covered crime, securing her first scoop by stalking a pathologist, charmed the leading tenor of the day into the bath to sing for a photo, interviewed movie stars like Robert Taylor and authors like George Bernard Shaw, and tailed Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret through the zoo at Regent’s Park.

When war broke out, Stumm followed Harley, now her husband, to Singapore and quickly found a job on the Malaya Tribune as a general reporter, bringing a “dash of Fleet Street” to Southeast Asia — so much so that her first story defamed the governor, almost getting her deported. Then, after the birth of her baby and the Japanese shelling of Singapore, she received a cable. It was her old editor at the Mirror. “Delighted to know you are safe. Can you become our accredited war correspondent and start filing stories immediately?”

Stumm became known as “that war correspondent with a baby.” Tiny Sheridan waited outside press conferences with her amah while her mother covered the refusal of authorities to believe that Singapore was vulnerable to Japanese attack. But Singapore did fall, and Stumm was forced back home to Brisbane, where she received another cable from the Daily Mirror: “All delighted you are safe. Can you represent us at General MacArthur’s HQ in Brisbane?”

The US general was the Supreme Allied Commander South-West Pacific Area, and Brisbane seethed with hundreds of thousands of serving US and Australian men and women. It was a city of sandbags, brown-outs and bomb shelters.

Stumm wore an Australian army officer’s uniform and the flat, broad brimmed Australian women’s army hat, all of which she felt was far from flattering. The American brass, complaining the hat made her look like a squashed tomato, gave her a US officers’ side cap, which she wore with flair. The quality of her reporting brought her to the notice of MacArthur, who included her in an otherwise all-male reporting pack sent to Port Moresby to cover the battle against Japanese forces.

“Here at this forward area, the atmosphere tinges with excitement and grim preparedness,” she filed. “Rugged Australian soldiers load trucks, dig roads, heave fence poles, their mahogany backs bent to the job, their Digger hats stained with the perspiration that pours off them in this humid land. Side by side with them work the Doughboys, more conventional in their fatigue suits with rolled-down sleeves, some even in khakis with ties neatly tucked in at the neck.”

She worked alongside George Johnston, who would cover the war in China and go on to become one of Australia’s most important novelists, and Ian Morrison, the war correspondent son of Australian George Morrison, who had covered the 1900 Boxer Rebellion in China for the London Times. Like most of the men, she operated out of the local command post, covering stories that she couldn’t see first-hand, like the Battle of Kaiapit that saw Australian soldiers defeat a much larger force of Japanese with few losses and establish an airstrip to protect the northern coastal town of Lae.

“The country around Port Moresby was so bad it was a wonder to me that troops could fight in such difficult terrain,” she would write later:

The jeep track leading to the Kokoda Track was so rough it was a misery to ride along. But even here, Australian humour came to the fore. At the start of the Kokoda Track, a huge banner was stretched across the track which read: “Through these portals pass the best damn mosquito bait in the world.” On the other side to welcome the returning troops was written: “We told you so!”

Stumm covered the work of nurses, impressed with their courage and the hardships they faced. “Into Moresby by plane usually come the wounded from land and sea battles. Twenty-four hours a day the girls of Moresby, Australian and American, are on the job, taking care of them,” she filed. She would later interview a group of nurses freed from Japanese captivity, who, fearing pack rape, had kept vials of morphine, ready to kill themselves.

“Even though I’d been through air raids in Singapore, New Guinea was a shock,” she wrote later. “I remember walking down a dusty track, feeling dazed by the heat and the noise, when coming towards me was a war correspondent colleague, George Johnston. He asked me how it was all going. ‘It’s all a bit overwhelming, suddenly finding myself in the theatre of war.’ He nodded sympathetically. ‘I know. It’s a case of I saw too much.’”

As the war was ending, Stumm took a job on the Daily Telegraph in Sydney. But there was one last cable to come from the Daily Mirror, this time asking her to go to Tokyo to cover the Japanese surrender. In a story that would be repeated for women correspondents for decades to come, the editor of the Daily Telegraph only agreed to let her go if she made her own way there. With no civilian flights available, Stumm called on her air force connections, who helped her in memory of her husband, Wing Commander Harley Stumm, who had been killed in action.

After the war, MacArthur awarded Stumm the Asiatic Pacific Service Star for her services as a war correspondent in New Guinea. •

This is an edited extract from Through Her Eyes: Australia’s Women Correspondents from Hiroshima to Ukraine, edited by Melissa Roberts and Trevor Watson, published by Hardie Grant Books.

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There were reasons for this. In those halcyon days we eschewed the very notion of leaders and actively resisted the media pressure to find them. And though in time, and ironically with our success, we lost that battle, at heart we libbers never lost our collectivist fervour. That there was a dark side to that deep-seated egalitarianism for those who went on to achieve their individual ambitions is yet another aspect of the story, one that Rowbotham felt keenly.

Above all else, Daring to Hope is an exercise in what Rowbotham calls “historical memory.” Maybe all memoirs are, but not in quite the same way as this one, for me anyway. From the very first pages it was like popping some memory-enhancing pill, my mind suddenly flooded with the incredible ferment of those years. Anybody who’s seen the film Brazen Hussies will have gained an idea of how exciting and radical it all was. The consciousness-raising, the marching, the conferences, the street theatre, the abuse from right and left (and I’m talking literally here). And painful too, what with the heart-wrenching churn of intimate relationships. How we struggled to put into words and fashion theoretical sense out of what was happening.

Rowbotham was one of the best of us. She wrote out of her experience in Britain, but that didn’t matter — within the Anglosphere, at least, the movement was a global one.

Her Women, Resistance and Revolution came out in 1973 and is still in print. I wouldn’t be the first to call it a classic. Take note of the title. We believed in revolution then. Juliet Mitchell’s contribution was The Longest Revolution, Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex. For if in large part women’s liberation was a child of the left, a good deal of energy was spent hoping to convince leftist males that women’s issues were legitimate ones and then, when we were successful, trying to stop them from arrogating the podiums to themselves (mansplaining being all too rife even then).

And if many of us identified as socialists — or socialist feminists as we came to call ourselves to distinguish us from “liberals” or “radicals” as the movement splintered — our aim was a socialism of an especially humane kind. On the whole we resisted dogma and championed underdogs, whether they were working-class or racial or sexual minorities or, counting us, any combination of the three. Intersectionality is what it’s called today.

But how to come up with a theory out of this? Rowbotham, it could be said, took it as her own life project, with Dorothy and Edward Thompson, doyens of left history in their day, as her mentors.

Yet Rowbotham’s work was always grounded in her activism. As groups sprang up and transmogrified across the London boroughs she managed to keep up with them and keep herself together by teaching at a comprehensive girls’ school, running Workers’ Educational Association courses and at one stage working as a doctor’s receptionist, while writing, writing, seemingly all the while. With Women, Resistance and Revolution published, the invitations to speak also came hard and fast. Where did she get the energy, I gasped, reading about it these many years later.

The fact is, she was young. We all were — I’d almost forgotten that. As she writes in her introduction:

In 1970 I was twenty-six and working on my first book. I was a socialist and part of the emerging British women’s liberation movement, supporting gay liberation, revolt in the trade unions and resistance to racism. Demands for economic and social resources and claims for recognition and respect were being asserted by many groups who had been either sidelined or outcast. The term “liberation” extended democracy beyond voting; it meant opposing all forms of inequality and hierarchy. It carried too a fragile vision of what else might be — a fusion of collective and individual freedom.

Throughout the subsequent decade the hope that gave birth to that vision met challenges at every turn, often from the many contradictory emotions that swirl to this day in our hearts. Rowbotham is appropriately candid about this, as our movement’s central insight was that the personal was indeed political. At the decade’s beginning she was more or less a free spirit, if an uncommonly hardworking one; at the end of it she was a mother of a small boy. If, in the parlance of the time, motherhood did a bit to cramp her style, it wasn’t for long, for that too was a gesture of hope. By then, too, the movement had grown beyond even our wildest imaginings.

Daring to Hope is Rowbotham’s second memoir; the first was Promise of a Dream: Remembering the Sixties, which I confess I haven’t read. Perhaps a third one about the subsequent decade or decades is in the offing, maybe not. As should be obvious now, I haven’t kept abreast of Rowbotham’s writings or indeed her life since the heady days of the 1970s. It’s as though she, like them, had been sequestered in my memory’s scrapbook, at least until now, when feminism has become a political force again. Which naturally raises the question of what went wrong in the years in between.

For one thing Maggie Thatcher happened, and Ronald Reagan. And with them a reversion to the crude laissez-faire capitalism we’ve come to know as neoliberalism — a cultural as well as an economic phenomenon during which second-wave-type feminism was repudiated along with any notion of collectivism. “The new amalgam of right-wing politics Thatcher came to embody,” Rowbotham writes, congealed into “a mindset… undermining the hopes of social equality and of extending democracy into daily life.” And look where it has gotten us.

But I would be the last to suggest that there will never be another time like the seventies. For all I know, as a woman in my eighties and captive to reminiscence, the ferment may be bubbling again right now. Certainly, there are signs. It’s never quite the same — history doesn’t work like that — yet women’s history has been noted for its cyclical nature. There’s #MeToo, and the rising anger over the appalling incidence of domestic abuse, the bullying of women in political life and on social media, the widening gender pay gap, the increasing homelessness of women in their fifties, and much else. Suddenly, feminism is no longer the dirty word it became in the intervening decades. And if by socialism we mean a genuine democracy, in which a nation’s wealth is more equitably distributed and societies are more than their economies, I see shoots growing there too. •

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I opened the piece with Lewis Carroll’s Alice being chased by the jealous Queen of Hearts — “Off with her head,” the queen cried — and observed that Alice was spared “only through the king’s kindness.” But that was Wonderland, and there’s never been much kindness in NSW party politics. Long before Keneally became premier, Labor’s stocks had fallen so low that her predecessors had decamped or been decapitated.

Bob Carr, premier from 1995 to 2005, resigned just as the electorate’s patience was wearing thin. Morris Iemma, his successor, won the 2007 election by promising a halt to the privatisation of the electricity grid, but resigned the following year after losing the support of his colleagues. Then came Nathan Rees, who lasted just fifteen months. Not only had he come from the party’s left faction, but he’d also wasted no time in sacking some of the most unpopular ministers, all of whom hailed from the right.

Then came Keneally, for whom the right’s support had been crucial. She had entered parliament in 2003, taking the seat of Heffron after defeating the incumbent Deirdre Grusovin for preselection. Ministerial portfolios followed: ageing, disability services and then, with the resignation of Frank Sartor, planning. She had been a year in that portfolio when the powerbrokers backed her for the premiership.

Here it is salutary to remember that there are two different ways of looking at what happened. I’ve outlined the first above — the infamous revolving-door leadership, soon to contaminate the federal party. Then there was the poisoned chalice view, whereby a woman was handed the ship of state just as it was sinking fast. As I wrote in 2010, “When the party chose Keneally for premier no one believed that it was anything but a desperate bid to shore up the government’s sinking fortunes. After all, it wasn’t the first time a woman had been given the leadership of a seemingly doomed government.”

The pattern had been set in 1990, when Carmen Lawrence was handed the Western Australian premiership in the wake of the “WA Inc” scandals. Next came Joan Kirner in Victoria, where manufacturing was shrinking, unemployment was high, and the state’s deficit had ballooned. “After a year of Kirner’s leadership,” I wrote, “during which she was subjected to some of the most vitriolic abuse ever dished out to a female politician, voters elected Jeff Kennett.” Yet this would prove nothing next to the hatred churned up for Julia Gillard.

Fast-forward to 10 September 2021. With Covid cases rising despite a seemingly unending series of lockdowns, and with voters increasingly exasperated by the Morrison government’s failures in quarantining, vaccinating the vulnerable and overall vaccine supply, Labor announced that Keneally, deputy opposition leader in the Senate, would be its candidate in the federal seat of Fowler. The decision, though in line with Keneally’s own ambitions, was a neat solution brokered by Labor factions in readiness for the coming federal election, whenever Scott Morrison finds it in his interest to call one.

Coincidentally, that very night I logged onto SBS on Demand to watch Strong Female Lead, a documentary about Julia Gillard’s treatment as prime minister. It’s hard to imagine anyone not being shocked in retrospect at what Gillard endured. The incidents accumulated, one gross misogynistic slur after another. I had written about Julia Gillard too, and as I sat watching I felt more than a twinge of sorrow that, my feminism notwithstanding, I hadn’t been entirely sympathetic with our first and, to date, only female prime minister. Only since she left politics have I come to appreciate just how good a leader she was.

The concentrated display of what Gillard was up against, from the Ditch the Witch/Bitch banners, Larry Pickering’s pornographic cartooning, Alan Jones’s slanderous vituperations to her passionate misogyny speech and more, left me, like many others, reeling. Even at the time, the ABC’s juvenile At Home with Julia left an awful taste in my mouth, and it was far from pleasant to be reminded of it. Nor did any of her attackers, least of all the opposition leader, stop to consider what they were doing to the office of prime minister itself, let alone to the Australian body politic.

Most tellingly, of all those interviewed, it was Cheryl Kernot who got to what I believe was the crux of the matter. For what did Gillard’s choice in taking the leadership from Rudd actually entail? Kernot posed the fundamental question: is it politic, when the moment arrives, for a woman to be “willing to take the risk and step up to the challenge,” as men in politics repeatedly do.

So, to Keneally. My interest in writing about her back in 2010 sprang from the fact that, like me, she was born an American, and yet this didn’t seem to pose a problem as it might have once. That said, my experience was substantially different, as was the Australia of 1958, the year of my migration. By the time Keneally was naturalised in 2000, Australia’s population had nearly doubled and its ethnic composition had changed enormously, with a quarter of Australians having at least one parent born overseas. Australians had also seemed to become — to this Yankee expatriate anyway — more comfortable with ever-increasing American inroads into what was once a largely British-oriented culture.

Moreover, in the forty-two years between my arrival and Keneally’s, the status of women in this country had improved considerably, in no small measure due to two Labor governments. Not without a struggle, the women in the party had succeeded in carving out a significant space for women. Outside the party, though, the gains of previous years had stalled with the Howard government — services were cut back, and the effective marginal tax rate on married women in employment went as high as 90 per cent as the cost of childcare rose. This, combined with the attractive family tax benefit B, acted as a significant disincentive for women’s participation in the workforce.

At the same time, though, increasing numbers of women were tertiary-educated, and expected to have careers. If it still had its difficulties, a woman entering politics when Keneally did in 2003 wasn’t considered extraordinary.

Eighteen years later, times have changed again. The announcement that Keneally has been shoe-horned into Fowler has triggered an avalanche of responses. Those objecting point to the seat’s predominantly multicultural composition and the rejection of talented Vietnamese-Australian candidate Tu Le, who has longstanding links to the community. For many, Keneally’s move into the seat is both a cynical attempt on her part to further her ambition and yet another instance of party officialdom’s high-handed treatment of local branches. At bottom lies the belief that not only should a parliamentarian fight for issues important to her electorate, but that a member who represents an electorate’s particular demography is ipso facto best qualified to do so.

The decision’s defenders argue that a high-flyer like Keneally offers the seat its best chance for due consideration where it counts — in cabinet. Keneally’s supporters include figures like Paul Keating and, unsurprisingly, Anthony Albanese, who are thinking of the unwelcome prospect of losing her talents had she been forced to take the party’s risky third Senate ballot position. They’re looking to the party’s chances of victory, not to mention their government’s pool of talent should they happen to win.

Whatever else you can say about it, another controversy over Labor’s inner workings is a retrograde step for the party, feeding into misgivings about the factional machinations and backroom deals of quasi-mythical “faceless men.” None of which is at all peculiar to one side of politics, though with Labor it somehow sticks, taking oxygen away from the endlessly egregious performances of the Coalition government. It’s certainly put Labor on the defensive; hence Albanese’s laughable contention that white, English-speaking American-born Keneally is just another successful migrant.

As for me, after reading all the commentary, I’ve come to conclude that something important has gone missing from the debate. It has to do with those revolving doors and poisoned chalices mentioned earlier. Both are part of the same package; both bedevilled the reigns of successive female leaders, most spectacularly Keneally’s and Gillard’s. Female premiers are no longer the oddities they once were, nor is the prospect of a female prime minister anywhere near as challenging. What matters most, it seems, is the manner of their ascendancy. To paraphrase Cheryl Kernot’s remark, does one seize the opportunity as it presents itself, or bide one’s time until circumstances are more favourable?

It’s true that men in the past have got away with circumventing the rules in ways that women seem not to be permitted, perhaps because it was men who invented them in the first place. But it’s looking like the practice has gone on too long, like the end result of years of “whatever it takes” is a deep deficit of distrust within the electorate. At the federal level at least, not many have heard the alarm bells. Yet, apart from and above specific considerations of gender or diversity, this diminishing trust poses a genuine threat to democracy, and the more people are alienated from the political process, the greater that threat becomes. We see it happening in the United States, and signs of it here.

If I were Tu Le, I might heed Albanese’s assurance that her time will come, and that one way or another the party will repay her for waiting. It’s the normal progression of a rising star’s political career. But that approach overlooks the profound disillusionment among voters, and the cynicism that has come to shape the electorate’s view of politics and the character of its active participants. It’s not Tu Le’s career I’m worried about, though I’m pretty sure she would make an excellent candidate and contribute to the ethnic diversity sorely needed in our parliament.

What I have been worrying about is what’s been happening in my adopted country, and I’ve been wondering if Keneally could have done something about it, something that would have taken courage, something that might have made a difference. Supposing that, instead of following the script and slotting herself into Fowler, she’d decided to run in a riskier seat. Given her talent and political skills, she would have had a chance of taking an extra seat for the party, and more importantly, made a statement about how democracy should proceed.

It’s true it might have been a risk. She lost when she ran in Bennelong, and she might have lost again. She’d be unlikely, though, to stay in the wilderness forever. Because principles matter, courage matters, and we have to believe that people do respond to them — if they’re given the chance. •

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By committing suicide in their shared office, Xi implicated Tang in her death: in the traditional moral code, suicide was the ultimate reproach, and the unsettled ghost of the dead was said to linger until justice was finally served. But Xi didn’t leave a note, or at least none was ever found. Did she kill herself because Tang had invested — and lost — a significant sum of her money on the stock market? Or because he had suggested she become his concubine, as her family later alleged? The tragedy and the surrounding intrigue, which touched on so many facets of China’s transition to modernity, captured the public imagination and inspired an outpouring of commentary. No fewer than three books about the incident were published within weeks.

Historian Bryna Goodman has delved deep into a story that has since lain forgotten among the greater dramas of the era. More than two thousand years of dynastic rule had ended only ten years earlier, with the republican revolution led by Sun Yat-sen. But the government had already split into warring factions, with further challenges to its authority from regional warlords, who carved off chunks of territory to rule themselves. The patriotic May Fourth movement of 1919 had galvanised students, workers and businesspeople alike to fight for national revival and cultural rejuvenation and helped to inspire the founding of the Communist Party of China in 1921. The semi-colonial exploitation of the country that had begun under the fallen Qing dynasty, meanwhile, continued into the modern era, with European powers and Japan controlling a number of key ports and resources.

Semi-colonial, transnational Shanghai was China’s most modern city, yet old ways and thinking maintained a stubborn hold. In The Suicide of Miss Xi, Goodman draws on a huge range of original sources, including court transcripts (Tang was subsequently convicted of financial fraud) and Xi’s own writings, to show how this incident illuminates the social, political and economic contradictions and tensions of its time.

Both male and female supporters of women’s rights had argued passionately for women’s participation in education, work and nation-building. Yet many also agonised about how women could preserve their “virtue” in male-dominated workplaces. After Xi’s death, even feminists spoke of her according to what Goodman describes as a “formulaic pattern of virtue”; she was, they said, “quiet, diligent and chaste.” That Tang might have proposed concubinage to her — as a way, perhaps, of helping her out of the financial hole he’d helped dig for her — struck them as particularly odious given that Xi had previously vowed that she would never marry.

Feminists of the time tended to view concubines as embarrassing, even morally tainted, leftovers from the old society. New marriage laws forbade a man taking more than one wife, and marriage was henceforth to be an arrangement freely chosen by both sides, in theory at least. Betraying their elite perspective, many feminists failed to consider that concubinage, which persisted as a practice, may have remained the only option for some less-privileged women.

Instead, they assumed that concubines, along with prostitutes, had made their choice out of avarice. Progressive women’s associations in Shanghai at the time of Xi’s suicide typically denied membership to concubines or even former concubines. To their minds, Tang’s alleged proposal was both outrageous coming from a man of supposedly progressive ideals and a profound insult to Xi’s character and identity as a modern woman.

Then there was the question of her shares. It was one thing for a woman to want to achieve economic self-sufficiency — to become, as Xi did, a provider for her family — but quite another to be greedy and profit-seeking. Many commentators, sympathetic and less sympathetic alike, noted that Xi was hardly alone in having risked money in this way. Pretty much everyone in Shanghai with money to spare was investing in the stock market — or rather, markets. By the end of 1921, more than 140 stock exchanges were operating, including some that traded in single commodities. Tang’s Journal of Commerce was one of many outlets founded on progressive ideals that promoted investment in stocks as a social and political good. Progressives had observed how stock markets in the United States, Japan and elsewhere contributed to the strength of these countries by raising capital for their industries as well as helping democratise wealth.

This is one of the details that has been largely lost in the telling of the story of modern China. As Goodman notes, “Historians have not generally placed economics, let alone stock exchanges, among the structuring ideas of the early Republic or as a constituent element of May Fourth ideas of science and democracy.” Her work here is a major contribution to modern historiography.

As Goodman shows, regulation was a lot scarcer than enthusiasm. The markets were rife with speculation, insider trading and other forms of manipulation. When the inevitable crash came, it took with it the precious savings of many, making Xi “a symbol of human vulnerability, an individual swept into the whirlpool of financial temptations, in a city of untrammelled greed.” Some of the fury that Tang copped in the aftermath of Xi’s suicide resulted from his paper’s previously enthusiastic endorsement of stock-buying combined with his own vested interests in the exchanges: he became, as Goodman observes, “a perfect target for public rumination over the immorality of the new order.”

That rumination had a platform in the vibrant and diverse local press that sprang up in the early republican era. In response to Xi’s suicide, the papers published a great stream of cartoons, commentary, reportage and even poetry written by readers; several even featured word-by-word transcripts of Tang’s trial. Women’s groups, chambers of commerce, and hometown or home-province associations — indeed, grassroots public organisations of all sorts — weighed into the controversy as well. With a dysfunctional polity, both public associations and the press stood in as arenas for public life, testing grounds for democracy, and arbiters of social justice.

The semi-colonial nature of Shanghai factors into this complex story as well. The Journal of Commerce had its offices in the city’s International Settlement, which had its own courts separate from China’s legal system. When Chinese judicial officials determined to put Tang on trial for financial fraud, they had to kidnap him in the foreign concession and take him across the street to Chinese sovereign territory. Yet because Xi had clearly killed herself and there was no evidence that Tang had committed any crime, and given that China was still years away from its first civil law, the fact that he was arraigned was a travesty of justice.

When Tang went to trial, the courtroom was packed with members of the public, journalists and even actors from a theatre troupe preparing to perform a play about Xi’s death. Despite the evidence for criminal prosecution being, as Goodman writes, “illogical, unsupported, and unwarranted,” the judge dismissed the brief prepared by Tang’s excellent legal team as “confusingly irrelevant.” Although the charges revolved around financial misdeeds, the judge was more interested in the accusation that Tang had pressured Xi to be his concubine. In the end, he sentenced him to three years’ imprisonment. Moral judgement, including the view that the stock markets were intrinsically malevolent and unethical, trumped the law.

Among those disturbed by the verdict was Sun Yat-sen himself, who asserted, “It is particularly inappropriate for a court of law to ignore the evidence in favour of the popular sentiment.” What’s more, a military man whom Tang had offended over other matters ensured that he served more than twice his sentence, and in a military prison.

The People’s Republic of China today continues to wrestle with many of the issues raised by Xi’s suicide. These include the relationship between private wealth accumulation and national flourishing, the nature of the judiciary and its relationship to the law, and the contradiction between the opportunities available to young women and societal expectations. Even concubines — now called “mistresses” — remain a hot topic that divides Chinese feminists. If, as ancient Chinese historians liked to say, history is a mirror, there are plenty of apposite reflections to be found in this one. •

The post Death in Shanghai appeared first on Inside Story.

With her starkly posed question, Srinivasan pushed the conversation beyond the disturbing subculture of incels to consider more broadly the politics of sex and desire. Can and should sexual preferences be subject to political scrutiny? And what of the sexual desires of people outside the bounds of mainstream sexual appeal? These are tricky questions but Srinivasan, cognisant of the high stakes, navigated them carefully and thoughtfully.

Srinivasan’s LRB essay fittingly takes centre stage in her debut essay collection The Right to Sex, augmented by a fascinating “coda” tracing responses to Srinivasan’s essay and her own evolving thinking about the “politics of desire.” Notably, the title is no longer posed as a question, though as befitting the essay mode and philosophical inquiry, the collection is replete with them.

Srinivasan writes in her preface that her essays “dwell, where necessary, in discomfort and ambivalence,” and are not intended “to convince or persuade anyone of anything, though I would not be unhappy if they did.” As explicitly feminist essays, Srinivasan positions them in the tradition of feminist theory spun from the reality of lived experience and shared struggle, rather than “from on high.” It’s a rousing and enticing lead-in, with an urgent tone. Re-read afterwards, however, the preface also signposts the competing tensions evident throughout, including between an avowed grassroots feminism and an interlocuter who is based at Oxford University.

The American edition of The Right to Sex — not the one I read — has a subtitle: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century. It’s apt insofar as Srinivasan canvasses the current hot topics associated with feminism, or demanding of a feminist response, most of them to do with sex: #MeToo, consent, pornography, sex work, and more tangentially, trans rights.

On most of these topics, Srinivasan’s intervention is as stimulating and welcome as any. In the opening essay, “The Conspiracy against Men,” Srinivasan shifts focus away from the high-profile figures ensnared by #MeToo to those most likely to be accused and/or imprisoned for rape: black and brown men. The #MeToo mantra “Believe women” is similarly challenged for eliding historical and enduring racialised sexual stigma. As for those who defend men on the basis that until #MeToo came along they had no idea what other men were doing, she persuasively dismisses them as “in denial of what men have seen and heard.”

The problems of carceral responses to sexual violence, and of “carceral feminism,” are picked up again in the closing essay “Sex, Carceralism, Capitalism.” Here, Srinivasan is at her most passionate, arguing for an anti-racist, anti-capitalist feminism (and a feminist working-class movement) of which there are both historical and current exemplars.

Yet while she points to “theorists and practitioners of feminist abolitionism” for inspiration, Srinivasan curiously devotes more space to feminists who have campaigned for the abolition of sex work rather than the abolition of the carceral state. This is in keeping with the heterodox historical approach that characterises Srinivasan’s creatively researched and synthesised essays. The historical turn in contemporary feminist writing is to be welcomed — like recent books by Katherine Angel and Lorna Bracewell, to name just two, Srinivasan generatively revisits the Anglophone feminist “sex wars” of the 1970s and 1980s — but sometimes the topic at hand begs for more engagement with contemporary activism and theorising.

Take, for instance, the essays “Talking to My Students about Porn” and “On Not Sleeping with Your Students.” In key respects, these are the strongest in the book and testimony to Srinivasan’s opening gambit that feminist theorising is most effective when extrapolated from life. Of all the essays, they are the most coherent in argument and focus, and the most engaging, if not least because Srinivasan shares more of herself in them.

In the latter, she makes a compelling case for a “sexual ethics of pedagogy,” variously drawing ideas from psychoanalysis, early feminist theorising on workplace sexual harassment, and feminist thinkers like bell hooks who have written about eros and pedagogy. As a counterpoint, the notorious case of Jane Gallop, the feminist philosopher accused of sexual harassment in the 1990s, is productively revisited. Yet we read more about one of Gallop’s male defenders opining in a literary journal than we do about the material conditions of the contemporary neoliberal university. These days, the teacher is more likely to be an exploited casual than a male god professor or feminist superstar, and increasingly teaching is mediated by screens.

I also wonder how representative her classroom is. But still, like Srinivasan, I’ve found students in my classes who are open to, and curious about, the anti-porn feminism exemplified by Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, while simultaneously wary of the sorts of solutions that seemed both possible and plausible in the 1980s.

Here, Srinivasan identifies and starts to fill what she sees as a lacuna: feminist writing about pornography that resists the pull of “anti-porn” or “pro-porn” feminism. She admirably traverses a diverse range of views on both the harms and possibilities of porn, yet ultimately retreats into a vague vision of “more joyful, more equal, freer” sex that recalls Ariel Levy’s 2005 polemic Female Chauvinist Pigs. Feminist writing about sex need not seem so removed from it.

The Right to Sex is, at once, equivocal, didactic, spirited and oddly bloodless in parts — which makes for mostly rewarding but occasionally frustrating reading. For those seeking a primer or refresher on feminist debates primarily emanating from the United States and Britain, Srinivasan is an erudite and well-informed guide, adept at summarising where we are now as well as illuminating some of the paths that led to it. Now that the promise of the LRB essay is fulfilled, and Srinivasan properly launched as a public feminist and intellectual, I look forward to future writing that opens up vistas briefly glimpsed in The Right to Sex. •

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While Davison didn’t identify himself as an incel, his actions echo those of men associated with this movement. In 2014, for example, Elliot Rodger killed six people in a shooting in Isla Vista, California, and in 2018 Alek Minassian drove a rented van through a pedestrian mall in Toronto, killing ten. Each of these men made clear their allegiance to incels.

These killings helped fuel concern about misogynist violence, and particularly violence linked to online forums. As Donna Zuckerberg, who happens to be the sister of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, argued in her 2018 book on the issue, “social media has elevated misogyny to entirely new levels of violence and virulence.”

A newly released report from a global team of researchers led by Manoel Horta Ribeiro backs up some of these concerns, finding that online anti-women groups, including incels and “men going their own way” (men who believe relationships with women are so toxic they are best avoided altogether), appear to be growing. Using data collected from forums like Gab and Reddit, the researchers also found the level of toxicity in the “manosphere” had risen significantly.

Policymakers have also expressed concern. In March this year the director-general of ASIO, Mike Burgess, described how a growing number of extremists no longer fit the left–right spectrum and are instead “motivated by a fear of societal collapse or a specific social or economic grievance or conspiracy.” Incels were among the groups ASIO is taking more seriously, he said.

Despite the new labels, the ideas motivating these groups are not entirely new. They follow on from a longer-standing men’s rights movement that has had significant influence, despite its relatively low profile, in key areas of family policy, particularly during and since the Howard government.

The men’s rights movement originated in the United States, where figures such as Warren Farrell, who was once a prominent male feminist, created a movement to oppose what they describe as “institutional misandry,” or hatred of men. Focusing primarily on political activism, these groups have campaigned on issues including a perceived bias against men when custody battles go to court, a belief that men are as much victims of domestic violence as are women, and the need for a greater focus on suicide rates, education levels and deaths in the workplace among men.

Several men’s rights organisations have been working on these issues for decades in Australia. Groups including Fathers4Equality, the Men’s Rights Agency and the Australian Men’s Rights Association have focused primarily on father’s rights, with the Family Court being a core concern. The Australian Men’s Rights Association, for example, argues that an “epidemic” of fatherlessness is hurting children, and has pushed against laws that separate men from their children. They also, somewhat paradoxically, provide men with advice on DNA paternity testing to overcome what they believe is a trend of “paternity fraud.”

Despite their relatively low profile, these groups have had some influence in conservative politics. In 2006 the Howard government amended the Family Law Act to prioritise a child’s right to have access to both parents in the case of divorce. While the legislation offered an exemption in cases of domestic abuse, there is evidence that the shift has resulted in some abusive men having ongoing access to their children.

One of the key advocates for this change was Bettina Arndt, who advised the Howard government on family law and child support issues. Arndt, who was controversially awarded an Order of Australia in 2020, has followed a similar trajectory to many men’s rights activists. Previously a self-proclaimed feminist, she now believes that radical feminism’s critique of men’s behavour has damaged relations between the sexes.

In recent years Arndt has fashioned herself into one of Australia’s leading men’s rights activists. “Now it is men’s lives we aren’t allowed to speak about — the very real problems confronting men and boys in our male-bashing society,” she wrote in her 2018 book, #MenToo. She has become a staple on conservative TV, and frequently appears on Sky News Australia, where men’s rights issues have become a topic of concern.

But other groups have recently taken a higher profile. The Australian Brotherhood of Fathers, or ABF, which has more than 70,000 likes on Facebook, is one of the most active. Its Facebook page discusses the perceived injustices of the family law system and the plight of men denied access to their children.

Mothers of Sons — launched in 2020 at an online forum hosted by the conservative commentator Prue MacSween and featuring NSW One Nation MP Mark Latham — is run by a “group of ordinary women whose sons have faced extraordinary ordeals in our unfair, anti-male legal systems and workplaces.” Mothers of Sons holds to the belief that some women make “false accusations” of sexual assault and domestic violence against men, and rails against the “excesses” of the #MeToo movement.

Like Arndt in the early 2000s, these groups are also achieving some political success, although through different avenues. In recent years men’s rights groups have found favour within Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party. In 2019, for example, after lobbying by the ABF and members of the “Blokes Advice” Facebook group, Hanson successfully moved for a parliamentary inquiry into the family law system, which is chaired by herself and the former Liberal minister, and high-profile social conservative, Kevin Andrews.

The ABF argues that twenty-one Australian men commit suicide each week following family breakdown, and link this to failures of the family law system. The figure is highly contested, and even former Queensland One Nation leader Steve Dickson, a key men’s rights supporter within One Nation, concedes it is anecdotal. That hasn’t stopped its being taken up more widely by men’s groups.

In pushing for the inquiry, Hanson herself promoted that other, highly contested, belief of the men’s rights movement — that women frequently lie about domestic violence and rape in order to get back at men. “There are people out there who are nothing but liars and who will use that in the court system,” she claimed.

The committee is still at work on its inquiry, but One Nation has already adopted many of the demands of the men’s rights movement as part of its policy platform. The party’s family law policy, for example, takes the view that apprehended violence orders and other court orders shouldn’t necessarily restrict parents’ access to their children, and that allegations of abuse should only be heard during divorce proceedings if they are accompanied by medical records or a criminal conviction.

Although the men’s rights movement has had a growing influence on the conservative side of politics in Australia, Ribeiro and his colleagues found that this older variety of activism is becoming less popular, while groups like the incels and men going their own way are thriving.

Reflecting longstanding assumptions about inherent differences between men and women, men’s and manosphere rights groups often focus on reinforcing traditional ideas of masculinity and femininity. Thus, they believe the gender pay gap reflects women’s inherent desire to spend less time than men in paid work rather than structural problems in the labour force. Using ideas from evolutionary psychology, the manosphere focuses on these supposed differences in sexual and romantic relationships – arguing that women engage in “hypergamy,” a strategy in which they only date men of a higher social, economic or physical status.

The “manosphere” is therefore distinct from the older men’s rights groups in a number of ways. First, its members are less focused on political activism and more on fixing their personal lives. Manosphere discussion primarily focuses on sex and relationships, and features constant complaints about women, sex and love.

The second major difference between the newer groups and their predecessors is their online focus. Men’s rights activists act in the same way as other established political groups, with men getting together in meeting rooms, in conference halls and, occasionally, on the streets. The manosphere meets most often on Reddit, 4Chan, YouTube, Gab and other social media.

While the influence of the internet in fostering extremism is often overstated, it has had a direct influence on how these groups form and operate. My own research has found that men in these communities have relatively weak connections with each other online. They are attached to the idea of the manosphere but don’t find a deep social connection with others. They often remain deeply socially isolated, sitting at home, online, growing angrier about their lives with no one there to support them.

Other researchers have found that the architecture of social media platforms can push participants towards more toxic and extreme discussion. Research by Tiana Gaudette and colleagues, for example, found that Reddit’s voting function normalised radical anti-Muslim and anti-left sentiment in the forum dedicated to support of Donald Trump. Voting was used to mobilise members around these sentiments, creating the sense that participants are part of an in-group opposed to an identified out-group. Reddit’s upvoting feature produced a “one-sided narrative that serves to reinforce members’ extremist views,” wrote Gaudette and her colleagues, “thereby strengthening bonds between members of the in-group.” My research finds that these sorts of trends are viewable in the manosphere as well.

These new features create a noxious combination. Alongside ongoing social isolation, the belief in essential differences between men and women fosters a form of nihilism in which men see no solution for the problems they are facing. Matched with growing extremist content, this can create an environment of hatred and misogyny, which can push some individuals to undertake deadly attacks.

Australia has yet to see any incel-motivated attacks of the kind experienced in the United States, Canada and Britain. But does that mean the threat doesn’t exist?

The influence of these groups is often harder to measure than traditional men’s rights groups. While many of the online communities are very large, it is impossible to know individuals’ locations or level of commitment.

Some signs suggest that the influence of the manosphere is present in Australia. Prior to the pandemic, influential American manosphere activists frequently made Australia a destination. In 2017, for instance, filmmaker Cassie Jaye visited the country promoting her movie The Red Pill. Taken from the movie The Matrix, the Red Pill is a term used by these groups to describe the process of learning the harsh truths about feminism. Local men’s groups organised screenings of the movie, and Jaye made several high-profile media appearances.

Later, in 2019, Canadian conservative and anti-feminist thinker Jordan Peterson sold out theatres across the country promoting his anti-feminist self-help text 12 Rules for Life. While he is unlikely to see himself as a member of the community, Peterson is famous in the manosphere, particularly for his perceived tendency to “destroy” feminists in interviews or forums.

Similarly, the “seduction industry,” made up of companies and individuals that teach men a range of (often coercive) tactics in order to “pick up” women, has had a presence in Australia for well over a decade. Way back in 2014, Julien Blanc, who has publicly advocated for men to coerce women, had his visa revoked while on a trip to Sydney. Despite this controversy these groups have stayed strong. Early last year the Sydney bookstore Kinokuniya announced a ban on such behaviour when it discovered that pick-up artists were operating on its premises.

The views of these groups are unlikely to represent a significant portion of the Australian population, or even of Australian men. Like the men’s rights movement, the manosphere is relatively small, both globally and in Australia. Yet, with its growth online and its influence in politics, it is a force worth watching. If even one of its members decides to take out his anger in the real world, as happened in Britain just weeks ago, the consequences could be very serious.

Of course, some of the complaints made by these men are well founded. Male suicide rates are extremely high, as are deaths in the workplace. It is also true that men are, at times, the victims of domestic abuse and rape, and as victims are sometimes ignored. Boys often fall behind in our schools, and men face high levels of mental ill-health. These are all issues that need serious attention.

But the ire of the manosphere is directed at feminism rather than the real causes of these problems, and too frequently turns misogynistic. While claiming they stand for gender equality, these groups undermine the serious work needed to achieve it. •

The post Australia’s manosphere: a prehistory appeared first on Inside Story.

One evening I glanced at the rug and couldn’t believe my eyes. I asked my son to corroborate. “Tanks, warships and helicopters,” he said, having already seen them, as an eleven-year-old would, but until then reluctant to say. We laughed at how I’d been diddled. Little did I realise that what lay at our feet was an item of genuine value.

I tell this story because my ignorance was emblematic of the Western attitudes towards Afghanistan that are the overall theme of Tim Bonyhady’s Two Afternoons in the Kabul Stadium. Bonyhady, a cultural historian, has fashioned a history through imagery, a refreshing approach to a highly complex and often elusive subject. His exploration of the Western boom in war rugs erupting out of Afghanistan’s conflicts is a prime example of his method.

Afghanistan’s history has been shaped by outsiders’ repeated attempts at conquest, in which their arrogance has combined with the fiercely independent spirit of Afghans to produce failure. First the British, then the Russians and later the Americans foundered there. After twenty years the United States has finally pulled out, dragging us Aussies with them, and the Taliban is poised to take over. The book couldn’t be more timely.

Two Afternoons in the Kabul Stadium spans from the early twentieth century to the September 2001 attack on New York’s twin towers and its aftermath. Apart from its use of various types of imagery as barometers of successive foreign influences and Afghan responses, one other thing distinguishes this book: Bonyhady’s exposure of how that imagery has been greatly misrepresented in foreign media, chiefly because much of it has been shaped by cameras capturing what we foreigners expect to see — a phenomenon that encapsulates for Afghanistan what Edward Said wrote about Orientalism in general.

Take women’s dress. You couldn’t find a more politically loaded symbol of Afghanistan’s vicissitudes, from periods of modernisation to those of fundamentalist backlash, complicated by regional and tribal differences, and all of it responding to foreign influence. Add to that the fact that Western perceptions are largely shaped by developments in Kabul, a city that has both welcomed and discouraged the interest of foreign media.

In the 1920s the country’s Queen Soraya made a show of throwing off traditional dress. A famous photograph has her face bared, her hair fashionably bobbed, and her neck and arms exposed in a sleeveless jewelled gown. As a sign of Afghan women’s new freedoms, it appeared in countless overseas outlets. Many upper- and middle-class Kabul women followed suit, throwing off veils and donning short skirts. Girls in the city were being educated, some were going on to employment, and a few ended up in prestigious careers. In 1929, however, their newfound liberties were cut short. A rebellion against Western influence had women back in chadaris (the Afghan burqa) and it wasn’t until 1959 that Western styles took hold again.

It was in that year that Afghanistan’s prime minister staged an “unveiling” at Kabul’s Ghazi Stadium, signalling the government’s return to women’s advancement. For two decades women enjoyed greater freedom in dress and opportunities, at least in the capital, but this was quashed by a new wave of religious fundamentalism triggered by the onset of mullah rule in neighbouring Iran. Then Soviet-backed communists seized power in Kabul, initiating a swing back to wider horizons for women and another relaxation of the dress code. Some women even became celebrated parachutists.

American and Saudi financial support for the mujahideen meanwhile escalated, “transforming Afghanistan,” Bonyhady writes, “into a prime site of the Cold War and of Islamic fundamentalism.” The Soviets hung on until 1989, then leaving a vacuum that enabled a host of tribal warlords to sweep through the country. Two years later the Soviet Union itself collapsed, and by 1994 the Taliban were in charge. Now, twenty-seven years on, history, in that hackneyed phrase, appears to be repeating itself.

This necessarily brief survey doesn’t begin to do justice to the tremendous detail and nuance Bonyhady brings to his subject. The second “afternoon” of the book’s title, for example, was the 1999 public execution in the Ghazi Stadium of a woman named Zarmeena, in striking contrast to women’s ceremonial “unveiling” on the site forty years before. Convicted of murdering her husband, she was clad in a flowing blue chadari when she was executed by Kalashnikov shots to the back of her head. Members of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan filmed the execution with cameras hidden in their chadaris, and the video went viral after one of the RAWA women appeared on Oprah Winfrey’s program.

Zarmeena was most likely innocent, but in such frenzied times any reasonable doubt counted for little in Afghan courts. And Americans, post 9/11, would prove only too eager for evidence of Taliban rigidity. Yet Bonyhady’s portrayal is of an ever-spiralling chaos in which the Taliban themselves were caught. He notes their frequent retraction of edicts in response to popular resistance, and compares them to the warring mujahideens whose bloodlust was far greater. As for their executions, they were fewer than Iran’s or Saudi Arabia’s at the time, or even those by lethal injection in Texas.

While Bonyhady conclusively shows “the heft of the visual,” he also shows how susceptible images are to misrepresentation, not to mention manipulation. He recognises their importance in societies with high levels of illiteracy, yet points to the dangers they hold even in those with literacy rates like our own. Given their central place in his argument, it’s a pity so few images are reproduced in the book.

Still, for an exploration of Afghanistan and its fateful interaction with the West, you couldn’t do better than this book. The wealth and range of its material, combined with its extensive analyses of the status of Afghan women and the roles of posters, photography, television, cinema and pictorial carpets, can make it dense reading, but its map and timeline help with navigation, and I was grateful for the index. The chronological rather than thematic structure can be challenging: its discussion of a single image or artefact — a carpet, say — is set within the various histories of regional carpet weavers, the Western buyers of their carpets and the places they were sold, all in the context of unfolding political developments. A sign of Bonyhady’s breadth, it also means there’s a lot to digest in each chapter.

Finally, if you’re wondering whatever happened to my war rug, all I can say, as a measure of its worth, dear reader, is that it was stolen. •

The post The heft of the visual appeared first on Inside Story.

What happened next became one of the most high-profile domestic violence homicides in a year when their rising tally was grabbing national headlines. Her father stabbed her mother Salwa to death in front of Haydar’s youngest sister Ola, who was wounded when she tried to intervene. The case went to trial, first for the conviction and then for sentencing; throughout, her father’s side of the family appeared daily in public support of him.

In 2018, after the case had made its way through the criminal justice system, Haydar made her public debut as a visual artist. For the Archibald Prize, she painted herself in gloriously patterned hijab holding a framed press photograph of Salwa. In Salwa’s arms is a photograph of her mother Layla Shaikh Hussain Haidar — the artist’s beloved Teta, who was killed by Israeli drones during the war in Lebanon in 2006. Just as the beautifully layered portrait draws the viewer in, its title “Insert Headline Here” gives them something more to think about. Too easily, and too often, headlines reduce the lives — and deaths — of women like these, women in headscarves, to fit sexist, racist and Islamophobic stereotypes about Muslim women and Islam.

Haydar’s remarkable portrait, with its intricate bundling of generations, kinship and shattering loss, is hidden on the back cover of The Mother Wound, where it both contains and unleashes Haydar’s memoir. With this painting, she found a way to start sharing, as she puts it, “the parts of our stories that Dad’s family, the legal system and the media had not made room for.” Through her art, her advocacy against domestic violence and now in her writing, Haydar continues the loving and painful work of making personal and wider meaning of the deaths of her mother and grandmother, and her place in a matrilineal line wounded by trauma. Her distinct perspective — as the first-born daughter of Muslim Lebanese immigrants who grew up in southwestern Sydney in the shadow of the Cronulla riots — animates this quest and underpins the larger significance of the book.

