The Women's Movement in Protest, Institutions and the Internet: Australia in transnational perspective [1 ed.] 0415830907, 9780415830904

Table of contents :
Cover
The Women’s Movement in Protest, Institutions and the Internet
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of illustrations
Notes on contributors
Preface
Acknowledgements
1 Finding the women’s movement
2 Disruption, continuity and waves in the feminist movement
3 Discursive politics: changing the talk and raising expectations
4 Taking to the streets
5 Hiding in plain sight: Australian women’s advocacy organisations
6 The institutional harvest: women’s services and women’s policy agencies
7 Role models and Roller Derby: feminism and popular culture
8 Blogging and the women’s movement: new feminist networks
9 SlutWalking: where is the next generation of Australian feminists?
10 Global feminist organising: identifying patterns of activism
Appendix: how, what and why
References
Index

Citation preview

‘This is the most authoritative text on the state of the women’s movement written in well over a decade. A must read for anyone who doubts the continued existence of feminism, these meticulously researched and magnificently written essays, reveal that it is alive, thriving, and changing.’ Verta Taylor, Professor and Chair of Sociology, University of California, USA. ‘No, feminism is not dead! This collection of vibrant scholarship, using a wealth of data, makes the case clearly and strongly that feminism continues to mobilize and build new institutions. It effectively contributes perspectives from Australia to the global debates.’ Sylvia Walby, Distinguished Professor of Sociology and UNESCO Chair in Gender Research, Lancaster University, UK, and author of The Future of Feminism Polity 2011.

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The Women’s Movement in Protest, Institutions and the Internet

The death of feminism is regularly proclaimed in the West. Yet at the same time feminism has never had such an extensive presence, whether in international norms and institutions, or online in blogs and social networking campaigns. This book argues that the women’s movement is not over; but rather social movement theory has led us to look in the wrong places. This book offers both methodological and theoretical innovations in the study of social movements, and analyses how the trajectories of protest activity and institution-building fit together. Rich empirical study, together with focused research on discursive activism, blogging, popular culture and advocacy networks, provides an extraordinary resource, showing how women’s movements can survive highs and lows and adapt in unexpected ways. Expert contributors explore the ways in which the movement is continuing to work its way through institutions, and persists within submerged networks, cultural production and in everyday living, sustaining itself in non-receptive political environments and maintaining a discursive feminist space for generations to come. Set in a transnational perspective, this book traces the legacies of the Australian women’s movement to the present day in protest, non-government organisations, government organisations, popular culture, the Internet and SlutWalk. The Women’s Movement in Protest, Institutions and the Internet will be of interest to international students and scholars of gender politics, gender studies, social movement studies and comparative politics. Sarah Maddison is Associate Professor and Australian Research Council Future Fellow at the University of New South Wales, Australia. Marian Sawer is Emeritus Professor in the School of Politics and International Relations at the Australian National University, Canberra, Australia.

Routledge research in gender and politics

1

The Women’s Movement in Protest, Institutions and the Internet Australia in transnational perspective Edited by Sarah Maddison and Marian Sawer

The Women’s Movement in Protest, Institutions and the Internet Australia in transnational perspective Edited by Sarah Maddison and Marian Sawer

First published 2013 by Routledge 2 Park Square Milton Park Abingdon Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business. © 2013 Sarah Maddison and Marian Sawer for selection and editorial matter; individual contributors their contribution. The right of Sarah Maddison and Marian Sawer to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-415-83090-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-79902-4 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear

Contents

List of illustrations Notes on contributors

ix x

Preface

xii

SARAH MADDISON AND MARIAN SAWER

Acknowledgements 1 Finding the women’s movement

xviii 1

MARIAN SAWER

2 Disruption, continuity and waves in the feminist movement

20

DRUDE DAHLERUP

3 Discursive politics: changing the talk and raising expectations

37

SARAH MADDISON

4 Taking to the streets

54

CATHERINE STRONG AND KIRSTY MCLAREN

5 Hiding in plain sight: Australian women’s advocacy organisations

70

MARIAN SAWER AND MERRINDAHL ANDREW

6 The institutional harvest: women’s services and women’s policy agencies MERRINDAHL ANDREW

87

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Contents

7 Role models and Roller Derby: feminism and popular culture

105

CATHERINE STRONG AND SARAH MADDISON

8 Blogging and the women’s movement: new feminist networks

118

FRANCES SHAW

9 SlutWalking: where is the next generation of Australian feminists?

132

SARAH MADDISON

10 Global feminist organising: identifying patterns of activism

148

MYRA MARX FERREE AND CHRISTINA EWIG

Appendix: how, what and why

163

MERRINDAHL ANDREW, KIRSTY MCLAREN, FRANCES SHAW AND CATHERINE STRONG

References Index

175 200

Illustrations

4.1 4.2

4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6

4.7

4.8

6.1

Women’s movement protest events reported in the Sydney Morning Herald, 1970–2005 Women’s movement protest events about reproductive rights and health, compared to other issues, Sydney Morning Herald, 1970–2005 Women’s movement protest events about peace, compared to other issues, Sydney Morning Herald, 1970–2005 Women’s movement protest events reported in Tribune and the Sydney Morning Herald, 1970–1991 Articles on women’s protest events in Tribune and Sydney Morning Herald, 1970–1991 Establishment of rape crisis and sexual assault services compared to women’s movement protests about sexual and other violence (reported in Sydney Morning Herald) – New South Wales, 1970–2005 2006 Reclaim the Night poster designed by Katrina Allan Design for the Office for Women, Government of South Australia International Women’s Day march, Sydney 1977: the Tribune reported that 3000 people marched in Sydney. The SMH, on the other hand, did not report on any IWD marches that year. Courtesy SEARCH Foundation/Tribune/State Library of NSW Women’s institutions (government and non-government) (n = 475) – Australia – Number of establishment events and abolition/end events, by year 1970–2005

56

57 58 61 62

63

66

67

92

Contributors

Merrindahl Andrew is Senior Research Associate in the School of Politics and International Relations at the Australian National University. She completed her doctorate at the ANU in 2008 and has published her work in journals including Social Politics, Social Movement Studies and Politics & Gender. She has worked in advocacy organisations in the areas of gender equality, community services and Indigenous rights. Drude Dahlerup is Professor of Political Science at Stockholm University. She is a Danish citizen and has published extensively on women in politics, electoral gender quotas, women’s movements and feminist theory. Among her edited books are The New Women’s Movement: Feminism and Political Power in Europe and the USA (Sage, 1986); Women, Quotas and Politics (Routledge, 2006) and Breaking Male Dominance in Old Democracies (Oxford University Press, 2013). She has been a consultant on gender quota systems in Sierra Leone, Cambodia, Kosovo and Tunisia and a member of UN Women’s Global Civil Society Advisory Group. Christina Ewig is Associate Professor in the Departments of Gender & Women’s Studies and Political Science at the University of WisconsinMadison. Her research centres on gender, race and the politics of inequality in Latin America. Her book, Second-Wave Neoliberalism: Gender, Race and Neoliberal Health Sector Reform in Peru (Penn State Press, 2010) was the 2012 winner of the Flora Tristán book award for best book on Peru from the Latin American Studies Association. She edits the book series Crossing Boundaries of Gender and Politics in the Global South for Palgrave Macmillan. Myra Marx Ferree is the Alice H. Cook Professor of Sociology and Director of the European Union Center of Excellence at the University of WisconsinMadison. She is the author of Varieties of Feminism: German Gender Politics in Global Perspective (Stanford University Press, 2012), and co-editor with Aili Mari Tripp of Global Feminism: Women’s Organizing, Activism and Human Rights (New York University Press, 2006) and with both Aili Tripp and Christina Ewig of Gender and Human Security: New Feminist Perspectives (New York University Press, 2013).

