
So, 1970. What was it like here in Australia?
Well, it was a very different world then. Imagine yourselves without PCs, or computer printers, without iPads or tablets, without mobile
phones. Colour TV was a couple of years
away. There were no ATMs or credit
cards. No CDs, let alone DVDs or
BlueRay or streaming. No digital cameras, let alone
smart phones. Above all, no internet and
no social media. But we managed brilliantly without them. Our tools were telephone trees, typewriters, gestetner and roneo machines, and photocopiers, and
there was a lot of screenprinting then.
But back to that anger.
Why were we so incensed? Well,
again, things were different.
Except in a very limited sense, as sex objects and homemakers, we
women were invisible. You never saw a
woman driving a bus, let alone piloting a plane. You never saw or heard a woman reading the
news, let alone commenting on it. There
was not a single woman in the house of representatives. In both the Liberal party and the ALP women
were relegated to their auxiliaries, which were responsible for fundraising
and had very little policy clout. It was
almost impossible for a women to be preselected for a safe seat. There were hardly any women CEOs or even
managers; they made up only 3% of senior executives, public or private.
Only recently had married women
been given permanency in teaching or in the public service. There were separate newspaper ads for women’s
jobs and men’s jobs. Needless to say, only
a very brave or naïve woman would apply for a designated man’s job, and no man
I can think of would have applied for a woman’s one. Jobs, like the ads, were rigidly gender
specific.
A woman was unable to get a loan
without a male guarantor, usually her husband or father. A woman couldn’t even go into a pub without a
male to accompany her. There were taxes on contraceptives
and the advertising of them in the ACT was illegal. Abortion, although no longer unlawful due to
recent case law decisions, was expensive and often life-threatening.
Then there was women’s
unemployment. In the postwar period
the most important goal for governments of any stripe was full employment, and
that meant only 1-2% of the workforce was meant to be unemployed. Unemployment figures of 5% and above were
considered catastrophic. (The figure
today of 6.4% is misleading and would be much higher if unemployment was
measured as it was then.) One reason why
the figure was so low in 1970 is that women were discouraged workers, that is
they didn’t bother to register with the commonwealth employment service because
they knew that jobs for them were few and there was practically no child
care and if their partners were in work they were ineligible for assistance. But research done at the time
found that women’s hidden unemployment rate
was around 12%. If these women had
bothered to register the official rate would have been much higher
than that much vaunted 1-2%.
For women who did have jobs the
rate of pay was substantially lower than that for men doing the same work or
work of equal value. Today it’s still
18.8% lower; not much different from what it was in 1970 though at times it was as low as 25%. It was assumed that women were never
breadwinners; this was the rationale for pay inequity, and it was inscribed in
industrial law.
But the sixties and seventies were
decades of tremendous social movements and the political protests that
accompanied them – civil rights, anti-war, last but not least the women’s
movement, or feminism, or women’s liberation as we called it then. And to go back to the unemployment issue, it
was the juxtaposition of a new generation of recently educated women, many
highly educated, who found it difficult to get jobs commensurate with their
qualifications, that was the trigger for it.
Think of it, all these educated women with time on their hands – it was
a recipe for trouble. But it was also a lot of fun.
My own experience was typical and
yet atypical. When I arrived in
Australia in 1958 from Los Angeles, a bride of 19, I was shocked by what I
found here, the extent of what we later called sexism, though we didn’t have
the name for it then. By 1970 there was one: ‘male chauvinism’. ‘Male chauvinist pigs’ was what we called the worst of the men. That’s a term
that's gone out of style, but what it attempts to describe surely
hasn’t. This is something I’ll return
to. But for now, this is what happened
to me. In 1970, when I was 32, I got my
first paid job here, after bearing four children and eventually graduating from
Sydney University. It was as a
publisher’s rep and Canberra, where I was living then, was my
field. I went around the schools
flogging the company’s textbooks but the more interesting part of the job was
going around universities and research schools on the hunt for
manuscripts. One day, on mission to
hurry up some late ones that the company had contracted for, I met two lowly
women academics, one a research assistant, the other a departmental tutor, and
they invited me to a meeting. All very hush-hush
it was. When I got there I found some
30 or more other women, all fired up with enthusiasm and, like the books we’d
been poring over, brimming with anger.
