Letter to the Daughters of Feminism
Page Tools
![null](/web/20161127142403im_/http://www.theage.com.au/ffximage/2004/11/26/wbfemicartoon.jpg)
Today's feminists should do a bit less complaining and a
bit more
fighting, writes Liz Conor.
I think the time has come. A day each year should be set aside for the Daughters of Feminism. Shrinking violets should be sold on train stations to schoolgirls, lest they forget the terrible juggling the mothers of today daily endure.
By "Daughters of Feminism" I mean the women of my generation who have characterised themselves as the well-intentioned but naive recruits of feminism. Their motherliness has been martyred to the misplaced ideal of Having It All. Like a funereal chorus they insist that their experience of maternal repudiation is a lesson that must be learned.
The Daughters of Feminism know feminists in the same ways that we know the Digger. Both have been positioned in popular memory in ways that bear little relation to historical facts. By the omission of these facts, arguments can be made about the reckless squandering of young lives through their recruitment to an ideal so politically correct it could not be resisted.
Ask any schoolkid what Anzac Day was about and they'll tell you, straight faced, that Australian boys fought for our freedom. Ask the same kid what feminism was about and she'll tell you, feminists wanted to have all the things men have and that's why they were all lesbians. Before long it will be feminists who handed out white feathers to stay-at-home mothers and forced them into the workforce.
For the record, feminism has a history. Certain things were said and done at certain times, by certain women. This record exists for those eccentric writers, sometimes referred to as rigorous, who defer the gratification of prejudice by checking their arguments against facts. Given the immense impact it has had on all of our lives, feminism should be remembered with accuracy.
Feminists are also alive and well. Every week I attend a meeting, seminar, book launch, rally, receive postings from an e-list or participate in a website. It might be a Mothers and Children of Refugees rally, a seminar on work/family balance, a pro-choice meeting, a posting from the Green Women's Network. The day before Joanna Murray-Smith's piece ("Feminism's booby trap") appeared in The Age I'd been at a Lilith Journal conference. Its theme was how feminism is being remembered. And while it may be difficult for feminists of my persuasion to admit, the recent quashing of Tony Abbott's anti-abortion ambitions prove that feminists are everywhere, even in the Liberal Party.
The Daughters of Feminism lament that feminism led women of my generation to believe that we could have it all. If we pursued careers our babies would just fit in and we'd live blissful post-feminist lives. The plastic figurine for this memory of feminism is the briefcase-and-baby career woman. Let's prop her up on the shelf of mythologised inventions next to the digger who defended Australia from invasion by the Turks.
Her thought balloon, carefully scribed by the Daughters of Feminism, reads: "I can't juggle this briefcase and baby any more, the load is unmanageable, to my anguish and everlasting despair I'm going to drop one."
I can identify with this anguish. Every week I drop a bundle of some description in the effort to combine care and career. My kids will give graphic accounts to their therapists in years to come. But is it only my work, invested with years of study and a HECS debt, which puts our family "under pressure"? In truth it is my partner's workplace, which gives no recognition of his caring and domestic responsibilities, that ensures our lives are structured in unsustainable ways.
The difference between me, a feminist, and the Daughters of Feminism is that I've discovered that it isn't because of the things that feminists won that I'm overwhelmed and overburdened. It's because of what they tried valiantly to win, but lost.
Can we pin the blame on feminists, or should we take a closer a look at who and what stood in their way when they fought for workplace reforms that would accommodate women and men with caring responsibilities? It was the employers, the profit motive and legislators with full-time wives that obstructed them.
Let's take a recent example. Who was it that quashed Pru Goward and Sharan Burrow's proposal for a national paid maternity leave scheme? By jingo, it was John Howard and not Anne Summers after all. How perplexing.
These anti-maternal feminists (many of whom happen to be mothers), who didn't tell us about our biological clocks, or how heartbreaking it is to have a termination, or how torn we'd feel about leaving our kids in care, they did nothing for mothers, right? Interesting then that accessible contraception and child care were the cornerstone achievements of second-wave feminism. That would suggest, wouldn't it, that feminists did know something about the limits of combining career and care.
Feminists knew that if mothers were not economically independent they became vulnerable to loss of skills and to unemployment. If their husbands withheld the family wage, or left them, they suffered poverty. American feminists had a name for this - "the feminisation of poverty". It was our feminist mothers' hunch, and in some cases their experience, that poverty was worse for children than onerous hours of child care imposed by inflexible workplaces.
Our feminist mothers also had to make hard choices, precisely because they couldn't have it all. This felt unfair to them too - they called it "sex discrimination". They fought to make it fairer, and in some key areas, they lost the fight.
The Daughters of Feminism have partnered with the Sons of Feminism. These are not violent, controlling slobs who are likely to run off with their secretaries, leaving their families in the lurch. Their mothers and girlfriends have imparted them with feminist ideals. It hasn't taken a PhD in women's studies for them to figure out that the present conditions under which the women they love are mothering are doing their heads in. They're not simpering SNAGs, but they do know that domestic equity makes trust and intimacy possible.
The Sons of Feminism have been making noises about being more involved fathers, but they have as yet proved unwilling to pressure their employers to accommodate their responsibilities as carers. The deregulation of the workforce and attacks on unions has meant their jobs are less secure and they have less bargaining power.
The Daughters of Feminism are careful not to "belittle the victories" of feminism, but how many of them know it was feminists who put playgrounds in public parks? The very feminists that apparently cared not a jot for mothers spending time with their children. And who campaigned for a federal scheme for motherhood endowment - an income for mothers at home - before a royal commission in 1927? It was Jessie Street, president of the feminist club, and trade union feminists Jean Daley and Muriel Heagney; women since forgotten who built the foundations for working mothers, whether in the workforce or at home.
I could go on and on, but it's all there, for the record, in the histories of Australian feminism. Feminists didn't win a bewildering excess of choices for their daughters; they won a handful of claims that have profoundly benefited our lives. There remains a long list of things they sought but did not win. It's now up to us to fight for them.
That's why I'm a feminist, as distinct from a Daughter of Feminism. In the blur of Barbies and writing and potties and research, I'm trying to contribute to the slow fight for workplace provisions that would allow mothers and fathers to move fluidly up and down the home/workforce continuum, according to the changeable needs of their children.
It frustrates me, therefore, when the Daughters of Feminism undermine these campaigns with inaccurate arguments about what feminism did and didn't achieve, and when they question the value of continuing the fight.
Liz Conor is the author of The Spectacular Modern Woman, a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Melbourne, the convener of The Mothers of Intervention and is running for deputy lord mayor of Melbourne for the Greens. Her partner is a secondary school principal. He has a son and they have two daughters.