Contributors

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Kirsty McLaren is a PhD candidate in the School of Politics and International Relations at the Australian National University. She holds a Master of Philosophy in political science from which she has published in Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change. As well as working on the history of women’s movement protest events in Australia, she has undertaken research on visual images and reproductive politics, and on social movements in subSaharan Africa. Sarah Maddison is Associate Professor and Australian Research Council Future Fellow in the School of Social Sciences at the University of New South Wales. Her recent books include Black Politics: Inside the Complexity of Aboriginal Political Culture (Allen and Unwin, 2009) and Beyond White Guilt (Allen and Unwin, 2011), along with the earlier book Activist Wisdom (UNSW Press, 2006, with Sean Scalmer). She was a media spokesperson for the Women’s Electoral Lobby for a decade until 2005. Marian Sawer is Emeritus Professor in the School of Politics and International Relations at the Australian National University and co-editor of the International Political Science Review. She is author or editor of seventeen books and around 140 scholarly articles or book chapters. She has had a long involvement with Women’s Electoral Lobby as well as with Australian women’s policy agencies and the former UN Division for the Advancement of Women. Frances Shaw is Research Assistant in the Department of Media and Communications at the University of Sydney. In 2012 she completed her doctorate in Politics and International Relations at the University of New South Wales. Her doctoral thesis was based on research in feminist blogging networks in Australia, and she has presented and published her research in internet studies, sociology, and women’s studies conferences, edited collections and journals. Catherine Strong is Lecturer in Sociology in the School of Political and Social Inquiry at Monash University. Her research deals with various aspects of memory, nostalgia and gender in relationship to rock, popular culture and media. She is the author of Grunge: Music and Memory (Ashgate, 2011) and is currently exploring issues of gender in rock music in Australia.

Preface Sarah Maddison and Marian Sawer

In October 2012 the Australian Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, rose in parliament to speak on a motion from the Opposition. The motion argued that the Speaker of the House should be removed from his position following revelations that he had sent sexist text messages to a member of his staff. The context of the motion was politically complex; it is the spectacle of the speech itself, as it circled the globe that is highly relevant to what follows in this book. In response to the Opposition’s motion, Gillard, Australia’s first female prime minister, launched into a powerful speech directed at the Leader of the Opposition: I will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man, I will not. And the government will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man. Not now, not ever. The Leader of the Opposition says that people who hold sexist views and who are misogynists are not appropriate for high office. Well, I hope the Leader of the Opposition has got a piece of paper and he is writing out his resignation. Because if he wants to know what misogyny looks like in modern Australia, he doesn’t need a motion in the House of Representatives, he needs a mirror.1 Over the following 15 minutes Gillard recalled various instances in which the Leader of the Opposition had revealed his misogyny. When, for example, in a radio interview he had questioned the ‘assumption’ that the under-representation of women was ‘a bad thing’, and wondered aloud whether men may be ‘by physiology or temperament, more adapted to exercise authority or to issue command.’ Or when, as Minister for Health, he had described abortion as ‘the easy way out.’ Her examples flowed, and the nation watched in astonishment. The speech caused a sensation, not just in Australia but around the world. In just ten days the YouTube video of the speech had been downloaded from the Internet two million times. International media, including the blogosphere,2 rushed to praise the feisty Prime Minister from Australia, with the New Yorker suggesting that Barack Obama could take a leaf from Gillard’s book.3 In Australia the word ‘misogynist’ was suddenly a part of everyday conversation, creating new media interest and debate. It seemed that the women’s

Preface xiii movement, and the feminist discourse it had created and sustained, was not dead after all, but living and breathing in Australia’s Parliament.

The Australian women’s movement and the world This was not the first time that an Australian variety of feminism and the women’s movement had made an impact on the rest of the world. In a history that has been well documented, Australia achieved recognition for the unique model of women’s policy machinery developed during the 1970s, when women’s movement organisations turned to the state seeking a response to their demands. In 1975 the Prime Minister’s Women’s Adviser, Elizabeth Reid, led the Australian delegation to the first United Nations (UN) Women’s Conference in Mexico City. Not only had she been a prime mover in drafting the World Plan of Action but in her speech to a plenary session she introduced the word ‘sexism’ into the lexicon of the UN and hence into languages around the world.4 She said it was a word that nobody should be afraid to use: Sexism is the artifical ascription of roles, behaviour and even personalities to people on the basis of their sex alone. This does not simply create differences but inequalities. We none of us live in, and it is impossible to imagine living in, a non-sexist society . . . To attempt to work out strategies for changing this situation must, therefore, be our primary task at this conference.5 Observers from other countries were amazed that a feminist (and member of Women’s Liberation) could lead an official delegation in this way and help shape a new international agenda. Almost 40 years later it was a woman prime minister rather than a prime minister’s women’s adviser who was amazing the world with her denunciation of sexism. The model of feminist policy machinery developed in Australia in the mid1970s arose from and relied on a close relationship between activists in the women’s movement inside and outside government. Their model gave the rest of the world the term ‘femocrat’, the name for feminists appointed to positions with a specific mandate to improve policy outcomes for women. While the name was devised by their critics, it was soon adopted as a badge of pride. It was hoped that women’s rights, needs and interests could be institutionalised in the practice of government. This was a radical goal. To indicate its subversive nature, a hostile Senator read into Hansard a parable written by a former head of the Office of Women’s Affairs for a Women’s Electoral Lobby conference. The parable dealt with the short-lived kingdom of Craminalot, where the lady-inwaiting wove magic to ensure all girl babies were allowed to live, rather than mothers being forced to abandon every second new-born female child. Just outside the palace walls grew a tree of magic that was tended by wise women and brought forth a profusion of purple flowers. As the lady-in-waiting was overworked she was allowed to bring in some of these wise women to help her,

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but most of the wise women stayed outside the palace to tend the magic tree, which was the source of her power. The hostile Senator interpreted this parable to mean that the first loyalty of the femocrat was to Women’s Electoral Lobby or the women’s movement, not to the government of the day.6 The way in which the women’s movement operated through government was of course more complex than these early interpretations might suggest. The chapters in this book provide the first detailed, empirical evidence about the trajectories of the Australian women’s movement, whether the incidence and visibility of protest actions; the development of services and institutions, both autonomous and nested within other institutions; and the introduction of discourse that changes the way women (and men) think, talk and act. While it brings new evidence to bear, our book also builds on an important body of scholarship. Studies of the Australian women’s movement have exercised international influence, providing much of the initial empirical data for the analysis of feminist institution-building within government. Not only did institutional innovation in Australia precede much that occurred elsewhere, but so has the reconfiguration or ‘mainstreaming’ of those institutions. Forty years after the initial creation of movement-inspired policy agencies and women’s services, Australia remains well positioned to contribute to international scholarship and theory-building on movements and their institutional impacts. The transnational character of women’s movement advocacy and policy diffusion through transnational bodies has led to a certain degree of similarity in institutional forms, particularly in old democracies. The global spread of neoliberal discourses and modes of governance has also presented similar challenges to feminist-inspired institutions. Of course the international relevance of this study has its limitations. Political context matters, and the trajectory of the Australian women’s movement has been shaped by its relationship with the Australian welfare state. Thus, the data and analysis in this book is likely to be of greatest interest and relevance to actors and scholars of social movements in other old democracies in the West.

