By Tracy Sorensen
A solitary foot soldier in the war against women's rights reached the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald recently: a snippet in "Column Eight" revealed that a man stood up to offer his seat to a woman in a crowded commuter carriage. She sat down, and he proclaimed loudly, "That's to show that chivalry is not dead". Then he turned to his fellow male passengers, urging them to offer their seats to the "ladies". (The blokes simply buried their heads further into their newspapers.)
Hostile reactions to the women's movement are hardly new. From its earliest days, the struggle was pronounced absurd, contrary to nature, dangerous or already dead. Meanwhile, women continued to march into the work force and their daughters cheerfully began to expect that they could have it all: satisfying jobs and partners who would share the domestic burden.
But over the past few years, efforts to drive back women's rights have been gathering momentum. Increasingly, the women's movement appears to be fighting defensive, rather than offensive, battles.
The drive to return women to a more traditional role in the family takes many forms and has a motley array of supporters, as US feminist author Susan Faludi documents in compelling detail in Backlash.
In this country, the campaign against women's rights includes the predictable ranting of right-wing columnists, the blood curdling anti-feminist howls from groups of fathers wanting custody rights over their children and the Liberals' promise to shut down the Affirmative Action Agency if elected to federal government.
It includes the attacks on women's studies and "political correctness", the outrage when anatomical footage of a clitoris was shown recently on late-night television, and the moves by church patriarchs against the ordination of women. A more insidious version is the suggestion that feminism makes women unhappy — that they can have either love and children or their jobs.
A particularly nasty strain of the anti-woman virus suddenly flourished in the second half of last year: the blonde joke. Here was ideological backlash in its purist form: a flagging stereotype was being rehabilitated.
Meanwhile, it's an ideological atmosphere convenient for a Labor government which ostensibly supports women's rights. While some useful work comes out of the Labor-supported femocracy — our expanding knowledge of the extent of child sexual abuse and domestic violence is largely due to its work — the government's commitment to programs that would cost serious money (affirmative action legislation with real teeth, for example) is more faint.
A more conservative social landscape allows the government to get away with policies that indirectly harm women, such as cutbacks to tertiary education.
In a time of recession and a low ebb in the labour and social movements, there is potential for serious damage to the gains of the women's movement. It is at our peril that we view as the lunatic fringe the likes of Melbourne Herald-Sun columnist Terry Vine (who celebrated International Women's Day by "humorously" suggesting women get their "usual belting").