In her own estimation, Haydar is more confident as an artist than she is as a writer, but as is sometimes the case when a person is driven to write because they must, The Mother Wound grips the reader’s attention and emotions from the first page. It opens with Haydar giving birth to her daughter, just months after her mother’s murder. When the midwife acknowledges her loss, Haydar responds: “I am so happy to have a daughter. I come from a family of strong women.”

Among them are Haydar’s two sisters, whom she depicts with love and affection without ever presuming to tell their stories for them. As the title infers, though, The Mother Wound is not a straightforward triumphalist account of multigenerational maternal strength. Instead, it unfolds resolutely on Haydar’s terms, its non-linear and sometimes repetitive form reflecting how her mother’s brutal murder rearranged everything she knew about her family and the world.

In passages likely to resonate strongly with readers whose own lives and families have been upended by violence, Haydar revisits her memories of her parent’s marriage, including her mother’s account of it. This powerful thread unfolds across the course of the book, made more acute by Haydar’s frank recollections of minimising or not properly comprehending what her mother had confided in her.

During her father’s court case, she reveals, she was still getting used to calling what her mum had gone through abuse. Like many other abusers, her father was not physically violent towards her mother — until he was, fatally. Looking back to what she’d been taught in school, she remembers a whole swathe of useful information about sexual and general health, but “not anyone asking whether we could identify abuse, or whether we had witnessed it.”

In the worst possible circumstances, Haydar began to educate herself and others, aided by public awareness campaigns like Destroy the Joint’s Counting Dead Women project. Her nascent feminism started to “crystallise,” sharpened against a wider culture which correlates Muslims with violence; a criminal justice system stacked against victims; and condemnation from members of her own extended family and community. Movingly, Haydar also discovered how politically engaged her mother was before she died, adding another layer to her nuanced tribute.

The Mother Wound is a major contribution to the discussion of domestic violence, including its impact on surviving family members. Haydar weaves in pertinent research, but what stands out are her own hard-won views and insights. She expresses some ambivalence about carceral responses to gendered violence, while firmly believing there are no excuses for men like her father. In sharing her story, she documents a wider cultural shift, an expanding public space for talking about domestic violence, and one that is crucially becoming more diverse.

Summing up The Mother Wound as an important book about domestic violence would do it a disservice, though, and not only because it potentially condemns the memoir to a worthy obligation read. The wound Haydar carries also includes her grandmother’s death in a war that seemed so distant in 2006 that she didn’t feel it entitled her to special consideration at school. Haydar and her mother both grieved deeply, but apart, separated by differences in age, personality and upbringing.

In the cruellest twist of fate, Haydar is now able to fathom her mother’s pain and public mourning, and to identify that her Teta “has been denied a language and a response. There is no movement and no hashtag for this kind of woman.” There isn’t, but there is now Haydar’s urgent and necessary book. •

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This rulebreaker was Constance Stokes. Although she won the coveted two-year National Gallery travelling scholarship in 1929, she never received the same recognition in Australia as her male competitors. Exhibiting in London, she won high praise from Kenneth Clark and other British critics, but at home she was largely ignored. Forgotten for many years, Stokes is only now being rediscovered.

She wasn’t the first woman to show her work in public, of course. Women had been exhibiting their paintings in Melbourne and elsewhere for decades. But they didn’t have the assurance of male artists; and when they exhibited in the company of men, their work was often ignored. Many careers paused because of the demands of marriage and children, as did that of Constance Stokes. Some never developed.

Women’s individual achievements were belittled. When Nora Heysen won the Archibald Prize for portraiture in 1938, she was photographed in her kitchen. The report was headed: “Girl Painter Who Won Art Prize Is Also Good Cook.” Heysen was twenty-eight years old. An unsuccessful entrant, Max Meldrum went public with the thought that it was “sheer lunacy” for women to think they could paint as well as men. Being “differently constituted,” they should concentrate on raising a healthy family.

Meldrum was echoing the long-established view of the proper role of female artists. Samuel Johnson gave his ruling in the mid eighteenth century when he declared that “public practice of any art [was] very indelicate in a female.” When portrait painting involved “staring in men’s faces,” it was a serious breach of decorum.

Such comments were not about a woman’s skill as an artist; they were about her place in the world. If she insisted on devoting her time to painting, she would do best to stick to flowers or small children, and not to offer her work for sale. In some ways, it was easier for female writers. They could make themselves invisible, as Jane Austen did when she published as “A Lady,” or, like the Brontës and George Eliot, they could use a male pseudonym.

Nora Heysen’s Archibald win might have been less offensive to traditionalists because her subject was a woman, the elegant wife of the consul for the Netherlands. In 1960, when Judy Cassab won the award with a portrait of the swaggeringly assertive Stanislav Rapotec, the press wanted to be sure that Cassab could cook and was a devoted mother. By winning the prize for a portrait with a male subject, she made a double breakthrough. Cassab won again in 1967, this time with a female sitter. Other female artists had to wait. Over the hundred years of Archibald contests, only eleven women have taken out the prize.

Questions about a woman’s place in the public world of art are central to Jennifer Higgie’s new book, The Mirror and the Palette: Rebellion, Revolution and Resilience: 500 Years of Women’s Self-Portraits, a captivating study of how female artists have created their images of self. Although the invention of the mirror benefited male as well as female painters, it had special meaning for women. Excluded from the life class, they could become their own models.

In earlier times, the female self-portrait had often come from those whose artist fathers trained them to be studio assistants. The remarkable seventeenth-century artist Artemisia Gentileschi was taught by her painter father, who in turn was a disciple of Caravaggio.

Until the nineteenth century, mirrors were scarce and expensive. But the female self-portrait flourished as soon as any female artist could study her own likeness. She saved money by not employing a model, and she could be alone with her art. It wasn’t just a matter of making up for the life class in a private anatomy lesson; for many, it was a chance for reflection.

Alice Neel in front of her 1980 self-portrait in New York. Sonia Moskowitz/IMAGES/Getty Images

Higgie adroitly places her artists in the context of their times and personal circumstances. Rather than take them in chronological order, she uses a thematic structure that groups them under such headings as “Smile,” “Allegory,” “Hallucination” and “Naked.” The “Smile” chapter is really about not smiling; the Mona Lisa look is as open as it gets. Some of the women depicted are lively and responsive to being seen, but they seldom show more than a glimpse of teeth. This restraint, as the author suggests, may have been partly due to poor or non-existent dentistry, but even in modern times the lips of most sitters remain closed.

The naked self-portraits were created in deliberate defiance of the rules that for centuries excluded women from the life class. In 1980, American portraitist Alice Neel painted herself at eighty, with no soft lighting on her ageing body. Unfazed by showing her sagging breasts, she faces the world with assurance, her expression jaunty. No regrets, no apologies; this is who I am.

In “Allegory,” the author suggests, we find coded messages from the painter. The empathy for the terrified woman in Artemisia Gentileschi’s Susanna and the Elders (1610) must reflect the artist’s own experience as a victim of rape. In 1794, a middle-aged Angelica Kauffmann looked back on her choice of career to paint herself in a moment of hesitation between the competing arts of music and painting. Angelica, an innocent in white, rejects the advances of blowzy Music and begins the uphill climb marked out for her by the stern figure of Painting.

“Hallucination” includes the wayward art of Leonora Carrington and the nightmare visions of Frida Kahlo. Carrington’s self-portrait shows the artist seated on a red cushion in an empty room. Behind her is a white rocking horse; outside the window another white horse gallops freely. Close to the artist’s chair, a hyena turns a malevolent gaze on the viewer. This expression of Carrington’s inner world stretches most notions of self-portraiture. What, after all, is the self and where does it begin and end?

Swedish artist Helene Schjerfbeck painted herself in a series of nightmares. In her eighties, anxious, lonely, dying of cancer, she produced twenty self-portraits. In most of them she is an apparition, “an other-worldly being in swirls of brown and beige.” In the last paintings she stares ahead, barely alive, barely human.

The story of Gwen John, sister of the more famous Augustus John, is a painful example of a life overwhelmed by force of circumstance. Illness, poverty and misplaced love might suggest a victim, but her superb self-portrait, painted in her mid-twenties, shows her as strong and self-contained, demure yet amused.

“I am not a flower”: Margaret Preston’s only self-portrait (1930). Art Gallery of New South Wales

Australia’s Margaret Preston had few doubts; hers is a history of triumphs and blunders. As Higgie says, Preston’s fascination with Indigenous art coexisted with a staggering ignorance and insensitivity to cultural trespass. She appears to have painted herself only once, on request. She wasn’t enthusiastic about the task. “I am not a flower,” she said. “I am a flower painter.” By contrast, Nora Heysen did many self-portraits. Whenever she changed her place of living, she would start by painting the person she knew best, herself.

Heysen’s self-portraits show subtle shifts in mood. Often she is seen at her easel, absorbed. In one painting, she turns away from her work, displeased by an interruption. There is no clutter in her studio. Her clothes are in clear, bright colours, plain and smooth as her neatly braided hair. The mood is one of composure, a quiet certainty without assertiveness. As the daughter of the famous Hans Heysen, she needed to be reassured about her independent self: her self-portraits affirmed her separateness. Heysen’s private space may seem limited, but it was her own.

Jennifer Higgie is an Australian art historian and screenwriter who now lives in London. Because her wide-ranging, generous and perceptive book can give no more than a selection from 500 years of women’s self-portraiture, it seems ungrateful to complain of omissions. Yet, in a study that includes self-portraits by artists from many cultures, some space could have been found for Indigenous Australian women. One example: Julie Dowling’s Self-Portrait: In Our Country (2002) carries the burden of her family history.

Higgie skates rapidly over colonial Australia, where she finds nothing of interest. Georgiana McCrae is an obvious omission. Trained in London, with professional experience in 1830s Edinburgh, McCrae was forbidden by her husband from painting for money. Her career ended after her marriage and settlement in Port Phillip. She did, however, paint portraits of family and friends. The most relevant to Higgie’s study would be McCrae’s early self-portrait, coupled with her much later portrait of “Eliza” of the Bunurong tribe. Eliza’s pose, with one hand at her breast, matches that chosen by McCrae for her own image. The young Georgiana looks confident, even coquettish, while Eliza’s gaze is patient, expecting nothing. Painted at a time when McCrae’s hopes had dwindled, Eliza’s portrait may express the artist’s empathy.

In an art world that didn’t accept women as equals, the self-portrait was an assertion of individuality. “This is who I am,” these artists say. It’s their response to those who questioned their right to a career in art with the putdown of “Who does she think she is?” Jennifer Higgie’s spirited and engaging book shows that there are as many answers to that question as there are individuals. Their versions of self, in many moods and modes, encompass worlds of experience and achievement. •

The Mirror and the Palette: Rebellion, Revolution and Resilience: 500 Years of Women’s Self-Portraits
By Jennifer Higgie | Weidenfeld & Nicolson | $39.99 | 336 pages

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It was, in fact, less an interview than an extended opportunity for Banks to detail the “shocking allegations” she makes against parliamentary colleagues in her new memoir, Power Play. Banks looked nervous as she began to describe a working environment where “Mad Men meets House of Cards.” Tingle prompted rather than challenged.

Allegations like these certainly matter, but in the absence of consequences their continued outpouring risks simply becoming dispiriting. Last week’s Four Corners featured another extended airing of grievances by former Australia Post chief executive Christine Holgate. “I was thrown under the bus and the bus reversed back over me,” Holgate said as she recalled the prime minister’s sudden attack on her in parliament last October.

When such powerful and influential women present themselves as victims, the message is double-edged. On the one hand — and this is Banks’s and Holgate’s point — it shows they are up against an exceptionally hard-grained, intractable culture of abuse wrought by those more powerful than themselves.

On the other hand, it raises questions about how women in positions of power can manage their options. This is the focus of Ms Represented, a four-part ABC series premiering next Tuesday to mark the centenary of the first time Edith Cowan — the first woman elected to an Australian parliament — spoke in Western Australia’s House of Assembly.

Writer and presenter Annabel Crabb, who sometimes risks trivialisation in her determination to show the lighter side of our political culture, is at her best here: crisp, vivid and ironic. She and director Stamatia Maroupas, with deft work from editors Andrew Hope and Karin Steininger, blend historical narrative with observations by twenty groundbreaking female parliamentarians.

One of their strategies is to get the participants to read the historical narrative to camera, cross-edited between speakers. And so we have Anne Aly, Ros Kelly, Julie Bishop, Linda Burney, Natasha Stott Despoja, Amanda Vanstone, Julia Gillard, Bronwyn Bishop and Penny Wong working as an ensemble to tell the story of how the 1902 Franchise Act was passed.

Aside from the novelty of catching all these speakers quite literally reading from the same page, there’s significant entertainment value in the way they present the material. Rivalling trained actors, they use shifts in tone and pace to underline the absurdities of antiquated political attitudes. Except, of course, such presumptions are now proving to be not so antiquated.

These female voices from across the political spectrum are also in chorus, unscripted this time, on the syndrome of “gender deafness.” It goes something like this: put forward an idea in a meeting, and there is no response — until, a few minutes later, it is repeated by a male colleague as if it were his own, and is thereafter cited with general approval.

In the telling, these experiences come across as social satire rather than victim narrative; the speakers share a wry awareness of their own capacity to manipulate the wilful blindness of ego-driven male colleagues. But there are times when it really is no longer funny, as a succession of recent scandals and crises has shown.

In some of the worst instances, the procedures of the parliament itself are at issue. Sarah Hanson-Young’s account of being sabotaged on the floor of the Senate by Cory Bernardi, who crept up behind her and audibly whispered the names of all the male colleagues he implied she had been intimately involved with, is well supported by video documentation from the chamber. Bernardi was called to order, but it was Hanson-Young who was formally ruled against, for suggesting that he be breathalysed.

What is most striking about Ms Represented is how, time and again, these usually discordant voices converge to present identical narratives and perspectives on issues that really matter, not so much for themselves as individuals trying to make their way in an especially difficult professional environment, but for women in general.

They emphasise the opportunities they have as parliamentarians, and the responsibility they feel. Quick-witted, insightful and determined, and with a directness and honesty rarely evident when they are “on message,” they make entertaining company across the four episodes. “What’s not to like?” as Amanda Vanstone asks at one point.

And yet, over the decades, there has been so much outright vilification, from shocking comments in the 1902 Hansard about the prospect of Aboriginal women in parliament, read out by Linda Burney, to Tony Abbott and his supporters congregating under a placard urging “Ditch the Witch.”

The centenary perspective is an appropriate reminder that a difficult road has been travelled, but also that any sense that the journey is complete is premature. What the series lacks is the perspective of independent MPs, with Cathy McGowan, Jacqui Lambie, Kerryn Phelps, Helen Haines and Zali Steggall all unaccountably missing. Surely an additional episode might be devoted to them? They may well hold the key to a real change in the culture of parliament. •

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In reality, though, most domestic abuse involves coercive control: a pattern of physical, sexual, financial and psychological abuse that one person (usually a man) uses to control and dominate another person (usually a woman, and usually an intimate partner).

This week a multi-party parliamentary committee recommended that New South Wales become the first jurisdiction in mainland Australia to criminalise coercive control. (Tasmania introduced related offences sixteen years ago.) After nearly a year of research and consultation, a committee of Liberal, Labor, Greens and One Nation MPs unanimously recommended that coercively controlling a current or former intimate partner should become a crime.

The committee didn’t specify the precise wording or scope of the new offence. But because these laws exist in Britain and elsewhere — as the committee highlights in its report — we can expect two key elements to feature.

First, like stalking laws, a coercive control offence will focus on a pattern of abuse, not on isolated incidents. This means the justice system will be forced to see abuse the way victims experience it, as an ever-present threat. This focus on repeat behaviour will present challenges to investigating police. But it will also deal with a key shortcoming in the main response to family violence: intervention orders. These orders sometimes result in women being mistakenly identified as the primary aggressor, because they limit police’s consideration to the immediate event (disregarding the possibility that her actions, if any, may have been taken in self-defence). By looking at the whole of the relationship, rather than just the most recent incident of violence, the new offence provides a better lens for assessing who is the real abuser.

Second, the new offence will outlaw psychological, emotional and financial abuse. Isolation from family and friends, degrading and humiliating conduct, and deprivation of necessary financial resources will be prohibited. This is behaviour that has traditionally fallen outside the scope of the criminal law. The offence won’t, though, apply to reasonable behaviour, and it will only apply if the offender intended the behaviour to cause harm to the victim or if a reasonable person would have known that harm was likely. Concerns that the new offence will prevent parents from disciplining their children, or spouses from taking the family car without the consent of their partner are wrong and inflammatory.

Other elements of the new offence are less settled. For instance, while overseas jurisdictions limit their coercive control offences to familial relationships, or some more narrowly to intimate partners, the committee left open the possibility of including broader relationships.

It is also important to realise that as groundbreaking as this proposed reform is, in some ways it isn’t new. Most states and territories already indirectly criminalise coercion, psychological abuse, control, emotional abuse and financial abuse when it occurs as a breach of an intervention order. What is novel is that the new offence wouldn’t require victims to first go to court and obtain an intervention order before the abuse became criminal. Instead, they could directly seek the assistance of police, who would now be better able to respond.

So, how might this new law work in practice? The case of Natalie Curtis, who lived with her husband just east of London, is illustrative. By the end of their six-year relationship, he was calling her up to forty times a day, threatening to kill her, throwing her belongings out of the house and smashing their furniture. He blamed Natalie for his behaviour.

As is often the case, the relationship didn’t start out that way. He initially seemed attentive and caring, but over time that attentiveness became surveillance, and care became control. Natalie describes it as “a drip effect, each event gets a bit worse and a bit worse… And then someone has control over you.” She developed severe anxiety and panic attacks, and eventually went to the police. Her husband was charged with controlling or coercive behaviour and ultimately sentenced to two years’ jail.

Of course, some of his behaviour, such as threats and property damage, was already criminal. But the justice system, viewing them in isolation, often doesn’t take these offences seriously enough. In fact, two years before Natalie left him for good, her husband received a suspended prison sentence for threatening to kill her. A few weeks later, after he promised to reform and begged her to take him back, they moved back in together. It got worse after that.

To be clear, criminalising coercive control is not a panacea for the shadow pandemic of family violence that costs our country lives, untold misery and billions of dollars every year. And there are still important tasks ahead. The NSW committee recommended establishing a taskforce to oversee careful drafting of the new offence, to consult about its final form, and to monitor its implementation. That taskforce will need to deal with concerns about the ability of our justice systems to deal with domestic violence and “invisible” harms. The new law must also be drafted and implemented carefully to meet the needs of Indigenous Australians.

The committee made it clear that a new offence was contingent on broader, systemic reforms occurring concurrently: widespread community education campaigns; extensive training for everyone whose work will be affected by the new law; and additional resources for domestic violence services and criminal justice agencies to help them absorb the extra workloads created by the new offence.

With nearly all states and territories now considering whether to criminalise these forms of family violence, New South Wales leads the way. A new law that directly outlaws these forms of abuse will give effect to what victims, frontline workers and researchers have known for decades: that coercion and control, rather than physical violence, are the core of domestic and family violence. •

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Titley would have needed to prove a lack of consent and doing that required physical evidence of a struggle. Not just minor signs, either: the contemporary textbook Medical Jurisprudence, Forensic Medicine and Toxicology advised that “slight traces of a struggle… on the thighs and breasts” should be treated as evidence of the woman having failed to use “all her strength in her defence.” Indeed, it noted, members of a “certain class of woman” were known to “make a point of a show of resistance before yielding.”

The question of consent would also have thrown the burden of proof and the attention of the court onto Titley herself. Being orphaned and poor (she was a house cleaner in the inner-Melbourne suburb of Emerald Hill), and having previously had a boyfriend, she might well have been accused of being unchaste or belonging to that “certain class of woman.” Being seen as promiscuous meant being considered “common property,” and to this extent, outside the reach of rape laws. After all, rape was a crime of trespass against another man’s property, either her husband or father. A similar logic underpins a still-common belief that sex workers or women who enjoy sex with multiple partners can’t be raped: a woman who belongs to no man belongs to every man.

But this is not just another miserable story of women’s oppression in the Victorian era. Frances Titley fought for her rights in the civil courts and won in a way that we might not have anticipated. By proving that Moltine had promised to marry her if she became pregnant, she was able to sue him for breach of promise aggravated by “seduction” (or coerced sex).

This charge shifted the focus on to Moltine’s actions and words. He bore the burden of proving that he had neither promised marriage nor “seduced” her. And, like the vast majority of defendants sued in this way, he lost. If he had been living in the United States, where seduction in the late nineteenth century was a criminal offence, he would have gone to jail. In Australia, he was subject to the unusually large damages of £200 (double the average for the century). As the Australian reported at the time, “lovers of justice would be pleased.”

Titley v Moltine came to mind when the NSW government announced earlier this month that it would adopt changes to the criminal law’s sexual consent provisions recommended by the state Law Reform Commission. Among other things, the law will incorporate an affirmative model of consent and codify a person’s right to withdraw consent at any point.

The announcement sparked the usual tired debate about the balance between the rights of the victim and the presumption of innocence, but nobody has questioned whether consent itself should be reconsidered. While I wouldn’t recommend going back to legal actions based on “seduction,” Titley v Moltine is a reminder that consent is not the only way the law could distinguish sex from rape.

Consent’s problems are evident in the way it increasingly comes with qualifiers — affirmative consent, enthusiastic consent, communicative consent — all of which are attempts to carve out sexual agency for women from a concept that consigns them to passivity. With its origins in contract law, consent is a cumbersome, clod-footed category when applied to the delicate shadowlands of sex, power and desire.

My jurisprudence students are always surprised when I tell them that feminists have been the most trenchant critics of this use of consent. Prompted by the women’s movement of the 1970s, legal theorists like Catharine MacKinnon declared the focus on consent to be a major cause of the injustices experienced by rape survivors in the courts.

Although consent promises to focus the court’s attention on women’s sexual will, MacKinnon argues, it actually enshrines the worst gender stereotypes. By accepting that “man proposes, woman disposes,” it preserves a power imbalance in which men have sexual will and women merely permit, or don’t permit, sex — a very low bar for sexual agency.

The problem goes back to consent’s origins in contract law. Whereas the temporal boundaries of sex are nebulous, contracts govern the delivery of goods within a specified period. This gives rise to the popular idea that men are “owed” sex if consent has been granted. If a man can show that a “free and voluntary agreement” was reached at the beginning of an encounter, then he can easily claim good faith on his part.

What goods was the law imagining would be delivered when it sought to regulate sex through contract law? The woman’s body, of course — in accordance with the common law tradition of treating women as the property of their fathers and then their husbands. By the late nineteenth century, though, a series of legislative reforms had begun to shift ownership of a woman’s body (or at least a white woman’s body) from her husband or father to herself. They were now considered to have “property in their own persons” that allowed them to contract out their own bodies or their labour (unlike slaves, who were the property of others). With the exception of marital rape, which was not prohibited until the late twentieth century, the “trespass” of rape was no longer on the property of an “owning man” but on the woman. This was certainly an improvement, but the law of consent still bore no relation to the act of sex or the harm of rape.

In imagining a woman rationally consenting to the use of her body by another, the law imposed a mind/body split on an act that by its very nature dissolves such distinctions. Far from being a rational exchange between two parties, the language of sex is often an inarticulate language of gestures and sighs — of non-verbal, non-rational, corporeal communication. And this is why rape is so damaging. It is an assault on a woman’s sexual will and body at the same time. In Linda Alcoff’s words: “It is not that ‘my body’ has been taken; I have been taken.”

Contract law’s notion of a “free and voluntary agreement” also suggests that both parties reach an agreement as equals, which obscures how a woman’s consent and decision-making may be constrained by economic dependence, coercion or other subterranean forms of inequality. More fundamentally, it also ignores how women are socialised into sexual passivity and how male dominance is eroticised in almost all forms of popular media. How meaningful are the terms “free and voluntary” in a society where sexual imaginations are still overwhelmingly shaped by male power and fantasy?

The NSW amendments go some way towards recognising these complexities by specifying that consent needs to be active and ongoing, and that consenting to one act does not mean consenting to all acts. But the underlying problem remains.

We’re left with a paradox: consent is both the main problem with the law of sexual assault and the only conceivable solution. Yet no number of qualifiers will fix the fundamental mismatch between the language of contract law and the language of sex. Returning to nineteenth-century notions of seduction may be no answer, but knowing that other means have been used to prosecute sexual violence gives us more room to be imaginative in finding legal solutions. •

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Those women were part of a movement that stretched back to 1965, when a group of Sydney women calling themselves Save Our Sons, or SOS, began protesting against conscription. They were swiftly dismissed as a bunch of eccentric housewives.

Every picture tells a story, but not necessarily the whole story. In the years since then, memories of Australia’s anti–Vietnam war movement have tended to focus on images of the huge moratorium marches, largely ignoring or downplaying the role of women. Coming across photos of the Sydney protesters almost fifty years later, I too thought I had them pegged, albeit more kindly, as a group of concerned middle-class mums.

As a mother of a teenage boy myself, it wasn’t hard to empathise with Joyce Golgerth, who formed the Sydney SOS after learning that her twenty-year-old son had been picked for conscription in the Menzies government’s conscription “lottery,” a crass spectacle involving an actual bingo barrel. And it was easy to understand why, after the organisation issued a “distress call — SOS — to mothers everywhere,” others were inspired to form their own groups in Townsville, Brisbane, Newcastle, Wollongong, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth.

But the more I delved into my research, sifting through archives, ASIO files, newspapers, letters and interviews, the more it became clear that SOS involved much more than maternal outrage. Indeed, as the stories started tumbling out it seemed the entire history of the twentieth century was converging on this one phenomenon.

Black-and-white photographs of women in sensible shoes and matching handbags don’t do SOS justice. In my book, Save Our Sons: Women, Dissent and Conscription during the Vietnam War, I wanted to look at the stories behind the images, to present a more nuanced picture of this grassroots movement and of those who joined it.

As I soon learned, there was no typical SOS supporter; many weren’t even mothers. They were young and old; rich and poor; working and non-working; of all political and religious creeds; and they lived on farms and in cities and country towns. Some were well known in peace circles; others had never joined a cause in their lives.

Individual stories stood out: the television celebrity with the radical past; the ambulance driver (now a mother of ten) who had patrolled London during the Blitz; the German migrant whose husband had been part of the SS and who was determined not to be a “fellow traveller” again. I read heartbreaking letters from women who were still living with the fallout from previous wars. One, who had lost all her close male relatives in the second world war, now had two sons of conscription age.

It became clear that history hadn’t given SOS its due: it was one thing to march with thousands of others in 1970, but a different matter altogether to picket an army barracks in 1966. Indeed, SOS was one of the first groups to protest against conscription, and one of the last to put its banners away.

For almost eight years, supporters worked tirelessly, often behind the scenes, assisting young men and their families, and fighting for civil liberties along the way. As the war dragged on, some became more radical: scandalising Melbourne Cup–goers in scanty anti-war fashions; hijacking an evangelical rally; holding parties to fill in false conscription papers; and setting up a series of safe houses to hide draft resisters.

The year following the Canberra protest, five SOS members were jailed after staging a sit-in at a Commonwealth office in Melbourne. Politician and moratorium leader Jim Cairns would later describe it as a turning point in the anti-war campaign (and apologise for not mentioning SOS in his memoirs).

Protesting came at a personal cost. SOS women were followed by ASIO and faced widespread hostility, sometimes within their own families. One woman’s workmates poured hot tea on her (she resigned at once). When ridicule didn’t work, SOS women were derided as communist dupes, bad mothers and neglectful wives.

More surprising was the bitterness of other women; one declared SOS “a disgrace to womanhood,” and members clashed publicly with “white mouse” Nancy Wake, the Australian war hero.

Pinpointing SOS’s legacy is difficult, but as well as their practical contributions, there can be no doubt that these “respectable” women helped widen the appeal of the anti-war movement and made public dissent more acceptable. After SOS, some adopted new causes, including the women’s movement; a few moved into politics. Others, like ballet teacher Edna Gudgeon, quietly resumed their former lives. Asked why she had joined the Canberra chain gang, she summed up the frustration of the times: “Because I cannot seem to reach this government in any other way.” •

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The case the court has agreed to hear, Jackson Women’s Health Organization v Dobbs, challenges the constitutionality of a 2018 Mississippi law that bans almost all abortions after fifteen weeks of pregnancy, with narrow exceptions for medical emergencies or foetal abnormalities. A federal district judge and a panel of the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit have both upheld an appeal against the law launched by the women’s health organisation that runs the only abortion clinic in Mississippi.

The case effectively reopens both Roe v Wade and the US Supreme Court’s 1992 decision in Planned Parenthood v Casey, which held that “the state’s interests” in relation to a foetus that isn’t yet viable “are not strong enough to support a prohibition of abortion or substantial obstacle to the woman’s effective right to elect the procedure.” In accepting the Mississippi case, the court says it will examine whether “all pre-viability prohibitions on elective abortions are unconstitutional.” The state’s attorney-general will argue that the capacity to survive outside the womb is the wrong place to draw the line.

Among developed nations, the longstanding and increasingly partisan political battle over women’s reproductive rights is uniquely American. Continual challenges to legal guarantees encapsulated in Roe v Wade and elsewhere not only undermine women’s freedoms but are also likely to be contributing to the appalling rates of maternal and infant mortality in the world’s richest nation.

A quick history lesson highlights how precarious the legal right to abortion is for American women. While Roe v Wade is commonly seen as guaranteeing a right to abortion, it secures only the right to privacy when seeking access to an abortion, thus protecting a woman’s autonomy in the decision to have an abortion.

Even this is mitigated by what the distinguished legal journalist Linda Greenhouse calls “a physician-centric framework.” To a remarkable degree, indeed, Roe v Wade is about doctors’ rights. The majority opinion, written by Justice Harry Blackmun, actually says that “the attending physician, in consultation with his [sic] patient, is free to determine, without regulation by the State, that, in his medical judgment, the patient’s pregnancy should be terminated.” This doctor-knows-best rhetoric could well have helped enable the limitations since placed on American women’s reproductive rights.

It is important to note that Roe v Wade is essentially superseded by the 1992 decision. When this case reached the US Supreme Court, only Justice Blackmun remained of Roe’s seven-member majority, and a majority of the justices had been appointed by presidents who openly sought its reversal. Even so, the court surprised everyone by reaffirming Roe’s central tenet of the right to an abortion; but it also instituted an “undue burden” standard that permitted the state to regulate abortion to protect unborn life from the beginning of pregnancy, so long as women’s authority to decide whether to give birth was protected. In taking this approach, the court created opportunities for restrictions on abortion that Roe itself never sanctioned.

In the wake of the Roe v Wade decision, anti- and pro-abortion groups were galvanised. At the same time, Republican strategists were staking out anti-abortion positions as part of a strategy to appeal to Catholic and evangelical voters. This was the beginning of a growing partisan divide on the issue, which has become almost a litmus test for aspiring Republican lawmakers.

Efforts to limit abortion soon turned to focusing on funding for reproductive services. The Hyde amendment, introduced in 1976 and enacted by every Congress since, bans the use of federal Medicaid funds for abortion services, with exceptions for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest and pregnancies that would endanger the mother’s life. It is particularly harmful to women of colour and those with low incomes, who disproportionately rely on Medicaid for their healthcare coverage. (Note that the Hyde amendment does not block states from using their own Medicaid funds; currently fifteen states pay for more abortions than those permitted under the amendment.)

Gallup polls report that around 50 per cent of Americans agree abortion should be legal “under certain circumstances” and another 29 per cent “under all circumstances.” This level of public support makes the federal political fight difficult, leading anti-abortion activists to be more relentless in their use of the courts and to target Republican-dominated state legislatures.

Donald Trump oversaw a major effort to curtail abortion. The “gag rule” was applied to recipients of US global health aid (a hard line that was particularly punitive for female victims of sexual violence during conflicts), access to contraception was restricted, and insurers and healthcare professionals were given more latitude to deny reproductive health services. He also made good on his promise to load up the Supreme Court with justices who would overturn Roe v Wade by appointing Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

Joe Biden has been reticent about speaking out on abortion. His election campaign didn’t highlight the issue, and he hasn’t taken it up since moving into the Oval Office. Perhaps his Catholicism has played a role, but more likely his silence reflects the many other important issues that need to be tackled.

But he has made a good start on rolling back Trump’s undermining of women’s health. He has reversed the restrictions on funding Planned Parenthood and overseas groups that provide abortion referrals; reversed restrictions on the supply of medical abortion drugs; and removed hurdles to medical research that uses foetal tissue derived from abortions. He has appointed vocal advocates of abortion rights to key federal posts, including Xavier Becerra as health and human services secretary.

The mere fact that the Supreme Court agreed to take up this case indicates it is likely to overturn or severely limit the judicial basis of abortion rights. None of the usual criteria for accepting a case were satisfied — there was no split in the circuit decisions and no unsettled question of federal law — and the case had languished on the court’s docket since before the death of Justice Ruth Ginsburg, an ardent support of Roe v Wade. Moreover, the newer, more conservative justices have already shown their willingness to overturn longstanding precedents and expand the scope of decisions.

Biden will be under enormous pressure to do more to protect abortion rights, not just because of fears about the outcome of Jackson Women’s Health Organization v Dobbs but also because of even more draconian state-level anti-abortion provisions. Sixteen states have attempted to ban abortion before viability, mostly with “heartbeat” bills, which seek to ban the procedure from the time a foetal heartbeat can first be heard. (This is six weeks from conception, at which time many women are still unaware they are pregnant.)

The anti-abortion legislation recently passed by the Texas legislature highlights what the future could look like without Roe v Wade (which originated in Texas). It not only bans abortions after six weeks but also allows private citizens the right to sue anyone who aids or abets an abortion — including healthcare workers and facilities, insurance companies, counsellors, families, the person who drives the patient to the clinic, and even those who donate funds to support abortion services. As lawyers opposing the legislation have argued, it enables anti-abortion groups to “weaponise the judicial system” to paralyse women’s healthcare services, isolate women who need abortions, and intimidate these women’s supportive networks.

All of these bills have been blocked by court orders, and await the undoing of constraints imposed by Roe v Wade. Many more bills are coming: since January, 549 abortion restrictions, including 165 abortion bans, have been introduced across forty-seven states; sixty-nine of these, including nine bans, have been enacted.

Biden made an election commitment to codify Roe v Wade into federal law and abolish the long-time ban on federal funding for abortions via the Hyde amendment. Vice-president Kamala Harris campaigned on a proposal to create a “preclearance” system, analogous to that in the Voting Rights Act, whereby states that want to change abortion access must seek approval from the justice department. In a first step, Biden’s fiscal 2022 budget request, just released, omits the Hyde language.

To enact any or all of these provisions, Biden must determine how much pressure he wants to put on the Democrats in Congress to tackle these fraught issues ahead of the 2022 elections. And there is an additional problem: all of these measures can only be passed if the Senate filibuster (a requirement for sixty votes rather than a simple majority) is abolished.

A more contentious way to tackle this issue — one that is already on the table for some Democrats —is to expand the number of justices on the Supreme Court (there is precedent, although not recent). A group of Democrats has introduced a bill to do this in the House of Representatives; and, not surprisingly, Republicans have been scathing in their opposition. But the bill has a doubtful future even without Republican opposition: House speaker Nancy Pelosi has said she has no plans to bring it up for a vote.

Although the court’s composition is clearly on Biden’s mind, he has been in no hurry to make a decision. In April he signed an executive order setting up a bipartisan commission to examine the court’s size, the justices’ lifetime appointments and other court-related matters, thus fulfilling a campaign commitment.

The key issue that may drive Biden and his administration to apply more effort to abortion rights specifically and women’s reproductive health more generally is his strong commitment to improving access to healthcare and creating a more equitable society. “We are deeply committed to making sure everyone has access to care — including reproductive health care — regardless of income, race, zip code, health insurance status, or immigration status,” Biden said in a joint statement with Harris on the forty-eighth anniversary of Roe v Wade in January.

The hard line against abortion rights that is so prevalent in American politics puts women’s lives, livelihoods and health at risk and widens the disparities between rich and poor that are already a feature of US healthcare. More importantly, the current battles ignore the real-life complexity — ethical and financial — of ending a pregnancy. That is not likely to change any time soon. •

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This approach was on full display after former Liberal staffer Brittany Higgins told her story in February. Caught off guard by the outpouring of outrage that followed her devastating claims, the Morrison government ordered no fewer than five reviews.

Not counting the continuing police investigation, there’s the Foster review of how serious incidents are handled at Parliament House, the Gaetjens review of who knew what and when about the alleged rape, the Kunkel inquiry into the behaviour of the prime minister’s media staff, the Hammond review of how Coalition offices operate, and the Jenkins work on parliament’s workplace culture.

Three months later and counting, with parliament back and Senate estimates in session, we have had several (painstaking) opportunities this week to learn where these inquiries are up to.

After estimates yielded little information on Monday morning, Anthony Albanese’s first question to Scott Morrison in question time was why none of the reviews had been concluded. Probably having guessed something like this was coming, the prime minister said he was expecting the Foster review “very, very shortly.”

As it turns out, Stephanie Foster — a deputy secretary in his department — finished her report at 8pm that evening. Later the same night, she also learned Morrison would issue a media statement about her key recommendations the next morning. The two had not yet talked about her final report.

Foster appeared at estimates on Tuesday, alongside finance minister Simon Birmingham, who was representing Morrison and is heavily involved in the government’s Higgins response. Birmingham said he only learned of the announcement that morning and had not read the whole report. Despite a barrage of questions from an unimpressed Penny Wong, he couldn’t say whether it would be released publicly.

Pending the detail, the headline recommendations seem sensible. On top of a previously announced 24/7 support line for current or former parliamentary staff (“1800 APH SPT”), they include face-to-face education for managers and staff, and an independent, confidential complaints mechanism. The report will go to cabinet next week and will indeed — as we later learned from Morrison in question time — be released publicly for more consultation.

But the rush and confusion around the report’s release struck a worrying note. It also came after the officials who run building security (a different part of the bureaucracy from Foster) told estimates there have been “no formal changes” in the policies governing how parliamentary staff handle serious incidents. No changes, that is, during the two years since Higgins’s alleged rape in a ministerial office, after she returned to the building late at night with a senior colleague, obviously intoxicated.

Another review head, prime minister’s department secretary Phil Gaetjens, also appeared before estimates. Gaetjens has the delicate job of examining exactly when the prime minister’s office found out about the alleged rape. This was paused in March so as not to clash with the Federal Police’s investigation, but has since restarted.

Well before this week, the vibes were bumpy. Remember how Morrison declined to mention that Gaetjens’s work had paused when asked about progress back in March? And remember how it emerged that no plans had been made to speak to Higgins?

It was hard to feel more confident following Gaetjens’s appearance. He could only provide a loose time frame for completion, saying he needed “probably weeks… certainly not months.” Nor could he say how many staff members had been interviewed or if the report will be made public. The interviews with staff have been done confidentially, he said, and although he still hasn’t talked to Higgins, a meeting is now “scheduled.”

But while Gaetjens’s release is still to be confirmed, and we don’t have the full detail of Foster’s work, another report landed, complete and public, on Tuesday afternoon. These were the findings of Morrison’s chief-of-staff, John Kunkel, who has been examining claims the PM’s political staff negatively briefed journalists about Higgins’s partner, David Sharaz.

Higgins made a formal complaint a month after the backgrounding claims were first reported by the media, writing to Kunkel that “numerous journalists” had told her about a campaign against Sharaz. On Tuesday morning in estimates, Labor made repeated attempts to unearth details of Kunkel’s work. But come question time, Morrison tabled the report unexpectedly, declaring emphatically that Kunkel had “found in the negative.” On that basis, some media reports suggested his office had been “cleared.”

If you read the four-page report, you’ll find that Kunkel actually wrote that he wasn’t in a position to say for sure because he had found no “first-hand” evidence. (Not surprisingly, most press gallery journalists weren’t forthcoming about what they’d been told in private conversations.) On top of this, Higgins reportedly had no warning Kunkel’s review would be released, and didn’t know that parts of her discussion with him would be quoted in the document.

And the other reviews? In February, Morrison asked Liberal MP Celia Hammond (who took over Julie Bishop’s old seat) to look at the culture of Coalition offices; in March, sex discrimination commissioner Kate Jenkins was appointed to look at parliament’s workplace culture. If Morrison was seeking to shine a special spotlight on his own party, the intention was shortlived. Within weeks, the Hammond review was rolled into Jenkins’s. This certainly avoids double-ups and provides a more arm’s-length way of reviewing Coalition offices (something Hammond was concerned about), but sceptics also point out that Liberal Party practices and culture in Canberra will escape a focused review.

Jenkins is seeking submissions from anyone who has worked at Parliament House. Her independent process — funded by the government but run by the Australian Human Rights Commission — is due to provide an initial response in July and a final report in November. Both will be made public.

Leaving aside Jenkins’s inquiry, the treatment of the four other reviews has created a growing and disturbing pile of niggles. Confusion, obfuscation, a lack of detail, a lack of warning and, in some instances, a lack of respect for Higgins — it doesn’t look like a government sincerely doing everything within its power to deal with a problem and try to get ahead of it. It looks much more like a government going through the motions in the hope that will be enough to make the whole thing go away. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

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The defence naturally had a different story: “Everything that took place at those premises on that night was consensual.” And, consistent with the statistics on sexual assault (only one in ten reported cases results in a conviction), de Belin and Sinclair were found not guilty. On one charge, that is — the jury’s eight men and four women were unable to reach a verdict on the remaining charges.

Does it matter that twice as many men as women were sitting on that jury? It’s not customary when reporting on trials for journalists to discuss the jury’s composition, but in this case the Sydney Morning Herald’s court reporter, Georgina Mitchell, saw it as relevant.

It’s true that jurors are randomly selected from the election roll, but a recent study by the Melbourne Age found that women called up for jury service in Victoria are more than twice as likely as men to be excluded from criminal trials by peremptory challenges (the right of barristers to veto jurors without giving a reason), and even more likely if the case concerns a sexual offence.

It has always been thus. Unlike British women, who gained the right to sit on juries in the early twentieth century, Australian women had to wait until the 1990s to achieve full jury rights in every state. Until then, women were denied their power to engage in the adjudicative process or to be judged by a jury of their own peers. Female victims of sexual violence usually had to narrate the most traumatic moment of their lives to a male judge, male journalists, male barristers and a jury comprised entirely of men. An institution that was meant to be the democratic voice of a sovereign community was instead one of the most unrepresentative institutions in Australia.

While I was reading about the de Belin case my desk was piled high with archival materials detailing the tireless efforts of feminist organisations to get women on juries. Let me correct that: tireless isn’t quite the right word. By the 1940s the women had been campaigning for more than half a century, and they were exhausted. “This meeting is a waste of time,” huffed Miss Cotton in a 1942 deputation to NSW justice minister R.R. Downing. “We are not asking for a privilege; we are asking for a very unpleasant right… We think it is work we should be doing and it is our right to do it.”

Like those of us who have served on a jury, the women knew that in the bundle of rights, duties, privileges and obligations that define citizenship, jury service is most definitely a duty. “It is no privilege that women seek, but the right to take their place as full citizens with the knowledge that civil and social duties should not be determined by sex,” one woman wrote to the Melbourne Argus in the 1940s. Erna Keighley, a feminist activist from the same era, agreed: “Any community which excludes half its citizens from such activities, because of sex alone, is undemocratic.”

By the middle of the twentieth century white Australian women could vote, sit in parliament and practise as barristers and solicitors. As an editorial in the Sun put it, “The bar table, the witness box, the dock and the gaol are all open to them; only the jury box is closed.” Worse than that, women were removed from court in any case involving sex, while men were allowed to stay. As activist Annie Golding complained in 1929, “When a man is charged with a sexual offence against a young child of six, seven, or eight years of age, or against an unfortunate girl that has been seduced or outraged, the court is cleared” of women and the girl in the witness box is left “friendless.”

Queensland was the first state, in 1923, to grant women the right to sit on juries, but it was an opt-in system that required                 women to volunteer to the local sheriff. So few volunteered — and those who did were usually subject to peremptory challenges — that by 1941 only three women had served as jurors. It took until 1995 for Queensland women to gain full jury rights.

A similar story can be told of Tasmania, where women were allowed to volunteer for jury service in 1939 but didn’t have equal jury rights until 1991. South Australia denied women any right at all to sit on juries until 1965; full jury rights came in 1975. Western Australia gave women full jury rights in 1985, New South Wales and Victoria in 1977 and the Australian Capital Territory in 1979. It’s a shocking performance from a nation that likes to celebrate the fact that it granted women the right to vote and stand in parliament relatively early.

What reasons were given for the denial of this basic and not very pleasant right? Put simply: toilets. Or, as one justice minister euphemistically put it in 1942, “The greatest difficulty in the way of anything being done immediately is the provision of accommodation.” Yes, in New South Wales and Victoria the main barrier to women’s jury franchise cited by justice ministers was that courts lacked female toilets and it would cost too much money to build them.

Of course, governments were having no problem financing high-grade arterial roads, the Snowy Mountains Hydro Scheme, tramways, railways and entire new suburbs. As one “well-known Labour woman” told a NSW deputation in the 1940s: “A lot of rot! The minister is only pulling your association’s leg. Accommodation!… [T]he government can put an extra lavatory and a bit of a wooden partition in other departments quick enough, why not in the courts?”

Those courts had been built during the Victorian era, when nobody imagined a role for women in legal adjudication. Women were seen to be too irrational, too burdened by suckling infants, too sexually ignorant or too easily corrupted by sexual knowledge. Men spoke the language of the law. Women spoke the language of morality.