Activism on and off the streets The chapters in this book draw on a unique, longitudinal study.7 To the best of our knowledge, there has been no other study anywhere in the world that tracks so comprehensively the institutional outcomes of a social movement over time. The project has produced a database that maps the emergence and, where relevant, the disappearance of institutions that grew out of the second-wave women’s movement in Australia, between 1970 and 2005. The database, discussed in more detail in the Appendix to this book, contains entries for nearly 500 institutions. In addition to the institutions database, the project has produced an event database coding over 1,000 events and detailing the media reporting of over 30 years of Australian women’s movement activism. These rich empirical components of the project, together with focused research on discursive activism, blogging and advocacy organisations, have provided an extraordinary resource

Preface xv through which to advance theoretical understandings of women’s movement activism. Our quantitative data has called into question some assumptions in social movement theory concerning the relationship between protest activity and institutionalisation. This is the first time that quantitative material on both institutionalisation and protest event activity has been available to test these assumptions. More specifically, this data reinforces existing feminist critiques of mainstream social movement theory. For example, social movements have often been characterised by noninstitutional forms of collective action and protest, such as street demonstrations and civil disobedience. A large literature has focused on these features of social movements, including the strategies of participants and their collective identities.8 North American scholars in particular have often viewed the use of unconventional and disruptive repertoires of political action as a defining element of social movements, at least as a heuristic device to distinguish them from other collective actors. Despite an acknowledgement that the initial distinction between contentious and conventional politics was probably too sharply drawn,9 there is still a strong tendency to see institutionalisation as signalling the end of the potentially transformative phase of political action. Feminist scholarship has also tended to share this negative view of institutionalisation,10 and many have observed with dismay the way activist energy and critical insight can become lost among organisational concerns. Yet the idea that social movements are by definition involved in disruptive repertoires has come under challenge by social movement theorists.11 It is now recognised that most movements have engaged with conventional politics, through lobbying and institution-building, at the same time as pursuing more adversarial and performative tactics. Particular questions have been raised concerning the relevance of the disruptive repertoires definition to the women’s movement.12 The media assumption that the women’s movement was ‘over’, which became common in the 1980s, relied on the expectation of particular repertoires of action that may not be characteristic of women’s movements. The idea that a social movement might be ‘over’ when it was no longer visibly engaged in public contestation was at odds with feminist views that there had always been a women’s movement over the past century.13 Feminist scholars have highlighted the institutional innovation associated with women’s movements and the conscious attempts to devise institutions that would embody feminist values, eschew hierarchy and model democratic service provision.14 Others have observed how women’s movements operate simultaneously and synergistically inside and outside the state.15 There is now a considerable body of evidence suggesting that institution-building is characteristic of women’s movement activism16 and better seen not as the end-point of a social movement, but as a means for realising its objectives. Indeed even though street marches and disruptive sit-ins are less common than in the recent past, the issues that feminists sought to bring to public attention in the 1970s are still being pursued through organisations such as women’s refuges, women’s health centres, women’s units in government and centres against sexual assault. One important

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discovery from the dataset developed in the project underpinning this book is the insight that institutionalisation does not always come after social movement mobilisation and nor does it necessarily displace it. Peak periods for feminist institution-building in Australia occurred at approximately the same times as the peaks in protest events. The data also indicate that non-government women’s services have been surprisingly resilient and stable in comparison with women’s policy agencies within government. Thus, while the women’s movement might no longer be so visible on the streets (although protest activity has been more persistent than the popular narrative might suggest) the data from this project confirm that the movement is still working its way through institutions, and is alive within submerged networks, cultural production and everyday living. Meanwhile women’s organisations have become more specialised and professionalised, and more reliant on cheque-book membership than collective action. Alternatively, at times when direct policy engagement and public contestation has few returns, there may be more of a focus on commemorative activities that validate collective identities and values. Feminist activity may take other forms among young women, sometimes with little connection to older women activists. Work on our project has been intergenerational, combining the expertise of senior and mid-career scholars with the insights of emerging feminist scholars. In this way we have sought to capture the new forms being taken by women’s movement activism, a repertoire often less familiar to older feminist scholars and activists. We have tried to maintain an openness in our ideas about what constitutes the women’s movement, a movement for which, as we shall see, there are no membership cards.

Women’s movement activism into the future Julia Gillard’s speech was remarkable for a number of important reasons relevant to the rest of this book. First, we saw Australia’s first female prime minister name the misogyny of her conservative opponent in no uncertain terms. Australian – and perhaps international – feminist discourse could receive no greater boost. The issue of misogyny and gender inequality was apparently being contested by the highest office in the land. This was important too for younger women, perhaps complacent, disengaged, or disillusioned with gender politics. The ‘badass motherfucker’17 challenging sexism among male colleagues in her workplace was a powerful reminder that feminist political contest is possible, important and powerful. To understand the context of Gillard’s speech, however, one must also consider what else happened in the Australian parliament that day. Earlier that morning the Prime Minister had faced down a divided caucus, on legislation to move up to 100,000 sole parents, of whom over 90 per cent are women, from a parenting payment to the lower, and indeed quite inadequate, unemployment benefit. This was similar to neoliberal policy agendas that had been implemented across the Anglosphere, justified by the perceived problem of ‘welfare dependence’ among

Preface xvii those who require income support from the state (dependence on a husband not being seen as posing a similar moral hazard). As we have argued elsewhere, by the time women reached significant numbers in parliament and executive government in Australia they were constrained by the dominance of such neoliberal discourses; it already seemed too late to promote feminist agendas concerning the value and role of non-market work.18 In contrast to the way Gillard’s speech in parliament took off through social media (press gallery journalists having missed its significance), relatively little attention was paid to the legislation affecting sole parents passed on the same day. Feminists did note that despite this denunciation of sexism the Gillard government was ‘making life for some of the most vulnerable women in Australia even harder than it already is’.19 Both kinds of response to Gillard’s speech, the global approbation of the denunciation of sexism and the critique of simultaneous cuts to sole-parent funding, highlight what the data in this study have told us, and the chapters in this book will argue: that women are still interested in mobilising as women to make claims that challenge the gender order. Discourse, including the naming of sexism is important and has changed women’s expectations. Yet the pro-market bias of neoliberal government, including a government headed by a woman, cannot satisfy demands for policy that recognises and provides public support for non-market work. Hence the importance of finding answers to our question ‘where did the women’s movement go?’

