By Margaret Allum
A recent TV commercial showed two school girls eating their morning tea. One has a shop-bought cake and is admonished at length by the other about how her mother always bakes her own cakes at home, with the most important ingredients, love and care. The first girl retorts, "At least my mum has a life".
As soon as the ad went to air, conservative "family" groups condemned it as an affront to women who choose to stay at home to look after children. The ad was withdrawn, with no mention of the fact that almost every other ad depicting motherhood presents the "good woman devoted to her family home" line.
That this one humorous attempt to defy the advertising stereotype of women with children was canned so quickly reflects the strengthening anti-independent woman ideology being peddled by this government.
The current glorification of the full-time mum is almost as unqualified as it was in the 1950s, when women had to be forced out of the jobs they assumed during World War II and prepared for a life spent rearing the next generation.
With today's high unemployment, the accusation that women "take men's jobs" is resurfacing. This is despite the fact that most women are taking casual or part-time positions not traditionally filled by men.
The current backlash against women's right to participate fully in the work force, and the creation of a social climate in which women are made to feel that they should be at home with their children, makes it much easier for governments to introduce policies which make the ideology a reality, leaving women with no choice but to become the full-time family carer.
Liberal and Labor
There has been an onslaught of backlash media coverage: stories about the detrimental effects of professional child-care; images of "neglected children"; and interviews with "caring" women who had made the stay-at-home choice. At the same time, Howard was making the biggest ever funding cuts to public child-care services.
These cuts are having an impact on women's options. A study done in Sydney's inner-west child-care centres last month has found that demand for places for children under two years' old have dropped significantly.
For many women, working full time and relying on professional child-care has become a financial liability. In some cases, children are being sent overseas to be cared for by relatives. (Howard's new family reunion immigration policies make that option is more accessible than bringing relatives to live in Australia).
The attacks on women's rights are escalating. Access to child-care, affirmative action, anti-discrimination provisions, and public education and health services are all being dismantled. And now Howard is trying to introduce tax "reforms" which will operate to further disadvantage women with paid work over those who stay at home.
The federal government has placed the federal Affirmative Action (Equal Opportunity for Women) Act under review, with the aim of weakening or abolishing it. Already, many of the reporting requirements of employers under this act have been relaxed or abolished.
For so long as systematic barriers to women's full and equal participation in paid work exist, affirmative action remains a vital step on the path to equality. Without it, unfair hiring and firing practices, lack of promotion opportunities and limited access to non-traditional work will mean that women's participation in many areas of work will likely decline.
Women still hold the majority of casual and part-time jobs and they are still over-represented in the lowest paid areas. The gap between men's and women's average wages is increasing and women are still less unionised than male workers.
This inequality has been exacerbated by the Coalition's Workplace Relations Act. But there are also more insidious moves being made to push or keep women out of the workplace.
With reports of sexual harassment to the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission on the rise, the government has cut funding and power from this body by around 40%.
The Office of the Status of Women's funding has been slashed by 46%, its $1 million grants scheme has been abolished and its staffing level has been cut by more than 50%.
The federal government has also abolished the Women's Statistics Unit in the Australian Bureau of Statistics and the Women's Yearbook, which published a wealth of information about many aspects of women's lives in Australia.
The Australian Institute of Criminology's national data base project on domestic violence, and the Women's Budget Papers, which monitored the effect of government policy on women, have also come been chopped.
Many women still place their faith in the ALP, the so-called pro-worker, pro-women party. Despite Labor's promise of a better deal for women, however, its record both in government and in opposition reveals that it is not serious about improving most women's lives.
It was the ALP that enthusiastically introduced enterprise bargaining, heralding it as a better deal. Those workers with the least bargaining power due to years of systematic discrimination soon started to feel the pain. Many studies have shown that women have fared much worse than men under enterprise bargaining, while the wages and conditions of the work force as a whole have not improved.
Kim Beazley has made no promises to remove this system, let alone to dismantle the Coalition's Workplace Relations Act.
Equality
What are the pre-conditions for women's equal participation in the labour force?
First, women must have full control over their reproductive lives, a right denied to them by all the major parties, which allow a "conscience" vote on abortion.
Second, mothers must have easy access to good quality child-care services and all working parents need more generous and flexible leave provisions. The Workplace Relations Act precludes that possibility.
Third, all women must have access to as much education as is necessary to pursue their chosen work. Thanks to the post-1983 policies of both Labor and Liberal state and federal governments, free education is far from universally available.
Next, equal wages must be paid to men and women within and between industries (i.e. for work of equal value), and women workers must have recourse to enforceable regulations against sexual harassment. While inequality persists, affirmative action and anti-discrimination programs with the goal of enforcing sexism-free environments in all work places are essential.
Finally, women need a social context in which they can choose to engage in paid work without being accused of creating unemployment or judged as negligent mothers.
Women's "double shift" of waged work then unwaged domestic work is still the main barrier to their equal participation in all spheres of society. Until more domestic labour is socialised and what remains is shared equally by men and women (women in Australia still do two-thirds of household work), women will not be able to be, or seen as being equal participants in the work force.
The personal wealth of the minority who profit from the sexual division of labour in capitalist society would be seriously affected by providing women with the pre-conditions for equality in the workplace.
This is not just because of the costs to employers of equalising women's wages and working conditions, but also because the services women now provide for free in the home — reproducing and caring for the past, current and next generation of workers — will have to be paid for; and the only people with the resources to do so are the employers.
Because of this threat to employers' profits, all of the past gains for women were hard fought for. It took hundreds of thousands of women to organise and take a stand for the rights of their sex to force some concessions out of government.
As we are seeing today, however, these reforms can also be taken away or weakened by the capitalist government of the day. In the absence of a fight against this regression, it happens much more quickly and completely.
Only by building a women's liberation movement which is politically independent of the capitalist parties, and which is at least as strong as those movements which won the reforms in the first place can we stem, and then turn, the reactionary tide against women's rights.