What comes as a surprise is that these attitudes persisted for a large part of the twentieth century. “Jurors become the judges of the facts, and so they should be worldly, impartial, logical, consistent and, in theory at least, sexless,” one commentator declared when South Australian women entered jury boxes for the first time in 1966. “Many male lawyers contend that women jurors not only lack such qualities but are often petty, moody (by nature), unpredictable and in sex cases revengeful in the cause of womanhood.”

Newspapers commented constantly on the problem of men in courtrooms being distracted by attractive women. Sheriffs worried that the state would be encumbered with the substantial costs of remunerating them for their labours of care. Inadvertently, the debate over juries raised the awkward fact that supposed labours of love, such as housework and childcare, for which women were said to be most suited were in fact unpaid work that saved government significant amounts of money.

Many of these historical injustices persist today. Rather than providing funding for female jurors with caring obligations, courts simply exempt them from service. Women continue to be targeted by peremptory challenges, quite likely leading to skewed results in a range of matters, particularly sexual assault. The cliché that women are harder on each other when judging these matters has not been borne out by research; instead, women’s shared experiences of the fear or actuality of sexual violence makes them far more capable of understanding the arguments of claimants like the woman in the de Belin case.

But the greatest continuing injustice of the jury system lies in its treatment of Indigenous people. Their criminalisation means that they are vastly over-represented among defendants and yet woefully under-represented among jurors. When the NSW Law Reform Commission last did the figures in 2009, Indigenous people represented less than 0.5 per cent of jurors. If Australia is to offer defendants “a jury of one’s peers” as a symbol of our democracy and the sovereignty of the people, then it needs to include all people and all experiences. •

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Nor did last year’s budget fix the gender problems created by the government’s Covid-19 stimulus policies: the JobKeeper guidelines that excluded many women in low-paid casual work, for instance, and the emergency access to superannuation that substantially reduced or wiped out some women’s superannuation accounts. While the government claimed that  women’s employment  was recovering more quickly than men’s, in fact women’s jobs and work hours had been hit particularly hard by the Covid recession.

The government reacted angrily to feminist critiques of its budget strategy. In one case, the prime minister’s department reportedly contacted a high-profile critic to argue that there was nothing gendered in the budget.

What a difference a year makes! With Brittany Higgins’s revelations, the allegations against Christian Porter, a series of prime ministerial missteps and widespread reports of sexism in Coalition ranks, polls have shown the government’s support among women dropping significantly. In response, Scott Morrison announced ministerial changes designed to bring “a fresh lens, in particular to achieving the outcomes, the results that we all want for Australian women across the country.” This year’s budget needed to tackle women’s issues explicitly.

Overall, the government pledged around $3.4 billion for women’s economic security, safety and health. The aged care royal commission’s call for an increase in the aged care workforce gave the government the opportunity to increase employment and training in a female-dominated industry, although it still doesn’t seem to fully recognise the economic benefits of funding more jobs in care services. The budget still favours some male-dominated industries that yield relatively few new jobs.

Extra funding for social housing was a step too far for a Coalition government, despite high levels of homelessness among older women. Instead, the government is going to make it easier for single parents, predominantly women, to take out mortgages, a policy consistent with the Liberals’ emphasis on property ownership. While that move will benefit some women, it risks encouraging those who are less well-off to take out mortgages, with as little as a 2 per cent deposit, that they may eventually be unable to pay. And with just 10,000 places  spread out over four years, the scheme has been criticised for its limited scope.

Increased funding for childcare is always welcome, even though it can be argued that the budget allocation is still insufficient. The budget also funds training programs to encourage women into non-traditional trades but will cover only 5000 places, as well as financing STEM scholarships for women. The government’s policies to support “sovereign” manufacturing could have put more emphasis on supporting those businesses that pursue gender-equity measures.

In keeping with its theme of security in uncertain times, the budget increases funding to counter domestic violence, a welcome outcome at any time but particularly now, with the pandemic having brought an increase in family violence.

Measures to prevent domestic violence can be ideologically acceptable to conservative governments because they don’t involve economic redistribution and are compatible with the view that it is men’s traditional role to protect women. But the government has gone a little further by suggesting it may reconsider the Coalition’s  preference for unpaid rather than paid domestic violence leave. It hasn’t committed to recommending paid leave to the pending Fair Work Commission review of the issue, however, let alone pre-emptively legislating for it.

Other Coalition positions seem unlikely to be reviewed. Although the Women’s Budget Statement mentions that women’s work is frequently undervalued, the government seems not to have taken a fresh look at the Abbott government’s decision to oppose Labor-inspired pay-equity measures that could have facilitated a revaluation of women’s work. Nor does it appear to have repented of its undermining of Labor legislation designed to strengthen equal-pay reporting requirements in the private sector.

Women who are lucky enough to return to work will often find themselves back in the same low-paid, often precarious jobs they had before the pandemic. While the government claims its industrial relations legislation will reduce the precariousness of women’s work, the ACTU has argued that the legislation will actually increase it.

This raises the question of how fundamental the government’s change of heart, and more importantly mind, really is. When it comes to gender and economic policy, Coalition governments have long operated on the assumption that the market is gender-neutral. All too often, Coalition governments seem to believe that simply making the business case that gender equity will benefit the bottom line will be sufficient to convince private enterprise to stop discriminating against women.

The government’s rejection of “identity politics” stops it from recognising the existence of socially disadvantaged groups. It also stops it from acknowledging those constructions of masculinity and femininity that may disadvantage women, including by undervaluing their work.

Nonetheless — as Annabel Crabb, among others, has pointed out — this budget is a major improvement on last year’s. Funding has been increased not only in the spheres I’ve already mentioned but also in women’s health and other areas. More women will be eligible for superannuation. A detailed Women’s Budget Statement has returned, even though it doesn’t provide the full gender analysis of the government’s budget settings that it used to offer.

But while the government is getting better at providing financial incentives to improve women’s position, it is still loath to use more regulatory, interventionist and redistributive measures to tackle structural gender inequality in the labour market. And while the Women’s Budget Statement talks vaguely about the need to change the culture, and the budget funds worthwhile measures against domestic violence and sexual harassment, the government is still unwilling to acknowledge a major cultural problem, namely that more traditional forms of gendered identity politics reinforce women’s disadvantaged position in Australian society. Consequently, the gender lens brought to the budget is welcome but still not wide enough. •

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But much of the debate about how to close this gap misses the bigger point. By focusing on retirement income policy — especially superannuation — it focuses on the symptom, not the cause.

The gender gap in retirement can only be fully understood in the context of the gender gap in lifetime earnings. The size of that gap is even more striking: an average woman with children, for example, earns $2 million less over her lifetime than an average man with children. Women are financially vulnerable even before they retire, and tinkering with super rules won’t fix that fundamental problem.

But the government has some tools to close the gap at its source, starting with the biggest economic reform available: cheaper childcare. High out-of-pocket childcare costs are the single biggest barrier to secondary earners, most of whom are women, taking on more work. The barrier is so high that in a household where both parents have a full-time earning capacity of $60,000, the second earner would be working for about $2 per hour on her fourth day in a week, and for free on her fifth day.

Raising the childcare subsidy from 85 per cent to 95 per cent for low-income families, flattening the taper, and removing the annual cap, as Grattan Institute has recommended, would ensure 60 per cent of families would pay less than $20 per day for childcare. We estimate these changes would cost an extra $5 billion a year and deliver a GDP boost of about $11 billion a year — and, crucially, an extra $150,000 of lifetime earnings for the typical mother.

If the government were looking for a smaller step in the right direction, it could consider making childcare free for second and subsequent children, recognising that childcare is especially expensive for families with multiple children in care.

A more equal government-funded paid parental leave scheme would also help. We recommend six weeks reserved for each parent plus twelve weeks to share between them, paid at the current rate of the minimum wage. Overseas experience shows that more equal sharing of care early on establishes habits for life.

By supporting women who would like to do more paid work, these reforms would go a long way to closing the gender gap. KPMG estimates that 39 per cent of the gap is the result of caring responsibilities, including career interruptions, part-time employment and unpaid care.

But the gap exists even for women and men who spend the same amount of time in paid work. This problem is harder for governments to fix, since much of it plays out in the private sector and is a result of prevailing norms. KPMG finds that 39 per cent of the gap can be attributed to explicit or implicit discrimination, since it can’t be explained by either the type or the amount of work.

But another 18 per cent of the gap reflects the difference in pay for male- and female-dominated occupations and the undervaluing of traditionally “female” jobs. This is something the government does have some power to change, because it is either directly or indirectly responsible for a large share of wages in the female-dominated care sectors. Care jobs historically have had very low remuneration despite their importance and complexity. We have recommended a review of pay and conditions in care sectors, including how to finance higher pay.

Other changes to retirement income policies can make a difference downstream. A case exists for paying super contributions on government-funded paid parental leave, for example, as already applies to other forms of remuneration. But a Grattan analysis shows that these payments would yield only modest income gains because they would be offset by lower pension payments after retirement. A high-earning woman who takes two stints of leave in her early thirties would get an extra $356 a year in retirement, a low-earning woman $164 a year, and an average-earning woman just $73 a year.

Another long-overdue change — abolishing the $450-a-month threshold for paying compulsory super, which can’t be justified in a world of electronic payrolls — affects almost twice as many women as men. Abolishing it would increase retirement incomes for affected workers by between $100 and $300 a year — another modest improvement.

Both those reforms would help, but only at the margins. Instead, the real priority when it comes to the gender gap in retirement is closing the holes in the social safety net for older women who are approaching retirement or already retired.

Single women who don’t own their home are at greatest risk of poverty in retirement and are the fastest-growing group of homeless Australians. Raising the rate of Commonwealth Rent Assistance by at least 40 per cent would lift the incomes of those women by at least $1300 a year, or about 5 per cent.

These changes to retirement income policy would tackle some of the most acute symptoms of the retirement gender gap. But the economic gaps between men and women begin much earlier.

The problem has no quick fix. It will require ambitious and often expensive changes. But unless we drastically reduce the lifetime earnings gap, we can expect to be papering over the retirement income gap for many decades to come. •

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Despite the lack of fanfare, the message could not have been plainer. “Urgent” action was needed to deal with workplace sexual harassment. A national survey in 2018 had found 23 per cent of women and 16 per cent of men had been sexually harassed at work in the past twelve months.

“It occurs in every industry and at every level across Australia,” sex discrimination commissioner Kate Jenkins warned. “This is not simply the story of ‘a few bad apples.’” Having spent eighteen months looking at the issue, she had fifty-five recommendations ready to fix it, including changing the Sex Discrimination Act, simplifying the complaints system and putting more onus on employers to eliminate harassment.

Porter and women’s minister Marise Payne said they would “carefully consider” the report. And then thirteen months went by. Granted, things have been happening elsewhere for the government (and, more lately, for Porter). But this excuse only travels so far. Most of Australia has been out of lockdown since mid 2020 and parliament has been back since August. And the pandemic hasn’t stopped the government pursuing non-Covid issues like industrial relations and university fee reforms.

All this blurred into the background on Thursday when Scott Morrison and new attorney-general Michaelia Cash held a sombre press conference in the prime minister’s courtyard to announce their “roadmap” response to Respect@Work. Morrison said the government was “embracing” the report, describing it as a “game-changer.”

New legislation will be drafted to make it easier for employers to fire sexual harassers. MPs, public servants and judges will no longer be exempt from the Sex Discrimination Act. More funding will come in the May budget.

Jenkins praised the response as “constructive,” but it’s hard not to be cynical about how Respect@Work is being used. It’s a small thing, perhaps, but the government is now taking the credit for establishing the review, when it was very much a joint initiative with Jenkins.

The government’s headline message is it is either agreeing to — “in full, in part or in principle” — or noting all the recommendations. Sound confusing? Well, the detail of its response to the fifty-five recommendations didn’t reach journalists until more than an hour after the press conference, and the chance to ask informed questions, had ended.

Indeed, despite its embrace of the report, the government has only “noted” one of its key recommendations — that a “positive duty” be imposed on all employers to take “reasonable and proportionate measures” to eliminate sex discrimination. For UTS law academic Karen O’Connell, who provided advice to the Respect@Work inquiry, this is a “significant missed opportunity to genuinely prevent sexual harassment.”

Then there is the pre-emptive finger-pointing. Cash is talking about how the states need to get involved and has written them a letter asking about their plans. Morrison says “issues” with the draft legislation still remain to be worked through, and is ominously pleading for “bipartisanship.”

There’s nothing shocking about a government sitting on a report and then trying to avoid being pinned down. Or trying to claim more credit than it deserves. But this is no ordinary report and this is not an ordinary political time. It comes as the government scrambles to regain a sense of authority (and, dare we suggest, empathy) over the “women’s issue” and arrest the anger and frustration felt both within the walls of Parliament House and well beyond it.

It is difficult to believe we would be seeing this response at this time had it not been for Brittany Higgins. Respect@Work was hidden away at the back of the political freezer until advocates and non-government MPs started to call for a response in the wake of her story.

Polling suggests the government really does have a problem. Between last November and 29 March, according to the latest Essential Report, women’s approval of Morrison dropped from 67 per cent to 49 per cent. Men, though, haven’t budged from 65 per cent. Labor’s internal research is showing a similar gender gap. Women are disappointed and angry with Morrison’s response to both individual survivors and issues of harassment and inequality more broadly.

Liberal strategists are similarly aware that women have been moving away from the party for years, and this ties in with a broader international trend regarding female voters and conservative parties. But they also know they have a specific problem among women under forty. Or not so much a problem, as one Liberal MP notes, as “a horror show.”

Within the Liberal camp, there are those who think the government is taking sensible, concrete steps (setting up a women’s cabinet, changing laws, holding summits) and needs to be patient. According to this reasoning, the climate at the moment is unforgiving and the Coalition will be damned for whatever it does. As long as there is demonstrable change, it can ride this out.

But there are also those who think their party leadership doesn’t “get it” and (still) sees the issue as a purely political problem. And this means the current response won’t be good enough. Many might find it hard to reconcile the prime minister’s stated commitment to eliminating bad behaviour with Andrew Laming’s remaining on the government benches.

But Labor strategists aren’t celebrating either. As one told me, male voters are “staring at the floor, waiting for the conversation to move on.” Morrison may have taken an enduring hit to his standing among women, but at least one half of the electorate won’t bust him for it.

Meanwhile, Jenkins is busy with another inquiry. And this is one the government really did commission. Due to report in November, she is examining what it’s like to work at Parliament House. The Human Rights Commission is recruiting more staff to help her, hopes to open submissions next month and will provide an update in July.

Staff around the building — both Liberal and Labor — are being encouraged to contribute and the government sees this as one of its key planks for a gender reset. So long as Jenkins doesn’t come up with anything too ambitious or impractical (such as a mechanism to sack MPs), the government will be able to show some evidence it is sorting out “toxic” parliament, ahead of the election, earlyish next year.

Provided it doesn’t sit on the report for fifteen months. •

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In France itself, of course, the reality was more complex — as was the Le Monde letter itself, which in its less inflammatory sections raised important questions about sex and censorship and the limits of personal testimony. #MeToo is an adaptive phenomenon, moulding itself to local conditions. The French movement against sexual violence continued to grow, extending to high-profile actions against the film and music industries, and to the gay community, with #MeTooGay gathering the testimonials of gay men who had been abused. “New” feminisms emerged, sometimes dismissed along crude generational lines or as American imports. Some issues cut right through the debates, however, namely incest and child sexual abuse, prompting widespread calls for action and a cultural reckoning.

It was against this charged backdrop that Pauline Harmange’s I Hate Men and Vanessa Springora’s Consent: A Memoir were published last year in France. Indeed, Springora’s finely calibrated account of the sexual relationship she’d had when she was fourteen, some thirty-five years earlier, with the fifty-year-old French writer Gabriel Matzneff marked a tipping point. What had once been tacitly accepted now needed to be named for what it was and is, and punished accordingly. Springora was hardly Matzneff’s only victim — he groomed many teenaged girls and boys, and wrote openly about his sexual desire for them. He will be tried in September this year for promoting the sexual abuse of children.

The genesis of I Hate Men is less confronting, but also newsworthy. Harmange, a twentysomething aspiring writer, wrote a blog post flirting with the idea of misandry as a response to feminist burnout. Republished as an essay by a small press, it caught the attention of France’s gender equality minister, Ralph Zurmély. Without having read the book, Zurmély declared it a “sex-based incitement to hatred” and called for it to be banned. Not surprisingly, a mainstream publisher picked up the essay and it became a bestseller, launching Harmange’s career and provoking predictable online harassment and death threats. Zurmély, meanwhile, is no longer gender equality minister.

Both books have now been published in English, each crisply and effectively translated by Natasha Lehrer. They arrive as “French literary sensations,” but beyond a shared historical moment and cultural context, and beyond sharing a translator, these are very different books. Harmange’s polemic is essentially an extended hot take, written in the spirit of the times and the blog format. Easily read in one sitting, the palpably provocative I Hate Men is good fun but hardly incendiary. Its title may bring to the minds of some readers Valerie Solanas’s searing SCUM Manifesto (1967), but while Solanas called for the elimination of men altogether, Harmange is married to one, a situation that allows her to reflect on how loving a man or some men need not preclude “hating men as a social group, and sometimes individual men too.”

Here and there, Harmange dutifully provides statistics about gendered violence and gender inequality at home and at work, but she harbours no pretensions about the depth of her research. The strengths of I Hate Men are in the observations of lived and shared experience and the clarity with which Harmange defines, defends and expands on misandry, as distinct from misogyny and as a potentially galvanising force. She gives short shrift to men who moan about #MeToo and “all this feminist bullshit” and to men who claim to be feminists.

Like many popular feminist books written from the first-person perspective, Harmange doesn’t offer much in the way of feminist strategy other than praising the value of female friendships, including in “book clubs, pyjama parties and girls’ nights out.” I Hate Men, in-your-face title aside, is gateway feminism. As an insight into French feminism, it could come from any vaguely approximate society with a history of white woman–centred feminism.

Springora’s memoir, on the other hand, is a mature work, and marks the literary debut of a talented writer who grew up loving books but turned her back on them in the aftermath of her relationship (for want of a better word) with the famous author, whom she refers to as G.M. when discussing the public figure and G. when describing the controlling and abusive man she came to know. Opening with a reflection on the power and purpose of fairytales, Springora launches her book as an act of revenge and reclamation. The prey will now “ambush” and “ensnare the hunter in his own trap,” the trap being words and books. Like Carmen Maria Machado’s virtuosic memoir of an abusive relationship, In the Dream House (2019), Springora’s book reads as though it has gestated for exactly the right amount of time to produce an instant classic.

Clocking in at less than 200 pages, Consent is both economical and evocative. Springora inducts the reader into her world, aged thirteen, on the precipice of her life-altering first meeting with “G.” at a dinner party. Her parents have split, her father neglectful and mostly absent, her mother loving but distracted. Springora’s sexuality is developing, but she is insecure about her looks and her friendship with her best friend Julien. “All the necessary elements,” she writes, “were now in place.”

Other “necessary elements” included the intellectual circle in which her mother, “a feminist of the May ’68 generation,” moved, if only peripherally, and in which Springora grew up during the 1980s. In this world, G.M. was not only tolerated but venerated. His 1974 essay, Under Sixteen, “a manifesto of sorts calling for the sexual liberation of minors” boosted, rather than undermined, his literary career. A few years later it was G.M. who initiated an open letter in support of the decriminalisation of sexual relations between minors and adults that was published in Le Monde (of course) and signed by intellectual luminaries including Simone de Beauvoir, Gilles Deleuze and Roland Barthes. His public and private writings overflowed with details of obsessive love affairs with young girls and sexual encounters with teenage boys in the Philippines. Springora indicts G.’s generation and its version of sexual revolution, as well as the special privileges afforded to writers, noting that apart from artists only Catholic priests have historically been “bestowed such a level of impunity.”

She is unflinching when describing what it was like to be involved with G., including sexually, and she does so with the impeccable pacing of the most gripping fairytales. Eventually the “spell” began to lift, but “no Prince Charming came to my aid to slash through the jungle of creepers that bound me to this kingdom of darkness.” Trying to disentangle herself from G., Springora was a girl alone.

This part of the book is the most haunting. What comes in the aftermath of G. — “the imprint” — is essential to the memoir’s impact, though the force of the narrative in the final sections, mercifully perhaps, dissipates somewhat. Springora’s life eventually moves in a positive direction, but it’s also indelibly marked. A whole other book could have focused on her mother, who endorsed her relationship with G.

Unlike Harmange’s polemic, Springora’s memoir is emphatically French and immediately addressed to that context. On that front, there are signs of change. In the past week, French MPs have voted to back a new law that will set the age of consent at fifteen, a first for the country. Springora’s memoir is an acknowledged influence, but it also has wider resonance. “Silence” has been taken to equal “consent,” she writes in the closing pages, but it is “at last, the turn of the victims to speak out” and break it. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

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As things turned out, I didn’t make it to that one either. Though I’m spry enough, age has beset me with a host of devilish susceptibilities, one of them being severe hay fever, which had laid me rather low. It heartened me no end, however, to learn that my savvy fifteen-year-old granddaughter was there, marching in my stead.

Now for a plug — but a highly relevant one. Just over a week ago, for International Women’s Day, the documentary Brazen Hussies was released on ABC iView, as well as in venues around the country. Having a small part in it, I’ve watched it several times. It’s a startling, illuminating film, and it’s been great to watch all my brave sisters speak about that time and see their younger selves in action.

It’s relevant because there I am among them, one minute a bride, the next a mother, and then, totally transformed, sitting on the floor in jeans listening to speakers at a women’s liberation conference. It’s hard to believe it was half a century ago. The times were, in a word, incendiary: the huge Vietnam moratorium marches; the campaigns against censorship and in favour of decriminalising homosexuality; the fight against racism; and then, at the tail end and mixed up in all of it, there was us.

At one of my first women’s lib meetings a woman whose name I didn’t know, but who became a close friend, argued that the women’s movement was even more important than the protest against Australia’s involvement in Vietnam. At the time, as the mother of four children under six with scarcely a minute to spare, I felt I had to choose, and she convinced me. From that moment I was not merely an angry woman — if more than justifiably so — but a committed feminist.

Fifty years later, there I was at home watching the day unfold on my laptop. First were the female MPs, beginning with Anne Aly, honouring the hundredth anniversary of Edith Cowan’s taking her seat in the House, our first female parliamentarian. Aly made history herself by being the first woman of Muslim descent to do so. It’s an emblematic reflection on where we are today that the electorate of Cowan, which Aly represents, is one of two WA seats considered for abolition in the proposed redistribution of electorates. The other is the seat of Pearce, which is Christian Porter’s.

Several moments stood out for me. The first was protest organiser Janine Hendry’s stroll through Parliament House, where she buttonholed the hapless deputy prime minister Michael McCormack, who distinguished himself by agreeing to look at the sex discrimination commissioner’s report on sexual harassment that had been sitting around from the year before, and claiming that he’d meet the protesters outside if he found the time. Equally memorable was her encounter with the ever-ebullient senator Jane Hume, who took her to task for having rejected the invitation for a delegation of women to meet with the prime minister and the minister for women in Scott Morrison’s office. Why refuse such an exciting opportunity? Because, as Hendry so cogently put it, she had read the room: the women outside wanted the prime minister to hear what they had to say, out in the open. And, reaching for the impossible perhaps, they wanted him to listen.

Then came one of the day’s most inspiring moments. The original plan was for The Project’s Lisa Wilkinson to read out a speech Brittany Higgins had prepared for the event. But Higgins had decided she wanted to give the speech herself. And what a speech it was, and what a delivery. The words that have stayed with me — “these people were my idols” — cut to the very heart of the Coalition’s problems. As with so many of us, her employers had lost her trust.

From Higgins the coverage moved to Grace Tame speaking in Hobart — again, brilliant, eloquent and fiery. The irony is that these young women are dignified in ways that the men and women in power are not. And if yet more proof of this were needed, we had the prime minister in question time reciting the paltry sums of money we women have managed to squeeze out of him, then topping it off with a gratuitous lesson in civics.

As for Marise Payne, our minister for women, who tried on 7.30, and again in question time, to defend the indefensible, I can only contrast these chilling, prefect-like performances with those of an earlier minister for women. The late Susan Ryan would have immediately gone out on the lawn to be with the women — arguing with them if she needed to, but at least she’d be listening.

It’s been almost half a century since I first went to work in parliament’s far less imposing, much more crowded, but arguably more congenial old building. And the revelations over the past weeks have set me wondering, as it has others, whether it was better or worse there for women back in the day.

The women’s movement took off while William McMahon’s Liberal government was still in office, and was instrumental in voting it out. With the Whitlam government came many significant changes, but there was still much to do, so many demands to meet. We focused mainly on getting childcare up and running, but equal pay, legalised abortion, equal education opportunity and anti-discrimination measures were also sought. We began funding health centres and refuges. The canvas was so wide because our status as women had been so very limited before. A couple of women sat in the Senate, but none in the House of Representatives.

What happened in the years since then? After Whitlam came a backlash; and even after Hawke was elected and Labor was in office again, Ryan had to fight long and hard for sex discrimination legislation. These were the “post-feminist” years, when the feminism that remained was all about middle-class career advancement, and so many of the services that had made even that attainable were privatised and priced out of reach.

For all that, so many women aspire to lives that we had scarcely dreamt of. Progress is undeniable, yet significant barriers remain — and they help explain the fury unleashed. And that fury is more focused on the horrific violence women can be subjected to, physical and sexual, in the domestic sphere and in the workplace, and even at the very centre of our democracy.

After cogitating on whether things are better or worse, I’ve also come up with disturbing remembrances of my own. Yes, I was groped by a cabinet minister once and never said anything about it — largely because I could scarcely believe it was happening, but also because I sensed there wasn’t much point. Who was going to believe me? I was also stalked by a highly respected man who worked in the building, and I did say something about that and wasn’t believed. Years later the man in question apologised. Fortunately I wasn’t raped, because in a dangerous moment a decent guy accepted without question my final rebuff of his advances. Thank you, I say to the wonderful young women who have made this the serious issue it always should have been.

I can’t see how a government that has lied so much so often, that has lost the trust of so many, can survive. When report after report about life-threatening shortfalls in funding for programs and services has been ignored, and Zali Steggall’s bill to make sexual harassment illegal has been summarily dismissed by the prime minister on the very day women all over the country were telling their stories and taking to the streets. When rampant patronage has been encouraged, and money spent unwisely and corruptly, and the threat of climate change has been minimised. When lives have been ruined by programs like Robodebt, and people like Bernard Collaery are targeted by punitive lawsuits and cover-ups.

I could be wrong. I often am. But for what it’s worth, here’s my advice to our parliamentary masters: it’s never a good idea to infuriate the people — maybe half the population or more — who happen to be paying your salaries. •

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By the time McManus took the podium, the crowd on the lawn before Parliament House was well primed. If it was anger that brought them together, a sense of common purpose was to the fore. Host Julia Zemiro kept the mood buoyant, emphasising the diversity of the assembly and the fact that this was in every sense a “safe” gathering, albeit one too risky for the prime minister to front up to.

After a gracious welcome to country from Aunty Violet Sheridan, Tjanara Goreng Goreng, a Traditional Owner from Central Queensland, spoke further about the importance of Capital Hill as ancient ceremonial ground and called for attention to “the quiet stillness of our country.” She evoked the principle of deep listening, and as they listened to her, those who had come for a protest march more closely resembled a mob in the Aboriginal sense of the term, a collective bonded by fundamental commonalities.

Not that anger was left out of the equation. According to march organiser Janine Hendry, the rollout of protests across forty cities was “an outpouring of rage about gendered violence.” Saxon Mullins, who heads a sexual assault and advocacy centre, spoke of lives stolen by years of trauma. Ballarat lawyer Ingrid Irwin appeared in a gown and wig to denounce a criminal justice system that fails to give sexual assault victims the right to a lawyer. Madhumitha Janagaraja, president of the ANU Students’ Association, introduced herself as an abuse survivor and emphasised the increased risk for those with disabilities in a system that is “not on our side.”

Canberra journalist Virginia Haussegger appeared with Biff Ward, founding member of the Canberra women’s liberation movement, whose proclamation, “It feels like a tidal wave of rage out there,” appeared in headlines a few hours later. Katharine Murphy, writing in the Guardian, declared that “voices raised in anger are echoing through the land.” The rage factor commands attention, and has certainly captured the imagination of journalists.

Soon after Ward finished speaking, Nine correspondent Chris Uhlmann took up a position at the upper end of the lawn, overlooking the march, and commenced a report to camera with the words, “Rage outside parliament is washing over politics.” The camera operator stopped him. “There’s no rage,” he said, gesturing towards the crowd which, shortly before, was illustrating Ward’s pronouncement very effectively. “Got to wait for the rage,” he added. And so they waited. The crowd, however, didn’t oblige. Those gathered were listening in deep silence to Brittany Higgins, who, battling to maintain her composure, had made an unscheduled appearance “out of necessity.”

Brief bursts of clapping and other sounds of encouragement punctuated her speech, but these were quiet moments, and the quietness itself was perhaps the most important message of the day. Sometimes you have to just listen. The three generations brought together in this crowd harboured reserves not just of rage, but also of generosity, social maturity and moral intelligence.

Little of that was on display inside Parliament House when, as the marchers dispersed, the government assembled for question time. Forced to acknowledge what was happening outside, prime minister Scott Morrison embarked on a waffling address full of double negatives (“this is not to suggest that good faith and genuine efforts are not being made”) and vacuous parentheses (“I would hope”; “… as it has, until now, and I hope into the future”). This was ready ammunition for opposition leader Anthony Albanese, who remarked that Morrison was displaying “not so much a tin ear as a wall of concrete.” There followed a succession of opposition questions drawn from statements made by Brittany Higgins.

Those on the government frontbench may have looked somewhat uncomfortable, but not acutely so. Here they were, in their place of greater safety, and for every challenge from across the floor there came a question from its own ranks about the marvels of the current economic recovery, to which Morrison and Josh Frydenberg responded with all the impassioned conviction that was entirely missing from the government’s responses to the urgent and fundamental demands for social justice delivered on its doorstep.

So what are we left with, after this extraordinary day of reckoning? Not much, if those at the rallies walk away carrying the burden of what is now a tired old adage about maintaining the rage. In an insightful article about rage and the rise of the women’s movement, Haussegger quotes American writer Soraya Chemaly confronting the question of “what to do with all this rage?” When properly understood, she says, it is “an outstandingly clarifying emotion.”

Some of the turning points of political history are marked by the surging of rage as a clarifying moral force, others by the blind rage of mob violence, as evoked in A Place of Greater Safety, Hilary Mantel’s chronicle of the French Revolution. It’s doubtful whether fear of the latter really lurks in the hearts of our leading federal politicians. They know they are safe at work, and they know the women gathered outside Parliament House acted in a spirit at the opposite end of the spectrum from the sentiments that prompted Trump supporters to storm the US Capitol on 6 January.

The image of Uhlmann standing on a wall outside Parliament House waiting for the rage is strangely appropriate. Rage is not the heart of the story here. The new generation of protesters is asking, first and foremost, for safety. But their sense of being under threat is caused, as Grace Tame so cogently insists, by a chronic imbalance of power. Rather than maintain the rage, perhaps we should adopt another old adage: “Don’t get mad, get even.” That might be done effectively if half a dozen of the impressive speakers who fronted the marches around the country ran for federal seats, swelling the ranks of brilliantly effective female independents in parliament so as to hold the balance of power. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

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The reports tell us there is a problem, and that there has been for years. They tell managers they have good reason to be concerned, and counsel them to ensure they run training programs, establish complaints procedures and keep data about progress. The statistics are unassailable: the rates of harassment and the level of non-reporting have remained stubbornly at around the same level in workplaces generally and in the legal sector in particular.

Since 2003, the Australian Human Rights Commission has conducted four periodic surveys on the national experience of sexual harassment. Its 2018 survey, Everyone’s Business, confirmed that sexual harassment in Australian workplaces was widespread, with one in three people (39 per cent of women and 26 per cent of men) having experienced sexual harassment at work in the previous five years. Four out of five were sexually harassed by a male. The majority of workplace sexual harassment took place within Australia’s four largest industries.

The AHRC’s Respect@Work report, which runs to over 900 pages, bleakly noted that the rate of change has been disappointingly slow for more than thirty-five years, and that Australia now lags behind other countries in preventing and responding to sexual harassment. The situation in the legal profession — my profession — is no better; in fact, on the whole it’s worse. Recent reports have confirmed that more than 30 per cent of women in the Australian legal profession have experienced sexual harassment at work.

Who are the harassers? Big reveal: most are male. Beyond this, it is difficult to identify any typical characteristics. Sexual harassers are to be found in all age groups, industries and social backgrounds. The AHRC survey provided some additional insights. Of the respondents who had been sexually harassed in the preceding five years, 79 per cent said that one or more of their harassers was male. Where the most recent incident involved a single harasser, more than half (54 per cent) indicated that the harasser was aged forty or older.

And, of course, harassers often strike again. The survey found that 41 per cent of those who said they had been sexually harassed in the workplace in the last five years were aware that others in their workplace had also been sexually harassed, most often at the hands of the same person. This data confirms that one of the big problems any attempt to tackle harassment must face is recidivism.

But why do they do it? My initial glib response to this question was: because they can. Following lengthy and mature reflection, I can now confirm that the answer is: because they can.

Power is important. In the case of the law, it matters that the profession is very hierarchical, with the ranks — clerk, graduate, lawyer, associate, senior associate, partner — clearly designated. Barristers progress through the roles of reader, junior counsel and senior counsel — and ultimately, perhaps, judge. At each stage, a reasonable period must be served (and high proficiency generally displayed) in order to move to the next level. As a result, age is a good indicator of seniority and status. It is not determinative — for example, I have had junior counsels working with me who are older than I am — but it is a fair proxy for one’s position in the hierarchy. The power dynamic is overt. The partner of the firm who will determine whether you get a promotion or a pay increase wields power over you every day. It is obvious to junior barristers that senior counsel possess the power to affect their reputation and workflow at the Bar.

It is very likely that this power structure has contributed to a culture of silence in the law. The same can no doubt be said of medicine, the military and many other fields where the hierarchy is obvious. But sexual harassment is clearly not confined to situations where a harasser is in a position of explicit seniority. The AHRC report found that harassers and victims were most commonly co-workers employed at the same level (27 per cent for single harassers and 35 per cent for multiple harassers).

Feminist scholars argue that broader gender inequality helps to explain the prevalence of sexual harassment in circumstances where the imbalance in power between the harasser and victim doesn’t fit a commonly recognised pattern, like a disparity in age, seniority or authority. Understood this way, sexual harassment by men of women who are their peers is the manifestation of an attempt to gain power over them. The feminist analysis is that the maintenance of a workplace atmosphere in which women’s contributions are routinely devalued, and in which they are sexualised and degraded, serves to undermine all women, and to reduce their potential advancement. Elizabeth Shi and Freeman Zhong argue that the conception of sexual harassment as individualised, aberrant behaviour entirely fails to address these structural and systemic issues.

Women in powerful positions are sometimes harassed by men who hold less powerful positions. This “harassing up” is often in the nature of derogatory gender-based comments or sexist jokes. Again, feminists posit that the harassment in these cases is aimed at undermining women by focusing on stereotypical characteristics attributed to them.

To find out what men say about this, I consulted the website of Male Champions of Change. Yes, that’s their name. The Male Champions of Change describe themselves as proponents of a “disruptive strategy to accelerate the advancement of women in leadership and to achieve gender equality.” You may wonder why it is that a group of men calling on other men to adhere to existing laws prohibiting discrimination has been awarded the label champions. When women talk about sexual harassment, they are humourless feminists. When men form a club to talk about sexual harassment, they award themselves medals for their efforts. Sigh.

In any event, the Male Champions of Change released a report in 2019 in which they proclaimed, from their position on the winners’ podium, that “sexual harassment, in all its forms, is an abuse of power… [and] represents behaviours that are beneath the standards we expect from every one of us and across our organisations.” Here, the Champions nail it. At its core, sexual harassment is indeed an abuse of power. That power usually comes from and is strengthened by a man’s position in the workplace hierarchy. But it may also be the personal rather than institutional power, which comes simply from being male rather than female. That subtle form of power may derive from working in an environment where, no matter how hardworking or intelligent your female co-worker is, she can be brought down instantly by being described or judged by reference to her looks, and, despite her wishes, she can be talked about, touched and propositioned because she is a woman.

Should we bother trying to fix this? Yes, we must. One does not need to care about the hurt feelings of women or their position in society to know things have to change. Even if you care only about the bottom line, you will want to stamp it out. Sexual harassment represents a cost to Australian employers through lost productivity, sick leave, staff turnover, negative impact on workplace culture, low morale, diversion of resources associated with responding to complaints, litigation and workers’ compensation, and reputational damage. A report by Deloitte estimated that, in 2018, workplace sexual harassment cost the Australian economy approximately $2.6 billion in lost productivity and $900 million in other costs. •

This is an extract from Power & Consent, by Rachel Doyle, released this month by Monash University Publishing in its In the National Interest series.

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As we celebrate International Women’s Day, we should recognise the economic pain women have borne through this crisis. They were more likely to lose their jobs, more likely to pick up extra unpaid work, and less likely to get government support.

It isn’t too late to right the wrongs. In a new Grattan Institute report we argue that federal and state governments should boost support for women’s employment to build a broader recovery and avoid exacerbating economic inequalities between women and men.

Women were more likely to lose paid work during the pandemic because they are more likely to work in the “social consumption” businesses that were forced to scale down operations or close entirely during lockdowns. About two-thirds of hospitality and personal service workers, for example, are women.

Women are also more likely to have part-time or casual jobs, which were much more vulnerable than full-time jobs. And that meant they were much more likely to lose jobs and hours than men, and less likely to be eligible for JobKeeper.

Since lockdowns lifted, the employment bounce-back has been faster than expected. But it is still incomplete. In January, 55,000 fewer women were in work than before the crisis, and 9000 fewer men. Unemployment and underemployment remain too high for both women and men, and are expected to stay that way for years.

Most of the industries that continue to be affected by restrictions — higher education, tourism and hospitality, for instance — employ a majority of women. Prominent among the vulnerable groups that haven’t experienced a bounce-back are single parents, 80 per cent of whom are women.

The divergence between men and women at work has been compounded by a divergence at home. Women already did the lion’s share of housework, caring and other unpaid work. With many adults working from home during the crisis, and children learning from home, that load only grew. Everyone did more, but women, and especially mothers, took on a bigger share of the extra work.

More unpaid work means less time for employment and education. Many women reduced their paid hours, left the workforce altogether or stopped studying. These choices, made out of short-term need, have long-term ramifications for women’s earnings, careers and economic security.

For many women who lost jobs or reduced their paid hours, 2020 will be another interruption in a stop–start career. And that means a wider earnings gap between men and women: even six months out of work can add another $100,000 to the $2 million average lifetime earnings gap between men and women.

What can be done? In the short term, governments must give priority to reducing unemployment and underemployment as quickly as possible. More stimulus is likely to be needed, and governments should take this opportunity to build a broader recovery.

The extra spending should be targeted to the sectors that are still struggling, many of which are major employers of women. This could include vouchers to encourage spending on hospitality, tourism and entertainment, and temporary expansions of social programs and services.

The federal government should also strengthen support for people who are still out of work. It should expand the JobMaker hiring credit and, as has been widely advocated, further increase the JobSeeker payment and Commonwealth Rent Assistance. This would boost economic activity, help unemployed people to look for work, and improve the living standards of Australia’s most vulnerable people, including single mothers.

As they focus on rebuilding in the longer term, governments should invest in the care economy to boost economic growth and improve the living standards of all Australians, while reducing women’s economic disadvantage. Making childcare cheaper is the most significant thing the federal government can do to support women’s employment. Investment in aged care is also urgently needed and would create jobs for women while improving the living standards of older Australians.

So far, the federal government has failed to meaningfully tackle the economic costs borne by Australian women in the Covid-19 recession. It should use the next budget, due in May, to ensure Australia really does build back better. •

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It’s not like walking into a Centrelink office or a motor vehicle registry. If you work across the lake at the university, as I do, you’ll probably have heating in your office, but you’d be lucky to have air-conditioning. As an economy measure, they stopped providing office bins years ago.

The main cast on Capital Hill looks good, too. Politics might be show business for ugly people, but many staffers could pass muster on the red carpet. You’ll see women in pencil skirts and heels, men in snazzy dark suits with silk ties. The effect is a halfway house between nightclub and L.A. Law.

At the beginning of a sitting week, usually on Sunday, politicians and staffers descend on Canberra. Most pull long hours and everyone seems to be performing for everyone else. Many will have their eye on their next career step, and quite a few on the several steps after that. Some likely imagine a future victory speech thanking “the true believers” or proclaiming a surprise election triumph a “miracle.”

On Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, they have Wednesday on their minds. That night, they empty into the more glamorous of the restaurants and bars around Manuka, drinking, networking, hooking up. They’re still performing. They still have their eyes on the prize.

The parallels with the latter years of school for teenagers, and with university life, can be striking — a similar sense of newly gained freedoms being tested, of rules being stretched or broken, of jostling for attention and position in a pecking order up for grabs, and in which much is seen to be at stake. It’s no particular surprise that the rape accusation against the Coalition’s Christian Porter that shook Australian politics this week is a story of late school and early university. It’s no stretch to see connections and continuities here.

We are now being permitted to see with greater clarity the dangers in how this culture has evolved, especially its threat to women. The system rewards the kind of thrusting and unscrupulous behaviour that is now all too common in Australia’s decrepit political parties. And it validates a personal aggression that is especially valued when performed by men.

Some politicians themselves also roam this world, rather like feudal barons, as has become clear enough from the revelations of sexual relationships between them and their staffers. Some get right into the party atmosphere, sleeping it off on a couch the next day. Sexual relationships or occasional flings occur among politicians, staffers and journalists, occasionally leading to “and they lived happily ever after” — if not for abandoned spouses and aggrieved children — and sometimes to a less pleasant denouement.

When things go sour, it’s easy enough on this lawless workplace frontier to move those who cease to be flavour of the month — usually female staffers — sideways or even out the door. Some, finding their careers stalled after harsh experience, decide to leave.

Brittany Higgins’s testimony that she was raped by a fellow Liberal staffer has led many women who have worked at Parliament House to tell their own stories. Those that have so far made it into the public sphere have not usually been about rape, but they have covered workplace bullying, sexual harassment and gender discrimination. There appears to be a growing public acceptance of the view that Parliament House is not a safe place for women.

The experiences women recount are often harrowing in their details, but at their heart most come back to two points. One is unchecked power. The other is male domination.

Parliament House is more like Dodge City than a modern workplace. Under the Members of Parliament (Staff) Act, politicians exercise a level of arbitrary power that is increasingly anomalous. In essence, it’s an elaborate racket designed by politicians to serve the interests of politicians.

The arrangements provide those who take advantage of them with a vast pool of free labour — hours chalked up to experience, party service and favours to be conferred in the future. It’s also a system in which people with power are rewarded with the deference of young, impressionable and smart people who call them “the boss” and devote most of their waking hours to doing their bidding.

Everyone who achieves a position of even modest seniority or power in a profession is likely to experience deference. Those with integrity and maturity try to redirect that impulse into a mutual respect that empowers others. No doubt there are many among Australia’s 227 elected federal politicians and their senior staffers who behave responsibly and ethically. But we also know that among them — as well as among staffers who aspire to their jobs — there are the bullies, the foul-mouthed, the greedy, the drunks and the gropers. And there is sexual violence.

There was a time when parliamentary systems didn’t really bother to pretend that those inside the whale were like the rest of us. Take a look at any of the older chambers, such as Victoria’s splendid Legislative Council. It resembles the gentlemen’s club it has been for much of its history, an antechamber to other gentlemen’s clubs still to be found on Collins Street.

But politicians have increasingly sent out the message that they are just like us — only more committed to public service. Anyone with even a glancing acquaintance with modern politics knows this is rubbish. As one former staffer put it to me, they are more likely to be the “weirdo dorks” who flourished in university politics. Or they have had a solid career pumping out propaganda for a think tank. Or maybe they inhabited a union back office. If they worked for a bank, it wasn’t as a teller.

Unchecked power enables both male and female bullies. But Parliament House is a place where much more power is exercised by men than by women. Some carry a well-developed sense of entitlement, nurtured in wealthy families and expensive all-male private schools. It’s telling that at the very time the lecherous and abusive behaviour of adult “boys” on Capital Hill is in the spotlight, so is the sexual exploitation by private school boys of the girls in their social circles.

The most powerful inhabitants of the Potemkin village, immune to serious scrutiny of their singular arrangements in the past, might have given rather too little attention to what the public thinks of this self-indulgence. A little-noticed aspect of the Barnaby Joyce affair of a few years ago was the easy and mistaken assumption that a politician’s private life is his own business, and divorce a regrettable but unavoidable reality of modern life. Perhaps so: but this doesn’t mean that people are also willing to elect as president of the local parents’ and citizens’ association a man who leaves his wife and four daughters for a younger staffer, pregnant by him, at the same time as he opposes marriage equality.

The “anything goes” values of Manuka and Kingston at Wednesday drinks are not those of Australian suburbia. The enthusiastic moralisers of Capital Hill — so evident again in the brutal dealing with the unemployed last month — might be about to receive an overdue taste of their own medicine. One can only hope that the result is at least a safer workplace for women, who have every right to a career in and around politics — and maybe even some grappling with the unenviable task of helping to retrieve the place from the disturbing depths to which it has sunk. •

Also on this topic — Marian Sawer: Dealing with toxic parliaments

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Workplace bullying and harassment have become endemic in a workplace characterised by precarious employment, high pressure, long hours and the demands of party loyalty. Unlike other employers, politicians can’t generally be dismissed for behaving badly towards their staff. Complainants find that partisan interests trump commitment to any kind of equality, and often echo a response recorded in a European survey: “I didn’t want to make the incident public. I didn’t want to damage my party.” And with political employment now the most common pathway to elected office, the perceived hostility of the parliamentary workplace has obvious implications for women’s political careers.