Notes 1 Gillard, ‘Transcript of Julia Gillard’s speech’. 2 Grattan, ‘International blogosphere applauds Gillard’s “misogynist” attack on Abbott’. 3 Lester, ‘Ladylike: Julia Gillard’s misogyny speech’. 4 Dowse, ‘Memoir’, pp. 8–9. 5 Reid, ‘Statement by the leader of the Australian delegation’, p. 2. 6 Commonwealth of Australia parliamentary debates, Senate, 2 March 1978, pp. 313–315. 7 The Evolution of Social Movements, funded by the Australian Research Council as DP0878688. 8 della Porta and Diani, Social movements. 9 See Goldstone, ‘Bridging institutionalized and non-institutionalized politics’. 10 For an influential example, see Lang,‘The NGOization of feminism’. 11 See, for example, McAdam, ‘ “There will be fighting in the streets” ’. 12 Staggenborg and Taylor, ‘Whatever happened to the women’s movement?’ 13 Spender, There’s always been a women’s movement this century; Lake, Getting equal. 14 Ferree and Martin, Feminist organizations; Andrew, ‘Looking back at thinking ahead’. 15 Banaszak, The women’s movement inside and outside the state. 16 Grey and Sawer, Women’s movements. 17 Morrissey, ‘Best thing you’ll see all day’. 18 Sawer, ‘Entering too late?’ 19 Convery, ‘On that parliamentary smackdown’.

Acknowledgements

This book is the outcome of a large-scale research project funded by Australian Research Council Discovery Grant number DP0878688. This grant made possible the exhaustive data collections on which this project is based, both the 35-year protest event database and the innovative longitudinal mapping of feminist institutions inside and outside government. It also provided the PhD scholarship held at the University of New South Wales by Frances Shaw for her study of online feminist communities. Research reports generated by this project can be found at: http://cass.anu.edu.au/research_projects/mawm. The Discovery Grant also made possible the workshopping of the draft chapters of this book, at the Australian National University in March 2012. We are indebted to Gwendolyn Gray, Helen Keane, Larry Saha, Zora Simic and Ariadne Vromen for their comments at or after this workshop, which helped improve the manuscript. Paul Bagguley and Sean Scalmer provided helpful comments on a conference version of Chapter 4 and Elizabeth Reid on the Preface. Others who have contributed to this large project include Gillian Evans, who provided valuable assistance with the compiling of the protest event database and along with Sarah Spiller and Veronica Oxman helped with the often taxing task of mapping the trajectories of women’s services and women’s policy agencies. Kirsty McLaren and Catherine Strong designed the protest event data base, while Merrindahl Andrew designed the institutions database. Alison Plumb did heroic work on the references. Permissions have been received for the reproduction of text or images. The images in Figures 4.7 and 4.8 are reproduced with the kind permission of the Office for Women of the Government of South Australia and SEARCH Foundation/Tribune/State Library of NSW, respectively. Some material in Chapter 10 appeared earlier in Christina Ewig and Myra Marx Ferree, ‘Feminist Organizing: What’s old, what’s new? History, Trends and Issues’ in the Oxford Handbook of Gender and Politics edited by Karen Celis et al. (2013). The material is used by permission of Oxford University Press, USA.

1

Finding the women’s movement Marian Sawer

For more than 30 years obituaries have been appearing for the second-wave women’s movement, in what has been called ‘false feminist death syndrome’. By 1998 Time magazine is said to have run 119 death of feminism stories.1 The grounds for pronouncing death are rarely clear. Some believe that feminism is no longer relevant because equality has already been ‘done’. There is often thinly disguised irritation that feminist claims-making is still happening, at least in Western democracies. Or else there is a lack of knowledge that such claims are still being made, perhaps because of lack of media interest. The women’s movement is no longer ‘new’ and therefore is no longer ‘news’. The women’s movement has outlived the attention span of the media. Some suggest that generational change has taken place and that the women’s movement is no longer relevant to young women, just as happened in the aftermath of suffrage mobilisation when ‘flappers’ supposedly became more interested in exploring their new social freedoms than in changing the world. Others argue that gender identity is now so unstable and intersects with so many other identities that it can no longer provide a basis for political action. We believe that this potential for political action still exists, even if it is absent from our television screens. This book contests the obituaries, setting out to find the women’s movement in one country and to show how it has sustained itself over time, even when the times have not suited it. As stated in the Preface and in greater detail in the Appendix, our findings are based on large-scale quantitative data relating to institutions and protest events in Australia as well as focused research on the mapping of discursive and advocacy communities. This is the first time that institutions arising from a women’s movement have been so comprehensively mapped, enabling their trajectories to be examined in relation to protest event activity. We believe the findings are relevant not only to the study of women’s movements in other Western democracies but also to the study of other social movements. It is true that the Australian women’s movement, like other Western feminist movements, is less visible than when it was receiving headline media treatment in the 1970s. As Sylvia Walby suggests, this is partly because: New forms of feminism have emerged that no longer take the form of a ‘traditional’ social movement, being institutionalised instead in civil society

2

Marian Sawer and the state. These new institutional forms are less recognisable as feminist by those who are accustomed to thinking of feminism as merely visible protest.2

But beyond the question of social movement form and visibility, we also contend that the way in which social movements themselves have been theorised has proven inadequate for understanding women’s movements. As shown in the Preface, one influential approach developed in the United States made the employment of non-institutionalised action the defining feature of social movements, the thing that distinguished them from other political actors. On this reading, movements lacked institutional resources and hence engaged in a distinctive repertoire of contestation.3 Identifying movements with a particular repertoire based on protest events meant in turn that the activity or life cycle of movements could be measured quantitatively, through protest event databases. While such measurement can tell us interesting things, and indeed is used in this book, it focuses on only one of the multiple ways in which social movements operate and tells us little about the meaning of these events for participants. It also privileges this mode of operating over others that may be more characteristic of women’s movements.4 Another influential approach to theorising social movements came from Europe and is particularly identified with the work of Alberto Melucci.5 It appears more relevant to our purposes than early resource mobilisation or political process theory, having an emphasis on identity-creation and meaningmaking and on movements as submerged social networks. However it ties the appearance of new social movements to a particular point in history when there was scope for the appearance of movements based on postmaterialist values. Yet as Drude Dahlerup argues in the next chapter, the women’s movement has been a continuous movement for more than a century, so cannot be tied to a particular post-industrial moment. Our approach builds on the work of others who have pointed to the lack of fit between propositions derived from maledominated movements and the nature of the women’s movement.6 We see women’s movements as challenging the existing social order through gendered claims-making and women-centred discourses, without this necessarily involving disruptive collective action. In other words, we argue that institutionalisation is part of how the women’s movement has always operated. This has brought us to define women’s movements in the following terms: • • •

mobilising collective identity as women; sustaining women-centred discourses; making claims that challenge the existing gender order.

