By Trish Corcoran
The women's movement of the 1960s and '70s had a profound impact and extended opportunities in virtually every aspect of women's lives. It is now much more accepted that women can have a career, that they don't have to spend their whole life looking after husbands and children. It is also more acceptable for women to work in non-traditional areas. Women have more reproductive freedom, with access to contraception and abortion, although this is limited and under threat.
A whole range of reforms were won as a result of the campaigns of this "second wave" of feminism (the first wave being the women's movement of the early part of the century, which won the right to vote, among other things).
Now we are witnessing an erosion of these gains, which began under the ALP and is now continuing under the Liberal government. There is no organised women's movement to stop this erosion. What has happened?
Feminist ideology is also making a shift. A liberal feminism is now dominant. In place of a women's movement based on collective action for collective liberation, there is now a promotion of individual successful women and individual choices.
Liberal feminism has faith in the ability of the system to deliver for women; it sees women's oppression as a deficiency that can be fixed without fundamentally changing the system.
The main liberal feminist organisation has been the Women's Electoral Lobby (WEL), founded in 1972. It organised a national campaign in that year which helped the ALP win that election.
Many liberal feminists went into government bureaucracies in the attempt to make change within the system.
"Some of these women took up positions as part of a conscious political strategy to effect certain reforms through state structures ... they were usually hired for their feminist politics (or at least a muted version thereof), their political skills and networks and they are to be found in large numbers among the 'femocrats'". (Gisela Kaplan, The Meagre Harvest, quoting Lesley Lynch in a 1984 article in Refractory Girl.)
ALP governments made funding available to a large number of women's services: health, rape crisis, refuges, art, cultural.
Even feminists who initially weren't part of the liberal feminist section of the movement got jobs in this sector. For many, over time, their activism was replaced by devoting themselves to their job and the "service" they were providing.
Not only were activists absorbed into the service sector. Funding also tied the services to the ALP government. They became unable to criticise the government because they would risk losing their funding.
Now, when there are cuts in funding to these services, some centres have chosen not to campaign against the cuts in fear of jeopardising their positions. Others have attempted campaigns, but the movement has been weakened to such an extent that they were unable to win.
Political weakness
The rise in liberal feminism is related to the political weakness of the second wave. It was never really a movement of working-class women. But liberal feminism is also a product of the broader balance of class forces and a conscious ruling-class ideological campaign. Its rise has further weakened grassroots activity of the women's movement.
A clear example of this weakness is the lack of response to the Howard government cutbacks in areas such as education and industrial relations, which are not only of concern to women but will also impact harder on women than on men.
There are also direct attacks on women's services, such as child-care, the threat to the Medicare rebate for abortion and the whole push on "family values".
Women were present in significant numbers in the mobilisations throughout 1996, but not as an organised feminist contingent. The response from feminists has been little more than a whimper.
Helen Garner
Helen Garner's book The First Stone plays an important role in the development of the feminist debate. The book was about a sexual harassment claim by two students at a college in Melbourne in 1993. Garner attacked the students for taking feminist principles too far and in the process destroying the career of a male academic.
The fact that Garner was once a significant figure within the feminist movement gave her book more impact. Otherwise, it might have been passed off as right-wing trash.
Garner found allies in the likes of John Laws. Her views became even clearer at a lecture in August 1995: she asked how women think that they have the right to go about the world dressed as they please and not expect some response from the men who see them. She invited young feminists to grow up and get real.
The book accused young feminists of being puritanical, prudish and too inclined to use the law over a minor unpleasantness.
This was followed up by Anne Summers, author of Damned Whores and God's Police, one of the first books to tackle the question of the double standard.
Summers is one of the feminists from the second wave who "made it". She was selected by Paul Keating to woo the women's vote for ALP in the 1993 election, and is now the editor of Good Weekend.
Summers followed The First Stone with a special women's issue of Good Weekend. Her introduction attacked the younger generation of feminists, wondering why they seemed so "strangely inarticulate". She concluded "Maybe the third wave will lead the way to a calmer and more reconciled future. I just wish they'd get started."
Individualism
DIY Feminism, edited by Kathy Bail, and Generation F by Virginia Trioli are largely a response to Garner, Summers and an assortment of others. Both claim that there are many "feminisms" in the younger generation.