For the past twenty years the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, joined more recently by the Inter-Parliamentary Union, has sought to set standards for what the two organisations call gender-sensitive parliaments. Inter-Parliamentary Union members, including Australia, endorsed a plan of action for gender-sensitive parliaments in 2012, and individual parliaments have responded in different ways.

In the Canada, Iceland and European parliaments, MPs must sign a commitment to help create a work environment free of sexual harassment. A failure to do so in the European Parliament disqualifies an MEP from being appointed as a rapporteur — responsible for steering a piece of legislation — or participating in official delegations. The European Parliament also provides training for parliamentarians in managing and staffing their offices.

Most relevant to Australia are the policies, codes of conduct and complaints mechanisms recently adopted in Canada and Britain. In both countries staffers are publicly funded but directly employed by MPs with the power to hire and fire, creating the same structural problem as exists here.

Canada’s House of Commons led the way in 2014 with a policy to prevent harassment of political staffers. But it was criticised for lacking a fully independent grievance process, with staffers required to raise matters first with their employing MP, despite their employment being largely dependent on the MP’s goodwill.

Under the latest version of the policy, approved in January, the office of the Chief Human Resources Officer has primary responsibility for training all new MPs and employees within three months of their arrival, and again every three years. The office also handles complaints and publishes an annual report on the parliamentary website. In 2019–20 it handled two complaints of abuse of authority, two of harassment and one of sexual harassment. A separate code of conduct is designed to eliminate sexual harassment among MPs.

In Britain an independent inquiry into the bullying and harassment of staff, headed by Dame Laura Cox, was established in the wake of the 2017 “Pestminster” scandal. Even before the inquiry reported, the House of Commons adopted a Behaviour Code, with accompanying policies on bullying, harassment and sexual misconduct. These were to be implemented through an independent complaints and grievance scheme, a process in which Cox recommended MPs should play no part. Since last year an independent expert panel has had the power to recommend an MP be suspended or expelled, or face other serious sanctions. Such recommendations need to be approved by the House of Commons, but without debate, in the interests of the complainant’s confidentiality.

Another independent inquiry, this one by Gemma White QC, heard from many staffers and emphasised their uniquely vulnerable position. Many considered that complaining about bullying and harassment was career suicide. The UK grievance scheme has now been extended to former staffers — the group most likely to take advantage of it, White noted — which it is hoped will influence MPs’ behaviour. In Britain, as in Canada, all newly elected MPs are required to attend training sessions.

Despite staffers being employed centrally in New Zealand, many of the same dynamics are in play. In 2018 the parliamentary speaker, Trevor Mallard, initiated a review by independent consultant Debbie Francis that found evidence of serious bullying of staff and other unacceptable behaviour, including sexual harassment and even sexual assault. A new code of conduct, drafted by a cross-party group of MPs, has been signed by all parties on a voluntary basis, leaving the speaker and party whips to enforce it. Although no agreement has been reached on the creation of an independent complaints commissioner, Mallard said last year that he had begun requiring “the worst-behaving MPs” to undergo workplace training before being allowed staff in their office.

What can Australia learn from these initiatives? First we need to acknowledge the problem. Then we need an independent inquiry to assess the extent of bullying and harassment, including sexual harassment, and make recommendations informed by the views of staffers themselves — particularly former staffers, who are freer to speak. Out of that inquiry must come a code of conduct and an independent body to take responsibility for implementing the code and handling complaints, which would require amendment of the Members of Parliament (Staff) Act. Finally, as in comparable parliaments, training in office management and harassment prevention must be mandatory.

Those working in parliaments need the same rights as employees in other workplaces. Those employing staffers need to be accountable for their behaviour. Parliaments need to model good behaviour, not bad, if they are to earn respect. Above all, now that women are present in sizeable numbers as both parliamentarians and staffers, they need to be given an equal opportunity to perform well without the career-limiting constraints imposed by bullying and harassment. Let us hope this is parliament’s #MeToo moment. •

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Sydney MP Jason Falinski echoed many within the Liberal party room when he tweeted: “Assault of any sort, but sexual assault in particular is just unbelievable. Ms Higgins is incredible [sic] brave for speaking out and we should all respect that.” As another government MP noted midweek, “it has genuinely shocked people.”

Unsurprisingly, it has also shaken people outside the building. Some MPs are reporting a similar level of community correspondence and outrage to early 2018, when Barnaby Joyce’s affair with staffer Vikki Campion was made public.

Of course, the alleged perpetrator, not the government or the building, is responsible here. But you can’t blame voters for thinking Parliament House is a terrible place to work.

Higgins’s story, and her claim she was not adequately supported by her bosses, has produced a confusing flurry of reviews into working conditions and political staffing in Parliament House. Coalition MPs say there is a genuine desire to make the place safer for women and make sure no one else has a similar experience. But the government also needs to be seen to be doing something and doing something fast. So far, it’s unclear how the reviews will be coordinated and turned into something real.

Doubtless, there is also a reasonable expectation within Liberal ranks that any parliament-wide investigation will turn the spotlight on other parties as well.

As the details of who knew exactly what and when are thrashed out, one of the major disappointments (in a week of many) has been Reynolds’s performance. We know it took Reynolds several days to talk to Higgins after her acting chief of staff, Fiona Brown, learned of the alleged rape. And we know the meeting happened in front of the very couch where Higgins says the assault happened. (Reynolds says she was not aware of this at the time.)

Reynolds’s parliamentary apology to Higgins on Tuesday also raised eyebrows because it came in response to a question from Labor during question time, not as a statement on her own initiative. In the procedure-driven world of the Senate, this speaks volumes. Her tears in the Senate on Thursday, on the other hand, highlighted the emotional impact of this week’s revelations.

Reynolds’s missteps are also seen against her background as one of the Liberals’ most prominent advocates for women in politics. As a backbencher, she was arguably best known for pushing the party’s federal executive to adopt gender-equality targets. Whenever the issue was about “women in the Coalition,” Reynolds was at the top of journalists’ lists to call for comment.

Even since her appointment to the ministry in 2018, and amid the distractions of the defence portfolio since 2019, Reynolds still promoted her work with women. Her website carries a whole section titled “empowering women.” “Senator Reynolds is a passionate champion for gender equality and female empowerment in politics and in society more generally,” it begins. “Senator Reynolds continues to work hard to effect genuine organisational change within the Liberal Party.”

And while much is made of Reynolds’s pre-parliament military career, a significant chunk of her CV is taken up by political staffing roles. She was former customs minister Chris Ellison’s chief of staff in the early 2000s and, before that, an electorate officer for former Western Australian MPs Fred Chaney and Judi Moylan. She knows what it’s like to be a female Liberal staffer, even a relatively junior one.

Some Coalition colleagues this week put Reynolds’s bungled response (to an admittedly difficult situation) down to her relative inexperience as a minister. There were dark mutterings about how she was elevated too quickly to cabinet to make the party look more female-friendly ahead of the 2019 election.

In all this, though, she was being advised by a political operative of considerable standing and experience in the party. Fiona Brown was a long-time adviser to Arthur Sinodinos before working for Reynolds, via the prime minister’s office.

Other Liberal members said any discussion of Higgins’s story needs to concentrate on the broader workplace culture — an observation that comes off the back of increasing concern about the safety of women and the treatment of political staff at parliament. Beyond Four Corners’s recent investigation into allegations of harassment and bullying by ministers, ANU political scientist Maria Maley has been researching the experience of political staffers at state and federal levels.

Maley has interviewed former staffers who describe examples of sexual harassment and bullying by other staffers and their bosses. She notes that their job security is also extremely precarious. According to their terms of employment, they can be sacked at any time if the MP or senator loses “trust or confidence” in them.

It’s also a job that involves late nights, high stress and plenty of booze. While this is the case in many industries, parliament is a bit different because so many people fly into Canberra for sitting weeks, and fly out again straight after. If not a bubble, it certainly leads to a “what happens on tour, stays on tour” atmosphere for those who participate enthusiastically in the many functions, dinners and drinks that crowd sitting-week evenings.

Former Liberal MP Fiona Scott also points to a “persistent upstairs/downstairs class system” in parliament, which involves everyone who works in the building. “This creates a power imbalance between MPs and all employees at Parliament House,” she told me this week. “And that’s just not in line with wider Australian workplaces.”

Australia may see itself as egalitarian, but inside parliament, MPs are treated as somewhere between gods and celebrities — with separate entrances, separate security processes and separate dining areas. They are chauffeured around in Comcars and brought glasses of water by attendants, and can have lifts especially vacated for them. They are called not by their names but by titles like Mr Speaker, Minister and Senator. Even colloquially, they are known as “the boss.” This special status can also trickle down to their senior staff.

It is not hard to imagine Higgins feeling her allegiance should be to her boss and the political optics ahead of an imminent election, rather than to her own personal situation. It’s also not hard to see how she felt she had little choice about what to do, even if she was told she would be supported to go to the police.

When the #MeToo movement hit the entertainment and media industries several years ago, many within federal parliament wondered when it would reach politics. Given the response among politicians, staff and the public, they don’t need to wonder any more. •

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The revival of the governess and the accompanying debate about privilege and educational advantage gives historian Patricia Clarke’s new book more contemporary resonance than its 1985 edition, The Governesses: Letters from the Colonies 1862–1882. This revised version of that book is also exquisitely illustrated with nineteenth-century landscapes, lithographs and cartoons that further enliven a forgotten yet suddenly relevant subject.

Beyond governesses, Clarke’s oeuvre has pushed Australian female writers into the biographical canon, especially her invaluable history of women’s journalism in the nineteenth century, Pen Portraits (1988); biographies of novelists Rosa Praed (1999) and Jessie Couvreur (1994), journalist Louisa Atkinson (1990) and feminist Eilean Giblin (2013); her edition of Judith Wright’s memoir, Half a Lifetime (1999); and the book she co-edited with Dale Spender, Life Lines: Australian Women’s Letters and Diaries 1788–1840 (1992). Her eye for archival life writing that reveals hidden histories is similarly evident in Great Expectations, which is drawn from governesses’ letters to the Female Middle Class Emigration Society, or FMCES, the organisation that funded their passage to Australia between 1861 to 1886.

While today’s governesses (or the male equivalent, “governors”) presumably have a teaching degree, Clarke’s young women were characters straight from Bridgerton who offered their students little more than basic literacy and numeracy, possibly with art, French and music, and a posh accent that hid their genteel poverty. Along with their books and other luggage, they packed the rigid English class system, and before they even embarked they were complaining about travelling second-class, an early warning of the trouble ahead.

Those who found work with a family complained about the colonial children: “[They are] wild and impetuous,” wrote one. “The floor is the place for everything and it is no use making yourself unhappy because they will not acquire English manners for they do not like them.” They also struggled with the colonial mothers, who, they opined, were far too interested in their children, “do not like to be made to feel inferior” and were “indolent and untidy.”

Clarke responds empathetically to the entitled but naive women who arrived in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, blinded by the southern light and the reality of their new situation. She argues that they were lured down the colonial garden path by promises that were clearly at odds with news reaching the FMCES’s founder, Maria Rye, that the colonies didn’t need more governesses.

By the 1860s, in a colonial version of the skilled occupation list, colonial governments assisted only those whose skills were in demand: artisans, labourers and domestic servants. To overcome this hurdle the FMCES offered loans that covered a governess’s expenses, to be repaid once she secured employment as a governess in the colonies. But getting a job was becoming increasingly difficult as school systems created expectations of education outside the home. In this respect, Great Expectations offers a history of the efforts — at the governesses’ cost — to establish formal private and public schooling in Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland.

Despite warnings, Rye believed that dumping more of England’s problems on the colonies was a good idea — if no longer convicts, why not single women? In Clarke’s telling, she is a tunnel-visioned, anti-Catholic evangelist who wilfully ignores her scheme’s problematic premise to the detriment of more than 300 young women. Great Expectations is as much about Rye’s great illusions as the governesses who experienced her scheme’s great disillusionment.

Through extracts from their letters to the FMCES, Clarke gives voice to the governesses’ culture shock and isolation. They expected to be met by FMCES contacts, but most found little help. As late as 1874 — a decade after the scheme began — Ellen Ollard wrote to the FMCES that “never while I live, shall I forget the feeling of despair that took possession of me” on arriving alone in Melbourne. They competed for the few available governess jobs and by and large found themselves to be no more than glamorised servants, especially if they couldn’t teach music. Those who were willing — or more often compelled by a lack of work in the city — travelled hundreds of kilometres to remote stations.

Some of the more resilient, adventurous governesses adapted; some of the entrepreneurial began their own schools; a few married, which was another lure of the scheme that had been nicknamed the Export Wife Trade by the Saturday Review back in London. Clarke quotes Rye — “Teach your protégées to emigrate; send them where the men want wives, the mothers want governesses” — and then, like a Twitter moderator, flags another false promise: the colonies were already fine on the marriage front.

Placed in Clarke’s wider context, the governesses’ struggle to adjust reveals the women to be more than haughty and hapless snobs. Great Expectations is written in a clear if brisk style that will appeal to a wide, non-specialist readership. Where possible, Clarke provides brief details of the governesses’ lives and employers using archival information beyond their letters, but sometimes I wanted to linger with some of these women and more fully understand, as much as factually possible, the situations they found themselves in and the people they found themselves among.

After recurring references to her “friendlessness,” we do learn more about the miserable Rosa Phayne, begging for help to return to England from her rural station post. Her last letter to the FMCES is in 1872: an appeal for help finding work in London, written as she was about to board a ship home. It’s to be hoped that present-day pandemic “governesses” and “governors” are writing about their lived experiences for a future historian to continue Clarke’s work. •

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Still, #MeToo goes on, not least as a publishing phenomenon. Into this crowded and eclectic field comes a genuinely thought-provoking collection of essays by New York–based writer, editor and journalist JoAnn Wypijewski. Some of these pieces were published or written before the emergence of #MeToo, but are offered as freshly meaningful in its wake. Two come from the 1990s — one on Nushawn Williams, a young, Black man who caused a nationwide scandal when it was revealed he’d infected thirteen young women, some of them white, with HIV; another on the killing of Matthew Shepard, a twenty-year-old student, by two other young men in Laramie, Wyoming, in 1998, since memorialised as a tragic gay-hate crime.

In the 2000s, Wypijewski covered the case of gay Catholic priest Paul Shanley, convicted and imprisoned in 2004 for raping a child back in 1980, based on the “recovered memories” of one accuser — a story with so many layers that Wypijewski dedicates two essays to it. In another piece, she focuses on the court martial of Lynndie England, the young US army reserve soldier at the centre of the Abu Ghraib scandal. There are other essays too, not all of them as substantial (Wypijewski musters an astute appreciation of Madonna’s Sex book) but each of them animated by a “principled humanity” in which every person — whether labelled victim or suspect — is represented as “one of us, whether ultimately found guilty or not.”

Across a career that spans more than four decades — including as editor of the Nation magazine from 1982 to 2000 — Wypijewski has clearly been around. From this vantage point, she calls out #MeToo, or the American version of it, as a “sex panic.” It’s a term that also applies to the cases above, and in the rousing title essay Wypijewski dissects them as such. She defines a sex, or moral, panic as a “social eruption fanned by the media and characterised by alarm over innocence imperiled,” stereotypically that of white women and children.

Taking her cues from Sex Panic and the Punitive State (2011), in which anthropologist Roger Lancaster links these “mass convulsions” with the “expansion of state violence,” Wypijewski takes seriously their effects while rallying against them. When a panic takes hold, unwanted caresses are conflated with serious crimes like rape, and “all the stories are true, and the accused are guilty by default.” Conservatives, liberals and feminists have all stirred sex panics, deploying their “inflammatory language” and seeking retribution via the law-and-order mechanisms of what Wypijewski calls the “biggest prison state” in the world.

In these terms, #MeToo is nothing new, but rather the latest iteration of a recurring phenomenon bound up with carceral politics from which no one is exempt, including children. And some people, of course, such as Black boys and men, are much more likely to experience the full force of the police state, to take the wrongful imprisonment of the Central Park Five in 1989 as a stark case in point. Wypijewski is not the first to make these arguments — including in relation to #MeToo — but she makes them with bracing clarity and urgency.

Crucially, Wypijewski moves beyond the sex panic frame in each essay to the “causes and complications” beneath “the stories we think we all know.” Where she truly hits her stride is when she delivers the detail and analysis that the impoverished discourse of moral panic leaves no space for. Against the tabloid account, the hot take or even the fact-checked exposé, she offers both the long view and the close inspection. She is no fan of avenging #MeToo reporters like Ronan Farrow (also featured as a bit player in a sharp and compassionate essay on his father, the disgraced filmmaker Woody Allen) and not above jabs at what she sees as the sensationalist coverage of highly regarded publications including the Boston Globe, which broke the story of “paedophile priests” in the Catholic Church back in 2002, and Vanity Fair. She models a different way of telling a story, to get to what she calls the “mess of life.”

Occasionally, the essays lose shape — there’s a penchant for digression, including childhood recollections. A handy afterword ties up the narrative threads, but several essays would have benefited from their own explanatory notes. And if it’s not obvious by now, these are also very American stories, with limits to their wider applications. In late January alone, #MeToo was trending again in Greece, the Balkans and India.

Readers looking for an in-depth account of #MeToo may be disappointed by What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About #MeToo. Within the terms Wypijewski sets herself, though, this is a remarkably coherent collection, provocative in the best sense. In an era in which #MeToo’s most high-profile convict, Harvey Weinstein, can’t seem to be punished enough — news of his Covid-19 infection was widely and gleefully shared on social media — Wypijewski questions a wider culture that makes monsters out of men. •

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Now, in the dying days of the one-term Trump presidency, two authors — British activist and writer Laura Bates and Australian-born, US-based feminist philosopher Kate Manne — offer a different way of comprehending all that has happened in recent years. In their arrestingly titled new books, Bates and Manne switch their focus to men, or rather patriarchy and its many manifestations. These range from extreme and disturbing misogyny — “incel” Elliot Rodger’s murderous shooting spree in California in 2014 — through to the seemingly intractable everyday patterns that mean men do far less housework, for instance, than women. Inevitably, given flashpoints like Harvey Weinstein and Brett Kavanaugh, Bates and Manne sometimes cover similar ground, but their projects are also distinctive — reading one should not preclude reading the other.

Manne, building on her first and more academic book Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (2018), examines how male entitlement works, and explores its effects, including how women’s bodies are policed but harms against them aren’t taken seriously. As per Down Girl, Manne advances her own vocabulary and theoretical framework, with misogyny described as the “law enforcement branch” of patriarchy, and sexism its “theoretical and ideological branch.” “Himpathy,” first introduced in Down Girl to explain the pervasive but under-examined sympathy sometimes shown towards male perpetrators of sexual violence, returns in tandem with “herasure,” whereby victims and targets of misogyny are blamed for what happened to them, or ignored.

These remain useful terms, but between books Manne has also discovered intersectionality and Entitled accordingly “tackles a range of ways in which misogyny, himpathy and male entitlement work in tandem with a range of other oppressions.” Manne’s analysis of misogyny now takes in transmisogyny and misogynoir — not her own terms — and draws on more scholarship and insights from Black women, non-binary people and women of colour. The book’s strongest chapters — on bodily control and medical care — benefit most from her new intersectional approach.

Manne’s enlarged focus justifies a new book that elsewhere recycles some of the same arguments and case studies as Down Girl. It’s also pleasing to read a book by a feminist academic aimed at a wide audience. Manne moves smoothly from examples of male entitlement in pop culture to cogent analysis of anti-abortion rhetoric and legislation. She pokes holes in complicit and complacent media rhetoric about whether women are “electable” to the highest office, and research that purportedly shows men to be more stoic about pain than women. Her concluding chapter, in which she cautiously hopes for a more justly entitled future for her daughter and other girls, is sufficiently galvanising.

Yet for all its obvious strengths, Entitled is a somewhat uneven book, and some sections appear to have been written in haste. Pages and pages are dedicated to labouring an example or case study — say, the play Gas Light or the podcast series Dirty John — creating a padding effect. Elsewhere, in paying tribute to Black feminist writers like Tressie McMillan Cottom, Manne seems to assume her readership would not already be aware of this work. For a writer who skilfully scrutinises the practice of “mansplaining,” Manne doesn’t seem aware of her own occasional tendency to tip over into an adjacent explanatory style, though she does dutifully acknowledge her privilege and subjectivity.

Manne’s book is mostly focused on American examples, though the odd Australian reference — including to Julia Gillard, Alan Jones and Geoffrey Rush — pops up. By contrast, I lost count of the Australian examples in Laura Bates’s more substantial and ambitious investigation of contemporary misogyny, which makes for bracing reading. In Men Who Hate Women, Bates convincingly argues that the so-called fringe online world of the “manosphere” has a ripple effect way beyond the online subcultures of “incels” (short for involuntary celibates), pickup artists and men’s rights activists who gather on platforms like Reddit and 4chan.

Bates’s entry point is personal: as a public feminist and educator, she has been a frequent target of trolls and men’s rights activists, and subject to death threats. In recent years, she’s also noticed how some teenage boys she works with in schools have begun to sprout the rhetoric and false statistics of the manosphere. Now, in an exhaustively researched and carefully argued fashion, she joins the dots between the manosphere, the alt-right and mainstream media and politics.

Readers will be familiar with at least some examples of the mainstreaming of misogynist and sexist views — the language used by the outgoing American president being a case in point — but Bates’s skill is in drawing familiar and new material together in freshly revealing and insightful ways, including by historicising these male communities and putting them in a transnational frame. Men’s rights activists, for instance, emerged from a “devastating schism” in the men’s liberation movement in the United States, and now its most prominent organisations and spokespeople are virulently anti-feminist, retailing false statistics and claims about rates of false rape allegations and men as victims of domestic violence. In Australia, prominent men’s rights activists have been given airtime on Seven’s Sunrise and have directly influenced politics, most recently Pauline Hanson’s successful call for an inquiry into family violence. Hanson, without producing evidence, claimed women routinely lie about abuse to gain advantage in court.

The size of these online communities — some of which overlap and all of which exhibit consistent and virulent misogyny, as well as racism and homophobia — is almost impossible to estimate with “any great accuracy,” writes Bates, but she succeeds in capturing a strong sense of their outsize and real-world influence. At the same time, she refutes the standard arguments used to dismiss or minimise what is evidently a globally interconnected phenomenon. She routinely and powerfully condemns the media for reductively polarised representations of incels (for example) as either “darkly violent and misogynist” or “a mischaracterised and disadvantaged group of lonely men.” The reality, writes Bates, “is that both these stories are true,” and herein lies the value of her book.

Bates pays attention to a whole spectrum of engagements with, and effects of, the manosphere. These include young boys who venture onto online platforms looking for advice or a sense of community and are gradually radicalised; “respectable” representatives of misogynist views, such as Jordan Peterson, who create and capitalise on what has become a booming market; and the Australian white supremacist Brenton Tarrant, who carried out the horrific Christchurch massacre in March 2019. Tarrant had links to “the troll culture of the chans, the alt-right and the manosphere,” but even more than this, argues Bates, “his entire act of hatred was planned, framed and performed within that world.”

The impact of Bates’s book is cumulative: by the end I was in no doubt that Bates had exhaustively identified and reckoned with a real and urgent problem. She wants “extremist misogyny” to be taken at least as seriously as other contemporary forms of radicalism and extremism: indeed, she contends, misogyny is typically a constitutive element, but not recognised as such because hatred against women is so normalised. I’m still mulling over some of her more specific solutions and strategies — which range from more youth social workers through to legislating online misogyny as hate speech — but it’s a credit to Bates that she offers so many of them. In the final pages, she confesses her fear about potential reactions to the book but declares it is “also an act of resistance.” Men Who Hate Women is a brave book, and it deserves a wide readership. •

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It’s not just theory. Recessions in the United States have come in all shapes and sizes since the end of the second world war, but most have been V-shaped. Australia’s few recessions have generally followed the same pattern.

But as financial wonks like to say, past performance is not a sure guide to the future. There are many reasons to think that Australia’s Covid-19 recession won’t follow the pattern. The government’s reliance on the shaky V-shaped assumption has resulted in a budget that’s big on spending but small on stimulus.

Covid-19 has not created a normal recession. While some recessions affect demand (like the 9/11 attacks, which kept US consumers at home) and others affect supply (earthquakes and tsunamis that cripple businesses), Covid-19 affects both. Government lockdowns and the fear of getting sick have kept consumers at home, while the shutdown of supply chains, shortages of workers, the inability to source inputs, and the sudden fall in international tourism, students and migrants have devastated businesses.

More than 900,000 businesses are on JobKeeper. The sad reality is that many will collapse once supports are removed, and that will reduce the economy’s capacity to produce goods and services. The speed of the recovery will hinge on the economy’s flexibility — how quickly workers can shift into new jobs, how quickly new businesses can be created and how quickly capital can be redeployed. Australia’s reduced labour mobility and high barriers to entry for new businesses suggest a slow process awaits.

International developments throw more cold water on a V-shaped recovery. It’s quite a list: Australia’s deteriorating relationship with China, our biggest trading partner; America’s unpredictability; growing calls around the world to reduce dependence on overseas suppliers; the collapse of the World Trade Organization’s dispute settlement system; the tightening of Australia’s foreign investment regime; an exchange rate already back at pre-crisis levels; and that collapse in tourists, immigrants and the international tertiary students who make up our third-biggest export sector.

All these conditions suggest less international support for the Australian economy after Covid-19 than we had before. This is a big problem for a country that gets a fifth of its gross domestic product from exports, $4 trillion of its capital stock from foreign investment and most of its GDP growth from immigration.

Then there’s the health crisis itself. The budget’s V-shaped recovery assumes not only no more outbreaks — a bold assumption when we look around the world today — but also the widespread availability of a vaccine by 2021. As the budget itself notes, the timing and efficacy of a vaccine is highly uncertain. Even if it eventuates, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has sought to moderate hopes that it will mean an instant return to life as normal, noting that face masks are more guaranteed to protect against Covid than a vaccine.

Yet a V-shaped recovery is the budget’s baseline — and the flaws in that assumption have significant consequences for the government’s planning.

The budget’s income tax cuts, for instance, are liable to be saved, not spent. While an investment allowance is worth a try, it assumes that cost is stopping businesses investing, rather than an absence of customers. (The poor take-up of similar measures in the past may suggest it’s the latter.) The budget has no plan for substantive structural reform to boost confidence, and some of the areas where stimulus would be most effective are conspicuously absent — infrastructure investment and the construction and repair of public housing represent an unusually small share of a big-spending budget.

There is also the question of where money is being directed. Covid-19 has hit the services sector the hardest, but it’s manufacturing that’s singled out for support. Covid-19 has disproportionately affected women, but most budget measures favour men and male-dominated industries. Covid-19 has caused massive unemployment, but it’s the employed who get the tax relief. Covid-19 has caused huge challenges for young people, but funding changes and a lack of support for universities threaten to make things worse for many.

The new JobMaker wage subsidy program, an improved NBN and investments in apprenticeships are the bright spots in the budget. But the risk is that Australia’s recovery more closely resembles a K than a V, with some industries booming (digital, manufacturing) while others go bust (universities, tourism), and with some cohorts of people benefiting (men, the middle-aged, the employed) while others aren’t (women, young people, the unemployed).

A V-shaped recovery is the goal, but it won’t be achieved if large segments of the population and the economy are left behind. The need to make growth more inclusive has never been stronger. •

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Tuesday night’s budget included several broad measures to support business and jobs, including its tax write-off for business investments and wage subsidy for employing young people. These look like sensible measures, albeit ones that bet heavily on business to lead the recovery. But when it comes to targeted policies for job creation, the 2020 budget is a sea of hard hats.

The three sectors with the most targeted support are all bloke-heavy: construction (more than $10 billion so far through the crisis), energy ($4 billion) and manufacturing ($3 billion). An extra $10 billion goes to transport projects, another boost to construction jobs in the building phase.

The problem? That doesn’t fit the story of this crisis. Unlike past recessions, the worst fallout in the Covid-19 recession has been in services sectors. Hospitality, the arts and administrative services have all been hit hard. These sectors are dominated by women, which is one reason women’s employment has taken a bigger hit this year.

Yet these sectors received next to nothing in the budget. They are also less likely to benefit from economy-wide supports such as instant asset write-offs because they are the least capital-intensive sectors.

The federal government could have helped these sectors in many ways. Overseas governments, and some state and local governments, have funded vouchers and discounts to encourage people back to restaurants, cafes and regional tourist destinations. Grants or direct support to help the arts sector revive could provide a desperately needed boost to our creative recovery.

The government could also have created many more jobs by directly investing in government services. Services create more jobs than infrastructure per dollar spent, and they have especially high economic multipliers right now.

The budget initiatives in education, aged care and mental health are welcome, but very small in the scheme of new spending. Major investments in aged care and education would be a jobs boon and could have provided a more rounded vision for the recovery.

“This government recognises that women have been significantly impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic,” the federal minister for women, Marise Payne, said just before the budget, “and it is critical that we focus on rebuilding their economic security as a priority.” Yet the government has left the biggest opportunity on the table. Making childcare more affordable is the most effective way to reduce the gender gap in working life and retirement — directly supporting jobs and the economic recovery.

The Grattan Institute has recommended a $5-billion-a-year package that would make childcare significantly cheaper and improve the workforce-participation incentives for primary carers (still mainly women). Instead, women seem to have been relegated in this budget to an afterthought in the form of a $240 million “support package” that offers no meaningful economic support.

All of these omissions are even more glaring given the spending on other areas and groups with far less need for support. Sizeable measures are targeted at energy, agriculture and defence. Yet all of these sectors have increased their total work hours since March. Another $3 billion is slated for manufacturing, a sector that has shed jobs during the crisis but should bounce back more quickly than “social consumption” businesses such as hospitality, retail and personal services.

Construction spending is needed because a crunch is expected as housing construction slows. But the focus on major transport infrastructure for job creation doesn’t make so much sense. These projects are less jobs-intensive. And states such as Victoria already have a big pipeline of large projects, so have little capacity to deliver more.

The $3 billion for shovel-ready projects focusing on road safety and local roads is better targeted to create jobs. But the government has missed the opportunity to deliver a major social housing spend to provide something desperately needed that would also help mitigate the downturn in housing construction.

To achieve its stated objective of getting unemployment well below 6 per cent as quickly as possible, the government should be focusing on stimulating sectors where activity has fallen the most — especially services sectors.

But this budget overlooks the hard hit in favour of the hard hat. The government should check this blind spot quickly.

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The biggest budget announcement is full immediate expensing of business investments, at a cost of $26.7 billion in just over two years. Under the scheme, almost every company in Australia will be able to immediately write off in full any eligible depreciable asset. Bringing forward depreciation reduces the real cost of investing for firms, particularly in long-lived assets such as plant and equipment. Similar schemes have proven effective in boosting business investment and employment.

The plan to offer wage subsidies to firms that hire workers under thirty-five should boost employment. Young people have been hardest hit by the Covid-19 recession, and are at the greatest risk of scarring should they remain out of the workforce for an extended period. The government will subsidise the wages of newly employed workers to the tune of $200 per week for new employees under thirty, and $100 per week for those under thirty-five, so long as they are employed for twenty hours a week or more and are a net addition to the payroll. This will support employment, but it’s a big step down from the JobKeeper wage subsidy, which is scheduled to be phased out by March next year.

Each of these measures will support employment and investment. But most striking is what’s been left out of the recovery plan for now, especially more direct measures to boost employment, and support for household spending beyond next year.

The plan to bring forward $13 billion in personal income tax cuts will help, but the extra money for middle-income earners won’t flow through until mid next year. Further cash handouts of $250 to pensioners and carers, in December and again in March 2021, should also boost spending, although many pensioners proved reluctant to spend the first two tranches in April and July. But there’s little in the budget beyond the end of next financial year to keep households spending.

So what’s missing?

Social housing is the most obvious absentee, given it can be rolled out quickly and delivers something that is desperately needed. Industry forecasts suggest that 12 to 18 per cent of all construction workers could lose their jobs in the months ahead, as the pipeline of apartment buildings starts to dry up. The government should have committed to build 30,000 social housing units, at a cost of $10 billion, to quickly fill that hole.

Boosting the childcare subsidy to reduce parents’ out-of-pocket costs is among the more significant economic reforms the government could have announced. More direct spending on government services like mental health and aged care would also have been a proven job winner. Instead there’s another $10 billion for major road projects, where capacity constraints are already biting.

The question of what happens to the JobSeeker benefit remains unresolved. More than a million Australians are benefiting from a temporary $250-a-fortnight boost to JobSeeker from the coronavirus supplement, but that’s due to end in December. The government says it will make an announcement closer to Christmas, but the lingering uncertainty will crimp households’ spending in the meantime.

Support in the budget is so heavily concentrated in the short term that policy decisions taken since the Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook last December actually improve the budget bottom line in 2023–24.

At least some further spending in some of these areas is almost inevitable in the coming months. Beyond JobSeeker, the Royal Commission into Aged Care is all but guaranteed to recommend substantial further funding for aged care when it reports next February.

But perhaps the biggest concern with the budget is that it simply settles for getting back to the pre-Covid era, and takes nearly half a decade to get there.

While the government expects unemployment to peak at just 8 per cent by Christmas, it’s still expected to remain above 6 per cent by the end of 2022, and be 5.5 per cent by mid 2024. Yet those who can still remember pre-Covid Australia will remember the economy back then was nothing to write home about. The jobless rate averaged 5.5 per cent over the five years to February 2020, and the average worker’s wages rose by just 0.3 per cent a year (after inflation) over that time.

Unemployment of 5.5 per cent in four years’ time would remain well above Treasury’s “full employment” estimate of 5 per cent, so it’s no wonder real wage growth is forecast to flatline over that time. Even for people in work, living standards are expected to stagnate.

The government should inject a further $50 billion in fiscal stimulus by the end of 2022. This could drive unemployment one percentage point lower, kickstarting growth in wages nearly two years earlier than under its current plan.

Concern over the cost of public debt shouldn’t hold the government back. Australia is expected to spend 0.9 per cent of GDP on interest this financial year, falling to 0.8 per cent by 2023. That’s lower than the 1 per cent it spent in 2018–19, despite a big growth in debt. And debt is expected to shrink as a share of GDP over the next forty years, despite projections that interest rates will gradually rise from 1 per cent today to 5 per cent within the next two decades.

Budget 2020 is a good start, but there’s plenty of unfinished business. There remains more work to do come MYEFO in December, and the 2021 budget in just seven months’ time. •

Brendan Coates is Household Finances Program Director at Grattan Institute.

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In the chair was Justice Elizabeth Evatt, who would become the first chief judge of the Family Court of Australia in 1975. She was joined on the commission by Anne Deveson, a trailblazing journalist with a passion for social justice, and Felix Arnot, the progressive Anglican archbishop of Brisbane. Their terms of reference were extremely broad: they had to examine the “family, social, educational, legal and sexual aspects of male and female relationships,” with a focus on sex education programs, medical training in sexuality, family planning, pressures on women in relation to children and family, and the legal and medical status of abortion.

The commission invited Australians to tell them “what do you think?” about sex, abortion, family life, family planning, parenthood, childcare, women’s rights and homosexuality.” People responded to this call in many ways. They gave evidence in person. They phoned in. They participated in research. They wrote official submissions that were available to be read while the commission was sitting. All of this material informed their final recommendations — more than 500 of them, published in five hefty volumes, that caused a sensation when they were finally released in 1977.

The submissions were as diverse as the people who wrote them. Whether they were typed on letterhead, or handwritten on floral stationery or in block letters on plain paper, they expressed a range of emotions: love, anger, loneliness, bewilderment, determination. People wrote with ideas for how to make human relationships better. They wrote to plead for political and social change or, sometimes, to prevent it.

When submissions arrived at the commission’s offices in Sydney, they were numbered and sorted into folders. The submissions on abortion offer a snapshot of the community’s polarised views. The push to liberalise abortion laws at the very beginning of the 1970s had inspired the formation of groups who challenged reform, such as Right to Life Australia. On the day parliament debated the abortion bill, women’s groups constructed a “women’s embassy” on the lawns of Parliament House, an appropriation of Indigenous protest strategies that dramatised women’s exclusion from the debate taking place inside the parliament. But they were outnumbered by their Right to Life opponents, who reportedly sent thousands of letters and telegrams to MPs urging them to reject any reform.

So it is unsurprising that many Australians wrote to the royal commission to oppose any liberalisation of abortion law on the grounds that it was a moral affront that would undermine the traditional family. These letter writers saw abortion as a “degrading” practice that lowered the “moral standard” of the family, and of society more broadly.

In contrast to this language of family, nation, and moral standards were other submissions, like this one from “Mary,” which was later included in Anne Deveson’s book about the royal commission, Australians At Risk:

Here is a personal testimony of what I had to go through to get an abortion in 1965. I was over forty three years old, but had a very young family; a girl under nine and a boy four. My loving partner was an alcoholic who made my life painful and unbearable, without hope or future.

Falling pregnant again, Mary had searched without success for a doctor who would terminate the pregnancy, her mental health deteriorating rapidly. When she finally obtained the abortion, she found that the doctor had also given her a hysterectomy without her consent. “I was given no explanation for this and no psychological follow up,” she wrote. “I hope no other woman has to live through a similar experience… [M]y nightmare of four months has given me the impetus to fight for abortion law appeal.”

In writing to the commission, Mary placed a deeply private memory on the public record to make a claim for abortion law reform. Other men and women wrote with similar intentions. Women who had experienced violent relationships narrated their experiences with uncaring police. Gay men and women wrote of the shame they felt concealing their sexuality. Mothers wrote about the difficulty of balancing family and work.

While the commission took testimony from doctors, social workers and other recognised experts, many of the people they heard from were ordinary citizens whose authority to speak derived from their private experiences. Many of these people were not only heard through their submissions, they also contributed to the commission’s public hearings, which attracted consistent media attention.

The commission enacted a kind of public intimacy similar to that which animated many of the social movements of the decade. It was a new way to talk about private life and about a new political strategy. It is best summed up by the women’s liberation slogan, “The personal is political,” an insight that emerged from “consciousness-raising,” the group discussions of personal life used to build political communities.

Women’s liberation and gay liberation were animated by this idea. The idea that the personal was political made Australians rethink the boundary between public and private. It changed our political and social life. All too often, though, this change has been obscured when we tell the national story of the 1970s.

We have long viewed the 1970s as a decade of political upheaval, centred on the drama of the dismissal of the Whitlam government on 11 November 1975. More recently, a second narrative of the 1970s has also taken hold. This story, told by Paul Kelly, George Megalogenis and other journalists, foregrounds the economic upheaval of the period — the stagflation, the end of the long postwar boom, the oil shocks — to frame the 1980s and 1990s as an era of crusading deregulatory reform.

Forged in the wake of the ground-breaking reforms of the Hawke–Keating governments a decade later, in the 1980s, this narrative reflects the centrality of economics in our framing of contemporary political life. Those reforms needed a genealogy, and portraying the 1970s as a decade of economic failure provided one.

I’m not suggesting that this story of the 1970s is inaccurate, or that the pain that the economic downturn caused was imaginary. But we construct historical narratives to serve our purposes in the present. This one was crafted to persuade us of the necessity — and success — of that later wave of economic reform. Today, as we tally the costs of deregulatory economic reform, we might write this history differently.

The economic narrative also obscures the extent to which the seventies was an extraordinary era of social reform and social contest. The decade saw the emergence (or reawakening) of many social justice movements. Many of our fundamental ideas about marriage and sex were challenged. Movements such as women’s and gay liberation reshaped our social norms and our political culture, even if their impact was partial and uneven. It was a turning point in the history of modern Australia, and fundamentally changed how we view private experiences and recognise the distinctive needs of women, children and people with different sexual orientations.

While none of these revolutions is complete, the struggles they animated reshaped Australia. But because we have tended to investigate these changes separately, rather than cumulatively, their collective impact has been more difficult to gauge. This relative neglect of the social transformations of the 1970s is even more striking when we think about the many ways that public discussion of issues previously considered private have shaped contemporary political and social debate.

Think of the recent explosion of stories using the hashtag #MeToo. The long campaign for marriage equality. The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. Domestic violence. Today, the politics of private experience takes up a lot of space in public life. Public discussion of these issues is characterised by an emphasis on personal testimony —individuals speaking publicly about private experiences.

Think of Chrissie and Anthony Foster, advocates for survivors of institutional child sexual abuse, or Rosie Batty, the 2015 Australian of the Year, who found a public voice as a woman who had endured domestic violence. The marriage equality campaign used ordinary people’s love stories to encourage Australians to vote “yes.” And #MeToo resonated so strongly because it gave women who had experienced sexual assault a platform for sharing personal stories.

It was in the 1970s that our ideas of what was “public” and what was “private” began to change. Women’s liberation and the gay and lesbian rights movement criticised the idea that things that happened in private were beyond the realm of politics.

“The personal is political,” the title of an essay by American feminist Carole Hanisch, was one of the most famous formulations of the Women’s Liberation Movement. It destabilised a foundational concept of modern political culture: the notion that there were two separate spheres of life, public and private. In this formulation, the public was the space of politics, government and paid work; the private was the place for intimacy and domesticity. The division between the two was strongly gendered, reinforced by ideology and government policy.

Citizenship is key to understanding these changing ideas of public and private. For much of the twentieth century, Australian citizenship was defined in exclusionary ways by ideas not only about race but also about gender. Historically, Australians’ rights to welfare, for example, were determined by gender as well as race. The foundational Harvester judgement of 1907 insisted that male wages should be determined by the needs of a male breadwinner with a wife and dependent children. This system — a form of social welfare – ensnared women as dependents of their husbands, as Marilyn Lake and other historians have demonstrated. In response, white women argued for special rights and protections (such as maternity allowances) on the grounds of their valuable national service as mothers, which further reinforced the gendered division between public and private spheres.

The assumption of male power within the family also left women and children vulnerable to abuse: domestic violence and rape in marriage, for example, were often viewed as “private” matters rather than crimes — indeed, rape within marriage was not criminalised nationally until 1991. And “privacy” was not an equal right: in some cases, it perpetuated oppression.

Across the 1970s, our ideas of what was “public” and what was “private” began to change. Second-wave feminism criticised the idea that what happened in private was beyond the realm of politics. As the split came into question, so too did the ideas of citizenship that had developed from it. Feminists no longer argued that motherhood was the basis of women’s contribution to the nation; gays and lesbians argued that keeping their sexuality “private” was oppressive and harmful.

Challenging and contesting the boundary between public and private life was central to the liberation movements of the 1970s. The changes they wrought in Australian social, cultural and political life are the subject of my book. It asks: how did the personal become political, and how did this change reshape the boundary between public and private life? How did this reshaping of what we thought of as public, and what we thought of as private, transform Australia in the late twentieth century?

These movements brought the personal to bear on the political in new ways. The shift rewrote our expectations of government and generated new ways to “do” politics and to become political. Women, in particular, emerged as a distinctive constituency with their own political demands: for women’s refuges, childcare centres, equal pay, and a host of other reforms. These new demands of government didn’t just change women’s lives — they changed our politics, the role of the state, and how we thought about citizenship.

They also created new kinds of political allegiance that didn’t always map neatly onto a male-dominated politics of left and right, Liberal and Labor. While Gough Whitlam appointed a women’s adviser to his staff, for example, many Labor MPs remained vehemently opposed to abortion. Later in the decade, prime minister Malcolm Fraser faced feminist opposition within his own party as he struggled to limit government spending on women’s services. The new politics of private experience carved new allegiances across long-standing political divides, and it continues to do so in often unpredictable ways.

These changes have not always been progressive. We can easily mistake decriminalisation of homosexuality or the Sex Discrimination Act as moves towards “equal rights” when in fact they didn’t guarantee these rights. The rights movements have been overwhelmingly white, though they have had vocal Indigenous critics (and sometimes participants).

The emergence of neoliberal economic prescriptions in the late 1970s also stymied and distorted many of the women’s movement’s key reforms. Childcare, demanded by mothers as a right to respite from the work of motherhood as much as a workplace entitlement, was soon tied to the goal of increasing women’s workplace participation and alleviating the “burden” women placed on the welfare system.

By the end of the 1970s, the ground had shifted beneath the feet of the liberation movements, and the logics of competition and deregulation had changed the framework of possibility for revolutionary gender and sexual politics.

To be interested in the 1970s, then, as the American scholar Victoria Hesford noted, “is to be interested in the alternatives offered to what has become our neoliberal present.” The seventies can provide us with a roadmap to understand the present day, but the era also gives us a glimpse of a different way of thinking about the nation, a way of imagining national belonging outside the framework of efficiency and productivity.

There are many ways to tell this story, but here I will focus on three case studies to show how these movements and campaigns reshaped Australian politics and conceptions of citizenship: early campaigns for homosexual law reform, feminist struggles to fund women’s refuges, and the emergence, in the late 1970s, of organised anti-feminist women’s groups. All reveal how the shifting line between private and public — between the personal and the political — reshaped both Australian politics and experiences of private life in the 1970s. Together, they show how the meanings — and the political uses of the private — changed over the period, with unpredictable consequences.

In the 1950s, according to the historian Graham Willett, homosexuality was “carefully excluded” from public life in Australia. Yet by the late 1960s, it had become an issue that many activists, civil libertarians and politicians believed needed to be “dealt with” through legislative reform. Why did this change take place? And how did homosexual people themselves emerge as part of these campaigns for decriminalization and equal rights?