This combination of characteristics brings us close to the definition offered by Dorothy McBride and Amy Mazur, who understand women’s movements as comprising of ‘collective action by women organized explicitly as women presenting claims in public life based on gendered identities as women’.7 We don’t

Finding the women’s movement 3 bring the word ‘feminist’ into our definition because, as we shall discuss below, there have been times when women’s movements were doing all the things in our definition but distanced themselves from word ‘feminism’ – the early years of Women’s Liberation are but one example of this. If we no longer rely on disruptive action as a defining element of a social movement, then this has implications for the kind of longevity we can attribute to a movement. Social movement theorist Sidney Tarrow developed a life-cycle model of such movements, arguing that by their nature, as non-institutionalised mass movements, they could not be sustained for long.8 A movement’s adoption of more institutional forms, incorporation into existing institutions, or collapse altogether, was seen as inevitable. This view of social movement life cycles lends itself to proclamations of the death of a movement when the activities of movement activists are no longer visible. Either the movement’s claims are accommodated and institutionalised or else the movement fails, but either way the movement is ‘over’. In such life cycle theories of social movements, institutionalisation means ‘the substitution of the routines of organised politics for the disorder of life in the streets’.9 There is a general assumption that institutionalisation is something that comes after, replaces or usurps the role of social movements and signals the end of the potentially transformative phase of political action. As we have seen in the Preface, social movement theorists themselves increasingly acknowledge that the original dichotomy between contentious and conventional politics was too sharply drawn. Nonetheless, there is still a strong tendency to see institutionalisation as a strategy mistakenly adopted by social movements, which leads to co-option and displacement of goals. This negative perception of institutionalisation precludes asking how social movement agendas can be sustained over time, even as the form of engagement changes. In contrast, a definition such as ours opens the way for greater understanding of the ways in which movement goals can be pursued through creating institutions, as well as through non-institutional action. As we shall see from the quantitative data presented in subsequent chapters of this book, institution-building can take place at the same time as non-institutional contentious action, rather than following from a period of contentious action as sometimes suggested by social movement theory. The inclusion in our definition of a discursive element acknowledges the significance of cultural production as well as the role of women’s organisations in sustaining women-centred discourses through difficult times. Thanks to the Internet such organisations now use social networking and blogs to affirm values and maintain feminist rage, often through feminist humour, as do the feminist on-line communities discussed by Frances Shaw in Chapter 8. This chapter looks at how, in terms of our definition, the women’s movement has had a continuous existence since the nineteenth century, even as it has diversified and as its repertoire and agenda have changed. We find that despite such changes, activists continue to identify with previous struggles. This justifies our argument that this is the same movement manifesting itself in ways that are both the same and different.

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Women’s movement repertoires As we argue above, the idea that the women’s movement is ‘over’ is tied both to negative perceptions of institutionalisation and to the definition of social movements in terms of disruptive or contentious repertoires of action. Our own rejection of this approach comes partly from its lack of fit with the history of women’s movements in Australia and its close neighbour, New Zealand. If we consistently applied the definition of social movements as based on noninstitutionalised protest activity we would have to conclude that successful campaigns for the vote in Australia and New Zealand in the late nineteenth century did not involve women’s movements, which is clearly wrong. Nonetheless the repertoire of direct action used by the militant wings of the women’s suffrage movement in the United Kingdom was a source of inspiration to later generations and was appropriated by movements that lacked a similar history of militancy. For example, ‘chaining’ and making public speeches while chained to the railings of important buildings in London was part of the repertoire of both the Women’s Social and Political Union and the Women’s Freedom League at a time when women had already won political rights in Australia. In 1908, Australian elocution teacher Muriel Matters, a WFL member, became famous as the first woman to make a speech in the British House of Commons – while chained to the grille of the Ladies Gallery. A year later she again received headlines when she sought to drop handbills over Westminster from a Votes for Women airship.10 Inspired by knowledge of suffragette chaining, in 1965 Australian women received world-wide media-coverage for chaining themselves to a public bar in Brisbane – at a time when women were forbidden to drink in such bars in Australia. Four years later Zelda D’Aprano chained herself to the doors of the Commonwealth Building in Melbourne, in protest against an equal pay decision that only brought equal pay to the 18 per cent of women workers who did the same work as men. The use of disruptive repertoire was also the way that much of the world became aware of the arrival of the second wave of the women’s movement. The catalyst was a disruptive 1968 protest against the Miss America Contest. A ‘freedom trashcan’ was planned where bras, girdles, stiletto-heeled shoes, curlers and other instruments of torture were to be dumped. A sympathetic journalist added the flames, thinking the analogy with the burning of draft cards would give the event added gravitas – thus giving rise to the headline that went around the world of ‘Bra-burners and Miss America’.11 The alliteration of ‘bra-burning’ and the image it conjured up became so pervasive in the media that even many women’s movement activists came to believe that some bras must have been burnt somewhere by someone. One symbolic element of the Miss America protest that was quickly appropriated by Women’s Liberation groups around the world was the image of a clenched fist within Venus’s handmirror, the latter being the symbol used in biology to denote female. The image provided a visual jolt, together with its reproduction in ‘menstrual red’, the name used by Robin Morgan to deter

Finding the women’s movement 5 appropriation by lipstick manufacturers. The clenched fist symbol was still being used by the Norwegian Women’s Front in 2008, the year they finally succeeded in their struggle to criminalise the purchase of sexual services.12 While confrontational repertoire became identified with Women’s Liberation, it is generally true that women’s movements have been less likely to engage in disruptive or violent action than male-led movements. Even in the case of protest events, such as those explored by Catherine Strong and Kirsty McLaren in Chapter 4, women’s movements have found non-violent ways to become newsworthy by transgressing gender norms. But much of the work of women’s movements has been of an institutional or discursive nature. A study of the UK, France and Germany covering the period 1980–2007 found that only 2 per cent of the overall activities of women’s movements were protest-related or disruptive.13 Women’s movements operate in multiple arenas, using a wide variety of repertoire, which may include disruptive action but also less public ways of challenging the gender order. As discussed further in Chapter 3, one of the best known is consciousness-raising – meeting in small groups and discovering the commonality of experiences. As Robin Morgan wrote, ‘The Women’s Liberation Movement exists where three or four friends or neighbours decide to meet regularly over coffee and talk about their personal lives.’14 While this technique requires the trust established in small groups, disruptive action may be needed to get the message out via the media to broader groups of women. As shown in Chapter 7, popular culture may help disseminate the message still further, whether through music, television or even sports such as Roller Derby. Contrary to those who think that the transformative phase is over, we find that the women’s movement is still challenging the gender order and working its way through institutions, as well as engaging in cultural production, cyberspace and everyday living. Women-centred discourses and claims-making are sustained through women’s advocacy organisations, vocational bodies and women’s services, as well as through social networking campaigns. Women’s units established in Australian governments in the 1970s institutionalised the feminist insight that no public policy could be assumed to be gender-neutral in its effects, given the social division of labour. Women’s services institutionalised explanations of domestic violence as arising from systemic inequalities between men and women. While there may be less visible policy engagement and public contestation, there are extensive commemorative activities that sustain collective identities. For example, the Sydney-based Colectivo Mujer brings together commemorative objectives with those of challenging the gender order. It seeks to honour the achievements of past and present Latinas and Spanish-speaking women, to highlight the role of women’s activism and ‘to disrupt, challenge and reimagine current gender realities in our communities’.15 Elsewhere, annual memorial lectures named in honour of second-wave feminists such as Clare Burton or Pamela Denoon16 provide an occasion for reaffirmation of identity and values, as do awards, prizes and scholarships for feminist achievement.