Still, this wasn’t bitter anger. This was inspiring. It felt like what it was - a
revolution. It’s almost impossible to
convey my excitement listening to all these women articulating thoughts
that had been brewing in my brain for years. There wasn’t time to even introduce
ourselves, there was so much to say, and it was months before I began to piece
together faces with names.
What did we want? Child care, equal pay, equal employment
opportunity, equal educational opportunity, women’s refuges, measures to combat
sex discrimination, in workplaces, schools, clubs and pubs. We wanted to participate fully as citizens, and it was the beginning, a truly exciting one, but we knew there was a
long haul ahead. Most of us realised
that for all the reforms we might achieve, the most impenetrable barriers were those
embedded in our psyches, male and female.
In other words these barriers weren’t only legal or social – they were
cultural.
All this was taking place during a
time of great social tumult, as I’ve said.
In Australia this was expressed electorally. Between 1970 and 1972, the women’s movement
grew. But 1972 was an election year and
that was when the Women’s Electoral Lobby, a Women’s Liberation offshoot, was
born. WEL was determined to get the
issues we’d been talking about and demonstrating for, holding public forums and
staging street theatre and enduring either the scorn or the patronising of our
male contemporaries, onto the party political agenda. WEL devised a questionnaire and distributed
it to all the candidates and followed this up with lobbying them in
person. As a result, a few of them (remember, scarcely any were women) had their consciousnesses raised, but for most it was a painful business.
On 2 December 1972 the Whitlam Labor government was elected, after 23 years of conservative rule. In April the
following year, Whitlam appointed the world’s first prime ministerial women’s
adviser to his personal staff. A year
and a bit later I was appointed head of a small unit in his department to
assist this adviser, Elizabeth Reid, with her voluminous correspondence and with
policy development. It was a huge job
for both of us and, again, it was a beginning.
Feminism was no longer just a protest movement but was now involved in
government policy. And so it still is, though sadly in much diluted form,
today.
Although it’s no strange thing to see women in
politics now, or as CEOs of banks, or as heads of government departments, we still have reason to feel angry, even cheated somehow. We’ve had women premiers and governors, even
a woman prime minister. Yet for all our
progress – and from my vantage point it’s been quite amazing – it’s safe to say that the
bedrock of sexism remains. We've seen it in the trashing of our first women prime minister. But before I end and leave time for questions, I'll raise one more concerning example.
And over to you now: Why do you do you think this is so?
Thanks for sharing this talk Sara. It's an excellent recap of how things have gone. I was still a teen in 1970 but old enough to be aware of "women's lib". I read The female eunuch in 1972, I think. A lot has been achieved. BUT the horrific increase in domestic murders this year is something I too have noticed. As you say, behind it is another whole story of domestic violence. I was horrified enough when I read last year that the rate of women murdered domestically in Australia was about 1 a week and then gobsmacked to read that by early March this year there had already been 14 (I think). I'm still reeling.
ReplyDeleteI have no idea why it is, except that the increasing visibility may be a factor. It's become clear to me that while a lot of change has occurred, it's still on the surface of culture. The idea of human equality is clearly not deeply entrenched in our value system. The one positive I see is that young women seem to be starting to rise again after a couple of decades of too much apathy, of thinking it had all been achieved, despite evidence to the contrary. They are starting to see we are a long way off yet. THAT is probably a signifcant legacy of Gillard's time as PM. It brought the hate right out into the open - it was hard for women to close their eyes after that.
Yes, you're so right, WG. It was so blatant it was hard to ignore, how Gillard was treated. As are the horrific domestic violence figures. It was gratifying nonetheless to see the bright faces at Brigidine, and field their intelligent questions. The dismaying thing is that the feminist passion flares up and dies down and flares up again - a pattern of women's history. Perhaps because the veneer of equality is easily stripped away in times of stress combined with raised expectations.
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