Several factors were at play in the change, but perhaps most important was the gradual emergence in the 1960s of a liberal-minded middle class in Australia, members of which worked for reform in a number of areas, including civil liberties. On the question of homosexuality, they were guided by the Wolfenden report into sexual offences and prostitution, released in Britain in 1957. Wolfenden took as its guiding assumption the liberal view that homosexuality was determined by biology or childhood rather than “choice.” “It is not the function of the law to interfere in the private lives of citizens…” it declared. “[T]here must remain a realm of private morality and immorality which is not the law’s business.’

The report received surprisingly strong media and even religious support, but even with this backing, the British parliament was very slow to enact its recommendations, only passing the Sexual Offences Act in 1967. But that legislation came at an ideal time for Australians seeking similar reform here. The local call to decriminalize homosexual acts “between consenting adults in private” was, as Willett noted, lifted straight from the language of the Wolfenden report, and the earliest organisation to campaign for this change was not made up of gay men and women but of Canberra-based civil libertarians.

The Homosexual Law Reform Association of the ACT, formed in 1969, was one of the earliest organisations to campaign for homosexual law reform in Australia. Yet, as founder Thomas Mautner, a lecturer in philosophy at the ANU, stated, “we are not a society for homosexuals, and to my knowledge, no member of our committee is a practising homosexual.” The group argued for homosexual law reform on a platform of the right to privacy and protection of civil liberties: for homosexuality as a practice to be legal but publicly invisible.

When the pioneering gay rights organization CAMP — the Campaign Against Moral Persecution — was founded in 1970, only two of the founders were willing to be publicly identified in a newspaper profile in the Australian. Yet CAMP was different from the ACT reform group, because its members were themselves gays and lesbians. CAMP sought a new public visibility for homosexual people: in their first newsletter, Camp Ink, the group stated that: “the overall aim of CAMP INC is to bring about a situation where homosexuals can enjoy good jobs and security in those jobs, equal treatment under the law, and the right to serve our country without fear of exposure and contempt.”

By the early 1970s, gay activists were “coming out” rather than staying “private,” a brave move when male homosexual acts were still against the law. Being gay, then, was no longer simply a matter of what you did in private, but part of one’s intimate identity that could not be confined to the private sphere. The personal became political. Within just a few years, gay men and women were making submissions to government inquiries, including the Royal Commission on Human Relationships, and were seeking visibility, not privacy, to alleviate their oppression.

Women were also demanding new rights and protections from the Australian government. In 1973, Gough Whitlam was the first national leader in the world to appoint a dedicated women’s affairs advisor, the talented Elizabeth Reid. Reid worked within the government while activists worked outside it: both were equally important to the feminist reforms achieved during the Whitlam era.

The scale and scope of women’s activism in this period was immense, but I want to focus here on the development of women’s refuges, because they emerged from feminist theorising of the relationship between the private and the public, the personal and political.

While domestic and family violence has a very long history, it was reframed by the women’s movement in the early 1970s. The movement offered a new, structural analysis of domestic violence and a new response: the women’s refuge. Australia’s first women’s refuge was established in March 1974, when a group of Sydney women’s liberationists took possession of two houses in inner-city Glebe, establishing a refuge they named Elsie.

Feminist refuges like Elsie represented a new response to domestic violence: church-run women’s shelters had existed for decades but they focused on bringing families back together after violent incidents and offered no structural analysis of the problem of men’s violence against women and children. Women’s refuges were crucial to making the “private” problem of family violence visible in public: they drew attention to violence, but also to the lack of effective responses and protections for victims. Refuges sought to remove the protection of the private sphere — and its attendant shame — that allowed these crimes to continue, unprosecuted. Within a year of Elsie’s creation eleven women’s refuges had been established around Australia.

But even as women’s refuges quickly proved an indispensable response to the endemic problem of domestic violence, they remained a feminist innovation that sat uneasily within existing patterns of government service provision. Were they a health, housing, welfare or childcare service? Refuges served all these functions and more, but the integrated, overlapping nature of the work they performed made it difficult for them to secure government funding from a single agency or department. Even after refuges had some success in obtaining federal government funding, Australia’s system of federalism, where funding for health and other services is collected by the Commonwealth but administered by the states, produced significant funding inequalities across the country. Progressive state governments, like that of New South Wales, allocated considerable resources to women’s refuges, while others, like Queensland’s, did not.

Complicating the picture even further was the federal government’s shifting position on funding. Women’s refuges constantly had to pursue and defend state funding for their service in the face of threatened (and actual) funding cuts, and the Commonwealth ceased all dedicated federal funding for refuges in 1981–82. It would be more than a decade after the first refuge was founded before governments took any policy action on domestic violence beyond limited funding to refuges. Activists succeeded in politicising male violence against women in the 1970s, but securing stable government support for refuges would be an ongoing, and difficult struggle.

The struggle over refuge funding was a microcosm of the larger problem for the women’s movement. The mid 1970s was a moment of reckoning, with feminists facing a Liberal government that they feared would be less sympathetic to their demands for state support for women’s services. What they didn’t yet understand was that the mid 1970s was also the beginning of a seismic shift in western politics. The stagflation and recession of those years undermined the longstanding Keynesian consensus of the postwar period.

New economic prescriptions emerged, insisting that free markets, not state intervention, were the keys to greater efficiency, prosperity and freedom. By the early 1980s, a noisy faction of economic “dries” had emerged within the Liberal Party, emboldened by the economic downturn — and the lack of effective policy responses to it — that had overwhelmed Malcolm Fraser’s final term in office.

The feminist public servant Sara Dowse called this shift the “monetarist ascendancy.” Diverse groups including libertarians, devotees of the free market and moral conservatives all believed that policies and services designed to promote social equality were not only to blame for the poor economic conditions but also ran counter to conventional Liberal ideals of self-reliance and individual rights.

Shrinking the state would have particular implications for women, who had only just secured government funding for childcare, refuges and health centres. Reductions in these services would mean that women would once more be expected to shoulder the burden of family care and domestic labour. This dovetailed with conservative calls for women to renew their embrace of home and family. It was in this charged ideological space that anti-feminist women’s groups emerged and found a brief moment of political influence in Australia.

Two groups gained particular prominence: The Women’s Action Alliance, formed in 1975, and Women Who Want to Be Women, formed in 1979. While they were small, they exerted a measure of political influence: for example, Margaret Slattery, a member of the Women’s Action Alliance was appointed to Malcolm Fraser’s National Women’s Advisory Council in 1980, and members of these organisations were active in women’s groups in the Liberal Party. If we are to understand the impact of the women’s movement from the 1970s onwards, especially how it ruptured and remade the foundational categories of “public” and “private” and reshaped women’s citizenship identities, we must also consider the ways that this opened up possibilities for new kinds of anti-feminist activism for women.

Both Women’s Action Alliance and Women Who Want to Be Women were staunch and persistent in their advocacy for women they believed were neglected by feminism: stay-at-home wives and mothers. They sought to connect their activism to older traditions of maternalist politics while simultaneously presenting themselves as political outsiders, who had been displaced by upstart feminist activists. Depicting themselves in struggle against feminist “insiders” within government gave them greater credibility in their quest to gain influence over women’s policy in the late 1970s.

In their 1976 newsletter, Women’s Action Alliance argued that feminists lacked “expertise in the field of the woman at home” and had no “understanding or interest in the position of the full-time homemaker.” Women Who Want to Be Women constructed a constituency (in its newsletters) of “the silent majority of women, even those who haven’t heard of us, who want to be and are happy to be women.” The group objected vehemently to feminists in government roles and targeted their positions for abolition, and it made use of new channels designed to facilitate women’s access to government, like the National Women’s Advisory Council, to call for the abolition of these new forms of access.

Rather than embrace the women’s movement’s structural analysis of women’s oppression, anti-feminists asserted a liberal individualism in which state intervention was to be abhorred. Babette Francis, spokeswoman for Women Who Want to Be Women, told the Australian in 1980 that “promotion of theories of women’s oppression and disadvantage serve merely to destroy hope and initiative. Feminists, apparently, won’t feel their utopia has arrived until they have herded all women into one gigantic women’s refuge or rape crisis centre.”

At the same time, though, anti-feminist women campaigned for their own forms of state support using a politics of personal experience, just as feminists did. Anti-feminists called for new tax supports for single-income families and for financial assistance for women who chose to stay at home with their children. In effect, they used strategies developed by feminists to work against feminism’s goals. Their activism raises an important question: if the personal was political, then whose “personal” would be prioritised in Australian politics moving into the 1980s?

As we look back on the seventies today, it is clear that the feminist and sexual revolutions reorganised our public and private lives, with far-reaching and often unpredictable consequences. The faultlines in Australian politics have blurred and shifted; politics today is organised as much by gender and sexuality as it is by older ideas of left and right. Marriage equality, for example, was passed by the Australian parliament in December 2017 only after a postal survey demonstrated that there was majority public support for such a change. Just as abortion had fractured the 1973 federal parliament along cross-party faultlines, so too was support for marriage equality found across the political spectrum.

The Australian public’s enthusiastic endorsement of same-sex marriage in 2017 would have been unthinkable in the 1970s. The Royal Commission on Human Relationships, in a set of otherwise sympathetic recommendations on homosexuality, did not “feel able to” recognise homosexual marriages in 1977. Whether you think the passage of marriage equality legislation was radical or retrograde in 2017, that it happened at all was due to the persistence of activists, not politicians, and to a receptive public culture that offered LGBT people visibility and platforms to tell stories about their lives.

This is one of the important legacies of seventies movements: the creation of spaces for a range of perspectives in public life. Creating this space has helped to create social change. The Royal Commission on Human Relationships was one of the boldest enactments of the Whitlam government principle of “open government” and it gained its authenticity and authority from “ordinary” people’s stories of their experiences. Two more recent government inquiries — the Human Rights Commission’s Bringing Them Home report in 1997 and the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in 2017 — also demonstrated the powerful impact of telling personal stories in public.

These inquiries had limitations in producing change: Indigenous children are still removed from their parents at higher rates than the rest of the population, and the royal commission did not investigate the family and home, the place where most sexual abuse occurs. But they both helped shift public debate. In the words of Katie Wright and Shurlee Swain, the Royal Commission made child abuse “speakable and nameable” as a social problem.

Asserting that “the personal is political” was not enough to make change in the 1970s; it was a belief enacted through activism, and political reform. This reform was dependent on a strong activist presence beyond the parliament and bureaucracy. Elizabeth Reid could argue for change in government policy because there was a strong women’s movement supporting her; anti-feminist women, despite all their energy, failed to effect lasting change because they did not mobilise a large group of women behind them.

Women’s and gay and lesbian activists of the 1970s didn’t quite manage to remake the world, but perhaps it is unfair of us today to judge them for that, when we still have so much change to make. As Carol Hanisch reminded her readers in 1970, “there are no personal solutions at this time. There is only collective action for a collective solution.” Perhaps we need to reanimate this principle today, as we grapple with both the legacies and the unfinished business of the 1970s. •

This is the edited text of this year’s Ernest Scott lecture, presented on 19 September. The lecture can be viewed here.

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Some parts of the eulogy seemed familiar to me, including the observation that “Cecilia Gladys Thomas,” who had studied singing with “a Mrs Trantham Fryer,” had a fine contralto voice and started a poultry farm at Deepdene to pay for her training. A page or so further on, we learn that Cecilia, after her marriage to Peter Berry, became “a passionate friend of Vida Goldstein” during the Great War and created the Women’s Peace Army with her. The penny dropped. I had researched the suffragist women in Goldstein’s WPA for my doctorate and I knew who her passionate friend was.

Moorhouse’s acknowledgements for the third volume, Cold Light, explain that “the orations for Edith’s mother and family are a collage drawn from the lives of actual contemporaries, as recorded in The Australian Dictionary of Biography.” It amused me to find that the extraordinary life of Cecilia Annie John — the Deepdene poultry farmer — had caught the eye of Moorhouse, who immortalised her as Edith Campbell Berry’s mother.

Outside Moorhouse’s portrayal, Cecilia John is little remembered in Australia, except as a real-life character in books about Goldstein, most recently Jacqueline Kent’s new biography, Vida: A Woman for Our Time. Unlike her fictional counterpart, she was not married when she became Goldstein’s confidant; in fact, her life took quite a different trajectory.

Cecilia John was born in Hobart in 1877 to Welsh blacksmith Daniel John and his wife Rosetta. Even though she may have inherited her fine singing voice from her Welsh forbears, she clashed with her father from an early age. Her desire for a musical career made her determined to leave Tasmania for the mainland in the 1890s, where her goal was to train with singing teacher Charlotte Tranthim-Fryer. To pay for her training, she did indeed set up a poultry farm in what was then the outer suburb of Deepdene, building the sheds herself from scrap timber.

Cecilia may have started lessons with Charlotte Tranthim-Fryer when she was teaching in Hobart in 1895; if so, her training there would have been short-lived but seems to have been enough to fuel her passion. Tranthim-Fryer left for London in 1896, where she attended the Royal Academy of Music and her artist husband, James, studied sculpture. After the couple returned to Australia around 1900, Charlotte resumed her career as a singing teacher, this time in Melbourne. James became the first director of the Swinburne Technical College in 1908 and head of its art school nine years later.

Cecilia was soon studying with Tranthim-Fryer, and by December 1902 the magazine Table Talk was announcing her public debut at a Melbourne Liedertafel concert. Among other pieces, she sang Brahms’s “Sapphic Ode,” with one reviewer describing her as possessing a “voice of good mezzo-contralto quality” and showing “evidence of good feeling and an artistic temperament.” Three years later, in a review of a concert in Sydney’s Albert Hall by the Melbourne Concert Party, she was described as a contralto with “a fine powerful voice.”

Photos of the members of the Musical Society of Victoria featured in the Melbourne Weekly Times of 20 May 1905. A head-and-shoulders shot of Cecilia John shows a young woman with an aloof gaze, her dark hair wrestled into an elaborate Edwardian coiffure. Above a low-cut evening gown, a string of pearls encircles her neck.

Having become a registered music teacher and taken on singing and voice production students at a studio in Collins Street, Cecilia’s other talents began to be evident. In late 1912 she was approached to join Vida Goldstein’s Women’s Political Association by a young woman who lived near her poultry farm in Deepdene. Doris Hordern, Vida’s joint campaign secretary for her bid to win the seat of Kooyong, had been taunted by her anti-suffragist father to sign up as a WPA member “that woman in trousers” who lived down the road.

Cecilia burst onto the WPA scene in 1913, becoming Goldstein’s close confidant and rapidly rising to the position of business manager. Goldstein was forty-four years old and had been working for the women’s cause since before the turn of the century. She was clearly swept away, if not enamoured, by the energy of this younger, multi-talented woman who wholeheartedly supported her suffragette militancy.

In the event, Vida lost that 1913 election to Liberal candidate Sir Robert Best, but her creditable showing convincing her to continue seeking a federal seat. She would make a further three unsuccessful bids, the last in 1917.

Cecilia’s swift rise through the ranks of the WPA didn’t go unnoticed among other hard-working members. “When Miss John wants a thing there does not seem anything to do but cave in,” one of them was heard to grumble. The elegant and equable Goldstein was revered by her acolytes in the WPA, so jealousy of Cecilia’s sudden power over their president was perhaps to be expected. “Miss John’s” brusque and uncompromising manner didn’t help, but it seems Vida did little to quell the rumblings.

Some had good reason to feel aggrieved. Life had changed dramatically for Doris Hordern when Vida’s sister, Elsie Champion, sacked her from her job at the Book Lover’s Library after she became engaged to barrister and fellow WPA member Maurice Blackburn. Unhappily relegated to Deepdene, Doris could no longer pop in to the WPA clubrooms. But Maurice, who did often lunch or dine there, kept her informed about the situation.

Blackburn, too, had reason to feel aggrieved, having found that any opinion contrary to the WPA’s official line was no longer well received. After making a comment about the right of an expatriate anti-suffragist to write in the Argus that there was no women’s movement in Australia, he reported to Doris that “Miss John wants to hold a class at Deepdene for the education of me — what do you think of that, Mouse?”

What was making some of the WPA women, and at least one man, uncomfortable was not simply jealousy about Vida and Cecilia’s closeness or misgivings about the WPA’s increasing “sex antagonism.” Lurking beneath their criticisms of Cecilia John was the spectre of what was then regarded as perversion.

Maurice Blackburn dealt with the unease by recounting condescendingly humorous anecdotes to his fiancée. While Doris appears not to have responded in kind, it was clearly a shared topic of conversation. Relating an incident at the WPA club in late 1913, during which several of the members were complaining to him about “Miss John’s” ubiquitous presence, he finished with “Miss Goldstein and Miss John” coming in “almost arm-in-arm.” A few weeks later he told Doris, “Miss Kerr says that the latest about the engaged couple is that Miss John has given Miss Goldstein a gold watch. I said I thought a ring was the regular thing.”

Goldstein’s second campaign for Kooyong was played out against international tumult. After Britain declared war on Germany on 4 August 1914, the Australian government promised troops and warships to support its ally. Vida’s pacifism seemed out of place in this fervid atmosphere, and she polled fewer votes than she had the previous year. But she and her allies in the WPA were already turning their attention to the fight for peace.

The WPA’s members were far from united on the question. A resolution for the association to add opposition to compulsory military training and militarism to its platform produced a split, with a number of members — including the newly married Blackburns — tendering their resignations. Undeterred, Goldstein formed the Women’s Peace Army in July 1915, which would be totally devoted to peace propaganda. Cecilia John and Adela Pankhurst, recently arrived from London, set up branches in Sydney and Brisbane. The indefatigable Cecilia also formed the Children’s Peace Army.

After the WPA bought fourteen acres of land at bayside Mordialloc in 1915, Cecilia was closely involved in running a new women’s farm, providing expertise in raising poultry. The farm produced white leghorns, reared cattle and grew produce to be sold at the WPA rooms; landscape architect Ina Higgins supervised the growing of flowers and vegetables. Women and girls were employed and trained on the farm, about six at a time, throughout the war. A reporter from the Socialist was quoted in the WPA newspaper Woman Voter as saying that “the robust and ladylike girls… looked as intelligent and as healthful as it was possible to imagine.”

Throughout the war years Cecilia performed the banned anti-conscription song “I Didn’t Raise My Son to Be a Soldier” in her powerful contralto voice at rallies in Melbourne’s Guild Hall and on the Yarra bank. She was arrested on one occasion, spending the night in the City Watch House; on another, she turned a fire hose on a soldier who tried to grab the WPA flag from her.

An image of Cecilia John as chief marshal in the spectacular Women’s No-Conscription Demonstration and Procession of October 1916 remains vivid, even though there is no photograph of the event. A striking figure on horseback, she was reported to have been dressed in white and carrying a staff decorated in the purple, white and green colours of the WPA. Three young girls carrying banners led the procession; Cecilia, in turn, was followed by the members of the Women’s No-Conscription Committee, including Goldstein.

The procession from Guild Hall to the Yarra bank included eight horse-drawn lorries with tableaux, decorated lorries full of children, and many individuals on foot and in vehicles. At one point several dozen doves were released from the children’s lorries. As a letter in Woman Voter three years later, signed by “Merle,” recalled, “I never pass by the Public Library and see that wonderful woman-figure on her warhorse, but I think of Miss John, how all through the war she was the Joan of Arc amongst us.”

Cecilia resigned from the WPA in 1918 to devote more time to music. Later that year she set up the People’s Conservatorium with composer and pianist Annie Macky, aiming to bring “the world of art to the masses.” But she was back at work for the WPA in the following year after she and Goldstein were nominated to represent it and the Women’s Peace Army at the International Women’s Peace Conference in postwar Paris. After an adventurous trip involving several delays, they arrived to find the conference venue had been changed from Paris to Zurich, in neutral Switzerland, to where they quickly proceeded. As the Westralian Worker commented on 18 July 1919:

Miss Cecilia John, who has been speaking in Switzerland on behalf of Australia, adds to her accomplishments that of practical poultry-farming, music teaching, motor-driving, and platform oratory… She is of robust physique and personality, and a decided contrast to Miss Vida Goldstein, who is also abroad. The two clever women should be able to demonstrate overseas that the sex in Australia is as diverse as it is adaptable.

The visit to Switzerland would change Cecilia’s life direction entirely. In Geneva she became interested in Dalcroze Eurhythmics, a new method of teaching music through movement, when the movement’s founder, Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, presented his first international summer course since the war. Concerned about the postwar plight of refugees, particularly children, she also became involved in the Swiss Red Cross.

Parting from Vida Goldstein in England later that year, Cecilia returned to Australia to become the organising secretary of the Australian branch of the new Save the Children Fund. She left again for England in 1921 to pursue Dalcroze studies, and later also worked as overseas delegate at the London headquarters of Save the Children.

After attending the Dalcroze Summer School in Oxford in August 1921, she took a term of classes at the London School of Dalcroze Eurhythmics. Then, at forty-four, she joined the full-time training course, lowering her birth date by ten years on the enrolment form. Dalcroze appears to have provided Cecilia with an avenue for bringing together her passion for music and her interest in children’s education. From the start, and while still a student, she was also able to use her organisational and administrative capabilities to further the development of the school.

Cecilia and renowned Dalcroze teacher Ethel Driver became inseparable companions in the 1920s, eventually sharing a flat in London and a holiday cottage in Surrey. In 1923–24 they made a six-month tour of Australia, largely organised by Cecilia, for the London School, promoting Dalcroze in public demonstrations. With another graduate, Heather Gell, Cecilia and Driver gave demonstrations in schools and public halls in most states, involving selected children in the performances.

The tour attracted extensive newspaper coverage. Cecilia John was described as an “old friend, feminist, politician, singer and entrepreneur but now an exponent of the Music of Motion” in Melbourne Punch in January 1924. Promotional photographs taken in England were distributed to the press, and several featured with the articles.

In 1930, following the death of the founding director of the London School, Cecilia was appointed as warden and then, in 1932, as its principal. After the school’s premises in Fitzroy Square were bombed during the war, Cecilia and the committee organised its move to Kibblestone Hall in Staffordshire for the duration. In 1946, she was again instrumental in setting up the school’s new headquarters at Milland House in Liphook, Hampshire, where she remained principal until her death in 1955.

Cecilia John and Ethel Driver’s relationship lasted until Cecilia’s death. Ethel inherited her estate and died in 1963. Both women are buried in the same grave in the churchyard in Liphook.

As Cecilia John left no personal papers, any account of her extraordinary life must depend on external sources, formal and informal, including the gossip that surrounded her throughout. Today she would no doubt be part of the LGBTQI community, a positive discourse not available to her then. One disparaging comment repeated about her — that she had a “constitutional inability to compromise” — could be reconstrued as a strength; she certainly seems to have conducted her life on her own terms. •

This article draws on Patricia Gowland’s entry, “Cecilia Annie John,” in the Australian Dictionary of Biography; Joan Pope’s article, “Cecilia John: An Australian Heads the London School of Dalcroze Eurhythmics, 1932–1955,” in the Australian Journal of Music Education; and Carolyn Rasmussen’s book, The Blackburns.

My thanks to Joan Pope for generously sharing her research with me and for giving permission to reproduce the photograph above, and to Carolyn Rasmussen for giving me access to the Blackburns’ courtship letters, SLV MS11749.

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The loving, glowing tributes she’s received from all corners of society invariably mention her sharp intelligence, her zest for life and her warm personality. My guess is that, until she died and all this was put on the record, the new generation of women who applauded her appearances on The Drum knew just a fraction of what she gave to this country. As for me, the news of her death plunged me into shock, as it did so many, and set off a flood of memories. So I am here to tell the story of how our long friendship began.

Susan and I met in the early 1970s when we were both single mothers, swept away from difficult marriages on that tumultuous feminist wave and drawn ineluctably to the women’s liberation movement. But she had a more pragmatic vision than many of us, and among them I include myself.

With a federal election looming in 1972, Women’s Electoral Lobby was born. Now there were two kinds of feminism, one deemed radical, the other decidedly reformist. Susan gravitated to the reformist WEL, and was a founding member of its Canberra branch, while I stood firmly in the radical camp. Radical or reformist, though, the word revolution tripped happily off our tongues, especially in Canberra, with its small, politically engaged population, where a women’s liberationist one minute could pop on her WEL hat the next, and vice versa. “Revolution” has been in very bad odour for decades now, and whenever I hear it uttered in clips of us at that time I’m touched by our naiveté but also by our splendid bravado.

Just before the Whitlam government was elected in December of that year, I got a job with the Australian News and Information Bureau; by 1973 I had been seconded to a minister’s staff and had joined the Labor Party. Susan, meanwhile, was working in the interests of government schools as executive officer of the Australian Council of State School Organisations and had started a local Labor Party branch. When Whitlam called a double dissolution in 1974, she decided to run for preselection for the new Canberra seat of Fraser.

She gathered a bunch of feminist party members and, sooner than I realised, I was helping run her campaign. Our first task was to get more feminists signed up to the party — in other words, to do some branch stacking. Some of the older, largely male, members were furious, calling us “groupers” (after the Catholic activists within the party and the unions in the early 1950s) and worse. But we pressed on. There wasn’t a single female member in the House of Representatives, and we were determined to change that.

It was a tight contest. Peter Wilenski, Whitlam’s principal private secretary, was a candidate. So was Megan Stoyles, press secretary to Bill Hayden, both of whom had done so much to get Medibank (as it was then, though stymied by the Senate) up and running. As Susan’s backers we couldn’t have come any greener, and being American-born with little more than a rudimentary understanding of how politics worked in Australia, I was greenest of all.

After Megan Stoyles dropped out, it was a three-way contest between Susan, Peter and Ken Fry, the ACT branch president and a member of the ACT advisory council, forerunner of the ACT Legislative Assembly. When Gordon Bilney, Wilenski’s campaign manager, sidled up to me one night, whispering, “What’s your number?” I thought he was planning to proposition me and walked away. He was actually looking for our preferences if Susan was knocked out.

The vote was taken and — to Wilenski’s disappointment and Bilney’s disgust — Ken Fry was the winner. Both Fry and Wilenski believed that Susan’s preferences got him over the line, but to this day I’m not sure this was true. I don’t remember our directing preferences at all. But their belief secured Susan’s reputation as a powerbroker, and Ken Fry continued to acknowledge his debt to her throughout his parliamentary career.

The rest, as they say, is history. In 1975, after a stint on the advisory council herself, Susan ran for the second ACT Senate seat and won. But that was the year Whitlam lost in a landslide. Right away she was in the shadow ministry, and I, by this time working in the prime minister’s department, found myself serving a government I deplored for the part it had played in Labor’s dismissal.

I know she was disappointed in me, as many were. But there was little I could say publicly about how necessary it seemed for me to stay in the department and try to maintain the reforms for women initiated under Whitlam. When this was no longer possible, I resigned from the service to chance my arm as a writer, and Susan helped me, as she had so many others, by giving me the job of drafting the ALP women’s policy that would eventually be implemented when she became a minister in the Hawke government — a contribution that could be my proudest. And when, years later, she resigned from parliament and went to work at Penguin, without my bidding she reissued my first novel, West Block, which had come out in 1983, the year she became Labor’s first ever female cabinet minister.

Thus ours was a friendship that went right back, to the beginning of what we’d scarcely dared believe was to be her brilliant career. Watching her up close and from afar she seemed to grow into herself more than anyone I knew. To risk a hackneyed phrase, she became larger than life, a commanding figure wherever she happened to be.

My shock is slowly subsiding, and for the first time since her death I am able to shed tears as I write this, as more and more memories of her come floating back. Little things, but in a way these are the most indelible. Like the time we went to see the movie of Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls, and when an older, heavily rouged woman with dyed black hair came on the screen, Susan grabbed me and cried, “Look! She’s just like my Irish aunts!” Or when we went to Melbourne together for one of the first women’s liberation conferences and shrank into ourselves as the militant Spartacists tried to take it over.

Then there were our battles with male delegates at the UN Conference on Women in Mexico, as we sought to keep our plan for the coming decade intact, crossing out words at their insistence then slipping them back in when they’d wilted. It was an endurance test worse than any interdepartmental committee I’d participated in, and certainly good preparation for what would be her lone voice in cabinet.

There was the time, too, when we stayed up all night singing every Tin Pan Alley song we knew, one schmaltzy ballad after the other. And how, the night she became a senator, the group of us sang, yes, Helen Reddy’s “I Am Woman.”

The thing about Susan Ryan is we all have such stories, and will be forever holding them close to our hearts. •

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Ridiculous? Well, this is essentially the system we have set up for second-income earners in Australia, most of whom are women. Here and elsewhere, Covid-19 has shone a spotlight on how inequality is baked into our social structures, and one of the many inequalities so exposed is the differential impact of crises like this pandemic on women.

It’s a deep divide, beginning with the high proportion of women doing the essential caring work in hospitals, the indispensable cleaning of public and private places, and the nurturing of children in the home. In order to take up the last of those roles, women often have little choice but to reduce their paid working hours. If this weren’t enough, women’s jobs were among the first to be cut in sectors such as hospitality and retail.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised about these inequalities. In Australia today, just seven of the thirty federal government ministers are women — an imbalance that extends across state and territory government too, with women filling only forty-eight (or 26 per cent) of 181 ministerial positions. When it comes to pressing public policy issues, whether they are social, economic or political, women are noticeably absent from the key decision-making forums.

So, are we going to continue to buy this pre-Covid product, or are we going to demand something more fit for purpose?

This week, a formidable coalition led by former foreign minister Julie Bishop, epidemiologist professor Fiona Stanley, former SA premier Jay Weatherill and philanthropist Nicola Forrest has called for a major structural reform that has the potential to build a more equal society. What they want is a high-quality, universally accessible childcare and early learning system.

On one view, “childcare” might be thought of as being the responsibility of individual parents. Looked at differently, though, high-quality childcare is fundamental to ensuring greater equality. It is also key to increasing women’s workforce participation. In Australia, women are currently 38 per cent of all full-time employees, and 68 per cent of all part-time employees. While some women want to work part-time, research confirms that many want full-time employment but can’t afford it.

Even after subsidies, full-time childcare fees absorb a quarter of household income for an average earning couple with two children in Australia, compared with the OECD average of 11 per cent. A family getting the maximum subsidy (on an income of less than $68,000) still needs to find an annual $9000 for full-time care. Almost half of Australian parents with children under five report struggling with the costs.

This means that if both parents earn $60,000 a year and the secondary earner — usually a woman — chooses to work more than three days a week, the secondary earner currently loses 90 per cent of the income on the fourth day, and all of it on the fifth day. This obviously has a brutal impact on women’s career trajectories, with part-time work rarely leading to leadership roles.

Lifting women’s workforce participation is an important step on the road to ensuring that both women and men have an equal opportunity to become political leaders. There’s plenty of room for progress — of the 193 countries in the United Nations, only thirteen are led by a woman.

Representative democracy is about representing the needs of the whole community and drawing on the expertise of all people. The current system discourages women from becoming active citizens for a range of reasons, including their disproportionate responsibility for childcare. Sharing the caring, not only within the family but within society as a whole, is fundamental to ensuring women are equally represented at decision-making tables around the country.

Universal, accessible early learning also benefits the children who are our future leaders. Research shows that the early years of a child’s life, up to five years of age, are critical to their future academic, health, social and professional trajectories. Play-based early learning develops the executive functions critical to our nation’s economic future. Competencies and emotional frameworks that lead to high-value jobs (which should include childcare) in the fastest-growing sectors are developed in those early years. We are investing in our future if we invest in children’s education at this age.

While we know these early years are critical, preschool is currently only universally available for four-year-olds, except in Victoria, where three-year-old preschool is becoming available. Childcare varies hugely in quality and is simply unaffordable for many Australian families.

These problems are reflected in the data, which shows that many children are continuing to fall through the gaps. The Australian Early Development Census reveals that one in five children entering school are developmentally vulnerable in one or more domains. If we look only at Indigenous children, the numbers are stark: six in ten are developmentally vulnerable. By the time these kids get to school, critical neural pathways are embedded. It will be a struggle for them to catch up, whether in reading, writing or emotional regulation.

As our leaders search around for “shovel ready” projects to get the economy back on track, they need to look beyond the obvious strategies of investing in bridges and roads. An investment in building universal, accessible early learning in Australia will have a multiplier effect, improving our economy and society in ways that benefit everyone. •

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What surprised me, though, was that Harry and Meghan have bought the Chateau of Riven Rock. The words Riven Rock took me back to another life I had written about, that of feminist anthropologist Elsie Clews Parsons, and to the heartbreaking story of one of her closest friends, Katharine Dexter McCormick.

The better-informed of the journalists reporting the royal purchase may tell you that the Chateau of Riven Rock was built on part of the estate purchased by the wealthy McCormick family in the 1890s, and that it was home to Katharine’s invalid husband, Stanley Robert McCormick, from 1908 until his death in 1947. Behind those stark facts is Katharine’s extraordinary story.

Katharine Dexter was born in 1875 in Dexter, Michigan, to prominent lawyer Wirt Dexter and his wife Josephine. Her father died when she was fourteen, and Katharine, her mother and her brother Sam moved to Boston. There, Katharine studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Sam attended Harvard.

Holidaying in Newport in 1893, the family met Elsie Clews, the daughter of a wealthy New York banker. Elsie, who had just completed her freshman year at Barnard College, began a love affair with Sam that ended tragically with his sudden death the following year. Katharine and Elsie’s shared loss deepened their friendship, and the two rebellious young women encouraged each other in their scholarly ambitions — Elsie to undertake a PhD in education at Columbia University and Katharine to complete her undergraduate science degree at MIT.

Instead of attending medical school as she had planned, though, Katharine married Stanley Robert McCormick, the youngest son of Cyrus McCormick of International Harvester fame. Two years later, in 1906, Stanley was hospitalised with what we now call schizophrenia. In 1908, still a danger to himself and others, he was installed at the McCormick’s eighty-seven-acre Riven Rock estate.

Stanley and his carers shared the large, two-storey Mission Revival–style house. Over the years a golf course and a theatre were added, a large art collection was established, and a music director appointed.

In addition to physical and cultural comfort, Katharine was determined that Stanley would have the best of medical attention and that everything should be done to try to find a cure for his affliction. In Boston, he had come under the care of a young resident physician, Gilbert Van Tassel Hamilton, who was adding the new subject of psychology to his medical degree. Hamilton had resigned from his hospital position to become Stanley’s personal physician, and he moved with him to Riven Rock.

Royal hideaway: the Chateau of Riven Rock.

At the time, it was increasingly believed that studying the behaviour of primates would help in understanding human psychology. In the hope that this research would help find a cure for Stanley’s problems, Katharine encouraged Hamilton to establish a primate laboratory at Riven Rock. The work of the laboratory, with its ten monkeys and one orangutan, is described by researcher Robert M. Yerkes in his 1916 book, The Mental Life of Monkeys and Apes.

On the basis of his experience at Riven Rock, Yerkes established his own research station, the Anthropoid Breeding and Experiment Station, in Orange Park, Florida, fourteen years later. By then he was professor of psychobiology at Yale University.

It is difficult to get a clear idea of Stanley’s condition, but it manifested itself as an aggressive fear of sexuality and of women. Katharine was not allowed to go near him; until she bought her own home there in the early 1940s, she stayed in a hotel when she visited Santa Barbara. The laboratory’s primate studies focused on the sex lives of primates.

Hamilton published only one paper, “A Study of Sexual Tendencies in Monkeys and Baboons,” which appeared in the Journal of Animal Behavior in 1914. His work apparently shed little light on Stanley’s condition, and nor did it indicate any clear direction for a cure. He left Riven Rock under a cloud in 1917. In 1929, as director of psychobiological research at the Bureau of Social Hygiene in New York, he published the pioneering book, A Research in Marriage.

Katharine never gave up on her search for a cure for Stanley. During the 1920s she became interested in the relationship between hormones and mental disorders. In 1927 she established the Stanley R. McCormick Memorial Foundation for Neuroendocrine Research Corporation (later the Neuroendocrine Research Foundation) at Harvard Medical School.

During these traumatic years Katharine was also throwing her energies into the feminist movement. After she met birth control activist Margaret Sanger in 1917, she began the work that would lead to probably the most important contribution to women’s freedom in the twentieth century. During the 1920s she helped smuggle diaphragms from Europe for Sanger’s Clinical Research Bureau in New York.

When her mother died in 1937, she inherited an estate of more than US$10 million; ten years later, Stanley’s death added another $35 million to her fortune. Much of this she put into birth control research.

In 1953 Katharine met Gregory Goodwin Pincus, who was developing a hormonal birth control method at his research laboratory, the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology. She began to fund the foundation, initially at $100,000 a year but increasing to between $150,000 and $180,000 annually until her death in 1967.

In all, she provided $2 million (around $20 million today) of her own money for the development of the oral contraceptive pill. Even after the pill was approved for contraception in 1960, she continued to fund research on ways of improving birth control research.

From the time she bought her home at 1600 Santa Barbara Street, in the heart of the small city, Katharine was an avid supporter of the city’s art institutions. She was a founding member of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, of which she was vice-president with fellow philanthropist and art collector Wright S. Ludington. Serving on the buildings committee, she was responsible for hiring renowned Chicago architect David Adler to convert the city’s old post office into the museum.

Katharine died in Boston, aged ninety-two, on 28 December 1967. She left her home to the museum, which used it to house the Ridley-Tree Education Center, where art classes for children and adults are held. Before her death she had donated funds to build Stanley McCormick Hall, a residential facility for female students at MIT that would make women a visible presence among students of science and engineering. Among many other legacies, she bequeathed $5 million to the Stanford University School of Medicine to support female physicians.

The original Riven Rock estate has since been broken up into smaller but still substantial blocks, of which Meghan and Harry’s Chateau of Riven Rock is one. The couple’s new neighbours will probably tell them that they can read a fictionalised version of the story of Katharine and Stanley in Riven Rock, a novel by local celebrity author T.C. Boyle; that they can see a cinematic version in The Romancing and Reaping of Riven Rock, a documentary funded by a group of Montecito residents; and that they can learn about some of the happier times in Katharine’s life, including a love affair, in my biography of her friend, Elsie Clews Parsons. But they will probably be happy simply enjoying one of the most beautiful views in the world. The rest of us can take a tour of the Chateau on YouTube. •

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Mary Gaudron, the only woman to have been appointed to the High Court, had retired and, astonishingly, was being replaced by the man we’ve heard so much about over the past week. My outrage was prompted not by any knowledge of Justice Heydon’s moral framework but by the fact that there existed a pool of women eminently suitable for the job. By choosing a man, the government was telling the daughters of Australia that even if they won all the traditional baubles of merit and had brilliant legal careers, they were not welcome in the nation’s top court.

The seventeen years since then have witnessed significant changes in the make-up of the High Court. To mark the occasion of the third woman being appointed to the court, I stood outside the building with my young children on the morning of 3 September 2007. Another ANU law colleague and her daughter had made a cake, which they later gave to the new justice, Susan Kiefel.

By the time Justice Kiefel was appointed the first female chief justice, ten years later, Susan Crennan had sat on the bench between 2005 and 2015, Virginia Bell had been sitting since 2009 and Michelle Gordon had joined in 2015. For most of the past decade, in fact, three of the court’s seven judges have been women — and, since February 2018, another woman, Philippa Lynch, has been chief executive and principal registrar of the court.

The shift in numbers is surely significant background to last week’s announcement. Would an all-male leadership team, or even a team with just a one or two women, have shone light on the inappropriate behaviour of one of its own?

When the chief justice’s revelations became public, I was in a “strategic planning” meeting in my new workplace, the University of Canberra, where I am co-director of the 50/50 by 2030 Foundation, working with our newly formed team considering how to best achieve our objective of ensuring that women are equally represented in all Australian decision-making bodies by 2030.

My co-director, Trish Bergin, had drawn a diagram illustrating drivers of gender inequality grouped under “society/culture,” “heuristics and human tendencies” and “structural barriers.” Her diagram raised the obvious question: where should our efforts lie?

We can all see the pervasive hurdles to gender equality — the unconscious bias, inherent resistance to change, gender stereotypes, imbalances of power, sexual harassment, government policies with no systematic gender-sensitive policy, biased and inadequate parental leave, and work structures and processes built around traditional family-unfriendly stereotypes.

So how do we change this? Should culture come first, or structural change? Should we be demanding — as I did when I protested about the system that enabled an all-male court back in 2003 — that a mandated commitment to at least 40 per cent composition of either gender (given there are seven judges) at any time on the High Court must occur.

Last week’s moment affirmed how structural change and cultural change go hand in hand. We must mandate 50/50 leadership in all sites of power in Australian society — an inclusive leadership that acknowledges our sex, gender, age, race, ethnicity, orientation or disability as relevant to how we live our lives, and must be openly acknowledged, to ensure cultural change is embedded. In international data released this week by UN Women, men are currently 75 per cent of parliamentarians, 73 per cent of managerial decision-makers, 72 per cent of executives of global health organisations, 76 per cent of the people we see, hear or read about in our mainstream news media, and almost all (87 per cent) of the people in peace negotiations.

When Justice Heydon’s appointment was announced in 2002 I was on sabbatical in Washington, DC, and the US Supreme Court had heard argument on the constitutionality of state legislation prohibiting the burning of crosses. The hearing provoked a passionate interjection by justice Clarence Thomas, the only African American on the Supreme Court. He spoke of the Ku Klux Klan’s “reign of terror” during the nearly one hundred years before Virginia passed the challenged law.

A burning cross is indeed highly symbolic, Justice Thomas said, but only of something that deserves no constitutional protection. It is “unlike any symbol in our society,” he said. The New York Times reported that “during the brief minute or two that Justice Thomas spoke, about halfway through the hour-long argument session, the other justices gave him rapt attention. Afterwards, the court’s mood appeared to have changed.”

We may never know whether chief justice Kiefel, justices Bell and Gordon and principal registrar Lynch have experienced harassment in their working lives, but we can reflect on that moment when the make-up of that leadership team enabled those female associates to be heard, and for real reform to be initiated. As Chief Justice Kiefel stated, “We have strengthened our policies and training to make clear the importance of a respectful workplace at the Court and we have made sure there is both support and confidential avenues for complaint if anything like this were to happen again.”

Similar reforms must continue in all workplaces to ensure equality in leadership positions in all positions of power, judicial, executive and parliamentary. As last week showed, an equal and diverse leadership team leads to better decision-making all round. •

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In the early 1980s, the Jobs for Women group took on industrial giant BHP (now Bluescope Steel), whose subsidiary Australian Iron and Steel methodically discriminated against women workers. The group won twice over, and along the way prevailed in the first class action in Australian law.

Robynne Murphy was one of the first intake of students at the Australian Film and Television School in Sydney in the 1970s. She was also one of a group of socialists who moved to Wollongong in 1980 and applied for jobs in the steelworks. The socialist men were taken on within months; the women joined a list of over 2000 the company kept waiting for “women’s jobs.” Any job for women attracted huge queues, so some resorted to getting up at 4am and taking a bus — a rickety, leaky bus — to Sydney to work in the rag trade or on a chicken-processing line.

Under the recent NSW anti-discrimination legislation, women were entitled to equal consideration for jobs. Inspired by the Aboriginal tent embassy, Jobs for Women set up a tent and distributed leaflets pointing out that BHP was breaking the law. They got union backing; they called a meeting; they received an enthusiastic response. Migrant women wanted these jobs. Some came from countries where women where already doing jobs like these.

In those days, Port Kembla was poor. When Slobodanka Joncevska came there from Macedonia in 1972 the place “was looking more poor than my poor country. Like a wooden house, built-up fibro house, no modern life for the young generation.” She was young and, she recalls, wore a short skirt and had great legs. She had broken hearts in her own country but came to join her brother for a different life. She was among those who joined Jobs for Women.

Aided by the forced discovery of a trove of company documents detailing ridiculous arguments against hiring women, and having brought in its own health and safety experts to counter the company’s views, Jobs for Women won its case before the state’s anti-discrimination tribunal.

For me, the startling thing about the language in the company’s documents was its similarity to memos unearthed at around the same time by an ABC board–authorised inquiry — never made public — into sex-segregated jobs at Aunty. With no federal sex discrimination legislation until 1984, the managers were able to get away with it.

After Jobs for Women won its case before the NSW board, Robynne was one of those to apply for work and be employed at the steelworks. (She wound up working for the steelworks for thirty years, and became a union organiser.) But the victory was short-lived. When Australian Iron and Steel began restructuring after a worldwide plunge in steel prices (provoked, among other things, by the OPEC oil crisis), the women were laid off in line with “last hired, first fired” practice.

Was this just? Well this, as they say, is where the story really gets going. The women argued that their firing was a legacy of years of systemic discrimination. They contended that they had a case for lost wages.

And so began what would become Australia’s first great class action. In industrial law, it’s been compared to the Harvester judgement, which established a basic wage (for men) in 1907. And it opened the door for many women otherwise denied justice.

Some of the background to this campaign is barely touched in Women of Steel. The late seventies were a time in which the women’s movement began agitating for equality within powerful organisations, including the trade unions. The first Women and Labour Conference, held in Sydney in 1978, was a landmark in this push to change the culture within the union movement.

Women of Steel presents an optimistic picture of how the Jobs for Women campaign made early alliances with the male-dominated union movement, in particular the Federated Ironworkers, led locally by the formidable Nando Lelli. I would have liked to know more about this aspect of the group’s work.

Some things stand out from that period. One is the sheer doggedness of the campaigners. Patience and persistence are often underestimated qualities in any campaign. The strength to persist comes both from a strong sense of justice and from the emotional support of a group. How did Jobs for Women hold together and keep going for so long? Its members persisted because their cause was more than theoretical — it came from their own experiences and desire for justice.

The second thing, unremarked in this documentary, is the significance of the early decision to limit the group to those actually seeking work. Also unexplored are the difficulties of finding the translators needed to enable decisions to be made across the language groups involved.

The third thing is the sheer daring of the campaigners. At different times, the women used every imaginable tactic — from conventional marches and leaflets to street theatre, chaining themselves to the steelworks fences, breaking down the doors of parliament, and ambushing state premier Neville Wran to demand access to legal aid. Along the way, there was endless fundraising, and the support of many outside the group.