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Other forms of feminist cultural production include films, books, music, art, theatre, websites or blogs, as shown by Sarah Maddison, Frances Shaw and Catherine Strong in this book. This form of expressive politics has been crucial to maintaining women-centred discourses and challenging gender norms during hostile or unfavourable political periods. Indeed, a recent survey in the UK and US found that newspapers were much more likely to run articles relating feminism to popular culture and politics than to cover feminist protests such as Take Back the Night/Reclaim the Night marches,17 reinforcing the perception that these no longer happen. Our own protest event data shows that one of Australia’s major broadsheets stopped covering International Women’s Day marches for a number of years after 1976, despite the turn out for marches being comparable to earlier years (see Chapter 4). Lack of media interest in such protest events may itself contribute to a shift in repertoires.

Understanding movement continuity Insisting on the use of disruptive or direct action as the marker of a social movement means disregarding much of the activity of women’s organisations and agencies and discounting it as an indication of the presence of a movement that links past to present and future. It means overlooking the demonstrable continuity over time in the ways women have constituted themselves as collective political subjects and sought separate space, free of male tutelage. Most importantly it means disregarding the ways in which women’s movements have themselves identified with preceding waves. Activists have reinforced collective identity (the sisterhood discussed below) through celebrating the genealogy of the women’s movement. As Dahlerup writes in Chapter 2, when we talk about women’s movement identity, this includes identifying with past as well as present generations of women and drawing on women’s past struggles as inspiration for present action. This point, that women’s collective identity means acknowledging the contribution of past as well as present generations of women activists, is one explicitly made by the Feminist Majority in the United States in their YouTube video on what it means to be a feminist. We have already noted the referencing of suffragette repertoire by later waves of the women’s movement. Recent women’s movements have often drawn inspiration from such ‘heroic’ moments of women’s political history. For example, Australian second-wave feminists organising events for International Women’s Year, led by the Prime Minister’s Women’s Adviser, adopted the colours of the Pankhursts’ WSPU as a signifier of solidarity with feminist struggles past and present. Since 1975 the WSPU colours have been used everywhere in Australia, from government publications and websites to International Women’s Day banners. One respondent to a survey of women who wore the colours said that for her they meant: ‘identifying with first-wave feminists who initially proposed these as signifiers of the women’s movement’. Another said: ‘They give me a strong sense of the history and ongoing struggle of women to achieve equality.’18

Finding the women’s movement 7 The purple, green and white of the WSPU and the events associated with these colours may have seemed more heroic than the white ribbons of the temperance movement that were so prominent in the suffrage movements of Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Even a conservative federal government in Australia was persuaded to use the WSPU colours for the suffrage fountain commemorating the centenary of women’s political rights.19 These colours had become the signifier of women’s struggle for the vote, freed from any specific organisational reference. Women’s movements have been notable for such commemoration of their past history. For example, there were very extensive celebrations of the achievement of women’s suffrage in Australia and New Zealand, a form of identity affirmation missing from the centenaries of male suffrage. This identification with past struggles has helped underline the historical continuity of the women’s movement, which coexists with connections to the newer social movements. Discounting continuity appears both counter-intuitive and unhelpful in terms of deepening our understanding of social movements. Examples of continuity can be found around the world. In Canada the case brought by the ‘Famous Five’, that women should be regarded as ‘persons’ under the British North America Act and hence eligible for appointment to the Canadian Senate, was finally successful in 1929. Among the many commemorations of the Famous Five is the striking sculpture on Parliament Hill, Ottawa, of the women receiving news of their victory. In Western Australia, Women’s Electoral Lobby recreated in 1999 the ‘mile-long’ suffrage petition presented by the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union a century before and hundreds of women carried it in an International Women’s Day march. One of the ways in which activists have mobilised collective identity is through deploying the idea of ‘sisterhood’, whether in the first or second waves. Indeed, imagined sisterhood is the emotional force that has brought together diverse groups of women to work on common projects. After addressing an audience of some 10,000 at the Albert Hall in London in 1911 Australian suffragist Vida Goldstein wrote that the meetings each ‘had for its centre and circumference an exalted sense of sisterhood of women’.20 Sisterhood also became a central mobilising device in the second wave of the women’s movement, as in the slogan ‘sisterhood is powerful’. In the first issue of Ms. Magazine, Gloria Steinem wrote that because of lack of self esteem, women had wanted to identify up with men and not down with women. It was only when feminist realisation dawned that the birth of sisterhood took place.21 One element of sisterhood was refraining from public criticism of other women. Of course this element of sisterhood was not always adhered to (Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer were notorious examples of feminist leaders who did down other women) but it could contribute to an unwillingness to recognise or deal with genuine differences. One set of differences that soon emerged was the critique of ‘mainstream’ women’s movement organisations as insufficiently attuned to the different realities experienced by Indigenous, lesbian, culturally and linguistically diverse

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women or women with disabilities. Such critique, sometimes forthrightly presented at ‘mainstream’ conferences, led to separate organising to ensure a national policy voice, often supported by funds made available by feminists within government. Today advocacy peaks representing all these groups work together in Australia on projects such as capacity-building for policy work, preBudget submissions, rating of election policies of political parties or shadow reports on the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (Chapter 5).

Continuity and discontinuity over time As Dahlerup points out, new waves of feminist protest often begin by distancing themselves from feminist predecessors, or particularly those of their mothers’ generation. The women’s movements of the early 1970s at first were slow to identify with their more polite predecessors. For the young women of what was later called the ‘second wave’ the women’s movement began with them. An article published in 1974 by the newly formed and highly effective Women’s Electoral Lobby (WEL) confidently began: ‘The women’s movement in Australia is now a full two years old.’22 When we talk about waves, there is danger that we overlook what comes between the waves, as the young women did in the early 1970s. Looking back, however, there seems to be remarkable continuity between successive waves of the women’s movement and what comes in between. Women have struggled for equal citizenship; for control of their bodies; for recognition of their claims as mothers and workers.23 Of course while succeeding waves of the women’s movement were contesting the prevailing gender order, they did not necessarily agree on how to achieve a better one. While first-wave feminists were clearly aware of the issue of domestic violence, feminist and temperance movements were often intertwined in seeing votes for women and control of the liquor trade as being the answer. In contrast, second-wave feminists were anxious to ensure that the underlying cause was seen as gender inequality rather than the availability of alcohol. The ‘taken for granted’ understandings of different generations on matters such as race, eugenics or sexuality were also vastly different. For example, hundreds of women attending a 1975 International Women’s Year conference in Canberra gave a standing ovation to Ruby Rich, a stalwart of the Australian women’s movement since the 1920s. Rich had been a long-time office-bearer of the Australian Federation of Women Voters, a campaigner for Aboriginal rights and a family planning activist. But her contribution to the family planning movement began with her role as a founding president in 1926 of the Racial Hygiene Association. It was not a ‘racist’ organisation as such – Rich and other members were Jewish – but like other birth control associations of the time it had eugenicist overtones that would be unacceptable in the post-Hitler era, let alone after the International Year of the Disabled in 1981. Yet in the 1920s concern over inheritance of disease or mental deficiency was commonplace among feminist

