Keeping us in the dark
Thirty-five years ago, Betty Friedan wrote a book called The Feminine Mystique. In it she exposed "the problem that has no name" — the discontent, depression and low self-esteem that women experienced as they lived the contradiction between their day-to-day reality and the dominant ideology of women as happy, healthy and fulfilled wives and mothers.
Over the following two decades, with the rise of the consciousness-raising groups, organisations and campaigns of the women's liberation movement, that problem was publicly named.
The limitations imposed on women by society's definition of their "natural" roles and capacities were questioned by increasing numbers of women who began to speak and write about their experiences in the family home, school and workplace.
Over time, this anecdotal evidence was confirmed by a growing body of research that documented the collective experiences of women. The institutionalisation of sex discrimination, harassment and assault, and the fewer life choices and opportunities for women, were publicly exposed.
The information collected by the movement was powerful ammunition in campaigns for child-care services, abortion rights, anti-sex discrimination programs, women's health and support services and every other gain for women which that movement won.
It is not surprising, then, that the first round of the Howard government's assault on those gains has included ensuring that the consequences of that assault — women's worsening economic and social status — is not documented or publicised.
Since Howard was elected, the Women's Statistics Unit in the Australian Bureau of Statistics has been abolished, and with it the Australian Women's Yearbook, which published a wealth of information about many aspects of women's lives.
The Office of the Status of Women has had its funding cut by 38% and its staff cut from 50 to 21. The office's Register of Women has been abolished; its grants program to women's organisations (many of which independently monitored indicators of gender inequality) has been cut and now has no staff to run it.
The Women's Budget Papers, a department by department report on how government policies and programs impact on women, have been cancelled.
The Women's Bureau in the Department of Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs, which monitors women's employment and related issues, is being reviewed and will likely be abolished under the guise of "mainstreaming".
The position of sex discrimination commissioner in the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission has not been filled since the last commissioner resigned in February. After slashing HREOC's budget and staff by 40% in the last budget, the government is now reviewing the "need" for the position at all.
The government's Affirmative Action Agency no longer requires companies and higher education institutions to submit annual reports, and the minister for administrative services has directed departments no longer to check affirmative action compliance in awarding government contracts.
The Australian Institute of Criminology's four-year national data base project on domestic violence (the first attempt to accurately assess the true level of domestic violence) has been de-funded.
The fact that all these means of monitoring reality have disappeared will not change that reality. The majority of women will still know, if only from their immediate experience, that things are getting worse for them.
However, less information does weaken feminists' ability to resist the attacks on women's rights and living conditions.
Against the perpetual backlash of the establishment media, the church and government, the women's movement can win its demands only if it raises public awareness of the systemic injustices against women and convinces large numbers of people to join the struggle for change.
Without public information, it is harder to educate, organise and mobilise the numbers necessary to force back the government's anti-women agenda.
Without it, it is harder to expose governments' rhetoric about gender equality and force them to implement real reforms.
And without it, it is much harder to let the millions of women who are as far as ever from fulfilment in all areas of their lives know that they are the norm rather than the exception. Gender inequality is alive and flourishing, and it can be beaten back only when those who are its victims refuse to be either blamed or hidden away, when they struggle side by side, using every means available, for fundamental social change.
By Lisa Macdonald