The Jobs for Women campaign is well worth celebrating, and this fine documentary does that very well indeed. Nothing inspires like success. But the lessons for those trying to achieve justice may need rethinking before the age of “iso” turns us all into outworkers. •

Women of Steel is available on demand at the Sydney Film Festival.

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The photo is dated “c. 1950,” when she was twenty-year-old Merle Wilson and a student at the University of Sydney, a period she describes as “the happiest time of my life.” It was there that she met her future husband, a bookish returned soldier named Neil Thornton; together, they would raise a family and have many adventures. Around 1950, the adventures included discovering sex, being in thrall to the philosopher John Anderson and mixing with the Libertarians who eventually morphed into the Sydney Push, the bohemian scene that incubated Germaine Greer, Clive James, Robert Hughes and other notables.

The Sydney Push would become notorious for its sexism, but by then Merle had moved on to the public service, where she quickly developed strategies to combat boredom and land the better gigs. “Before Germaine, there was Merle,” declares the cover blurb, and indeed there was. We’re very fortunate that Germaine Greer and Merle Thornton are both still with us, but while we know a lot about Greer — too much, perhaps — how much do even the most dedicated students of Australian feminism know about Thornton, other than the 1965 Regatta Hotel protest she is best known for, and perhaps the fact that she’s the mother of actor Sigrid Thornton? Until now, not nearly enough.

What Merle Thornton tells us about her life and times is, on any measure, the right amount — not too much, not too little, coy in parts but candid elsewhere, and vivid throughout. It’s a fast, breezy read, written with the assistance of Melanie Ostell, and grew out of a stage show, Frank and Fearless, commissioned by the Queensland Music Festival, in which Thornton shared stories with her daughter.

It’s a memoir that also wants to inspire and instruct, with life lessons and maxims peppered throughout. The narrative is chronological, peaking in the 1970s, with occasional pauses to showcase “indelible moments” and “bookish influences.” These features sometimes tip over into whimsy, but the overall effect is endearing. As a narrator, Thornton is consistently good company. Crucially, she knows she is a historically significant figure but doesn’t over-inflate her importance. And even without the better-known parts, the nine-decade span of her life makes for fascinating social history.

Thornton was born during the Great Depression and attended Fort Street Girl’s High in Sydney in the 1940s, at a time when the majority of her classmates left school at fifteen. In one memorable observation, she contrasts the femininities of university-bound young women like herself (“dowdy matrons in our black cotton stockings”) and the contemporaries who left school to enter the world of work and romance “dressed in fashionable pencil skirts” with “proper hairdos,” who were like “colourful birds.” “It’s an interesting paradox,” she notes, “that we would learn many different things that these women would never know about, and yet we remained children for so much longer.”

Merle Thornton (right) and Rosalie Bogner chained to the footrail at the Regatta Hotel, Toowong, in March 1965. Bruce Postle/Newspix

By contemporary standards, Thornton’s life path might be the more common one — she graduated from university, got married, had children and continued to work, study and travel — but some of the most fascinating sections of the book evoke how different Australia was in the 1950s and 1960s, especially for women.

As a university student, she was an anomaly; as a public servant she had to hide her marriage (and for as long as she was able, her first pregnancy) in order to keep her job. In the first decade of her marriage she used a cap and spermicide for contraception, and she recalls that “preparing for sex could be a slow, at times embarrassing and potentially shaming learning experience subject to trial and error.” The arrival of the contraceptive pill in the early 1960s is duly recognised for the seismic event that it was, even if the initial batch gave her migraines.

The 1960s became her decade. At the University of Queensland, where her husband took up a lecturing post in 1960, Thornton threw herself into campus life. In her first direct action, she stormed down the corridor from the dull women’s staffroom to the male common room and sat down, “heart thumping.” Never a fan of single-sex organisations or segregated socialising, she wanted the right to be where the conversation was, regardless of her sex.

In this spirit, Thornton and her friend Rosalie Bogner staged her next direct action, this time on a much more ambitious scale. They chained themselves to the front bar of the Regatta Hotel on 31 March 1965 to protest against liquor laws that excluded women from drinking there. With the press tipped off, their novel action made headlines around the world and inspired a wave of similar protests. For all of its spectacular qualities, however, it’s the quotidian details of the protest that stand out, including the large kilt pin she used to cinch the waist of her skirt, and the performance of deep conversation with Bogner as the action played out. “I have no recollection of what we said to each other,” Thornton recalls, “and wouldn’t be surprised if it was ‘rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb.’”

After the Regatta protest, which comes around three-quarters of the way through, the memoir’s energy dissipates somewhat. Riding on the protest’s momentum, Thornton became a “go-to person on the issue of equal rights” and established the Equal Opportunities for Women Association, which successfully lobbied for the removal of the “marriage bar” from the Public Service Act in 1966.

But while Thornton has remained a dedicated feminist, including as a foundational figure in women’s studies at the University of Queensland, women’s liberation was never quite to her taste. Hers is a politics of like-minded people working together for a common cause, whether it’s libertarianism and free thought, Aboriginal rights or equal opportunities for men and women. If at times these principles strike the reader as old-fashioned, this book also provides plenty of reminders — including the groovy cover — that Merle Thornton was a genuine trailblazer. •

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Only a writer with Brenda Niall’s command of research materials could notice such a moment of social connection. Her 1979 book, Seven Little Billabongs: The World of Ethel Turner and Mary Grant Bruce, established her as the pre-eminent scholar of these Australian children’s authors at a time when children’s fiction was looked down on as “kiddylit.” She has since become one of Australia’s most important biographers of literary and art figures, her subjects including Martin Boyd and the Boyd family, the artistic Durack sisters and the artist Judy Cassab. On the way, she has gained a wealth of knowledge about Australian society and how its cultural elites have intermingled over decades.

In Friends and Rivals, she draws on this knowledge to produce an entertaining exploration of the overlapping lives of four of Australia’s most admired women writers. It is the kind of book that can only be written by someone immersed in Australian literature and alert to the social and professional constraints on women writers.

Turner’s unexpected friendship with Baynton serves as an introduction to an account of Turner’s difficult childhood as the daughter of a widow who brought her daughters to Australia in a desperate attempt to retrieve her fortunes. Her unhappy Sydney marriage to a man ten years younger confirmed her daughters’ resolve to earn their own living rather than rely on marriage to support them.

By the time Turner married the young barrister Herbert Curlewis she was earning more from her children’s novels and her columns in newspapers than he was from legal practice. After 1917, when Curlewis had become a judge, his wife continued to churn out a novel a year. None would attain the popularity or acclaim of Seven Little Australians, though, and her ambition to become a famous adult novelist fell by the wayside.

Turner’s friendship with Baynton grew at a time when the older woman was a rich widow and canny investor. By the time she wrote them, Baynton’s stories of women trapped in horrific outback conditions appeared at odds with her respectable city life as a rich doctor’s wife. They clearly drew on a past she was anxious to hide, including her marriage to a man who had abandoned her and their three children. Baynton was a magnificent liar, inventing romantic myths about her early life and obliterating her poor parents and the grinding years in the bush. In Sydney she found work as a housekeeper for the wealthy Dr Baynton, marrying him the day after she finalised a divorce.

Niall sees her marriage as Pygmalion-like, with the much older Baynton schooling Barbara in the ways of the middle classes. After his death, she set up house in London and managed to enter the exclusive social world of the aristocracy, who were amused by her extravagant personality. Her marriage to the eccentric Lord Headley appears too improbable for fiction, though she was the model for Martin Boyd’s social-climbing heroine in his novels Brangane and Such Pleasure.

The connection between the writers from Melbourne, Henry Handel Richardson and Nettie Palmer, was more formal. Palmer attended the Presbyterian Ladies’ College a decade after Richardson and neglected her predecessor’s fiction until Richardson’s schoolfriend, Mary Kernot, drew her attention to the omission of Maurice Guest from Palmer’s Modern Australian Literature (1913). Palmer took her role as the custodian of Australian literature seriously and duly sought the novelist out at her home in Sussex. She became a committed promoter of Richardson’s work in Australia.

Of these four writers, only Richardson can indisputably be termed “great,” though Australians were slow to appreciate her work. The final volume of The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, Ultima Thule, was not published until 1929, after Richardson’s husband paid a subvention to Heinemann. It would lift the other two novels of the trilogy out of oblivion and lead readers to reassess Richardson’s schoolgirl story, The Getting of Wisdom. Like the other writers, Richardson tried to control public versions of herself, causing many readers and critics, encouraged by her memoir Myself When Young, to confuse the fictions with her life story.

Richardson was witty at Palmer’s expense (“impish,” she would have said) in letters describing the critic’s visits. Niall lets us see how Palmer’s seriousness emerged from her childhood circumstances — more stable than those of the fiction writers but nevertheless engendering an exaggerated sense of responsibility. She was never to know that Kernot and Richardson’s executor Olga Roncoroni were protecting her from the contents of those letters when they obstructed her proposed biography of Richardson. She wrote an important critical study instead.

Though these writers were not really the “friends and rivals” of the title, this loose frame allows Niall to give attention to some of the talented figures clustered around her four subjects who may not warrant full biographies of their own. Louise Mack, a schoolfriend of Turner, came to scorn Turner’s comfortable suburban life and unambitious children’s books, and ventured to England in pursuit of a more illustrious literary career. She published several novels, including a roman à clef that mocked Turner, and she was a war correspondent in Belgium at the beginning of the first world war. Without financial success, though, she spent the last years of her life in Sydney writing Mills & Boon novels and newspaper journalism.

Exact contemporaries, Ethel Turner and Henry Handel (Ethel) Richardson each had talented siblings called Lilian/Lillian whose achievements were eclipsed by those of their sisters. Turner shared various writing projects with her sister, but Richardson always portrayed her Lil as the simpler and stereotypically pretty younger sister. Niall brings her out of the shadows as an active suffragette whose first marriage to a German ophthalmologist collapsed under the strain of the first world war.

Lil later married A.S. Neill, a teacher and educational theorist, and together they set up Summerhill, a school that focused on creativity and self-expression in children. Lil managed all the practical aspects of the school, but, as Niall notes, just as Richardson downplayed Lil’s role in her own household, Neill erased Lil from his version of the founding of Summerhill. Niall also reminds us that while Richardson kept everyone in the house to her rigid routine, her husband George Robertson was downstairs in his study writing a major history of German literature and a biography of Goethe.

The cumulative effect of these loosely connected stories is to draw out the incentives that turned women into writers at a time when they had few other outlets for creativity. Turner and her sister were determined to become writers from their teenage years, while Baynton’s fiction appears to be a rare commitment to paper of her rich imaginative life. Richardson became a writer under the influence of her husband after the failure of her ambitions as a pianist. Nettie Palmer published her early poems but always deferred to the creativity of her novelist husband, Vance. Difficult childhoods may have provided material for fiction but supportive husbands clearly had important roles in the lives of these women. Palmer chose a novelist for a husband and spent her life supporting and promoting his work, probably at the expense of her own creative life.

But these aren’t presented as morals to be drawn from their lives (marry a stable man with potential earning power). They are evidence of Niall’s alertness to the conditions of art and the many talented people, men and women, who never achieve fame. She has evident sympathy for the critic, Palmer, who worked all her life to support the work of other Australian writers and accepted her task with humility. It is, perhaps, a sign of Niall’s own awareness of the secondary nature of the biographer and critic in the literary world. Her learning sits lightly on her narrative as she shares some of the fascinating insights she has gathered over a long career. •

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In her refreshing new pop history Difficult Women, British journalist Helen Lewis makes room for the likes of Stopes, one of the better-known figures profiled among an eclectic (though mainly British) group that also includes working-class suffragette Annie Kenney, trailblazing football player Lily Parr and Maureen Colquhoun, who in the 1970s became the first “out” MP in British history. The subtitle — A History of Feminism in 11 Fights — refers to how the book is thematically organised around various struggles (like divorce reform, the vote and access to education), most of which remain unfinished or ongoing business (sex, love, work and, perhaps especially, time). Hers is a productive approach — the examples are mostly confined to Britain but still have the capacity to surprise or even enrage, and every theme translates to Australia. While we have had no-fault divorce since 1975, they still don’t have it in Britain. Access to safe abortion remains an issue everywhere, and every victory is hard-won.

For readers attuned to feminist debate and conflict, the subtitle also suggests a history of feminists fighting each other over the best way forward. And while there’s certainly some of that, including Lewis’s sharing of her own exasperation with present-day “woke” culture and what she sees as its unreasonable demands, the real substance here is in her vivid accounts of a range of feminist causes and the women who have helped to advance them. Her appreciation of her subjects — even, or especially, when she disagrees with them or they’re not particularly likeable — is contagious.

Some of the difficult women are long dead, among them Caroline Norton, who began lobbying for women’s custodial rights in the 1830s when she lost custody of her own children after her husband George sensationally put her on trial for adultery. Or Sophia Jex-Blake, one of the Edinburgh Seven campaigners who won the right for women to study medicine in the 1870s (with the “proviso that lecturers did not have to teach them alongside the men”). When required, Lewis dutifully and sometimes performatively speaks to historians and visits archives, but she’s best in journalist mode, interviewing surviving “difficult women” or activists who continue the fight.

These include the formidable Erin Pizzey, possibly the most influential domestic violence campaigner of all. Pizzey would be a “feminist hero,” writes Lewis, if not for the fact that her theories about gendered violence have morphed so far from feminist analysis that her most receptive audience is now among men’s rights activists. Lewis offers a sympathetic and clear-eyed account, reinforcing the point that “Pizzey’s difficult relationship with feminism does not mean that she has to be written out of the story.”

Lewis is no feminist theorist, but mostly this works to the book’s advantage. She concludes with her own manifesto for difficult women, by which stage the point has already been well made. Of greater interest is how she brings different feminist activists, thinkers and texts together around a shared theme. In the chapter on time, she interviews sociologist Arlie Hochschild, best known for the sometimes-misused term “emotional labour,” about how her own experiences as a working mother informed books like The Second Shift (1989). Lewis also gives due credit to Selma James as a feminist visionary, noting that her 1952 pamphlet, “A Woman’s Place,” written from the perspective of a working-class, immigrant woman, anticipated Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) by over a decade.

Lewis’s ambivalence about the campaign for which James is most famous — Wages for Housework — makes for a layered and lively analysis, including for readers like me who gravitate more to James’s politics than those of Lewis. Nor does it preclude her from having a lightbulb moment about the Marxist influence on feminism. “It’s an odd quirk of history,” writes Lewis, “that most of today’s younger feminists know little about Marxism” yet “we have inherited an intellectual tradition steeped in it.”

The Marxist influence on feminism includes intersectionality, a feminist theory Lewis is better at applying than pontificating about. She offers, for example, a thoughtful and fresh account of Jayaben Desai, who as a recent South Asian migrant led the historic strike at the Grunwick film-processing lab in the mid 1970s. Elsewhere, Lewis wades into what she calls the “intersectionality wars.” As a high-profile, white, middle-class feminist in Britain, Lewis has been targeted as irredeemably privileged, but her lamenting of this treatment reads as more defensive than insightful.

Mercifully, she keeps that discussion short, otherwise it might have dated or limited the appeal of what is a pleasingly ambitious and wide-ranging feminist read. While immersed in it, and ever since, I’ve been imagining an Australian equivalent. As Lewis so effectively demonstrates, difficult women have been a driving force wherever feminism has taken root, and it’s important to honour them, flaws and all. •

Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights
By Helen Lewis | Jonathan Cape | $35 | 368 pages

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It’s the voice. Every writer needs one, and hers is a voice Australians are now familiar with — a certain kind of Jewish New Yorker’s voice, laced with irony and self-examination for all its community-mindedness. Yet biting, and far from self-indulgent. When I read her, echoes flood from my childhood — comforting, but at the same time confronting. It’s a judging voice, one she has questioned if never entirely relinquished.

But maybe she has with this book. Unfinished Business advertises itself as a book about books and reading. After all, books can be friends, and visiting old ones can delight but also surprise us; the things we remember often aren’t there on the page. Recently, seeking a quotation, I re-read a book that had a profound effect on me shortly after I came to Australia. Not only could I not find the quote, I was shocked to discover just how racist and sexist the book is.

As with life, so it is with books. You can’t go home again. Or if you do, you’re likely to meet with disappointment, or at least a disconnect. As Gornick says:

It has often been my experience that re-reading a book that was important to me at earlier times in my life is something like lying on the analyst’s couch. The narrative I have had by heart for years is suddenly called into alarming question. It seems that I’ve misremembered quite a lot about this or that character or this or that plot turn — they met here in New York, I was so sure it was Rome; the time was 1870, I thought it was 1900; and the mother did what to the protagonist? Yet the world still drops away while I’m reading and I can’t help marvelling, If I got this wrong, and this and this wrong, how come the book still has me in its grip?

Most of the books Gornick examines here she’s re-read twice, at different stages of her life, each time changing her take on them. And this applies to all different kinds of books — her reading is not only wide but worthy itself of comment. The authors include writers as disparate as Marguerite Duras and Colette; Saul Bellow and Delmore Schwartz; A.B. Yehoshua and Natalia Ginzburg; D.H. Lawrence, Pat Barker and J.L. Carr.

Their differences notwithstanding, there’s no discounting the critical place of feminism in Gornick’s re-readings. Her opening piece traces her own development along a common political trajectory from socialist left to women’s liberation. She was writing for Village Voice when she came upon the pioneers of feminism’s second wave, citing the galvanising effect of meeting Kate Millett, Susan Brownmiller and Shulamith Firestone, writers whose analyses of what we came to call sexism would hone her perspectives on love and sex for years to come.

But now, towards the end of her life, she finds their judgements, bold and perceptive as they were, to be missing something. She turns instead to an earlier feminist, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the nineteenth-century suffragist and editor of the journal Revolution, for a seemingly deeper embrace of humanity.

If this seems perplexing, it’s because Unfinished Business isn’t really a book about reading at all. It is about emotional poverty; and what Stanton said about this in her final public speech was that an individual life, female or male, through a combination of nature and history, is fundamentally alone. “Who, I ask you,” Stanton therefore cried, can “dare to take on himself the rights, the duties, the responsibilities of another human soul?”

Here, then, is the underlying theme that binds all Gornick’s authors together. She begins, after the chapter on her reading self, with D.H. Lawrence’s classic bildungsroman Sons and Lovers. I was introduced to this book shortly after arriving in Australia, and was dismayed to find out in my Sydney University English class that Gertrude Morel, with whom I identified completely, was the villain of the piece. Only after her son Paul (based on Lawrence himself) had broken away from her, we were told, was he on his way to adulthood. It was a purely Freudian interpretation.

When Gornick first read Sons and Lovers she identified with Miriam, Paul’s sweetheart, who is portrayed as being crippled by suppressed desire — the lot of many women in her day (and, I should say, in the 1950s). On Gornick’s second reading, though, at the crest of second-wave feminism, her sympathy lay with the free-loving bohemian artist Clara. Now, on her third reading, Gornick has come to perceive that Lawrence made far too much of sexual freedom. Over a century since Sons and Lovers was published and a half-century since her own feminist awakening, she has seen how we have asked too much of sex, how it can be a substitute for feeling, masking, for a variety of reasons, a near epidemic of emotional paralysis.

Page-wise, Unfinished Business is a small book. For all that, it packs a powerful punch. More, it sent me on a reading jag that included another of Gornick’s books, two of which are being reissued this year. And though I was familiar with many of the writers she discusses in this one, I had never read Elizabeth Bowen, and decided it was time I did. Beginning with The Death of the Heart, Bowen’s sixth novel, which many consider her finest, I moved on to Patricia Laurence’s biography of her and, having finished that, have started A World of Love, which came out in 1954. Bowen published ten novels and thirteen volumes of stories, as well as a family history and other nonfiction. Her own life, too, is as fascinating as anything she wrote.

Gornick is full of praise for Bowen, largely because society’s tamping down of genuine feeling is Bowen’s abiding subject. Orphaned young, she was parked among relatives for much of her adolescence. The Death of the Heart, a bildungsroman like Lawrence’s, springs from this experience, with Portia, its sixteen-year-old protagonist, bucking against the adult world of dissemblance and denial. It’s a powerful book, portraying Portia’s pain and resilience with more than enough hints of her creator’s. But then there is Eddie, the love interest. Most of us women, Gornick included, have had an Eddie in our lives, charming but faithless. “Although ostensibly an adult, he is actually a true Bowen child,” Gornick writes, a victim himself of “stunted empathy,” an avatar of “the human fallout” Bowen has made the theme of her novels.

So far, though I’m mesmerised by Bowen’s stories, and indeed her life’s story (Anglo-Irish, orphan, lover, spy), I can’t seem to wholly share Gornick’s admiration for Bowen’s prose. It’s too much of her time, too precious and wordy for me — so unlike Gornick’s own, in fact, with seven pages to Gornick’s single crackling line. It’s the New Yorker in me, I guess. So much depends on childhood, its echoes reverberating inside a reader’s brain, dictating a writer’s voice and, in the end, shaping our reading tastes. That said, how grateful I am for this latest book of Gornick’s, nudging me, prodding me, opening vistas for me, every step of the way. •

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Lee’s follow-up, Beauty, has an equally arresting cover and is similarly compelling. But it’s also more modest in size and ambition, despite the hefty cultural baggage of its title. Beauty is a personal essay in which Lee pursues a narrative and personal thread first introduced in Eggshell Skull. Lee writes that she grappled with whether to include details of her “small ritual” of vomiting after dinner in that book, and ultimately decided to go with it. In Beauty, she inspects her own “obsession with thinness” more closely, cognisant that it’s both an “embarrassing admission” and one that wider society endorses.

Beauty opens in early 2018, on the eve of Eggshell Skull’s publication, with Lee in seeming control of her disordered eating. Yet the looming publicity tour was reawakening her “longing to purge again.” The plot, such as it is, takes the reader from Lee’s determination to hit her goal weight for a glamorous photo shoot for a women’s magazine through to hard-won self-acceptance via ruminations on and research into “beauty” and associated themes. Lee’s light-bulb moment is shared close to midway — “In harming myself, I was harming others. The jig was up” — effectively dividing the essay into two parts, each with its own strengths and weaknesses.

In the opening sixty pages or so, Lee reveals the extent and character of her quest for “perfection.” Like many women, she recalls a time when she almost achieved it, at least physically. She was praised for how good she looked, even though — or because — her weight was “right on the borderline of an ‘unhealthy’ BMI.” Lee embarks on a new diet and exercise regime and follows model Georgia Fowler and the Skinny Bitch Collective (“infamous for granting membership only to the already trimmest-of-trim women”) on Instagram for inspiration and motivation.

There’s an admirable fearlessness to Lee’s writing in this section. She needs the reader not to like her but to comprehend what she once valued as “beauty” and what it cost her to do so. In one stand-out passage, the prose soars: “Self-improvement without self-loathing seemed impossible. In life you had to be both the horse and the jockey: whipping and giving directions while your own lungs filled with blood.”

Perhaps inevitably though, given the unrelenting and repetitive cycle of “perfectionism” that Lee is documenting in one of its most common and gendered forms, there are moments early on when the point feels already made. Contemporary beauty ideals are a sham, they hurt people, especially women, and they feed capitalism. Social media, of course, makes everything worse, but the literature Lee draws on to make sense of this does not add much that is new to the conversation. I preferred her own words, like “Girls are told their bodies aren’t valuable, then people roll their eyes if the girls themselves treat their bodies like trash.”

Lee pans out more widely in the second and most substantial part of the essay, to mixed effect. Her arguments are most lucid and powerful when she’s focused on the ongoing perversity and damage of the thinness ideal. As she notes, the fashion industry has made some token gestures towards body diversity, but its modus operandi remains business as usual. “It’s mind-blowing,” she writes, “how everyone always says someone else is responsible. The buck stops nowhere.”

More urgently, she forcefully condemns continued denial of the “damage done by eating disorders,” in particular anorexia, which has “the highest death rate of all psychiatric illnesses.” Lee’s reflections on the tragic fate of the astonishingly talented singer Amy Winehouse — who was obviously suffering from an eating disorder, though her death was officially categorised otherwise — are probably the best in an essay not short of arresting passages.

Where Lee is less successful is in expanding the potential of what constitutes “beauty.” It’s on this front that the limited utility of her somewhat privileged experience and embodiment as an able-bodied white woman is most obvious. A chance encounter with musician Nkechi Anele, who is of African descent, sparks some intersectional thinking about how racism compounds sexism, but one is left wondering what would have happened had they not crossed paths. Lee could have turned to any number of books, blogs and articles from women writing from diverse perspectives on similar themes, but it is as though fat activism — to name one obvious omission — never happened. Such absences give parts of the essay an oddly retro feel, exacerbated by extended engagement with Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth (1990).

Still, as long as mainstream perceptions of “beauty” continue to be represented by women such as actor Jennifer Aniston — who recently revealed her latest “beauty” secret to be fasting most of the day, with celery juice for a treat — writing from feminists such as Wolf and Lee will continue to make a mark. Ultimately, the impact of Lee’s essay will depend on how resonant her experiences are to her readers. •

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Although the article was welcomed by women who had experienced the kinds of discrimination she described, other responses were nowhere as approving, to put it mildly. The piece opened up a sore left to fester too long. Feelings went so deep that one African-American journalist ended up losing her job. It was this stupendous outcome and others like it that spurred Hamad into developing her arguments further in this book.

Some readers will be squirming from the very first chapter, for Hamad’s main contention is that, far from being “sisters,” white women have played a large role in oppressing women of colour. And they continue to do so, she argues — even now, in #MeToo’s shining hour. Not only that, but when confronted, the accused routinely deploy their weapon of choice, which is to dissolve into tears, arrogating victimhood to themselves. The accusation applies to liberal women as well as to conservative ones, progressives as well as reactionaries.

But to state it this plainly and reductively is to do Hamad a disservice, for White Tears/Brown Scars is diligently researched, comprehensive and insightful. So much so it’s almost impossible to mount a countervailing argument. But I’m going to give it a try.

First, a few biographical details. I came to Australia from America in 1958, all of nineteen years old, married to an Australian who had been having difficulty getting work in the States and wanted to go home. I was young, excited and deeply anxious. I hadn’t been at all confident that I’d be allowed to accompany him. Australia was notorious for its White Australia policy and, being Jewish, I wasn’t at all sure that I was white. In the States at the time we definitely weren’t treated as such. While never discriminated against to the degree that blacks were, we faced quotas in certain schools and universities, and we were prohibited from living in certain neighbourhoods and joining certain clubs. Even after news trickled out about the Holocaust, anti-Semitism was rife.

Because of Australia’s immigration policy, I had reason to believe that even if I could come, it would be much the same here. In retrospect — if you overlook my youth and the fact that in the decade preceding the second world war Jewish immigration had been severely restricted — this seems outlandish. Now, more than sixty years after my arrival, not only has the policy changed, but the “whiteness” of Jews is scarcely questioned. And in relation to Israel-Palestine, some Jews have been engaging in horrific discrimination of their own.

Still, as Hamad succinctly puts it, “Over the centuries, as the proponents and beneficiaries of colonialism, whites have set the standards both for humanity as a whole, embodied in the white man, and for femininity that is designed to complement the white male and is embodied in the white woman.” Rather than a biological fact, she argues, whiteness and colour are social constructs. That is not to deny their political implications, but this is exactly what she has found many white women do.

To back this up she has drawn on interviews with women whose experiences are so consistent that it would be hard to dismiss the pattern. Her sample is small — just over two dozen women of colour — but the consistency of their testimony, combined with an in-depth analysis of the history, taking in the slave trade and the supremacy of whites in all the settler-colonial nations, makes for a compelling case. Yes, the Greeks and Romans had slavery, but their economies weren’t based on it like those of the West Indies or the American South. Yes, Arabs were engaged in the slave trade, but it was the British who ramped it up. Everywhere she looks, Hamad unearths incontrovertible evidence. In short, it’s hard to think of a single statement she makes about white male culpability, or white women’s complicity, that I don’t basically agree with.

From the forced concubinage of slave women to persistent stereotypes that demonise black and brown women — it is all documented in the literature, disseminated through pop culture, or given in direct testimony that would, at the very least, be disrespectful to ignore. Still, I often found the catchy phrases Hamad uses to pinpoint those stereotypes — Lewd Jezebels, Bad Arabs, Angry Sapphires, and so on — disturbingly reductive themselves. And excellent as her diagnosis is, I can’t help thinking that she falls somewhat short when it comes to prescribing a cure.

My misgivings may lie in what we’ve come to call identity politics, and its tendency to sidestep the thorny issue of class. Though not dismissing class altogether, Hamad’s passion makes her downplay it, so all through the book I found myself caught up in a messy sort of dialogue, with her assertions on one side and a chain of “yes, buts” from me. Once again, this is unsurprising, given my own history. An old-time second-wave feminist, again and again I was wanting to point out that social movements, even at their peaks, are never monolithic. There were women in the 1970s who vociferously resisted feminism, who organised in groups such as Women Who Want to Be Women and lobbied at every turn against feminist proposals for reform. And we feminists were divided, often bitterly, among ourselves.

Broadly speaking, there were radical feminists, who were separatists, excising men as much as possible from their lives; socialist feminists focusing on the interface of patriarchy and capitalism; and liberal feminists, who saw little further than equal opportunity. There was inevitable overlap, but there are no prizes for guessing which feminism was tolerated when neoliberalism triumphed. I spent the better part of the next four decades wincing at the adjective “post-feminist,” as if the whole feminist project were done and dusted, and I was consistently dismayed when its vision narrowed to simply advancing up the ranks of a ruthlessly ideological, unregulated capitalism.

Even in the seventies we had seen that real power resides in the combined strength of all the groups disadvantaged by the system, if only that power could be activated. I guess this is what’s meant by intersectionality, but Hamad is troubled by that term, so long as white women are in denial. Yet the tactic of divide and rule has a long tradition, setting one group against another to deflect attention from those on top running the whole show. Its end point is tribalism, with its awful potential for tearing the world apart, such as we’re witnessing today. Neoliberalism champions competition, “giving a go for those who have a go,” but all the evidence suggests that humanity’s success as a species has depended above all on our capacity to cooperate in the face of our challenges.

At the end of her book a defiant Hamad rejoices that women of colour are finally joining together to deal with their persistent disadvantage. But when she speaks of their double oppression, I say it comes in triplicate — gender, race and class. It’s not just a question of lower glass ceilings or larger pay gaps or silenced complaints. We only have to look at the women cleaning our offices, schools and hospitals; caring for children, the elderly and the ill; or serving in restaurants and cafes to know that. Some are white, more are brown or black, but what they all are is poor. And until the new feminism embraces this reality, things are very likely to get worse.

But don’t mistake my rant for disparagement. White Tears/Brown Scars is a gripping book with a powerful, timely message. Ruby Hamad throws down the gauntlet, goading her readers into some fairly hard thinking, and I, for one, thank her for it. •

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Likewise hoping that her daughter might avoid the fate of a father who was “mad, bad and dangerous to know,” Ada’s mother, Lady Anne Isabella Milbanke, ensured that she was schooled with precision and discipline in mathematics from her earliest days, and closely watched her for any signs of the troubles that had plagued her father. Lord Byron, abandoning them weeks after Ada’s birth, died when she was eight; his legacy cast a ghostly shadow over her life.

Ada’s schooling marched ever forward, toward an understanding of the world based on numbers. “We desire certainty not uncertainty, science not art,” she was insistently told by one of her tutors, William Frend. Another tutor was the mathematician and logician Augustus De Morgan, who cautioned Ada’s mother on the perils of teaching mathematics to women: “All women who have published mathematics hitherto have shown knowledge, and the power of getting, but… [none] has wrestled with difficulties and shown a man’s strength in getting over them,” he wrote. “The reason is obvious: the very great tension of mind which they require is beyond the strength of a woman’s physical power of application.”

But Ada was never going to be denied the opportunity to learn about mathematics. Lady Anne was a talent herself, dubbed “Princess of Parallelograms” by Lord Byron. Having managed to outlive him, the desire to expunge in her daughter the slightest genetic tendency for mad genius and kinky sex took precedence over any concerns about Ada’s feminine delicacy.

Married at nineteen years of age, Ada, now Countess Lovelace, demonstrated curiosity and agility of mind that would prove to be of great service to the world. Just a year before her marriage, in 1833, she had met Charles Babbage, a notable mathematician with a crankish disposition (he could not stand music, apparently, and started a campaign against street musicians). Together they worked on plans for the Analytical Engine, the world’s first mechanical computer. It was designed to be a mechanical calculator, with punch cards for inputting data and a printer for transcribing solutions to a range of mathematical functions. Babbage was a grand intellect, with a penchant for snobbery and indifference to many of the practicalities of getting things done. Lovelace was his intellectual equal but arguably better adapted to social life.

Like the proverbial genius, Babbage struggled with deadlines and formalities. When one of his speeches was transcribed for publication in Italian and neglected by Babbage, Lovelace picked it up and translated it. She redrafted parts of it to provide explanations to the reader. Her work ended up accounting for about two-thirds of the total text. This became her significant contribution to the advancement of computing: turning the transcription into the first-ever paper on computer science. It became a treatise on the work she and Babbage did together.

There remains some controversy about the extent of Lovelace’s participation in this project, but ample historical evidence exists to dismiss the detractors, not least the direct praise bestowed on her work and intellect by Babbage. Lovelace applied her mathematical imagination to the plans for the Analytical Engine and Babbage’s vision of its potential. She sketched out the possibility of using the machine to perform all sorts of tasks beyond number crunching. In her inspired graphic history of Babbage and Lovelace, Sydney Padua describes Lovelace’s original contribution as one that is foundational to the field of computer science: “By manipulating symbols according to rules, any kind of information, not only numbers, can be operated on by automatic processes.” Lovelace had made the leap from calculation to computation.

Padua describes the relationship between Babbage and Lovelace as complementary in computational terms. “The stubborn, rigid Babbage and mercurial, airy Lovelace embody the division between hardware and software.” Babbage built the mechanics and tinkered endlessly with the physical design; Lovelace was more interested in manipulating the machine’s basic functions using algorithmic formulas. They were, in essence, the first computer geeks.

The kind of thinking needed to build computers is precisely this combination of artistry and engineering, of practical mechanics and abstract mathematics, coupled with an endless curiosity and desire for improvement. The pioneering pair’s work blurred the division between science and art and navigated the spectrum between certainty and uncertainty. Without Babbage, none of it would have happened. But with Lovelace’s predilection for imaginative thinking and education in mathematics, a perfect alignment of intellect allowed for the creation of computer science. Lovelace and Babbage’s achievements were impressive because they challenged what was possible while at the same time remaining grounded in human knowledge.

And beyond all this, Lovelace was a woman. (A woman!) In direct contradiction to her tutors’ warnings decades earlier, Babbage wrote, Lovelace was an “enchantress who has thrown her magical spell around the most abstract of Sciences and has grasped it with a force which few masculine intellects (in our country at least) could have exerted over it.” Lovelace showed it was possible to transcend not only the bounds of orthodox mathematics but also her socially prescribed gender role.

No doubt all this caused Lovelace’s mother considerable worry. The madness seemed to be catching up, much to her consternation. In the years after her visionary publication, Lovelace poignantly beseeched Lady Anne: “You will not concede me philosophical poetry. Invert the order! Will you give me poetical philosophy, poetical science?”

For Babbage, the perfect was the enemy of good, and he never did manage to build a full model of his designs. In 1843, knowing that he struggled with such matters, Lovelace offered, in a lengthy and thoughtful letter, to take over management of the practical and public aspects of his work. He rejected her overtures outright yet seemed incapable of doing himself what was required to bring his ideas to fruition.

Lovelace’s work in dispelling myths and transforming philosophy was cut short when she died of cancer aged just thirty-six. Babbage died, a bitter and disappointed old man, just shy of eighty. The first computers were not built until a century later.

Technological advances are a product of social context as much as of an individual inventor. The extent to which innovations are possible will depend on a number of factors external to the individuals who make them, including the education available to them, the resources they have to explore their ideas, and the cultural tolerance for the kind of experimentation necessary to develop those ideas.

Melvin Kranzberg, the great historian of technology, observed that technology is a “very human activity — and so is the history of technology.” Humans are responsible for technological development but do not labour in conditions of their own choosing. Had Babbage been a bit more of a practical person, in social as well as technological matters, the world may not have needed to wait an extra century for his ideas to catch on. Had Lovelace lived in a time where women’s involvement in science and technology was encouraged, she might have advanced the field of computer science to a considerably greater degree.

So too, then, technological developments more generally can only really be understood by looking at the historical context in which they occur. The industrial revolution saw great advances in production, for example, allowing an economic output that would scarcely be thought possible in the agrarian society that had prevailed a few generations earlier. These breakthroughs in technology, from the loom to the steam engine, seemed to herald a new age of humanity in which dominance over nature was within reach. The reliance on mysticism and the idea that spiritual devotion would be rewarded with human advancement were losing relevance. The development of technology transformed humanity’s relationship with the natural world, a process that escalated dramatically in the nineteenth century. Humans created a world where we could increasingly determine our own destiny.

But such advances were also a method by which workers were robbed of their agency and relegated to meaningless, repetitive labour without craftsmanship. As machines were built to do work traditionally done by humans, humans themselves started to feel more like machines. It is not difficult to empathize with the Luddites in the early nineteenth century, smashing the machines that had reduced their labour to automated work. In resisting technological progress, workers were resisting the separation of their work from themselves. This separation stripped them of what they understood to be their human essence.

Whatever the horrors of feudalism, it had allowed those who laboured to see what they themselves produced, to understand their value in terms of output directly. Such work was defined, at least to a certain extent, by the human creativity and commitment around it. With industrialisation and the atomisation of craftsmanship, all this began to evaporate, absorbed into steam and fused into steel. Human bodies became a vehicle for energy transfer, a mere input into the machinery of production. It gave poetic significance to the term Karl Marx coined for capital: dead labour.

Though the Luddites are often only glibly referenced in modern debates, the truth is that they were directly concerned with conditions of labour rather than mindless machine-breaking or some reactionary desire to turn back time. They sought to redefine their relationship with technology in a way that resisted dehumanisation.

“Luddites opposed the use of machines whose purpose was to reduce production costs,” writes historian Kevin Binfield, “whether the cost reductions were achieved by decreasing wages or the number of hours worked.” They objected to machinery that made poor-quality products, and they wanted workers to be properly trained and paid. Their chosen tactic was industrial sabotage, and when their frame-breaking became the focus of proposed criminal law reform, it was, of all people, Lord Byron who leaped to their defence in his maiden speech to the House of Lords. Byron pleaded that these instances of violence “have arisen from circumstances of the most unparalleled distress.” “Nothing but absolute want,” he fulminated, “could have driven a large and once honest and industrious body of the people into the commission of excesses so hazardous to themselves, their families, and the community.”

The historical effect of this strategy has been to associate Luddites forever with nostalgia and a doomed wish to unwind the advances of humanity. But to see them as backward-looking would be an interpretive mistake. In their writings, the Luddites appear more like a nineteenth-century equivalent of Anonymous: “The Remedy for you is Shor Destruction Without Detection,” the Luddites wrote in a letter to the home secretary in 1812. “Prepaire for thy Departure and Recommend the same to thy friends.”

There is something very modern about the Luddites. They serve as a reminder of how many of our current dilemmas about technology raise themes that have consistently cropped up throughout history. Another one of Kranzberg’s six laws of technology is that technology is neither inherently good nor bad, nor is it neutral. How technology is developed and in whose interests it is deployed is a function of politics.

The call to arms of the Luddites can be heard a full two centuries later, demanding that we think carefully about the relationship between technology and labour. Is it possible to resist technological advancement without becoming regressive? How can the advances of technology be directed to the service of humanity? Is work an expression of our human essence or a measure of our productivity — and can it be both?

Central to understanding these conundrums is the idea of alienation. Humans, through their labour, materially transform the surrounding world. The capacity to labour beyond the bare necessities for survival gives work a distinct and profound meaning for human beings. “Man produces himself not only intellectually, in his consciousness, but actively and actually,” Marx wrote, “and he can therefore contemplate himself in a world he himself has created.” Our impact on the world can be seen in the product of our labour, a deeply personal experience. How this is organized in society has consequences for our understanding of our own humanity.

What happens to this excess of production — or surplus value — is one of the ultimate political and moral questions facing humanity. Marx’s critique of capitalism was in essence that this surplus value unfairly flows to the owners of capital or bourgeoisie, not to the workers who actually produce it. The owning class deserve no such privilege; their rapacious, insatiable quest for profit has turned them into monstrous rulers. Production becomes entirely oriented to their need for power and luxury, rather than the needs of human society.

Unsurprisingly, Marx reserved some of his sharpest polemical passages for the bourgeoisie. In his view, the bourgeoisie “resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.”

This experience of exploitation gives rise to a separation or distancing of the worker from the product of her labour. Labor power becomes something to be sold in the market for sustenance, confined to dull and repetitive tasks, distant from an authentic sense of self. It renders a human being as little more than an input, a cog, a calculable resource in the machinery of production.

For those observing the development of the industrial revolution, this sense of alienation is often bound up with Marx’s analysis of technology. The development of technology facilitated the separation between human essence in the form of productive labour and the outputs of that labour. Instead workers received a wage, a crass substitute for their blood, sweat and tears, a cheap exchange for craftsmanship and care. Wages represented the commodification of time — they were payment for the ingenuity put into work. The transactional nature of this relationship had consequences. “In tearing away from man the object of his production,” Marx wrote, “estranged labour tears from him his species-life, his real objectivity as a member of the species, and transforms his advantage over animals into the disadvantage that his inorganic body, nature, is taken from him.”

As Amy Wendling notes, it is unsurprising that Marx studied science. He sought to understand the world as it is, rather than pursue enlightenment in the form of spirituality or philosophy alone. He understood capitalism as unleashing misery on the working class in a way that was reprehensible but also as Wendling put it, “a step, if treacherous, towards liberation.” There was no going back to an agrarian society that valued artisan labour. Nor should there be; in some specific ways, the industrial revolution represented a form of productive progress.

But how things were then were not how they could or should be forever. Marx’s thinking was a product of a desire to learn about the world in material terms while maintaining a vision of how this experience could be transcended. Navigating how to go forward in a way that valued fairness and dignity became a pressing concern of many of many working people and political radicals in his time, a tradition that continues today. •

This is an edited extract from Future Histories: What Ada Lovelace, Tom Paine, and the Paris Commune Can Teach Us about Digital Technology, by Lizzie O’Shea, published last month by Verso.

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But this is what relaxing means in the life of a woman who has barely paused on her path from wild youth to imprisonment and then to lawyer, high-profile advocate for women in the criminal justice system, and prison abolitionist who counts the iconic American activist, writer and academic Angela Davis as a friend. For Kilroy, even Sundays mean constant vigilance. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram: it’s often where things turn up first. Anything to do with imprisonment that might concern Sisters Inside, the advocacy, support and abolitionist group she founded nearly thirty years ago.

The sixth of January was looking like an average Sunday. Then: bingo. A post about Aboriginal dancer Ruben Yorkshire, who had been arrested in Western Australia for unpaid fines and taken to the high-security Hakea Prison to serve out a debt of less than $1700. He had no criminal history.

Kilroy saw red. Her thoughts flew immediately to 2014 and the horrific death of Aboriginal woman Ms Dhu after she was arrested and held in a police lock-up — also in Western Australia — for unpaid fines.

“I was so pissed off with governments and police and courts locking up Aboriginal people because they’re poor,” Kilroy says. “The disgusting way they are treated. Watching police drag Ms Dhu from her cell, unconscious. It was inhumane. I cried that day.” Another thing she rarely does.

That Sunday she immediately called Gerry Georgatos, a researcher and human rights activist in Western Australia. They devised a campaign called #FreeThePeople to raise $100,000 to free Aboriginal mothers imprisoned for unpaid fines, and to prevent the imprisonment of many more who, like Ruben, might be picked up by police at any time. Four hundred such warrants have been issued at the time of writing; the WA government will not disclose the number of women involved.

“Aboriginal people are imprisoned because they are poor. It’s as simple as that,” Kilroy says. “We keep them in poverty, all over the country. It is worse for Aboriginal women, especially those with violent partners, and those who are mothers. We — non-Aboriginal Australians — are responsible for this, and we can be responsible for fixing it.”

There’s an explosive concentration of energy and anger in the air when Kilroy and Georgatos take something on, even though they’re on opposite sides of the continent. #FreeThePeople took off fast, attracting donors from all parts of the political spectrum. Within twelve hours, nearly $100,000 had been raised.

“I just started tweeting. I targeted white middle-class women with high social media profiles, like Jane Caro, Anne Summers, Clementine Ford. I wanted the white world to know,” she says. “And we targeted privileged white men too, like Russell Crowe and Wil Anderson. Russell has twenty-seven million followers. And they all retweeted it. Yael Stone [Orange Is the New Black] picked up on it in the US, sent it around. In their tweets a lot of them said, ‘I support this, will you?’” The campaign also attracted media from around the globe.

It was vintage Kilroy. “Well, when I’m pissed off and have an idea, I go for it,” she shrugs. The fund hit $200,000 within days and the first fines were paid, the first Aboriginal woman released. On the same day, the fund paid the fines of a twenty-two-year-old Aboriginal mother who was homeless after escaping extreme violence, and living in fear of arrest over court-imposed fines. The money also paid for safe accommodation for her and for her children for twelve months.

The fund had reached $400,000 by June. Of its success, Kilroy says simply, “It gave ordinary people out there a chance to actively change things. There are many good people who feel frustrated, unable to be directly involved. This was direct and immediate. It’s uplifting, and not just for me and for the donors. Aboriginal women have been contacting me saying, wow, people actually care about us.”