Finding the women’s movement 9 activists and eugenics was more publicly acceptable than family planning. In fact the name Racial Hygiene Association was retained until 1960 when it became the Family Planning Association of Australia. Similarly, first-wave feminist campaigners such as Vida Goldstein were supporters of White Australia, as part of a progressive concern for social equality (it was assumed that a racially divided society would be an unequal one). Goldstein included White Australia in her 1903 platform when she ran for the Senate, along with support for protection, conciliation and arbitration and women’s suffrage. She did, however, oppose the exclusion of non-white mothers from the maternity allowance when it was introduced in 1912, saying it was the ‘White Australia policy gone mad’. As concerned sexuality, first-wave women’s movements generally campaigned for a single standard of sexual behaviour – purity for men as well as women (although exceptions are noted in Chapter 10). Goldstein’s campaign committee assured voters in 1903 that, contrary to rumours, she opposed easy divorce as antagonistic to the stability and purity of the home.24 Heterosexuality was generally taken for granted. The second wave also wanted to do away with double standards, but now in order to liberate women’s sexuality and talk about it openly. A pamphlet on female sexuality produced by Women’s Liberation members caused uproar when it was handed to schoolgirls in Brisbane in 1971. One woman was arrested and postal facilities were withdrawn. In Sydney the printers of the second-wave journal Refractory Girl refused to produce an issue in 1974 on the grounds it was obscene. When another printer was found a leaflet was included asking ‘Are lesbians obscene?’25 In relation to prostitution there were both continuities and discontinuities between the waves in Australia as elsewhere. First-wave feminists generally saw the existence of prostitution as incompatible with improvements in the status of women and many of their continuing organisations, such as the International Alliance of Women, have maintained this approach. They see decriminalisation of prostitution as encouraging not only the treatment of all women as sexual commodities but also the international trafficking of women. This view has inspired the policy of criminalising the client, but not the prostitute, which has been legislated in Sweden, Norway and Iceland. On the other hand, many second-wave organisations adopted a different approach to prostitution, adopting the discourse of ‘sex work’ and seeking better protection of the rights of sex workers, including protection from discrimination on the basis of occupation. Organisations such as WEL carried placards in International Women’s Day marches in the early 1980s supporting the rights of prostitutes, something that would have been unthinkable in first-wave marches. Another discontinuity during the early years of the second wave was that of organisational philosophy. As we shall see in Chapter 5, the second wave brought with it ideas concerning the relationship between hierarchy (identified as a masculine principle) and the disempowerment of women. The minimum of structure found in the new women’s movement collectives contrasted with the ranks of office-bearers of earlier women’s NGOs, even those at the more radical

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end of the spectrum. Many of these older feminist office-bearers wondered about the leaderless style of the new women’s organisations and whether it could be effective. At the same time, the creation of a wide range of women’s policy agencies and government-funded women’s services (see Chapter 6) became a part of the repertoire of the second wave that had little precedent.

Adopting or rejecting the label ‘feminist’ From its introduction in France in the 1880s the label ‘feminist’ has had mixed fortunes. Activists working to improve women’s lives have often eschewed the label, for a variety of reasons: ‘Some perceive feminism as inescapably linked to Western hegemony; others object to the bourgeois character of Western feminism . . .; yet others hope to avoid the marginalisation . . . that accrues to those who identify as feminist.’26 For example, the socialist Clara Zetkin, widely regarded as the mother of International Women’s Day, distanced herself from the term, believing that ‘bourgeois feminists’ were seeking to detach workingclass women from the class struggle. At the same time young college graduates in the US were embracing the term as a sign of modernism, while in the UK playwright Cicely Hamilton identified herself as a feminist rather than a suffragist because she was rebelling against ideas of marriage and motherhood as women’s destiny.27 The antipathy to bourgeois feminism expressed by leading socialist women such as Zetkin and Alexandra Kollontai continued into the interwar period.28 At the same time long-time feminist activists observed how, for different reasons, the term had fallen out of favour among young women: Modern young women know amazingly little of what life was like before the war, and show a strong hostility to the word ‘feminism’ and all which they imagine it to connote. They are, nevertheless, themselves the products of the women’s movement and the difficult and confusing conditions in which they live are partly due to the fact that it is in their generation that the change-over from the old to the new conception of the place of women in society is taking place.29 While young women in the interwar period might have seen feminism as oldfashioned, mainstream groups like the UK National Council of Women or the Women’s Institutes avoided the unpopular ‘feminist’ tag in order to maximise their membership.30 For these groups there was a perception that feminism was hostile to the vocation of wife and mother. Vera Brittain, mother of politician Shirley Williams, in an article entitled ‘The Bogy-Feminist’, wrote about how feminists were popularly perceived as ‘spectacled embittered women, disappointed, childless, dowdy, and generally unloved’. She herself was denounced as a bespectacled spinster, clearly with ‘strong feelings against the opposite sex’, after she gave a public lecture suggesting women could now combine home and family with a career.31

Finding the women’s movement 11 In Australia too, ‘feminism’ came to connote something old-fashioned and out of step with the times. An article in 1965 in the leading current-affairs weekly, The Bulletin, claimed that feminism had no folksongs, suggesting it was out of date compared with the new social movements. The author described the Feminist Club in King Street in Sydney as a ‘pleasant backwater’, while ‘hardcore feminists’ clustered around the League of Women Voters.32 The Bulletin’s label ‘hard-core feminist’ referred to the separate organising and polite but persistent advocacy of women’s rights maintained by organisations like the League of Women Voters over many decades. Their newsletters served to maintain feminist discourses through hard times, presenting feminist perspectives on public affairs and affirming feminist values. This kind of activity ‘focussed on maintaining networks, organizations and ideas’ has been described as typical of a social movement in abeyance.33 Perhaps, however, we can discard the ‘abeyance’ label to say that this kind of activity and the associated friendship networks have been typical of how women’s movements have operated over time. It was common in the 1960s for public commentators and indeed social scientists to decry separate organising by women as something holding them back. Norman MacKenzie, brought to Australia by the Social Science Research Council to investigate the status of women, was very critical of the attitudes of sex antagonism and sex loyalty he associated with feminism. He was heartened, however, to find ‘some evidence that the older forms of women’s organisations are losing their appeal and finding it hard to sustain their numbers’.34 His conclusion that younger women with more education and a wider experience of employment would not be interested in ‘women’s questions’ was a fine example of how disastrously wrong social science can be: a great resurgence of women’s organising was just around the corner. The media image of feminism as quaint, out-of-date (and basically ineffectual) made it perhaps unsurprising that even when the second wave arrived, young women did not want to be seen as feminists. They saw themselves instead as liberationists, like other radical movements of the time. Their vocabulary was one of the features that distinguished them from their predecessors, along with their scorn for formal meeting procedures and repertoires of ‘polite’ political action. As we have seen, their attitude to sex was also ‘liberated’ and very different from that of earlier generations of feminist activists. Gisela Kaplan notes that the Australian Women’s Liberation groups of the 1970s spurned the word ‘feminist’, seeing it as implying a limited, reformist approach.35 Anne Summers also recalls that in the mid-1970s: To our consternation the term ‘feminist’ was starting to appear more and more in the American publications. It was not one we could identify with. We were liberationists. Granted, the term was rather clumsy, its meaning was far from clear and it was easily lampooned . . . But it at least signified that we were modern, and forward looking. ‘Feminist’ was so old-fashioned: to us it conjured up elderly ladies with umbrellas who had fought for the

