Sisters in suits
Australia is famous for its femocrats — feminists who work for structures like women's advisory boards, women's units and equal opportunity offices. We have more such pinstriped sisters per head of population than any Western nation.
The femocrat tradition sprang from the women's liberation movement of the early '70s, when women clutching copies of The Female Eunuch chained themselves to public buildings to fight for equal pay, handed out thousands of angry liberationist leaflets at antiwar demonstrations and formed lobby groups to push for a better deal.
The movement wanted more than equality with men — it demanded an end to the political system which kept women down. In 1971, the newly formed Women's Electoral Lobby (WEL) confronted politicians with a pamphlet which spelled out the facts:
"Women are discriminated against at work, at school, and in the home. Married women suffer many anomalies in tax benefits, medical and welfare payments. Single women are discriminated against through credit, home loans and insurance. All women suffer from laws which deny them the right to control their biological destinies by adequate sex education, inexpensive contraception and elective abortion — these things must change."
This was heady stuff. By 1973 the Whitlam government had established a Women's Adviser and a National Advisory Committee. The Hawke government later set up the Office for the Status of Women, whose stated goal is equal opportunity for women in all aspects of life. Now, most large organisations and all government departments have equal opportunity officers.
Looks good. But just how effective have femocrats been in improving the lot of women?
At best, femocrat influence on policy making has been limited. Eva Cox,policy adviser for WEL, says, "We knew that legal changes would not abolish rape, that women's units would not change policy and the bureaucracy in major ways ... most of us recognised that the state and bureaucratic intervention could only achieve limited objectives."
Although many of the gains made by the women's movement, particularly in the areas of equal pay and abortion rights, came about through femocrats, this was possible only
because of the mass movement of women backing them. Verity Burgmann, author of Power and Protest: Movements for Change in Australian Society, suggests that government hamstrung the women's movement by coopting its leaders and handing out a few concessions:
"It could be argued that the state used the femocrats to modernise and rationalise itself in the face of the more fundamental challenge to it mounted by the radical and socialist feminists: capitalist patriarchy was conserved, with certain concessions and adjustments to contain feminist demands."
Now, the gains in employment opportunity, abortion rights and education are being pegged back as the recession worsens. If femocrats are fighting to protect women's rights at this critical time, they are not telling us. But we can be reasonably sure they are not chaining themselves to buildings or organising sit-ins to fight for real change.
By Angela Matheson