Not one Aboriginal woman has been jailed for fine defaulting since the start of the campaign, and new legislation to end current laws that imprison impoverished people for fine default was tabled in the WA parliament in June 2019. But the ongoing anger and outrage felt by Aboriginal people is understandable: it is now twenty-eight years since the royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody recommended this law change, and two years since the Law Reform Commission urged Western Australia to abolish the same statutes. Its report restated the obvious: that poverty, low literacy levels and the itinerant lifestyles of some Aboriginal people meant they were more likely to default on fines. It recommended Aboriginal people be allowed to work off their fines.

Debbie Kilroy left Boggo Road Gaol exactly a year after the royal commission released its report into Aboriginal deaths in custody. She established Sisters Inside the same year, vowing to work for incarcerated women and their children in every way she could. Since then the organisation has achieved major change in the system, initiated countless programs, advocated and supported thousands of women, and worked at the highest levels of government.

Yet arguably it is the quieter, lower-profile work she does as an individual and through Sisters Inside that is delivering real and lasting change for women and girls at risk throughout Queensland. One could say her steely commitment to changing the lives of Aboriginal women and girls has become a calling, a siren song she cannot ignore. But her twenty-four-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week attention encompasses all young women and girls in and around the criminal justice system, as she plots initiatives to get them out and keep them out of prison. Many of these actions don’t involve legislation and amendments and votes in parliament, but rather a low-key, one-on-one approach. Let’s call it micro-justice.

One of the hardest things for women sentenced to a term of imprisonment is the abandonment of children to a world without them, a world of displacement, frequent change, foster carers, separation from siblings, grief and shame. It may mean poverty (or worsened poverty), homelessness, family dysfunction, disrupted schooling. For Aboriginal children, the displacement can feel and be severe, depending on the strength of links to wider family and culture.

Kilroy’s own children were separated when she and her husband, Joe Kilroy — a Butchulla man and traditional owner of K’gari (Fraser Island) — were both sentenced to prison for drug offences in the mid 1980s. One child went to Debbie’s mother and the other to her grandmother. She witnessed firsthand the effects of a parent’s incarceration on young children, and on her release struggled to normalise her own life and theirs. Nevertheless she watched on helplessly as, within a few years, her daughter collided with the criminal justice system and was herself incarcerated.

Kilroy had promised to watch closely over the children of Aboriginal women with whom she had done time. Quietly, unobtrusively, she kept her eye on their lives, their movements, who they hung out with, their school attendance. Their own collisions with the law. She did this for years; some of them were toddlers when she began, and she kept watching as they grew through uneasy childhoods and adolescence. She understood them; she’d been a tearaway herself, lived on the streets, knew the wild thrills of law-breaking, the allure and terror and status of violence, of juvenile detention. But understanding and vigilance weren’t keeping this new generation out of trouble.

She decided then on a group approach. Organised staff and transport, canvases and paint, and the Sisters Inside Young Women’s Art Group was born. It took time to convince some of the young women, but within months there was a growing number of regular members showing up. More fun than stealing cars, one of them told her one night, and she knew she had them.

Out of this early concern for the ongoing relationship between incarcerated women and their children came several of the keystone programs of Sisters Inside: the Reconnect program and the Building on Women’s Strengths, or BOWS, program. The former supports twelve- to eighteen-year-olds whose mothers are incarcerated or who have been criminalised themselves or are at risk of homelessness. It aims to improve connections with extended family, work, education, training and their communities, and includes counselling and support for young people and their families, as well as advocacy with prison authorities.

“Of course, it is highly traumatising for kids when their mother goes to prison,” Kilroy says. “They feel ashamed. They think it’s their fault — that they’re bad or have done something wrong. When they visit their mum in prison they are often treated badly too, as if they are the prisoner. So they are imbued with a sense of shame. They internalise the trauma and the feeling of abandonment.”

It’s then that older children begin getting into trouble, she says. “They’re made to feel like criminals, so of course they see themselves as bad. We’re always saying to them: you are in control of your destiny. You are not bad — do not believe the negative things they throw at you. We are so much more than the worst thing we have ever done.”

She says guards at youth prisons say exactly the same things to young people now as they did to her when she was in youth detention: you’re no good, you’re bad. She’d answer back: well I’ll show you how bad I can be.

“I hear the screws say that and the kids reply. I can see them thinking it. And I say no — it’s the systems that are bad. But the kids believe their life will play out from there. It’s over four decades since I was in a youth prison, and it’s still the same. This is the prison industry. A pipeline from youth prison to adult prison. The system needs bodies behind bars. The system needs jobs. It’s an industry. And it’s institutionalising.”

Neta-Rie Mabo (named for her much-loved grandmother, Bonita Mabo, who died recently) came under the gimlet eye of Debbie Kilroy in her troubled youth. She’d been running wild with other friends around Logan — “partying, taking drugs, stealing clothes we couldn’t afford, getting into stolen cars.”

“It was pretty risky behaviour,” she says. “I got picked up, spent a couple of nights in the watch house.”

These days, Neta-Rie Mabo is a “multifaceted artist” who works with oils, acrylic, sculpture, mixed media and more. Her images of her grandfather, Eddie Mabo, won the People’s Choice Award at the 2014 Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards, and the work now hangs in the Australian parliament. She designed the commemorative fifty-cent piece for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Mabo decision in the High Court and the fiftieth anniversary of the referendum to decide Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ right to vote.

Alongside being an award-winning artist, Neta-Rie is the mother of Poipi, two, and the youth programs manager at Sisters Inside. She also runs the extraordinarily successful Young Women’s Art Group along with three other youth programs. A Sisters Inside bus transports the young women of the art group to the organisation’s headquarters in South Brisbane, where they work to produce oil and watercolour paintings, drawings and clay work. The group is about peer support, too: this is where they come to talk, ask questions, seek help. For many of these women, dysfunctional home lives mean this is the highlight of their week.

Neta-Rie’s great piece of luck came after she was sacked from her bar job fifteen years ago and Debbie Kilroy offered her some part-time office work. “I became aware then that she was watching me,” Mabo says. “She was stealthy, just watching and making sure I was okay at work. Then she encouraged me to enrol at uni to do art, and to become a youth worker.”

Kilroy’s involvement became crucial in what followed for the young woman who was, despite her famous family, adrift in the world. “Deb constantly supported me, believed in me,” she says. “That kind of belief makes you believe you can really do stuff. That’s been her biggest impact. There’s something about having someone constantly there, someone in the world who has your back and would do anything for you when you need it.

“I came from a family with alcohol issues; I couldn’t rely on them. And now it’s the same for these young women in the art group. She is the person they believe in. They know if they ever need something they can contact Deb.”

While Mabo’s status in the art world has grown with prizes, exhibitions and sales, the young women in the art group are all getting a taste of it through the increasingly popular yearly auction of their work held by Sisters Inside. Apart from family and friends, Kilroy ensures that local lawyers, magistrates and politicians — anyone with a big wallet, she jokes — are there to bid.

It is unfailingly competitive. Winning bids can be anything from $50 to $1500. But the young women voted years ago not to take their individual earnings home — rather, they’ve pooled the funds each time to go on some kind of adventure. To Uluru or the Great Barrier Reef.

“She [Kilroy] is changing their lives,” Mabo says. “Where else could they get that kind of experience? Their confidence grows and grows.”

Softly spoken Kyra, fourteen, has been coming to the Young Women’s Art Group for two years now. After a life of relying on her own resources and instincts, she loves the support and routine of the weekly group. Her mother went to prison when she was three; she has been in fifteen foster homes since. Her family — a brother, twenty-three (born when her mum was thirteen), twelve-year-old twin sisters and a three-year-old baby brother — are scattered. She barely sees them. Her mum is still inside.

“I’ve had to trust myself,” she shrugs, her eyes clear and steady. “I’m the only person I can rely on.”

In the past, her idea of excitement has been to break into houses or steal cars. Once, in an altercation with police, she was attacked by a police dog; she pulls up the sleeve of her shirt to reveal the scars on her arms. Now, excitement is the art group.

“It’s helped a lot,” she says, swivelling to scoop up a toddler wandering past in the big art room and settling the child on her hip. She looks around the room. “I trust them.”

Jamie, fifteen, is one of the group’s original members, quiet like the others but with a spark of mischief in her eyes. She’s been coming for eight years, following her two older sisters, aged twenty-two and twenty-one. Their mum is still inside. What would she be doing if she hadn’t come along to Sisters Inside? She doesn’t blink. “Getting in trouble,” she grins. She’s in Year 10 at school now and wants to go to university from there.

Destiny, seventeen, and Jamielca, eighteen, are two of the big success stories. Destiny began coming to the art program because her cousins came. She describes the experience as “a gamechanger” for her. “I love it here,” she says. “It’s my second home. I love the acceptance. There’s no judgement.”

Destiny’s story aligns with those of the others, but she never got into “bad stuff,” she says. “Others around me did. But I was in a group and we kept each other honest. I’d look at these others and think, you are not cool, stealing a car.” She says the group’s trip to the Great Barrier Reef changed her life. “It reminds you how much there is to lose.” Destiny is in Year 12 now and is thinking of engineering, perhaps as part of a career in the navy. But art is “a pretty high priority”: “I disappear into it,” she says. “There’s not a lot of groups like this.”

Jamielca graduated from high school in 2017 and is now on the payroll at Sisters Inside, working in administration and assisting with youth programs. She was a “little baby” when her cousins began coming to programs at Sisters Inside. As soon as Jamielca was old enough, she tagged along.

She regularly goes into the youth detention centre with Neta-Rie. “We paint, and the girls come and talk to us. Some of my family members are there,” she says. “I’d never been in that environment before, and it felt a bit sad. That kids are in there. My mum was always telling us to keep out of trouble. I’d been around when other kids were doing stuff but I just didn’t want to do it. But some of the kids in there, in trouble, they’re homeless. They’ve been kicked out, or have no homes, nothing. I always had a home.”

Jamielca wants to do youth work, at Sisters Inside and at the detention centre. “Art’s a big part of that,” she says. She’s also involved in camps run by Sisters Inside for young women, often at Minjerribah (Stradbroke Island), and most recently with some young women at odds with the police.

“We went to the beach, paddleboarding, talked with [counsellor] Antonia Bourke about intergenerational trauma. They understood what she was saying. The girls get to experience new things, and everyone is happy after that.”

Prison sentences — their effect on women and their children, how they impinge on human rights — are rarely the subject of polite cafe conversation. But one of the almost invisible, unspoken facts about prison is the number of women who languish inside on remand. That is, with no conviction. The same goes for young women in the watch house and in detention. At the moment, about one-third of all women in Queensland prisons are there on remand.

Mostly it is a matter of bail — access to it, knowledge of it, understanding of it. Few incarcerated women or girls know the process of getting bail, or anything to do with their legal rights. This has become one of Debbie Kilroy’s personal quests: to identify and free every woman and girl on remand and support them until they come to trial. Many of these women are refused bail because they lack homes or mental health support services. Kilroy organises both.

After a full week — including nights — of being in court for the law firm she established, of advocacy with government and non-government officials, of oversight of Sisters Inside’s fifteen funded programs, and of frequent media and public speaking engagements, Kilroy will often find herself inside. On many weekends, she will visit Brisbane’s women’s prisons — at Wacol and the newly refurbished facility in Gatton — or even the Townsville Women’s Correctional Centre, talking to women, explaining, gathering enough information for bail applications. But additional funding has now seen Sisters Inside appoint bail support workers in both cities. They interview women to assess their eligibility and help them make an application to the court. Other workers at Sisters Inside help with further necessary arrangements, including housing and support for women following their release.

For young women detained in the Brisbane watch house — sometimes for up to three weeks — a new bail support program has been raised under the banner of Yangah, a Yagumbeh word for “get up.”

“The numbers of kids going up on remand was huge, worse than ever,” Kilroy says. “I began talking about a bail blitz to get them out of the watch house. They’re often kept there because the detention centre is overcrowded and there are no beds. But there are no support systems at all for kids in the watch house.”

Sisters Inside staff organise bail for children and support for them outside. This support includes housing, arrangements around schooling and transport for court appearances, and getting them involved in the art program. Under the Yangah program, there have been ninety-eight successful bail applications by young women; the government has announced funding for the program until September 2019. Under the Supreme Court bail program, ninety-six women have been released.

It’s hard to quantify how many young women have been diverted from a repeating cycle of poverty, crime and imprisonment by the subtle yet insistent — and powerful — interventions driven by one woman. It is not just about steely determination and an enormous heart. It is Kilroy’s genius for enactment that has made these interventions so successful. She doesn’t waste too much time talking about them. If she had a motto it would be: Pick up the phone. Make it happen.

And there is the happy surprise of the #FreeThePeople campaign’s wider outcomes. Yes, freedom has been delivered, and empowerment, but also to unexpected quarters. The campaign has handed agency and new perspectives not just to impoverished women but also to many middle-class Australian women who, despite a real desire to contribute, to enact change, had not previously found a direct or obvious pathway to do so. To date, more than 8186 donors have contributed to the funding to release women imprisoned for unpaid fines.

This is one of the strongest and most powerful effects of micro-justice: that it pulls in those who aren’t and can’t be Debbie Kilroy but who nevertheless feel a deep commitment to social justice and to lives lived with much more risk and less privilege than theirs. The immediate and practical outcomes of initiatives like the #FreeThePeople campaign allow a pathway for others to step up, and a real sense of community with women in the criminal justice system — especially Aboriginal women and their children. Let’s call it win-win. •

This essay first appeared in Griffith Review 65: Crimes and Punishments, edited by Ashley Hay.

The post From little things appeared first on Inside Story.

“I thought that this was it. But it wasn’t,” Oriel Gray once remarked of her most famous play. Back in 1955, she had been delighted when the play was proclaimed the joint winner of that year’s Playwright’s Advisory Board competition, and she could have been forgiven for imagining that The Torrents would transform her career. She was living in a tiny cottage in Melbourne with her partner, journalist John Hepworth, and her three sons. Arriving home with a bottle of sparkling burgundy to celebrate, Hepworth told Gray to “enjoy this day — make the most of it. You know that when they start to produce it, there’ll always be things to be changed, you’ll worry and get doubtful.”

Yet she had good reason to worry, for she had the great fortune, and misfortune, to share her prize with another playwright, Ray Lawler. Their works were forever compared, and Gray always suffered in the comparison. Lawler’s play, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, premiered at the Melbourne Union Theatre in 1955 and was hailed as the beginning of a truly “dinkum” Australian theatre. A melancholy drama about two barmaids and their cane-cutter boyfriends, the play’s working-class setting, dry humour and devastating ending enthralled Australian theatregoers. The Doll’s success is regarded as a founding moment in our theatre history, and the play is still regularly performed and studied in schools.

The Torrents enjoyed none of The Doll’s success, and it was my curiosity about why this was the case that sparked my PhD research on Australian female playwrights of the 1920s through to the 1960s. Oriel Gray was part of a cohort of dramatists, including Mona Brand, Dymphna Cusack and Betty Roland, who were active members of Australian theatre culture. Drama, like most forms of Australian culture, has long been evaluated in nationalist terms, and calls for a “national theatre” featured in public discussions of Australian playwrights and their work across the twentieth century. But in the era before government subsidy of the arts, this was always more an aspiration than a reality. Until the late 1960s, Australian theatre was largely the preserve of amateur companies. Many dramatists also wrote for radio and, later, television.

Oriel Gray’s career is emblematic of her generation’s experience of playwriting. Born in Sydney in 1920, she joined both the Communist Party and the New Theatre in 1942. At the New Theatre, she wrote and performed agitprop sketches and plays for the theatre, including a popular adaptation of Henry Lawson’s stories, Lawson (1943). She described her plays as humanist rather than communist, recalling that whatever she wrote, “the audience was there at New Theatre waiting to love it.”

Gray left the New Theatre and the party in 1949, increasingly chafing at the strictures she felt the party imposed on her work. Her subsequent plays continued to explore prejudice and racism, to considerable acclaim, but with a growing focus on individual conscience and belief. Reviewing Gray’s 1950 play Had We But World Enough, the critic L.L. Woolacott described her as “one of the most significant and talented Australian playwrights whose work has so far been produced here.” By the time she won the 1955 competition, she had written twelve works for the stage.

The prize arrived just when the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust was looking for local plays to support. A play about cane-cutters, set in present-day Melbourne, was a more likely candidate than one about a “new woman” journalist in the 1890s, especially one written by a woman who was not only a former member of the Communist Party but also living in a de facto relationship. The cold war made any association with communism problematic; the desire to create an Australian theatre free of the taint of amateurism ruled out many theatres and writers from serious consideration.

Summer of the Seventeenth Doll won the praise of local critics, travelled successfully to London, and was even made into a film. As theatre historian Campbell Howard commented in 1995, “luck played a great deal in the success of The Doll. In fact, if I were Ray Lawler I would never henceforth take a ticket in Tatts. One does not get two lucky breaks in a lifetime.”

If Lawler was lucky, Gray was not. She was anxious to secure a professional production for The Torrents that could match The Doll. This proved elusive and the play eventually premiered at the Adelaide New Theatre in 1957. By all accounts, it was a disaster. A subsequent Melbourne production fared almost as badly, with the Age describing it as “barely adequate.” At every turn, The Torrents was compared unfavourably with The Doll: in 1962 a reviewer observed that the play had “had nothing like the production success of The Doll. Nor, one may make bold to say, will it.” Apart from a radio adaptation in 1956 and an ABC television production in 1969, it was neglected for decades.

It is for this reason that the current season, a co-production between the Sydney Theatre Company and Western Australia’s Black Swan Theatre, is so exciting. The production succeeds because it takes the play on its own terms, unlike the only other professional production, by the State Theatre of South Australia, in 1996. There, the director and designer’s lack of faith in the play was revealed through clumsy staging: Jenny Milford’s “new woman” was dressed like a 1950s secretary (to signify her role as a change agent, as if that wasn’t clear from the text), and she even introduced a computer to her boss at the play’s close. The Australian claimed that “plays like this give Australian playwriting a bad name.” Oriel Gray told me she had been “so thrilled at the idea of a decent production of it… and really it has finished me.”

For the current production, director Clare Watson and dramaturge Virginia Gay have given the play the workshopping it needed to come to life. Gray herself knew that it needed more work, telling her son in 1995 that it was “a great big, cumbrous, old-fashioned load of get-out.” Summer of the Seventeenth Doll was extensively rewritten before its premiere; only now has The Torrents received similar scrutiny. The play’s ending has been reworked, some of the longer speeches have been pared back, and a new scene between the two female characters added, all of which improve the play.

The production draws on the energy and charm of Celia Pacquola, an accomplished stand-up comic and television actor making her stage debut. In this production, she introduces the play as herself, recounting the story of how The Torrents won a prize. She goes on to state that it is taught in schools across the country and has had over 1000 productions. She suggests that The Torrents is right up there as a national symbol with Southern Cross tattoos and the Bunnings sausage sizzle. She’s stretching the truth, of course, but the sly reference to Summer of the Seventeenth Doll — without ever naming it — establishes the stakes of the production.

While The Torrents never matches The Doll for drama and impact, this production draws out the play’s gentle comedy and progressive politics. The play is set in the 1890s, in the office of a newspaper in the (fictional) goldmining town of Koolgala. The town is prosperous, but idealistic engineer Kingsley Myers is concerned about what will happen when the gold runs out. He proposes an ambitious irrigation scheme to reorient the economy to agriculture, but vested interests, personified by the boorish John Manson, seek to stymie the scheme.

Pacquola’s character, Jenny Milford, has successfully applied for a job at the paper as “J.G. Milford,” much to the horror of Rufus Torrent, the paper’s editor. Rufus’s son Ben, a journalist like his father, is weary of living in his father’s shadow and unenthusiastic about marrying his fiancé Gwynne. With the drama set up, the play moves briskly: Jenny proves herself, keeps her job and works with Ben to publish an editorial in support of Kingsley’s irrigation scheme. Manson, the paper’s investor, is furious, but as the play ends, Rufus Torrent has located his conscience, Ben has found his independence, and Jenny has earned the admiration of all.

Summer of the Seventeenth Doll delighted audiences in the 1950s because they felt that they could recognise the characters as Australians like themselves. The Torrents was never going to function in the same way. A play about the 1890s written in the 1950s, it is old-fashioned in many ways, heavy with earnest speeches. But this latest staging allows the play’s ideas, and wit, to shine. It also reminds us of the ways that expert actors and creatives can bring a play to life: it benefits from a bustling naturalistic set, and skilled performances (particularly from Gareth Davies as Ben Torrent) enhance the play’s comedy. If this production had been staged in 1955, then perhaps Gray, and The Torrents, might have made their mark: not quite up there with the Bunnings sausage sizzle but not entirely overlooked, either. •

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It didn’t take long for those questions to be answered. Two years later, in March 1974, women from Sydney Women’s Liberation squatted in an abandoned house in Sydney’s Glebe, and Elsie, Australia’s first women’s refuge, was born. Our Canberra refuge, Beryl, was set up the next year in a house leased from the territory authority. As it turned out, the demand for these services was enormous, and other women’s shelters followed in other cities. By then, I was one of Australia’s early femocrats, heading the women’s affairs unit in the prime minister’s department, and one of my biggest challenges was finding funds for what had become a network of refuges around the country.

It’s a problem that has dogged women’s services ever since. No sooner is the funding secured than a change in government dries it up. Not surprisingly, funding is maintained and often increased under Labor, then whittled back by the Coalition. Labor governments have been more accepting, moreover, of the need for refuges specifically for women, while the Coalition will bunch them together with gender-neutral shelters run by churches or groups like the Salvation Army. For most of this past decade, despite government-initiated community awareness campaigns, funding for women’s refuges has been savagely cut, with countless women and children turned away from the few remaining ones. Yet all this is happening as the incidence of domestic violence and intimate partner homicides has surged.

This, in a nutshell, is the situation that investigative reporter Jess Hill has grappled with over four years to produce See What You Made Me Do. The work she’s put into it shows. In all my long acquaintance with the subject, I’ve never come across such a thorough examination of domestic violence — or domestic abuse, as Hill prefers to call it. In this, I don’t seem to be alone; less than a month after its release, the book was already being reprinted.

Yet while Hill and her book have had extensive coverage, her findings have tended to be cherry-picked by readers or reviewers. Rather than any incomprehension on their part, this results from the very breadth and depth of Hill’s analysis, and the difficulty of absorbing her many disturbing findings. As Helen Garner puts it on the cover, this is indeed a “shattering” book. The horror of the incidents Hill documents; the meticulous fairmindedness of her approach; the conclusions she draws — all demand attention. But the reading is necessarily hard-going. Chapter by chapter, right to the end, Hill demonstrates incontrovertibly that what Australia is now experiencing amounts to a genuine state of emergency.

Early in the book we are introduced to Rosie Batty, the 2014 Australian of the Year whose eleven-year-old son was murdered by his father in full view of other parents and children. Batty was brave enough to turn what could fairly be described as any mother’s worst nightmare into a campaign to raise awareness of the extent of family violence and the inherent risk of homicide it poses. She thus became the poster woman for domestic abuse, if at great personal cost. “In the eyes of mainstream Australia,” Hill writes, “Batty was everyone — not from the stigmatised poor or the privileged rich, but from the demilitarised zone of the white middle class.”

One thing that’s prevented appropriate responses from police and the judicial system is the “battered woman profile,” a pernicious but entrenched belief that victimhood has something to do with a victim’s personality. What else could explain a woman returning time and again to a partner who repeatedly abuses her? For answers Hill has researched as far afield as studies of brainwashing during the Korean war, and she concludes that a victim of domestic abuse can be so sapped of confidence and vitality that she’ll come to question her own reality. It can take colossal determination and energy, then, as well as help and resources, to escape.

The experience of those running crisis hotlines and women’s shelters is that on average a victim will go back as many as nine times before she can finally leave an abusive partner. She then risks his stalking, assaulting or even murdering her — risks that can multiply when children are caught in the crossfire. But while women who’ve experienced extreme abuse can exhibit a range of psychological symptoms, not to mention bodily injuries, Hill convincingly argues that there’s no such thing as a type.

After tracking survivors and their children who have escaped to “the underground,” a shadowy world of aliases and motel rooms akin to witness protection, Hill shines a light on the men who have driven them there. Perpetrators, too, come in all ethnicities and classes, but whatever their standing in the community, their methods are strikingly similar. “Speak to anyone who’s worked with survivors and perpetrators,” writes Hill, “and they’ll tell you the same thing: domestic abuse almost always follows the same script. It’s a truly confounding phenomenon: how is it that men from vastly different cultures know to use the same basic techniques of oppression?”

Here Hill identifies two different types of perpetrators, “coercive controllers” and “insecure reactors.” These are broad categories, and abusers in either can exhibit characteristics of the other. But, broadly speaking, coercive controllers tend to be practised manipulators whose techniques are often premeditated, and insecure reactors tend to be less conscious of their motives, though their responses can be more explosive and often more dangerous.

I’m aware that so far I’ve only mentioned men. Hill devotes a chapter to female abusers, but their numbers are comparatively few, their male partners often ashamed and mute, and the violence usually comes after the women themselves have copped years of abuse themselves. The fact remains that most perpetrators are men.

The literature on domestic abuse appears to fall into two camps, one holding that violence results from escalating “family conflict,” the other resting on a feminist analysis in which gender inequality is the cause. These two quite different perspectives have produced different sets of statistics. The family conflict school focuses on the number of police call-outs, overlooking the unequal power relationships in which violent incidents occur. Feminists point to the wider and less easily measured impact of patriarchy, and Hill agrees. From my own experience and on the strength of her explanations, so do I.

But what does this mean? What’s good about Hill’s approach is that it isn’t about blaming men. She goes much deeper than that. The fact that we live in a patriarchy doesn’t mean that all men are powerful. On the contrary, few men are. But patriarchal culture makes many believe that because they are men they’re entitled to be powerful, and if they aren’t, that makes them losers. Hill maintains it’s this unfulfilled sense of entitlement that fuels the rage men can feel against women.

Of course, I’m oversimplifying an insight that Hill gives many pages to. But the closer we look at how our society is structured and the values on which it’s based, the easier it is to see why domestic abuse has increased so alarmingly in recent years and why public-awareness campaigns have served to ramp up the violence by triggering a backlash.

Changing community attitudes is an excellent policy for the long term, but in the meantime other measures are necessary. What we desperately need are more refuges, more affordable housing, better schooling of police and the judiciary, more listening to women and children, more effective programs for reforming perpetrators, and a more humane, less adversarial family law regime. All this takes money, mostly government money, and there’s not much chance of that in the years of likely austerity ahead.

I’ve left out any mention of Hill’s heartbreaking chapter on abuse in Indigenous communities; in the space here I could never do the subject justice. But read the book. In the present climate it’s hard to make predictions, but it’s my bet that See What You Made Me Do will be the definitive text on domestic abuse for some time. •

The post Rewriting the script appeared first on Inside Story.

Just over thirty years later, Fulton published her autobiography I Sang for My Supper in the same year that Germaine Greer published The Whole Woman, the belated successor to The Female Eunuch (1970). Fulton loved the juxtaposition:

At the time of writing this, the publicity machinery promoting Germaine Greer’s latest book, the sequel to The Female Eunuch she said she would never write, is in action in Sydney. A half-page photograph in the Sydney Morning Herald shows her in her kitchen in England, in front of her slow-combustion stove, her cupboards laid bare for me to see the row of jars and bottles of what looks to be commercial sauces. Later that day she appears on television slicing raw meat and showing a practised hand at bread making. She appears truly comfortable in her kitchen role. Ironic, isn’t it? She has discovered what millions of Australian women have always known — that cooking is one of the most rewarding and lasting activities in life. Sure, sex is great, but if it’s not around, you can always fly to the kitchen.

The Margaret Fulton Cookbook was republished by Hardie Grant in 2004 to inspire another generation of Australian cooks. Over a fifty-year period Fulton was a household name, and through her writing Australian food culture was transformed.

Margaret Fulton was born on 10 October 1924 in Nairn, near Inverness, Scotland. She was the youngest of six children, and arrived in Australia as a three-year-old when her family immigrated to Glen Innes, New South Wales. Her parents, Alexander and Isabella Fulton, had led middle-class lives in Glasgow; her father was a master tailor and her mother a housewife. The family was artistic, creative and bohemian — all traits that would influence Fulton’s later working life in Sydney. She learned to cook from a young age at her mother’s side. One of her jobs, she has recalled, was to stir the custard.

Fulton can properly be regarded as the “mother” of modern cookery in postwar Australia. Her experience giving cooking classes at the Australian Gas Light Company, and her time (1955–60) working as an account executive in the Sydney office of the world’s largest advertising agent, J. Walter Thompson, were pivotal in forming her as a cookery writer.

Her writing career began in 1954 with Fairfax’s Woman magazine, one of Australia’s three leading women’s magazines of the time. At the interview for the job, Fulton was asked not whether she could write but whether she could make “brown luncheon rolls.” After her years working for the Australian Gas Light Company, brown bread rolls came easily. “So,” she writes, “on the strength of making brown bread luncheon rolls (and, I suspect, a glimmer of some kind of promise) I started my career writing about food in newspapers and women’s magazines and ultimately writing cookery books.” She initially wrote under the by-line of Ann Maxwell.

In 1960, following the collapse of Woman, Fulton became the cookery editor at Woman’s Day, where she remained for nineteen years before moving to the Murdoch-owned rival, New Idea. Under the editorship of Dulcie Boling New Idea increased its circulation steadily over the next decade, and Fulton’s cookery columns eventually reached a million readers a week. It was while Fulton was at Woman’s Day that she was approached by British publisher Paul Hamlyn to write her first cookbook.

Fulton was in the vanguard not only of Australian cookbook writing but also of styles of cooking that would eventually change Australian kitchens. Importantly, she understood the importance of fresh ingredients, shopping locally and getting to know producers and shopkeepers. These were all lessons she had learned from her mother. So, in cooking terms Fulton had a good story to tell, but in literary terms she also found the right means of telling it. Crucial to the success of The Margaret Fulton Cookbook is a narrative tone that is both autobiographical and instructional.

In fact, Fulton’s cookbook is reminiscent of scrapbooks of recipes collected by women and annotated with hints, points to remember and intricate details so that even beginners would not be deterred. At the time no other Australian cookbook so explicitly integrated personal notes that bordered on a form of memoir.

Cookbooks had previously incorporated autobiographical details in an implicit form only; they might include a much-loved recipe from an elderly aunt along the lines of “Aunty May’s melting moments.” (See any edition of the Country Women’s Association Cookery Book.) The significance of Fulton’s narrative is the deliberate inclusion of stories from her own life; an example can be found at the opening of the “Soups” chapter: “What wonderful memories I have of soup and my Scottish mother’s kitchen. We had soup every day and each one had its own character and charm. When I grew older and studied French cooking, I knew why Mother’s soups were so good.” Fulton continues with further details about her mother’s cooking and how she imbibed the subtleties of soup making.

Fulton also took great care to explain the details of each recipe carefully, knowing that not all readers would be as expert as she was. The book had a three-star system (which is retained in the 2008 edition): “1 star — A simple and quick recipe that a beginner could accomplish with ease; 2 star — Dishes for the average cook with a knowledge of basic techniques, but requiring a little more time; 3 star — A special dish, requiring more skill and probably taking some time to prepare.” Beginners are encouraged to try the three-star recipes, allowing for extra time and concentration.

In creating The Margaret Fulton Cookbook Fulton believed she was writing not only for her own family but also for all families. She has said of that first cookbook, it was “a book for everybody in my family and I think that my family would be typical… in different degrees, of a lot of families. And I think it appealed… as I say, to the many faceted sides of being a woman, or a person.”

The valuing of women’s work, particularly cooking, was very important to Fulton. As her observations about Greer show, she believed that cooking was important to women’s self-esteem. She also fully understood the drudgery associated with cooking and wanted to simultaneously value women’s work and acknowledge the daily effort that went into producing nutritious, interesting food.

The immediate postwar period had been a time of recovery, but by the 1960s the pace of change had accelerated, particularly for women. Fulton knew this intimately — she had grown up through the Depression, had worked in a munitions factory during the war, had married and divorced in the early 1950s and was now a single parent. As she has explained, cooking was a way for women to expand their own world, and that of their families:

If you’re doing the same thing, day in, day out, it becomes a chore. What makes cooking so exciting for a woman — in those days, a woman at home — is to enter into someone else’s world. And actually do it. Sometimes not very well, but that’s irrelevant… everyone gets better the second time they make it and the third time they make it. But they became familiar, and it was an excitement that was brought into women at home, who otherwise could have been quite bored with a lot of the… cooking that had gone on. There was something very good about the food that had gone on before. But doing it day in, day out, and just getting better at it, wasn’t all that much of a buzz for women. What was a real buzz, and a real interest, was to be able to say to the family, “Oh, look, we’re going to have a Spanish paella tonight”… It was a lovely time for both me and also my readers.

The reference here to the “Spanish paella” is telling, as Margaret Fulton brought global cuisine into the Australian kitchen and made the exotic commonplace. Her experience of growing up in a small country town whose residents included Chinese, Greek and Italian migrants made her acutely aware of other food cultures. She had attended TAFE courses to further develop her knowledge of French cooking, and with Woman’s Day she had adventured to India, Chile, Argentina, Mexico, North America and Spain. All this inspired her to show Australians how to cook new, international recipes at home, ensuring that they worked and finding ways for Australian women to make them their own. The classic French quiche lorraine was a perfect example — the exotic becoming prosaic in a uniquely Australian way:

The real quiche lorraine didn’t have the bacon and bits in it. But then I said… this is the one we like and [so] we did variations… for the first time people… were able to make a quiche that had just the right amount of pastry because I said, [at] the bottom of the recipe, this mightn’t seem like much pastry, but… it’s quite enough to give the quantity that you need… And that was, in a way, a breakthrough because it was a cookery person understanding that if a woman was at home and had a big lump of pastry, she thought it all had to go in and then it would be too thick. So I began to know how it was and then [write] the recipes accordingly. From this sort of thing, I got the reputation. People said, “Oh Margaret Fulton’s recipes work. They work every time.”

In introducing her Australian readers to new cuisine, Fulton became a significant player in a global shift in food culture among anglophone societies. In international terms she wrote in the immediate footsteps of a group of remarkable women, Americans M.F.K. Fisher and Julia Child, and Englishwoman Elizabeth David, who brought global cuisine (in particular derived from the Mediterranean) into kitchens that had hitherto been dominated by English traditions. Fulton shared with these other writers an openness to new culinary experience that was reflected in unconventional personal lives; and a gift for writing about cooking, food and gastronomy that emphasised the way in which food expresses something profound about ourselves, our lands and their people.

The Margaret Fulton Cookbook not only changed the lives of many Australian women; it changed Fulton’s life too. Notably, it gave her a degree of financial freedom she had not previously experienced. The initial print run for the book was 10,000, then orders kept coming in and it was increased to 20,000, then 30,000, then 40,000 — all unprecedented for a cookbook. The publisher stopped printing at 80,000, worried that they had never sold so many copies — it was, after all, only a cookbook and Fulton was a first-time author! A second edition was issued in 1969 and over the years The Margaret Fulton Cookbook was reprinted nineteen times.

Fulton was also at the forefront of Australian food culture in her championing of the use of organic, non–genetically modified food. She eased (only marginally) her dislike of the new fad of television chefs and cooking shows, appearing in episodes of MasterChef Australia, and became a food ambassador for the supermarket Woolworths, with her own “Honest to Goodness family meals” recipes. This understanding and knowledge of food has also been championed by Stephanie Alexander in her remarkably successful, encyclopedic The Cook’s Companion (1996), published almost thirty years after Fulton’s first cookbook. It is Alexander that Fulton believed had progressed Australian cooking and food writing, and importantly, had encouraged young people into the kitchen.

Fulton is also one of the major exemplars of popular and accessible cookery writing. She has brought this long-established form of writing into the public sphere, combining her recipes with life writing as well as political and social commentary. The acceptance of other cultures and the openness to new ideas that characterised her approach to food was also apparent in her personal life. One of Fulton’s good friends was Aboriginal activist Faith Bandler. They knew each other as young women and their friendship spanned some sixty years, with Fulton providing the wedding breakfast when Faith Mussing married Austrian concentration camp survivor Hans Bandler in 1952.

As a result of that friendship Fulton became keenly aware of the vast differences in life chances for Indigenous Australians. In her autobiography she outlined the impact of the work that Bandler and others undertook in the late 1960s and 1970s — the 1967 referendum, the return of land to the Gurindji people in 1975, and the Fraser government’s Aboriginal Land Rights Act. She was a sponsor of the inaugural national Sorry Day on 26 May 1998, when hundreds of thousands of Australians showed their remorse for government policies that had removed many Aboriginal children from their families. These were brave steps towards reconciliation, although it would be another ten years before Fulton would witness prime minister Kevin Rudd’s apology in 2008. It was appropriate that in 1997 Fulton and Bandler were included together in the National Trust’s initial list of one hundred National Living Treasures.

Discussing Fulton’s autobiography I Sang for My Supper, Elspeth Probyn argues that her cookbooks (as well as her autobiography) are an avenue to bring political debates into popular discourse:

In her autobiography [she] decries John Howard’s stance on reconciliation… [and] there’s a good chance that some of the millions who buy her books are listening to her message. Where and how we live… what we have done to Aboriginal people, and an openness to the tastes of other people are important issues.

Fulton used her cookery writing to tell stories and change kitchens, if not lives. •

This is Sian Supski’s chapter from Telling Stories: Australian Life and Literature 1935–2012, edited by Tanya Dalziell and Paul Genoni (Monash University Publishing).

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Rather than reflecting any strong convictions on his part, Trump’s attacks on women’s reproductive services and rights play to a key constituency — the evangelical Christian right — that helped him get elected. He has delivered on his promise of a more conservative Supreme Court by appointing two conservative judges, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, to the nine-member Supreme Court, thus giving conservatives a crucial five–four majority. This has energised evangelical voters, who seem strangely unconcerned about Trump’s moral character, and especially the anti-abortion movement, which sees a once-in-a-generation opportunity to tear down Roe v Wade, the landmark 1973 ruling that enshrines women’s rights to abortion.

Overseeing the changes to women’s health services are health department appointees with strong links to vice-president Mike Pence, who is seen as the driver of these initiatives in the White House. Pence, who has said he wants to see Roe v Wade “on the ash heap of history,” helped offset evangelicals’ concerns about Trump, who once supported abortion rights and described himself as “very pro-choice.” (Pence’s imprimatur worked: Trump got 80 per cent of their votes.)

In his first week in office the president reinstated what is known as the Mexico City policy, which blocks American aid to foreign organisations that provide abortions, abortion counselling or referrals, or advocate to decriminalise abortion or expand abortion services, even if these actions are not funded with American money. Introduced under the Reagan administration, the rule has been lifted or reinstated repeatedly, depending on whether a Democrat or a Republican is in the White House.

Later in 2017, secretary of state Rex Tillerson announced an expansion of the policy to all international health aid provided by the US government (nearly US$9 billion), including funding for maternal and child health, nutrition, HIV/AIDS, the prevention and treatment of diseases including tuberculosis and malaria, and some water, sanitation and hygiene programs. Earlier this year, the issue was ramped up further when Tillerson’s successor, Mike Pompeo, announced steps to fully enforce the policy, including withdrawing some funding and calling for “a strict prohibition on backdoor funding schemes and end-runs around our policy.”

Concurrent attempts are being made to replicate these restrictions within the United States. A proposed overhaul of Title X family planning programs set up under president Richard Nixon would require clinics receiving Title X funds and providing abortions to do so through physically and financially separate entities, and prohibits these clinics from referring  patients to separate abortion providers. (Under the 1977 Hyde amendment, Title X grant-holders must not use federal funds to provide abortions, except in exceptional circumstances.)

These restrictions are aimed primarily at Planned Parenthood, a major provider of women’s healthcare and reproductive services. Pence’s fingerprints are clearly visible: as a congressman in 2007, he introduced the first bill to strip federal funding from Planned Parenthood. Support for that quest has become a litmus test for conservative lawmakers.

Legal challenges mean that the overhaul is on hold. In the meantime, grants under Title X have gone out without the usual high-level scrutiny, based solely on the final decision of a deputy assistant secretary of health who is a longstanding advocate of sexual abstinence programs. The new restrictions on the program will limit poor women’s access not just to abortion but to the wide range of essential healthcare services organisations like Planned Parenthood provide.

The attack on family planning extends beyond Title X to Medicaid and Obamacare, and beyond contraception and abortion to stripping away the ability of poor and under-served women to access primary care and preventive-health screening services. While Republicans have failed to repeal Obamacare, the Department of Health and Human Services has stealthily dismantled a number of provisions in ways that adversely affect women.

A major rollback allows employers to claim a religious or moral objection to the birth control coverage mandate, under which all insurance policies must provide cover without co-payments for all contraception approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Although this ruling went into effect immediately, it is under legal challenge, and its impact has been muted, particularly in those states that require health insurance to cover prescription contraceptives.

Obamacare’s birth control coverage mandate is broadly supported by Americans, perhaps because it appears to have reduced women’s spending on contraception (on average every woman saves $255 per year). In all, about fifty-five million women have directly benefited from the no-cost birth control mandate.

This and other requirements — including a ban on insurance providers charging women more than men for coverage, the abolition of co-payments for breast cancer screening, and mandatory cover for maternity and newborn care — mean that Obamacare has delivered significant benefits for women, especially women below the federal poverty line. Indeed, women are more likely than men to have been helped by Obamacare; conversely, of course, they are more likely to suffer from any dismantling of the law.

The battle over abortion is being fought most strongly at the state level. Over recent months a number of Republican-majority states have enacted anti-abortion legislation with the aim of getting a case before the Supreme Court that delivers the holy grail: an overthrow of the Roe v Wade ruling.

FiveThirtyEight has analysed the diverse and extensive anti-abortion restrictions enacted since 2011. This year alone, 304 have been introduced by state legislatures. Most egregiously and most recently, the (female) governor of Alabama signed into law a bill that makes abortion a crime at any stage of pregnancy, with no exceptions for rape or incest. Under this law, any  doctor who performs an abortion is liable for up to ninety-nine years’ prison. Some eight other states, including Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi and Ohio, have also outlawed abortion beyond the point at which a doctor can detect an embryonic heartbeat — around six weeks, that is, before most women know they are pregnant.

Writer Jessica Valenti recently showed how many of the people (mostly men) who have legislated these bills don’t seem to know enough about how women’s bodies work to pass a high school health class. This minimal understanding of biology means they have no understanding of how their legislation will affect real-life women.

None of the new draconian restrictions has yet gone into effect, either because of delays built into the legislation itself or because of legal challenges. But public health experts are concerned about the public health crisis that looms if and when they do. The states with the most restrictions on access to abortions also have the highest rates of maternal and infant mortality, and although there is no necessary connection, abortion access is a proxy for access to healthcare and education and correlates with poverty. I wrote about America’s appalling maternal and child health statistics for Inside Story last year; the concern now is that limiting access to abortion will contribute to a further worsening.

Largely unremarked, meanwhile, is the fact that the US abortion rate has fallen dramatically over the past decade. A new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that the national rate declined 26 per cent between 2006 and 2015, hitting the lowest level on record. A decline in teen pregnancies and better use of contraception by young adults are seen as the likely causes.

Colorado has offered free birth control at family planning clinics for some years, and since 2009 the state has seen a 40 per cent drop in the teen birthrate (a faster rate of change than nationally) and a 42 per cent drop in the teen abortion rate. At the same time, the caseload for a state program that provides nutritional support for low-income women and their babies has fallen by 23 per cent.

But getting an abortion is increasingly difficult in many parts of the United States. The last clinic in Missouri, for example, is about to close following the state’s decision not to renew Planned Parenthood’s licence. Five other states (Kentucky, Mississippi, North and South Dakota, and West Virginia) have just one clinic.

The flurry of anti-abortion legislation around the nation is matched by the legal challenges being filed in response. At least twenty cases relating to abortion are in the legal pipeline that leads to the Supreme Court, but the route is long and complicated.

During his election campaign, Donald Trump said that overturning Roe v Wade “will happen automatically in my opinion because I am putting pro-life justices on the court.” But past experience shows that he and abortion opponents can’t rely on a conservative-leaning Supreme Court to deliver the results they hope for.

Anti-abortion campaigners had hopes in 1992 that a conservative Supreme Court would overthrowing Roe v Wade in its judgement on Planned Parenthood of South Eastern Pennsylvania v Casey. But even justices who had been sharply critical of Roe were not prepared to go that far. Three Republican-nominated justices — Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy and David Souter — recognised that Roe could only be overturned “at the cost of both profound and unnecessary damage to the court’s legitimacy” and worked behind the scenes to deliver a compromise.

The three reaffirmed what they called the “essential holding” of Roe: “the right of the woman to choose to have an abortion… and to obtain it without undue interference from the state.” That Supreme Court decision set the “undue burden” standard by which abortion laws are currently judged, and could well be applied to a case currently before the court concerning a law that requires a waiting period for an abortion after a woman has a sonogram.

But just as Trump can’t be sure what result he will get from the Supreme Court, neither can those who seek to protect Roe v Wade rely on a 1992-style outcome when the next challenge is brought forward. During their confirmation hearings, both Gorsuch and Kavanaugh made the customary statements about respecting the Supreme Court’s precedents, including Roe. But a recent majority opinion from the court, written by Justice Clarence Thomas and including Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, stated that it was fine to do away with the rule of precedent if the current majority believes that the precedent represents “an incorrect resolution of an important constitutional question.”

Thomas is the only remaining justice from the 1992 Supreme Court. When the court recently waved through an appellate court’s decision to block an Indiana law that would have prohibited women from choosing abortions after a diagnosis of a disability such as Down Syndrome or because of the fetus’s gender, he issued a twenty-page statement that likened abortion rights to “modern day eugenics.” He went so far as to state that a “growing body of evidence suggests that eugenic goals are already being realised through abortion.” Little data exists to support his statements and he has been accused of manipulating the evidence he quotes.

