The Meagre Harvest: The Australian Women's Movement 1950s-1990s
By Gisela Kaplan
Allen and Unwin, 1996. 242 pp., $29.95
Reviewed by Jo Brown
The Meagre Harvest surveys the experiences, successes and failures of the Australian women's movement over the last half century, the period of the "second wave" and its aftermath. This huge task is approached from a historical perspective by Gisela Kaplan, sociologist and author of Contemporary Western European Feminism.
Kaplan has accumulated a wide range of data and material from the period, including a comprehensive survey of the current status of women in Australia.
She asks whether the "second wave" really revolutionised Australian society, and concludes that for many women, such as lesbians, migrants and Aboriginal women, it has been a "meagre harvest".
Some reviews have portrayed the book as the story of how the women's movement failed because of differences and in-fighting. However, its value is that it goes beyond such generalisations and looks at the historical experiences of different groups of women, and at the intersection of race, class and gender issues.
This information and the provocative analysis that Kaplan provides are exactly what is needed for some sober and constructive debate among Australian feminists about the way forward.
Starting with the situation in the 1950s, the "constrained and prescriptive years", Kaplan traces the way in which the movement developed. Contrasting Australia with western Europe, she notes that in this country there was little opportunity for women to take on prominent roles in parliamentary politics or in trade unions.
Finding the "new left" and anti-Vietnam War movements of the 1960s to be dominated by men, women began to recognise their oppression as women. In the context of the general social radicalisation of the time, they began to organise and demand an end to their oppression.
Kaplan identifies three stages of the movement in Australia: 1969 to 1972, the period of spontaneous activity and consciousness-raising; 1972 to 1975, the "honeymoon" of the movement under Whitlam; and 1975 onwards (she argues that the movement can be considered to continue today), a more diffuse period of fracturing of the movement.
Defining feminism as the "renegotiation of value and power hierarchies, and the formation of new and different gender relations that lack ... domination", Kaplan surveys some of the different strands of feminist thought.
Liberal feminists are characterised as individualist and committed to reforming the system step by step, rather than challenging existing political and economic institutions. Radical and socialist feminists, by contrast, reject any working relationship with the present state, seeking more fundamental change.
Addressing the rise of postmodernism, Kaplan points out that there is a huge gap between postmodern relativism, undermining "universal truth claims", and women and other groups who seek to expose previously hidden truths and reclaim their history. Exposing the irrelevance of postmodern ideas for practical liberation struggles, Kaplan states, "In the contemporary world, women are entities and clearly disadvantaged ones".
Exclusion
Rejecting the postmodern view of differences between women as necessarily divisive and demobilising, Kaplan looks at the ways in which the movement did exclude certain groups of women in practice, and why this occurred.
She examines the beginnings of a lesbian movement in Australia, and the links and tensions between lesbian struggles and the gay movement on the one hand, and the women's movement on the other.
While shared oppression and some shared demands for democratic rights brought gay men and lesbians together, they were divided by the fact that women were also oppressed as women. However, within the women's movement, the needs and even the existence of lesbians were often ignored or hidden. Alternatively, they could choose to join lesbian separatists, "who at times regarded feminism as irrelevant".
The discrimination and harassment faced by lesbians are issues that the women's movement must take up, argues Kaplan. "The diminishment of lesbians must surely diminish all women."
Kaplan's analysis of the relationship between migrant and Aboriginal women and the women's movement is particularly timely. Going beyond the observation that the women's movement has been predominantly white and middle class, she looks at how migrant and Aboriginal women have fought their own battles, far from being passive victims of white women's racism.
Kaplan argues that migrant women had a lot to contribute to the women's movement. Women arriving in Australia from Italy or South America in the 1970s and '80s, for example, "generally knew more about political action than their Australian counterparts".
However, because of an attitude in the organised movement of struggling on behalf of migrant women, rather than with them, a lot of these women were not easily able to participate. And for many, racism and discrimination were the priority — issues about which the women's movement "has remained rather too silent, or insincere".
The separation of white, English speaking women and non-English speaking background women was a product of the social context of the time, but it was also something that the women's movement did not really seek to overcome.
According to Kaplan, the situation faced by migrant and Aboriginal women is a complex one because, while being oppressed as women, they also share experiences of racism with men in their communities."Aboriginal women's protests ... are made with or on behalf of their men, not against, about or despite them".
Liberalism
Kaplan concludes this chapter with the provocative remark that because Australian society is so firmly built on racial and national exclusion, and feminism is part of the "ongoing construction of Australia", it will continue to exclude Aboriginal and migrant women. This pessimism contradicts her earlier analysis that feminism is a (potentially) revolutionary movement that seeks to challenge the existing social order and thus presumably has common ground with struggles against the racism inherent in the system.
Kaplan seems to equate the stream of liberal, reformist feminism with the project of the women's movement as a whole. She does not explicitly address why, on a political level, racism and homophobia have not been high on the agenda of the movement.
I would argue that this is because of the dominance within the movement of women with a bourgeois-liberal political outlook — a political perspective that represents compromise with the existing economic and social order.
This perspective, and the class interests it represents, have no interest in building a movement for the liberation of all women, which would mean challenging the root causes of women's oppression in the private profit system. Such a movement would be based on the mobilisation of working-class women, including migrant and Aboriginal women, around a wide range of demands challenging this system, including those for an end to racism and homophobia.
It is this sort of women's movement that many Marxists have been trying to build since the beginning of this century. Kaplan's description of Trotskyist groups dismissing the women's movement as bourgeois and divisive is an unfortunate caricature, as sections of the non-Stalinist left in Australia and internationally have played an important role theoretically and practically in building the women's movement, and trying to build alliances between women and other oppressed groups.
Kaplan is right to argue that the revival of the women's movement will need the involvement of young women with new energy, as well as an understanding of the lessons and mistakes of the past. The Meagre Harvest is an important contribution to this historical analysis, providing a valuable account of the second wave and the social context in which it occurred.