By Karen Fletcher (Brisbane)
Imagine a world where women have won liberation and participate fully in public and private life; where a woman's skills, talents and intellect are valued and rewarded; where women and girls stride purposefully and speak with confidence; and where sexism and misogyny are dimly remembered curiosities studied by anthropologists and archaeologists.
To imagine such a world is to realise that, despite the "post-feminism" hype, we remain a long way from liberation.
Despite the catchy bumper stickers which proclaim "Girls can do anything!" and the desperate bravado of "do it yourself" (DIY) feminists who claim to have liberated themselves, the fact is that millions of women are this minute slaving in a kitchen, hanging out endless piles of washing, changing yet another dirty nappy or otherwise ministering to the physical and emotional needs of their families. If "girls can do anything", it seems remarkable that such an overwhelming majority still end up as domestic servants. How do we get there? Do we really get a choice?
According the DIYers, its all a question of attitude. Now that women are not the legal property of their husbands, now that we have the vote, the right to go to school and university, the right to work and the right to own and dispose of property, the only thing standing in the way of self-actualisation is our "victim mentality".
But a thousand invisible threads still bind women to servitude, even in a modern democracy like Australia, and most of them are banal realities which no amount of "positive thinking" will banish. They include low incomes, high unemployment and inadequate child-care, aged care, health and welfare facilities. In a world where no-one will care for our loved ones if we don't, we are well and truly blackmailed.
An Australian study in 1991 showed that women's unpaid work increased by 60% when they married and 91% when they became mothers.
But despite the economic and social imperatives which drive the vast majority of women towards unpaid, or low paid, carer roles, the feminists of the first and the second waves have raised many women's expectations beyond the traditional realm. As a result, more and more women are voting with their feet, walking away from both marriage and motherhood.
In the 1960s, more than 90% of Australian women became mothers. Current trends indicate that 28% of Australian women living today will never have children. Women continue to instigate the majority of the more than 50,000 divorces granted in Australia each year and the divorce rate rose by 12% during the 1990s alone.
Entry into the institution of marriage has been declining since 1947. The number of people aged over 15 who are married fell from 65.4% in 1976 to 57.4% in 1994. There were 106,100 marriages in 1996, the lowest rate since 1900.
For the first half of this century, less than 10% of women never married. However, the trend has been steadily moving upwards since the end of World War II. On present indicators, 22% of women will not have married by age 35 by the end of the century — the highest level in Australian history.
As marriage and birth rates fall, Australian governments and the big business interests they serve are getting very nervous. It is clear that, as a result of the way "wives" and "mothers" are treated in our society, both roles are increasingly unattractive options — particularly to young women. The "choice" is becoming increasingly stark: "marriage and motherhood" or "a life".
In response, the federal government is undertaking a massive program of social engineering designed to strengthen families by providing financial incentives to those who "choose" to live in a nuclear family (mum, dad and the kids) and disincentives to those who deviate: especially single mothers. As well as diverting money from the poor to the rich, the government's new tax system and welfare "restructure" are also designed to corral people back into the traditional family with mum at home full-time with the kids.
Listen to the way PM John Howard explained it to the Family Forum at Clayfield Girls College on August 18, 1998: "It is fundamental to this package and it is fundamental to my own personal, political philosophy that the most valuable and the most cohesive unit within the Australian community is the Australian family. It is not only the place from which people derive warmth and love and emotional support and companionship and guidance and understanding of what life is all about, but it is also ... an undeniable fact that stable, united families represent the most efficient welfare system that any nation has devised, and that the strain on society and the strain on the welfare system of society of disintegrating families is immense ... whatever any government can do through the tax and welfare system to help families and to relieve some of the financial burden on them and to provide them with more choices, then that government ought to do it."
To Howard, the family is the only place from which people derive warmth and support. Too bad if you haven't got a family like that: massive cuts to welfare, especially for young people, are designed to give them nowhere else to go — except home to mum and maybe dad.
And when Howard says the family is "the most efficient welfare system", he means it literally, in its economic rationalist sense: women's unpaid domestic labour makes child-care, aged care and care for the sick and disabled very cheap indeed. Free, in fact.
But the government's campaign is ideological as well as economic. In 1998, Howard released "To Have and to Hold", a report from the Federal Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee on measures to strengthen the traditional family. Among its key recommendations was increased funding to Christian churches for "marriage counselling".
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