Thus Bail writes, "Riot grrrls, guerrilla girls, net chicks, cyber chix, geekgirls, tank girls, super girls, action girls, deep girls — this is the era of DIY feminism. For young women, rather than one feminism there are a plethora of feminisms mostly going under new and more exciting tags."
And Trioli asserts, "Feminism now incorporates so wide a spectrum of thinking and action that some older feminists clearly cannot get a grip on it."
The younger feminists, she says, "are ambitious and politically sophisticated young women in their twenties and thirties working in the law, education, health, finance, the arts, the private sector and unions".
But what is identified here as "strength" in the feminist movement is the individual success of a few women. Some women have entered law, some women are rock singers, women are out there and doing things. Therefore, they conclude with more optimism than logic, it doesn't matter that there are no campaigns to defend and extend women's rights.
They seem to think that feminists and feminist groups can continue to be fragmented and, somehow, things will continue to progress, rather than go backwards.
The ideology of "do-it-yourself" is individualistic and liberal, focusing on the lucky few women who have been "successful" and implying that all women could do the same if they only went about it properly. This is just as much pie in the sky as the right wingers' claim that we could all be millionaires if only we worked harder.
The reality is that, despite individual women escaping some of the worst aspects, the system still maintains the institutionalised oppression of women as a group:
1. Australia has one of the most gender-segregated work forces in the world. In 1990, 55% of female employees were concentrated in two sectors — clerks and sales assistants. Of the 18.5% of women in professional occupations, half were teachers or registered nurses.
2. Sectors where women are concentrated are usually the least organised, with the lowest pay and worst work conditions.
3. Women on average still earn less than men, and enterprise bargaining is making this gap wider.
4. Women do most of the household chores and other unpaid work in the home and in society.
5. Women suffer eating disorders in order to attain the image foisted upon us by the fashion industry.
6. Violence against women and sexual harassment continue (the number of rapes reported is still rising).
Individualism only keeps us divided and unable to join together to bring about change.
Demobilising
It was right for feminists to be outraged by the opinions of Garner, Summers and Co.
The attack on "young feminists" is quite similar to union bureaucrats scorning their members because they are not prepared to fight, or even to go along to union meetings.
In the case of unions, the question to ask is: Why won't people participate? Many union leaderships have purposefully demobilised the union membership so that they would pose no threat to the project of the ALP government. After weakening democratic structures, not encouraging participation and making atrocious deals with the bosses, they expect the ranks to want to be involved in the union.
The women's movement has had a similar relationship with the ALP. Feminists like Anne Summers that were at the forefront of the liberal feminist wing. They consciously tried to pull the movement in behind the ALP project, leading to the demise of an active and united feminist movement.
So it is outrageous when people like Summers criticise young feminists for not being involved in the movement — the movement that she was a part of demobilising.
However, the refusal of Bail and Trioli to recognise any weakening in the movement, their promotion of individualism as a solution, is the same liberal politics, just from a different angle.
The family
Liberal feminism is satisfied if a few changes are made here and there — some law reform, some jobs for women in powerful places.
Real liberation of women is impossible under capitalism. The system relies on the oppression and exploitation of women.
Capitalism benefits from women's oppression in a variety of ways, including creating divisions within the working class, paying women lower wages and advertising and fashion industry profits.
However, women's oppression is fundamental to capitalism because the family is an indispensable economic institution of class rule.
The family is the basic unit that transfers the responsibility and costs for the welfare of the next generation from society as a whole to individuals — usually women.
John Howard expressed it exactly when he said that the family is the best welfare system that any nation could devise. It's the "best" because it minimises the cost to capitalism.
Mass women's movement
Because oppression of women is so deeply institutionalised in capitalist society, the fight for women's rights is a continuing one. It isn't enough to be defensive — to respond to attacks. To roll back institutionalised oppression requires a feminism willing and able to go on the offensive.
We need a movement that raises demands that relate to working-class women, migrant women, Aboriginal women, to ensure that the movement reaches out, involves and is relevant to different sections of society.
It has to be independent of the ruling class and its political parties, which maintain oppression even when pretending to oppose it.
It has to be mass based, grassroots, campaigning, democratic in order to win broad layers politically.
Above all, we need a united effort of masses of women working together in solidarity. The world will not be changed by individuals looking out for themselves: that's part of the problem, not the solution.