Vice-president Mike Pence (who coincidentally had signed the Indiana law when he was governor) praised Thomas on Twitter. Perhaps foreshadowing legal fights to come, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said that Thomas’s opinion displayed “more heat than light.” What is clear is that the Supreme Court is in no hurry to take up the abortion issue (and might deliberately avoid doing this ahead of the 2020 election). Supporters of abortion rights cling to the hope that when the court does return to the issue, chief justice John Roberts will respond as Justice Kennedy did in 1992. Given the chief justice’s support for the constitutionality of Obamacare, this optimism may be justified.

Despite the steady erosion of abortion rights in conservative Republican states, national support for the Roe v Wade ruling is strong. An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll last year found that 71 per cent of Americans — including 52 per cent of Republicans — didn’t believe Roe v Wade should be overturned: the highest level of support since that poll began in 2005. A more recent poll had 46 per cent of respondents saying the Supreme Court should uphold Roe if the issue comes before the justices, with 36 per cent saying the Supreme Court should modify the ruling and only 18 per cent wanting it overturned altogether.

Whatever Americans say about abortion and however they vote, abortion is a routine part of American women’s reproductive healthcare. Approximately 25 per cent of women in the United States will undergo an abortion before the age of forty-five, a similar rate to those of most developed countries. About 13 per cent of women who have an abortion identify as evangelical protestants. Poor women account for the majority of abortion patients and financial stress plays a major role in women’s decision-making.

As these issues continue to play out during the 2020 presidential campaign, they may present Trump and the Republicans with a tough choice between keeping their base happy and improving their support among women. A Pew Research poll found that Trump’s support among white evangelical voters has fallen from 78 per cent to 69 per cent since 2016, with only 55 per cent preferring Trump as the Republican nominee in 2020 when they are given other options such as Pence.

With most Americans disapproving of the Alabama abortion ban, Trump has joined a chorus of senior Republicans (including Senate leader Mitch McConnell, House minority leader Kevin McCarthy, senior Alabama senator Richard Shelby and senator Mitt Romney) distancing themselves from the decision. Trump said his view is “the same position taken by Ronald Reagan” — that abortion should only be legal following incest or rape — disregarding or unaware of the fact that Reagan, as governor of California, signed a liberal abortion law.

Some of the Democrat presidential candidates seem keen to make this a campaign issue. But while abortion is clearly on the minds of politicians, it’s less clear that it will be a crucial issue for voters in 2020. On the other hand, access to healthcare will be a huge issue, especially for those women who are most affected by the Trump agenda. They are the same women who, in 2016, voted overwhelmingly against him. •

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I have never liked drawing attention to the fact that I’m a woman in technology. I don’t want the most prominent fact about me to be my gender rather than my expertise or my experience, or the impact of my work. In male-dominated settings, the last thing I want to feel is that I’m only there because of my gender, or that it’s the first thing people notice about me. I don’t like that being described as a “woman in tech” flattens my identity, makes gender the defining wrapper around my experience, irrespective of race, class, education, family history, political beliefs and all the other hows and whys that make life more complicated. These are some of the intellectual reasons.

A more immediate reason why I haven’t wanted to be known for talking about gender is because I’m still young and I want to have a career in this industry. I like what I do. I work on a range of issues related to data sharing and use. At the moment I lead a technical team designing data standards and software to support consumers sharing data on their own terms with organisations they trust. Data underpins so much of the current interest in AI, so it’s a good time to be working on projects trying to make it useful and learning to understand its limitations.

It’s also true that most of the time my clients, employers, team members, fellow panellists and advocates are male. Most of the time they’re excellent people. I don’t like making them feel uncomfortable. People generally don’t like feeling as if they’re not being fair or that in some structural ways, the world isn’t fair. Avoiding making people uncomfortable — particularly those who decide whether you’ll be invited to speak at a conference, or hired, or promoted, or put forward for a new exciting opportunity — is still a sensible career move.

So I have long assumed that the best way to talk about gender and be a strong advocate for women is from a distance, at the pinnacle of my career, when I’m the one in the position of power. What a strange pact to make with myself: to effect change in the technology industry, to become a female leader, I just need to stay silent on issues affecting women in the industry. In thirty years’ time ask me what it was like and, boy, will I have some stories to tell — and some really good suggestions!

But I don’t think I can wait any longer. My sense of how to navigate the world as a woman and still get ahead was shaken in 2018. In the media, I watched as women who tried to keep their heads down and avoid making a scene still found themselves branded attention-seekers, deviants, villains — even though it was men behaving badly who were on trial. I published a book in a technology field and tried diligently to avoid discussing gender, only to be dismayed by the influence gender had on how it was received, who read it, who saw value in it.

At events, it was almost always women who approached me to say they enjoyed the panel and to ask follow-up questions. The younger the men, the more likely they were to want to argue with and dismiss me. At the book signings that followed, while my queues mainly comprised women, their requests for dedications were almost always to sons and nephews, brothers and husbands. I smiled politely through comments about being on panels specifically to add “a woman’s perspective.” I looked past the male panellists who interrupted me, repeated me, who reached out to touch me while they made their point.

I was also pregnant. By the time you read this I will have given birth to a baby girl. It is hard to describe how much this has recast what I thought was the right and wrong way to make it as a woman. She is the daughter of two intelligent parents who are passionate about technology. She is currently a ferocious and unapologetic wriggler who takes up every inch of available space and demands our attention, oblivious to the outside world. I don’t know her yet but I already admire her for that.

I do not want her to grow to believe that in order to successfully navigate the world she must make herself small, put up with poor treatment, apologise for taking up space that is rightfully hers. I don’t know how I would look her in the eye when she realises that this way of being does not help her.

While it can seem like we’re only now talking about gender issues in the tech sector, the discussion has been going on for decades. What makes it wearying is how many of the problems raised years ago remain the same.

In 1983 — before I was born — female graduate students and research staff from the computer science and artificial intelligence laboratories at MIT published a vivid account of how a hostile environment to women in their labs impeded academic equality. They described bullying, sexual harassment and negative comments explicitly and implicitly based on gender. They described being overlooked for their technical expertise, and ignored and interrupted when they tried to offer that expertise. The authors made five pages of recommendations aimed at addressing conscious and unconscious differences in attitudes towards women in the industry. “Responsibility for change rests with the entire community,” they wrote, “not just the women.”

It’s clear that for there to be serious improvements in the numbers of girls and women in technology, cultural attitudes towards what girls are interested in and capable of will have to change. We have to want them to change. But I’m not sure that we want that as a society. In Australia, declining participation rates among girls studying advanced maths and science subjects in high school continue to be a cause for concern. The reasons for the decline remain broadly the same as they were twenty years ago, when Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher interviewed more than a hundred female and male computer science students at Carnegie Mellon University, home to one of the top computer science departments in the United States, as part of their seminal study of gender barriers facing women entering the profession.

In Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing, Margolis and Fisher charted how computing was claimed as male territory and made hostile for girls and young women. Throughout primary and high school, the curriculum, teachers’ expectations and parental attitudes were shaped around pathways that assumed computers were for boys. Even where women did persist with an interest in computers into college, Margolis and Fisher observed that by the time they graduated “most… faced a technical culture whose values don’t match their own, and ha[d] encountered a variety of discouraging experiences with teachers, peers and curriculum.”

Back then, as now, barriers persisted in the workforce. In the mid 2000s, The Athena Factor report on female scientists and technologists working in forty-three global companies in seven countries concluded that while 41 per cent of employees in technical roles in those companies were women, over time 52 per cent of them would quit their jobs. The key reasons for quitting: exclusionary, predatory workplace cultures; isolation, often as the sole woman on a technical team; and stalled career pathways that saw women moved sideways into support or executor roles. “Discrimination,” Meg Urry, astrophysicist and former chair of the Yale physics department, wrote in the Washington Post in 2005, “isn’t a thunderbolt, it isn’t an abrupt slap in the face. It’s the slow drumbeat of being underappreciated, feeling uncomfortable and encountering roadblocks along the path to success.”

These themes emerge in thousands of books, white papers, op-eds and articles: women leave the tech industry because they’re isolated, because they’re ignored, because they’re treated unfairly, underpaid and unable to advance. These problems persist, and every year there are new headlines concerning gender discrimination at every level of the industry. In 2018, female employees working for Google in California filed a class-action lawsuit alleging the multinational tech company systematically paid women less for doing similar work to men, while “segregating” technically qualified women into lower-paying, non-technical career tracks. The same year, 20,000 employees and contractors walked out at offices around the world to protest sexual harassment at the company after news broke that Andy Rubin, the “father of Android,” had been paid US$90 million to leave Google quietly amid credible accusations of sexual harassment.

In every tech organisation I have worked in, these kinds of dynamics remain uncomfortably familiar. There are more women than men in administrative roles, in project coordination, and in front-end development and design roles, although some of these women began in the industry with technical degrees and entry-level technical roles. Gender-related salary gaps persist, even within the same technical roles and leadership positions. HR processes, designed to create a level playing field, still inadvertently reward those who complain the loudest, who demand more money, who tend more often than not to be men. It remains difficult for women to pursue bullying and harassment complaints, particularly against powerful harassers, without career consequences.

Writing about gender in technology, it’s easy to fall into what computer engineer Erica Joy Baker describes as “colourless diversity.” A 2018 study by the Pew Research Center noted that while 74 per cent of women in computer jobs in the United States reported experiencing workplace discrimination, 62 per cent of African-American employees also reported racially motivated discrimination. Women of colour in tech find themselves doubly affected.

I am reflected in the statistics around gender: I am affected by them, perpetuate them, benefit from them. I have never successfully negotiated a meaningful salary increase or bonus. I have watched as male successors in my own former roles are paid more than I was to do the same job. I have managed teams where my male employees earned more than I did. These kinds of things happen both because I don’t speak up and because organisations let it happen.

I know this because as a manager, I let it happen too. I get requests for higher pay and promotions more frequently from men. Even if they’re rude or unreasonable or completely delusional, I take their sense of being undervalued seriously. I want to make them happy. The women I have managed rarely express their outrage or frustration so openly. They’re slower to escalate concerns and less likely to threaten to leave. I also know that as a white woman in tech, despite these experiences, I’m still statistically likely to be paid more and receive more opportunities than any of my non-white colleagues, male or female or non-binary.

Years of focus on bringing more women into technology roles have created a sense of being eagerly sought out and highly valued. But workplace dynamics and cultural attitudes still persist in making women of all ages, ethnicities, sexualities, once they’re in the sector, feel undervalued and ignored. It’s a strange paradox to live within. On the basis of our gender we’re highly visible (more visible if we’re white and heterosexual). As experts, as contributors to those technologies, it can still feel like we’re hidden in plain sight.

In August 2018, WIRED magazine asked: “AI is the future: but where are the women?” Working with start-up Element AI, it estimated that only around 12 per cent of leading machine-learning researchers in AI were women. Concerns about a lack of diversity in computer science have taken on new urgency, partly driven by growing awareness of how human designers influence the systems making decisions about our lives. In its article, WIRED outlined a growing number of programs and scholarships aimed at increasing gender representation in grad schools and industry, at conferences and workshops, while concluding that “few people in AI expect the proportion of women or ethnic minorities to grow swiftly.”

For women, the line between “inside” and “outside” the tech sector — and therefore what contributions are perceived as valuable — keeps moving. While WIRED focused on a narrow set of skills being brought to applied AI — machine-learning researchers — it nonetheless recast these skills as the only contributions worth counting towards AI’s impact. The “people whose work underpins the vision of AI,” the “group charting society’s future” in areas like facial recognition, driverless cars and crime prediction, didn’t include the product owners, user-experience designers, ethnographers, front-end developers, the sociologists and anthropologists, subject-matter experts or the customer-relationship managers who work alongside machine-learning researchers on the same applied projects.

Many of these roles evolved explicitly to create the connection between a system and society, between its intended use and unintended consequences. They are roles that typically encourage critical thinking, empathy, seeking out of diverse perspectives — all skills that leaders in the tech industry have identified as critical to the success of technology projects. The proportions of women in these kinds of roles tends to be higher, both by choice and perhaps, as the female employees at Google alleged in their 2018 lawsuit, by design. Yet, even as we wrestle in public debates with the impact the design of a technical system has on humans and society, our gaze keeps sliding over these people — already in the industry — who are explicitly tasked with addressing these problems, including many women. If in public commentary we don’t see or count their contributions as part of the development of AI, then their contributions don’t get valued as part of teams developing AI.

I want more diverse women to become machine-learning researchers. I also want the contributions women already make in a range of roles to be properly recognised. What matters isn’t so much getting more women into a narrowly defined set of technical roles, the boundaries of which are defined by the existing occupants (who are overwhelmingly male). This is still a miserably myopic approach to contributions that “count” in tech. What matters is that the industry evolves to define itself according to the wide set of perspectives, the rich range of skills and expertise, that go into making technology work for humans.

What I really don’t want to see, as the relationship between technical systems and humans takes on greater status in the industry, is women being pushed out of these important roles. It would be the continuation of a historical pattern in the tech industry. As technology historians including Marie Hicks have shown, despite this persistent sense that women “just don’t like computing,” women were once the largest trained workforce in the computing industry. They calculated ballistics and space-travel trajectories; they programmed the large, expensive electromechanical computers crunching data for government departments and commercial companies while being paid about the same as secretaries and typists. But as the value of computing grew, women were squeezed out, sidelined, overtaken by male colleagues. Once considered a “soft” profession, women’s work, not “technical” as defined by the men who occupied other technical roles, computer programming eventually became highly paid, prized… and male-dominated.

I worry that we’re about to do it again, this time in ethical AI. Ethical AI is in the process of transitioning from being a “soft” topic for people more concerned with humans than computers, and treated by the technology industry primarily as a side project, to being a mainstream focus. Experts in ethical AI are a hot commodity. KPMG recently declared “AI ethicists” one of the most in-demand hires for technology companies of 2019. There’s a reason a book about ethical AI like Made by Humans got picked up by a mainstream publisher.

A significant proportion of critical research fuelling interest in the impacts of AI on humans and society has been driven by women: as computer scientists, mathematicians, journalists, anthropologists, sociologists, lawyers, non-profit leaders and policymakers. MIT researcher Joy Buolamwini’s work on bias in facial recognition systems broke open the public debate about whether facial recognition technology is yet fit for purpose. Julia Angwin’s team at ProPublica investigated bias in computer programs being used as aids in criminal sentencing decisions, and exposed competing, incompatible definitions of algorithmic fairness. Data scientist Cathy O’Neil’s book Weapons of Math Destruction was one of the first big mainstream books to question whether probabilistic systems were as flawless as they appeared.

There are many prominent women in AI ethics: Kate Crawford and Meredith Whittaker, co-directors of the AI Now Institute in New York and long-term scholars of issues of bias and human practice with data; Margaret Mitchell, a senior machine-learning researcher at Google, well known in the industry for her work in natural-language processing, who has drawn attention to issues of bias in large corpuses of text used to train systems in speech and human interaction; Shira Mitchell, quantifying fairness models in machine learning; danah boyd; Timnit Gebru; Virginia Eubanks; Laura Montoya; Safiya Umoja Noble; Rachel Coldicutt; Emily Bender; Natalie Schluter. In early 2019, when TOPBOTS, the US-based strategy and research firm influential among companies investing in applied AI, summarised its top ten “breakthrough” research papers in AI ethics, more than half of the authors were women.

Which is why it’s been disconcerting to see, as interest in and funding for AI ethics grows, the gender distribution on panels discussing ethics, in organisations set up explicitly to consider ethical AI, start to skew towards male-dominated again. It’s not just that more men are taking an interest in ethical AI; this is a reflection of its importance, which is something to be celebrated. What troubles me is that what “ethical AI” encompasses often seems to end up in these conversations being redefined as a narrow set of technical approaches that can be applied to existing, male-dominated professions.

Even as the women in these professions — and many of the influential women I just cited are computer scientists and machine-learning researchers — are doing pathbreaking work on the limitations (as well as the strengths) of technical methods quantifying bias and articulating notions of “fairness,” these technical interpretations of ethics become the sole lens through which “ethical AI” is commoditised.

Ethical AI is thus recast as a “new,” previously unconsidered technical problem to be solved, and solved by men. I have been consistently unnerved to find myself talking to academics and institutes planning research investments in ethical AI who don’t know who Joy Buolamwini is, or Kate Crawford, or Shira Mitchell. And I worry that user researchers, designers, anthropologists, theorists — many of them women — whose work in the industry has for years involved marrying the choices made by engineers in designing systems with the humans affected by them, will end up being pushed out as contributors towards “ethical AI.” I’m afraid we’ll just keep finding new ways to render women in the industry invisible. I worry that my own contributions will be invisible.

Every woman in technology can tell you a story about invisibility. At a workshop in 2018, I watched a senior, well-respected female colleague, who was supposed to be leading the discussion, get repeatedly interrupted and ignored. She finally broke into the conversation to say, mystified, as though she couldn’t quite trust what was in front of her own eyes and ears, “Didn’t I just say that? Did anyone hear me say that?” What stayed with me was the way she asked the group the question: she wasn’t angry, just… puzzled. As though perhaps the problem wasn’t that people weren’t listening to her, but that there was some issue with the sound in the room itself, or with her. As if perhaps the problem was that she was a ghost who couldn’t be heard.

I’ve listened to men repurpose my proposals as their own — not intentionally or maliciously, just not realising that they had heard me say the same thing seconds earlier. I’ve watched as men on projects I’ve led attribute our success to their own contributions. It is unsettling and strange to be both visible as a woman in tech, and yet invisible as a contributor to tech. For women of colour, invisibility is doubly felt. Even at conferences and on panels dedicated explicitly to the experiences of women in tech, most panellists will be white women in the industry.

Perhaps nobody has captured the stark influence of gender on visibility more vividly than the late US mathematician Ben Barres. In his essay “Does Gender Matter?” Barres recounts his own experiences as a graduate student at MIT, entering the school as a woman before transitioning to a man. At the time, Barres was responding to comments made by male academics, including Harvard president Lawrence Summers and psychologist Steven Pinker, asserting biological differences to explain the low numbers of women in maths and science. In the essay, Barres is careful not to attribute undue significance to his own experiences. But sometimes anecdotes reveal as much as statistics do.

Barres described how, as a woman and as the only person to solve a difficult maths problem in a large class mainly made up of men, she was told by the professor that “my boyfriend must have solved it for me.”After she changed sex, a faculty member was heard to say that “Ben Barres gave a great seminar today, but then his work is much better than his sister’s.” Confronting innate sex differences head on, Barres described the intensive cognitive testing he underwent before and after transitioning and the differences he observed: increased spatial abilities as a man; the ability to cry more easily as a woman. But by far, he wrote, the main difference he noticed on transitioning to being a man was “that people who don’t know I am transgendered treat me with much more respect. I can even complete a whole sentence without being interrupted by a man.”

This is the first time I’ve written publicly about my own experiences as a woman in technology. Up till now I’ve played by the rules. I have spent years being polite in the face of interruptions, snubs, harassment. I know instinctively how to communicate my opinion in a way that won’t upset anyone and have tended to approach talking about sexual harassment and discrimination on the basis that what matters most is not upsetting anyone. I have focused on finding the “right words,” the “right time” to talk about gender issues.

But I have observed the ways in which gender (and race, and sexuality) continues to shape who is in power and whose contributions get counted in the tech industry, in ethical AI. Even when it comes to the “right” way to talk about gender issues, I can’t help but notice how different “right” looks for men as compared with women, and for white women as compared with women of colour. Increasingly, men are publicly identifying as champions of change for women: they sign panel pledges, join initiatives pursuing gender equality, demand equal representation, and it’s seen as a career booster. Women demand change too forcefully and are labelled bullies, drama queens, reprimanded for their over-inflated sense of self-importance. Women of colour are vilified and hunted. And women who stay silent in the face of all this, as I have, implicitly endorse the status quo, often finding themselves swallowed up by it anyway. If my daughter grows up to be interested in tech, these are not the experiences I want her to have. I want her to be unafraid to speak up, to demand our attention. I want her to be seen, and I want her to speak up for others.

If there is no “right” way as a woman to speak about gender issues — if there is no “right” way for a woman to take up space, to take credit — then silence won’t serve me or save me either. The only way forward from here is to start speaking. •

This essay is republished from GriffithReview 64: The New Disruptors, edited by Ashley Hay.

The post Computer says no appeared first on Inside Story.

It was 1938 when Woolf wrote this, and war was looming. Today the places where we must think have expanded, and when the social media and the fake news come streaming in on us, when presidents take to Twitter and the bad behaviour of politicians and celebrities gushes onto our phones, when the riches of the rich are impossible to comprehend, when the trolls grow angrier, it is hard to know what to think, where even to begin. But think we must.

Yes, I thought, as I opened this book and saw the impressive array of women Julienne van Loon has interviewed — including Siri Hustvedt and Laura Kipnis, Julia Kristeva and Rosi Braidotti. It took me a while to correct the misapprehension that can come with a title and an epigraph. I should have taken more notice of the cover: the face of a woman cropped to show only the mouth, partly open and aswoon with feeling.

Towards the end of van Loon’s journey through her interviews with these impressive women, she asks: where are you at? It is a question she says we should all be asking each other, not so much for our physical whereabouts — though that can be crucial when a friend is in trouble — but to enquire about our own journey of becoming in the precarious world we inhabit. It is a question that holds the book together, though I did not realise it until I reached the end, for The Thinking Woman is not so much a book of interviews — though they form an organising principle — as van Loon’s own reckoning with where she is at now, as she approaches fifty.

Where life has brought her as a thinking, feeling woman, who has loved, and loved again, who has given birth to a child and worked for her living, who has wondered and feared as she has moved from city to city. How do we think our lives as well as feel them, she asks; how do we give meaning to the buffeting of emotion and the mismatch of the demands and expectations that are made of us? These, too, are questions asked by Virginia Woolf, and the thinking women who came before, and after, her. Where are we at with that, now, as women of the twenty-first century?

With three novels to her name, van Loon is at her best when those she interviews are as alive as her writing. She visits Marina Warner in her North London house with its “tiny” L-shaped garden which, that day, was “an attractive mess of late summer flowers.” Drinking tea in the kitchen, they talk and they wonder, in both senses of the word: they muse, and ponder, and enquire; they let themselves be “struck by wonder” at the marvels of myth and fairytale, of Scheherazade and the Alice of Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland. It’s an exhilarating encounter that has Warner and van Loon riffing on the importance of listening to other voices and marvelling at “the strangeness and possibility” of insects that spin their own cocoons and metamorphose — like the beings of ancient stories — into beguiling new form.

Can our capacity for wonder, van Loon wonders as she leaves the house, “actually change who we are”? Yes, she replies to her own question. Yes, and yes.

And so does our capacity for play. Indeed, we cannot wonder if we have not learned from our earliest becoming how to play. When Siri Hustvedt opens the door of her Brooklyn brownstone, the temperature outside dropping to code blue, that is the question van Loon has come to discuss. And should you doubt the importance of play, from those first to-and-fro noises between a mother and her baby, then contemplate what happens when a child is born into an environment so impoverished and abusive that she has no experience of play, none at all: none of those baby noises, none of the mimicking and hiding behind a hand, none of the counting and jumping rope. When Hustvedt encountered such a child in her work at the New York Hospital, the girl was twelve years old with no capacity to imagine, no ability to enter a story or a character, no cognitive comprehension of metaphor. All that was left to her as a mode of thinking was the damaged stasis Hustvedt describes as “concrete.”

“I think of play as a way of sorting out the world,” Hustvedt said — that mulling and wondering and trying other shapes and finding the patterns as we venture further into the world. Without play, we barely live.

Which raises, again, the question that lurks in the undergrowth of this book: “What is this ‘civilisation’ in which we find ourselves?” How are we to comprehend a world in which something as fundamental and human and universal as the play of a child can be obliterated? What is this “civilisation” that reduces so many to poverty and fear as the inequality in wealth reaches levels — van Loon quotes Thomas Piketty — not seen since Woolf was young.

The one Philosopher (with a capital P) whom van Loon interviews is Nancy Holmstrom. As van Loon says, philosophy as an academic discipline is still largely a male preserve, and Holmstrom’s path to the Chair of Philosophy at Rutgers University was far from straightforward. Van Loon turns to her for her work on capitalism, its structures and its impact on women. This is the chapter in which she thinks about her own history of work, and how different it has been from that of her grandmother and mother. It is at this point in the book that she writes of her jump from the security of a continuing university position to the precarity of a writing life — although she does now have a research fellowship at another university. It was a decision made as the work of university teaching was becoming caught in the malign influence of “profit and competition” that also had Marina Warner leaving her university.

As these things so often are for women, van Loon’s decision to jump was a move also for love. As memoir it makes interesting reading, but Holmstrom never comes alive as interlocutor, and the chapter sinks in the gap between the personal and the collective, between van Loon comprehending her own particular story and the task of coming to grips with the dire state of our polity.

As Holmstrom says, and van Loon agrees, “the challenge” for all of us is “to come up with an alternative… To unleash our imaginations and collectively work out what such an alternative would look like.” Which thinking person would not agree? But the uncomfortable thought is whether it is a matter of privilege — however precarious — for those of us who can opt for a thinking, writing life even to ask the question? And then what?

The last of van Loon’s thinking women is Rosi Braidotti. I’d expected her to be a tough subject, but on the contrary she shines a light as a presence in the narrative and as a guide, as van Loon thinks back to a friendship of her twenties with a woman called Jo. It was one of those early engagements that illuminates the path as we venture into the world. But as van Loon’s career consolidates, albeit shakily, Jo’s propensity to schizophrenia darkens. She is admitted to — and escapes from — various psychiatric hospitals, and finally lands back on the streets. Here, the question of where are you at takes on a hard immediacy for Julienne van Loon.

It is a powerful final chapter which, with Braidotti as guide, brings us back to Virginia Woolf. Not on the omnibus, having us think as we pass the Cenotaph — but in her playful love and friendship with Vita Sackville-West. It was there, more than anywhere other than at her desk, that Woolf could live the fluidity of being and becoming, of thought and feeling, that takes immortalised shape — as Braidotti and van Loon agree — in Orlando. That is the Virginia Woolf whose spirit hovers over this book, not the stern rider on the omnibus.

The Thinking Woman does a lot to help us think about how we can, how we could, even how we should, deal with our own feelings, and find the fluidity of imagination to live thoughtfully and fully. In this she has a long and honourable lineage. As to the next question, the hard question of thinking our collective way towards a better world in which life on the streets is no longer an unsurprising fate, I await volume two. •

The post Where are you at? appeared first on Inside Story.

She believes that the decade’s economic and political crises have dominated public memory, and wants to redress the balance by focusing on its significant social reforms. Many people, particularly women, remember their sudden access to higher education, fault-free divorce and, in some cases, professional opportunities they had only dreamed of. Whitlam’s government can’t claim credit for the contraceptive pill, of course, but its steps towards equal pay, parental leave, increased access to abortion and greater support for single parents made enormous differences to the most intimate aspects of individual lives. Few Australians were untouched.

Arrow makes clear this is not a comprehensive history of the decade. She gives women most of her attention, and the emergence of women as a distinct political constituency forms her major narrative. Her dispassionate view of recent historical material is admirable: though her own feminism is obvious, she restrains her enthusiasm for feminist achievements, writing a history of feminist social reform rather than a feminist history.

The Seventies begins with a survey of the growth in civil liberties during the last years of the prosperous 1960s. The White Australia policy had ended, the Commonwealth had recognised Aboriginal citizenship, capital punishment had been abolished, and some states had initiated abortion and homosexuality law reforms. By 1970, despite its commitment to the Vietnam war, a conservative federal government had begun to loosen censorship laws and was sympathetic to the growing interest in the arts, and particularly film.

Yet a boundary remained between public and private activities, with the white heterosexual men in power conceding privacy to private acts rather than acknowledging their place in the range of social life. The new decade saw sustained pushing against that boundary, with various feminist organisations and public events preparing the ground for the Whitlam government’s reforms. Arrow cites conferences on women’s rights and domestic violence, various consciousness-raising groups, women’s liberation organisations and the Women’s Electoral Lobby’s strategic interviewing of politicians before the 1972 election. Incursions were also mounted by those who felt even more disenfranchised — Aboriginal women and men, and the gay men and women who were vocal in the Campaign Against Moral Persecution, or CAMP, and other organisations — making them the catalysts for wider debates about the nature of Australian domestic life.

A major strand of this story is Elizabeth Reid’s experience as Whitlam’s women’s adviser and the rise of what came to be called “femocrats.” Appointed in 1973 amid a barrage of media attention, Reid travelled around Australia listening to women’s views in order to set priorities for action. Childcare seemed to be the most pressing, but hundreds of letters from women on a range of issues reached her office. She and her small staff redirected many of them to relevant government departments hoping to raise public service awareness of the ways that policies affected women across the board.

Reid and her advisory committee strategically chose to spend their grant for the 1975 International Women’s Year on research initiatives (particularly women’s history), cultural projects (for example, the film Caddie) and public conferences such as the Women and Politics conference in Canberra. They were criticised for the elitism of these projects when so many women’s services, including rape crisis centres and childcare services, were short of funds, but Reid sensed that her moment of influence would be brief, and she wanted to invest in long-term changes in cultural attitudes. As the Whitlam government fell apart there was a backlash from both radical and conservative critics. Reid resigned in October 1975, leaving an impressive legacy from just two and a half years of work.

Her judgement about ongoing influence was proved correct when the new Coalition government accepted many of these reforms, including retaining Sara Dowse as head of the women’s affairs branch. Then, in 1977, Fraser shifted the branch into the new home affairs ministry, where it was cut off from information and influence. Dowse resigned, but the feminist cat was already among the conservative pigeons, continuing to create debates and conflicts. With women’s affairs disappearing into a remote part of the bureaucracy, Fraser appointed a National Women’s Advisory Council, or NWAC, chaired by Liberal stalwart Beryl Beaurepaire and including Quentin Bryce, Wendy McCarthy and other prominent women.

The NWAC’s research reiterated recommendations on law reform, sex discrimination and domestic violence and soon raised the ire of more conservative women, who formed into the Women’s Action Alliance and its breakaway organisation, Women Who Want to Be Women. By 1980 women from these groups had been appointed to the NWAC and asserted their anti-feminist call for women to define themselves by their roles in the family. In their view, as Arrow puts it, “women’s problems were not structural, but personal — a direct reversal of the ethos of ‘The personal is political.’”

In the meantime, Justice Elizabeth Evatt, journalist and social researcher Anne Deveson and Felix Arnott, the Anglican archbishop of Brisbane, were working their way through submissions to the royal commission on human relationships, which had been established by bipartisan agreement in 1974 mainly as a way of avoiding a divisive parliamentary debate on abortion. The commission “audited Australian intimate life in the 1970s,” writes Arrow, “with a particular focus on the problems created by family dysfunction, violence, poverty and poor education,” moving well beyond abortion and issues of sexual freedom to their context in difficult and sometimes violent lives. Gay advocates were successful in getting the commission to include homosexual issues in its purview, so it heard testimony across the full range of Australian sexual and family experience.

Arrow does her best to summarise the main issues arising from the submissions, particularly the evidence of poverty, poor education and domestic violence. More trivial matters take her attention, too, and these indicate the uneven nature of this kind of historical archive: she cites, for example, a man asserting his right against convention to witness the birth of his child at Parramatta Hospital, though I can attest that this was standard practice in Canberra Hospital by 1974. The commission’s archives clearly contain the material for more detailed discussion of the changes in Australian family and sexual life, and it is significant for revealing the hidden violence in Australian families and the implications of social disadvantage for personal life.

Arrow’s coverage of the royal commission leads her away from the main thrust of her study — the unstoppable rise of women as a political constituency. The anti-feminists could not hold the line against feminism, and in 1983 Labor was returned to government federally with more than 50 per cent of the women’s vote. This is the year that marks the end of Arrow’s “seventies.”

The Seventies describes the triumph of a reforming rather than a radical feminism that opened opportunities for middle-class women graduates and ensured there would be many more of them in the generations to come. It is curiously Canberra-centred, in that so many of these reforms were shepherded into legislation by women who were public servants or active as government lobbyists. Arrow uses the term “femocrats” as if it were a banner of pride rather than the derogatory put-down of the time, when the combination of “feminist” and “bureaucrat” expressed the resentment of both conservative and radical observers, especially those outside Canberra.

While the changes these women achieved have provided lasting benefits to the mainstream of middle-class women and their families in Australia, they left behind pockets of poverty and disadvantage, especially among Aboriginal people. But the voices of Aboriginal women kept intruding in the public discussion to contrast their history of sterilisation and forced abortion with white middle-class calls for reliable contraception and access to abortion, and the alliance with middle-class white women helped some Aboriginal women pursue confident activism. In 1972 Aboriginal woman Pat Eatock stood for the seat of Canberra with Elizabeth Reid as her campaign manager and the support of the Women’s Electoral Lobby. She went on to an academic career.

Though the book’s subtitle emphasises the personal as well as the political, it has too much public activity to cover to give much attention to personal experiences. Arrow acknowledges the relationship of film and television to shifting attitudes, with shows such as Number 96 introducing gay characters, and the appearance of four openly gay people on the ABC’s Chequerboard program in 1973. She contrasts the ocker sex comedies of the period (Alvin Purple, Petersen) with more refined female-centred films such as Caddie and My Brilliant Career, but she overlooks ABC television series such as Tony Morphett’s popular and influential Certain Women (1973), which directly addressed contemporary change in the lives of suburban women, or John Dingwall and Margaret Kelly’s Pig in a Poke (1977), which noticed the inner-city lives of Aboriginal people, migrants, abused women and gay men. A later ABC anthology drama series about social problems, Spring & Fall (1980, 1982), might well have taken the royal commission report as a source. Arrow mentions in passing Elizabeth Riley’s little-known novel of lesbian experience, All That False Instruction, but not Monkey Grip (1977), Helen Garner’s much-loved testament to the complexities of feminist change. Sara Dowse’s West Block (1983), a novel based on her femocrat years in Canberra, might have provided another personal perspective on this material.

Of course, I am reading as a literary historian interested in cultural change, and one of the virtues of The Seventies is that it provides a clear frame of public activity and inquiry for other historians and readers to fill with their own discoveries and memories. It serves as a companion to Frank Bongiorno’s The Eighties: The Decade that Transformed Australia and his earlier The Sex Lives of Australians to give fresh perspectives on how we came to be where we are. •

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At the same time, the Australian Dictionary of Biography has been concerned by its under-representation of women. The ADB is Australia’s pre-eminent dictionary of national biography. Founded in 1966, and published by the Australian National University, it tells the story of Australia through the lives of the dynamic, engaging, eccentric and sometimes notorious individuals who have shaped it.

Since the first ADB articles were published, ideas about who is important and who should be chosen as examples of Australian society have changed amid a huge explosion of new research. Efforts to respond to these changes have included a supplementary volume of “missing person” entries, a two-volume biographical register of names who have just “missed out” on ADB articles, and various spin-off projects. But women still only account for about 12 per cent of entries. For the colonial period, the situation is even more worrying, with less than 4 per cent of articles recognising women.

In 2017 the ADB committed to improving the gender balance of the dictionary by adding 1500 new entries on women who flourished during the colonial period. Alongside this project, another has also emerged. A collaboration between Inside Story, the Canberra Times and the ADB, the Missing Women obituary project is a long-overdue tribute to the lives of twenty-eight women who, like those in “Overlooked,” have gone unmentioned.

Many of these women were extraordinary; others less so. Unlike the New York Times, where obituaries are chosen to recognise the lives of “remarkable” people, the ADB aims to tell the story of the nation through the lives of Australians both significant and representative.•

You can read the profiles here.

You can help us add another 1500 women to the Australian Dictionary of Biography’s entries for the colonial period by nominating those you think should be in the ADB. To learn more about the colonial women in the ADB project and to download the nomination form follow this link. And if you would like to donate to the ADB Endowment Fund to help sponsor this project, please click here.

The post Why don’t we know their names? appeared first on Inside Story.

The former Ann Woodhead emigrated as a free settler with her husband Anthony and their four young children aboard the Phoenix. After the vessel docked, Ann penned a letter to her parents back in England for delivery on the return voyage. During her first trip ashore, though, she saw that the well-dressed ladies of Sydney Town followed the latest fashions and had the means to pay for them. She returned to the boat and quickly added a postscript to her letter, with a request.

“I wish we had about £10 of your goods that I might begin in a little way,” she wrote. “We shall endeavour to sell some of our things and save a little if we can and buy some wool to send you to sell for us, send the return in stays… Cotton ginghams, prints, muslins, and lace are very dear, checked shirts and silk slops and waistcoats fetch a great price… Bonnet shapes, ribbons and sewing silks as well. I wish you could be so kind as to trust us £10 or £20 of [each] at cost price. We will endeavour to send you over as much wool as in our power for you to sell and pay for the goods with.”

Ann had sized up the women accurately. “The stays,” she said, “must be from 24 to 30 inches… and more 27 and upwards as women run large.” Astute and quick-witted, she had also grasped her family’s prospects, reporting to her parents that “if people strive, they may get a living middling comfortably.”

Ann had learned the trade from her father, a London bonnetmaker and staymaker originally from Retford, Nottinghamshire. Intelligent and well educated, she had developed into a stubborn, strong-willed businesswoman. Her husband, on the other hand, was a mild-mannered and relatively uneducated wheelwright and coachmaker.

Not wasting any time, Ann announced in the Sydney Gazette on 14 July 1825 that her business had begun: “Mrs Hordern, Long Stay and Corset Maker, Whalebone Manufacturer, from London, begs Leave to acquaint the Ladies, that she has commenced Business at No. 2. Upper Pitt-street, Sydney,” which is now at the northeast corner of Pitt and Campbell Streets. “Stays, made to Order, on the shortest notice, and in the most fashionable way, on reasonable terms; an assortment of Stays ready-made. Staymakers supplied with Whalebone, ready dressed.”

Her trade flourished and she continued to post six-monthly advertisements. By January 1827, with the arrival of the goods ordered from her parents, she had progressed from staymaking to running a general drapery warehouse. In March that year, she advertised her growing range of merchandise: “More Bargains are now on sale at Mrs HORDERNS… consisting of a Variety of good large size twilled Shawls, only 4s. 6d. to 5s. 6d. Sterling each, figured silk scarves from 9s. Sterling and upwards, prints, muslins, and a numerous assortment of other Articles, are now on Sale.”

With her developing business, she already needed to employ staff, advertising for “Two or Three respectable Young GIRLS, from the Age of 11 to 13 Years, are wanted to learn the Staymaking Business.”

During the economic downturn that probably closed her first shop in 1828, Ann may have assisted her husband in running the Coachmaker’s Arms tavern, which he had opened in George Street. A trader at heart and by experience, she is thought to have also run a stall opposite the tavern.

By 1830, however, she was again in business, this time in a reopened shop at 17 King Street, near Castlereagh Street. Here she specialised in the sale of bonnets. She accompanied an advertisement in the Sydney Herald in April 1834 for her “Splendid Stock of Ladies’ and Children’s Tuscan Bonnets” with a filled-in line drawing of a bonnet — the first illustration of its kind to be published in Australia, making her a pioneer in fashion-plate advertising.

This “BARGAINS IN BONNETS” advertisement listed her increased range of merchandise, including leghorn and beaver hats, coloured stays, cloth cloaks, umbrellas, “Ladies’ best French Kid Gloves,” handkerchiefs, boots and shoes. Over the years, her stock steadily diversified: silks and laces and “furs such as sable, chinchilla, squirrel fitch mynx &c &c” replaced the loose, thin outer garments called “slops” and the “calicoes” of 1825.

Anthony Hordern & Sons, 569–700 George Street, Sydney, c. 1924–25. The building was controversially demolished in 1986. Home and Away Collection/State Library of New South Wales, 35121

Ann and Anthony had moved to larger premises at 12 King Street in 1836. Two years later, Anthony gave up both the tavern and his coachmaking business to join his wife in her drapery store. When a neighbour saw Anthony cleaning the windows and washing down the shop, he mistook him for Ann’s assigned convict.

The Horderns soon started buying up land in what are now the central business districts of Melbourne and Sydney, generously helping set up their sons with a residence and shop each, and their daughter Elizabeth and her husband in business. Again, Ann seems to have been the progenitor of this decision. From the profits that had flowed from her business, Anthony was able to move in social status from a working-class tradesman to a middle-class landowner.

Ann remained the dominant partner in both domestic and business affairs. When Anthony joined Ann at her store, however, the name became “Anthony Hordern” — the first retail store of that name. It was to become synonymous with the huge commercial retailing business that, in the words of the Bulletin, “rule[d] the retail trade of the metropolis and the colony in general.”

While Ann Hordern was working to support her family from 1825 to 1838, she also bore six more children. Two sons died in infancy, as did one of the sons who came with her and Anthony from England. A devoted mother, she was also an organising one — even after her children had set up their own businesses.

Forthright and hardworking, sometimes hot-tempered, Ann Hordern was a remarkable woman who exhibited toughness and initiative. In her book Children of One Family, Lesley Hordern — the wife of Marsden Hordern, a descendant — identifies Ann as “the driving force behind her family’s commercial ventures and their subsequent considerable achievements.” She had recognised the business possibilities of early Sydney and grasped the opportunity to invest in inner-city land. Her legacy was the foundation of the “Anthony Hordern” tradition that her sons and their descendants were to follow.

Ann Hordern died on 18 January 1871, aged seventy-nine, at Retford Hall, the family mansion her son Anthony had named after her hometown in Nottinghamshire. Nottingham House (situated on land purchased for son John in George Street, Sydney) similarly honoured her.

Ann’s male descendants have been acknowledged in at least twelve National Centre of Biography entries. It is now time for Ann Hordern, the founder of the “Anthony Hordern & Sons” dynasty, to be given her well-deserved place in the sun. •

Further reading

Children of One Family: The Story of Anthony and Ann Hordern and Their Descendants in Australia 1825–1925, by Lesley Hordern, Retford Press, 1985

Minding Her Own Business: Colonial Businesswomen in Sydney, by Catherine Bishop, NewSouth Books, 2015

Shopkeepers and Shoppers: A Social History of Retailing in New South Wales from 1788, by Frances Pollon, Retail Traders’ Association of New South Wales, 1989

The post Forthright and hardworking, this corsetmaker founded a retail empire appeared first on Inside Story.

Born in County Sligo, Ireland, in about 1806, Henrys moved to England and fell in with a gang of criminals. At five feet six inches, she was tall for her time, and she was described as having pale, pock-pitted skin, black hair and hazel eyes, with a tattoo of a cross on her right arm. On the journey from England to Van Diemen’s Land, according to the ship’s surgeon’s journal, she contracted pleurisy, a debilitating lung illness similar to pneumonia. The surgeon also described her as being “very bad” and “incorrigible.”

Henrys arrived in Hobart on the Arab on 25 April 1836. Over the next fourteen years she was convicted of forty-nine offences, primarily involving disobedience, drunkenness, assault and misconduct, in the form of “profane, beastly and threatening language to the constables.” She was also convicted numerous times of absconding. In one instance, in 1841, she left her place of servitude (convicts were often assigned to free settlers as labourers or domestic help) and lived in the bush for a year, during which time she dressed as a man, went by the name of Jemmy the Rover, and worked as a timber splitter. She was caught and returned to the Cascades Female Factory, a workhouse for female convicts, and earned a further six months’ hard labour on top of her original sentence.

Of one court appearance, the Hobart Colonial Times reported on Tuesday 24 March 1846:

Yesterday, a powerful virago of a woman, named Catherine Henry [sic], holding a ticket-of-leave, was charged by Constable Sharpe with being drunk and absent from her authorised place of residence. The “fair penitent” was sentenced to two months’ imprisonment, with hard labour. To this, she demurred and alleged that those rogues of constables always sacrificed her, and for what she did not know, inasmuch as she was a most quiet and peaceable person. Hereupon Sharpe declared that “Miss Henry” was “flaring up” with a large lot of whalers, sailors, and other roisterers. “Miss Henry” was then conducted from the dock, and, as the door to the cage was opened for her reception, she suddenly, and with most Amazonian vigour, attacked the constables right and left, dealing such mighty blows as would have well become the immortal Boadicea herself. Of course, a rumpus took place, but “Miss Henry” could not be pacified; blows were given, and as to tongue, we could not, if we would, chronicle the language.

Returned to the dock, Henrys again protested at the “oppression” of the constables. “She was cautioned by his Worship,” concluded the paper, “and carried away as before, uttering loud exclamations and, indeed, most bitter imprecations against all in the office.”

Her initial ticket of leave was granted in 1845 but revoked five times over the next decade. In January 1848 she was convicted of assaulting a constable and was sentenced to nine months’ hard labour at the Cascades Female Factory. Within weeks she had escaped by sharpening the end of a spoon to pry out a cell bar and then climbing a stack of tubs, having fashioned a rope from her blanket to let her down on the other side. The Launceston Examiner reported that this “notorious female” had a reputation as a pugilist, and claimed that her “masculine” appearance was quite in keeping with her character.

Henrys married former convict Samuel Dobbs in 1849 but remained rebellious to the last. In November 1850 she and two other women were charged with robbing a man of £3 10s in a house of ill fame. When the victim declined to prosecute, the charges were dropped. But Henrys was found guilty of having afterwards smashed five panes of glass and part of a sash with a rock at the next-door neighbour’s house, and was sentenced to the Cascades Female Factory for one month.

On 19 December 1850, while Henrys was still incarcerated, Samuel Dobbs left Launceston for Melbourne. In March of the following year Henrys, too, embarked for Melbourne where, although it is hard to imagine, there is little evidence of further infraction. She died of cancer at Melbourne Hospital on 15 August 1855, as Catherine Henry, aged forty-nine. •

Further reading

Convict Lives: Women at Cascades Female Factory, by Lucy Frost, Female Convicts Research Centre, 2012

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