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It was a sign of the women’s movement’s constant change and adaptation that the more all embracing and less left-identified term ‘feminism’ returned to replace ‘women’s liberation’ in the second half of the 1970s.37 In the US, Gloria Steinem was winning converts to the women’s movement from both the city and the suburbs with her wit and style. As she often put it: ‘Women have two choices: either she’s a feminist or a masochist.’ In Australia the term ‘feminist’ became important for WEL members as they rediscovered the continuity of the women’s movement. The 1980 WEL Papers began with a period woodcut and a 1915 definition: Mother, what is a feminist? A feminist, my daughter, Is any woman now who cares To think about her own affairs As men don’t think she oughter. But by the 1990s the term ‘feminist’ was once again to fall out of favour among young women, a phenomenon explored in Chapter 9. The pressures of combining work and family were now seen as the ambivalent legacy of feminism to the new generation, the myth of ‘having it all’. Feminism had supposedly persuaded women they could either be superwomen juggling careers and families or to put their careers ahead of babies.38 In 2012 Princeton academic Anne-Marie Slaughter, who had given up a job in the Obama administration involving 16-hour days, wrote a cover story for the Atlantic entitled ‘Why women still can’t have it all’. In the week after its publication more than one million people read it on-line and 160,000 commented on Facebook. This phenomenon was written up in the Murdoch press under banner headlines such as ‘Death of the Feminist Dream’39 – as though ‘having it all’ was a feminist concept and feminists had dreamed of women having 16-hour days in the paid workforce. As with the first wave, there were also the media stereotypes of feminists as man-hating and sexually unattractive. Sarah Maddison found when Convenor of Younger WEL in NSW that media images of feminists as ‘ugly, hairy legs, separatists, man-hating, fat’, were a barrier to the recruitment of young women.40 While these images were different from the bespectacled and scrawny images of an earlier generation of feminists they carried the same message: challenging the gender order made women unattractive to men. Even at the height of women’s movement influence in Finland in the late 1980s, feminists were perceived as aggressive, fanatical and vilifying men.41 In London, the leading women’s rights advocacy organisation, the Fawcett Society explained in 2005 that it rarely used the term ‘feminism’ because ‘it was perceived negatively in focus groups’.42 Eventually women’s organisations in the US, the UK and Australia started to respond to this media denigration. In the US the Feminist Majority Foundation

Finding the women’s movement 13 sponsored a Feminist Expo in 2000, became the publisher of Ms. Magazine in 2001 and also took to social networking.43 The Foundation organised YouTube celebrity endorsements of feminism and the wearing of ‘This is what a feminist looks like’ T-shirts by a diverse range of men and women. In Australia the YWCA took a lead in a similar promotion, while in the UK the Fawcett Society rebranded itself with a slogan saying ‘Reclaim the f-word with Fawcett’. Some of those reclaiming the word ‘feminism’ used the term ‘third-wave feminism’ to indicate this was feminism for young women, not just ageing second-wavers. While the term can be described as an empty signifier,44 for some it indicates a feminism that differs from its predecessors by including men, by being ‘prosex’, and being more sensitive to forms of difference that intersect with gender. Whether these are characteristics that in fact differentiate ‘third-wave’ from ‘second-wave’ feminism is a moot point.45 In the US a high point in the reclamation of feminism was the January 2009 cover of Ms. Magazine, showing President Barack Obama revealing a ‘This is what a feminist looks like’ T-shirt under his suit and tie. In the same year the Dalai Lama also declared himself to be a feminist. In Sydney the F Collective embarked on a blog project in 2012 to showcase on a weekly basis ‘other organisations and people who are part of a movement that is alive and kicking patriarchy in the arse’.46

Building feminist institutions As we have seen, one problem with equating social movements with disruptive action is that it renders invisible the historic continuity of women’s movements. Another problem is its effects on how social movement engagement with the state is perceived. For some writers, disappearance off the streets and into public institutions, including government, is a sign that a movement is over because it has succeeded – bringing new people and new perspectives to the policy process. For others it is a sign of co-option, of buying off revolutionary potential. But social movements do not just disappear into existing public institutions. They may be responsible for creating a new constellation of institutions reflecting a movement’s values and perspectives. In Chapter 6 Merrindahl Andrew analyses the nature of this constellation, drawing on a database covering the institutional harvest of the Australian women’s movement over a period of 35 years. Our databases provide a unique opportunity to trace women’s movement legacies, but the findings are of relevance well beyond Australia. As we shall see, some of these institutions proved more durable than others. While women’s budget programmes disappeared in the 1990s, feminist vocational bodies multiplied. As we have already observed, there is still a strong tendency on the part of social movement theorists to see ‘institutionalisation’ in negative terms: to view it as a strategy mistakenly adopted by social movements, which results in co-option, deradicalisation, routinisation, marginalisation or ‘fading’.47 Institutionalism is identified with professionalisation of women’s organisations and with work inside the system, a choice that drains energy from social movement activism.

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Yet it is evident that feminist institutionalisation has proceeded apace in most parts of the world over recent decades. We understand this in the broadest sense to mean the creation of women-centred institutions with a mandate to empower women and promote gender equality, whether through democratic service provision, through providing cultural space, through providing redress for discrimination or through policy advice and policy monitoring. Some of this institution-building takes place within existing institutions, such as within professional or cultural bodies, churches, trade unions, government, parliament or multilateral bodies. Other institution-building takes place outside existing bodies, whether through the creation of women’s centres or advocacy groups, community-based women’s services, or cultural spaces such as feminist blogs and women’s choirs. The term ‘institutionalisation’ is sometimes used more broadly to refer to the establishment of new norms of behaviour or the adoption of new discursive frameworks – for example, policy documents framing domestic violence in feminist ways. Like Mary Fainsod Katzenstein, however, we use it in this book mainly to refer to the creation of space for women’s claims-making.48 As we have already noted, in examining discontinuities with first-wave feminism, ‘second-wave’ feminist institution-building was deeply influenced by anti-hierarchical organisational philosophies. Second-wave feminists took these organisational ideas into other campaigns they became involved in, whether over environmental or peace issues, or the treatment of asylum seekers. They even took them into government. In New Zealand the new Ministry of Women’s Affairs practised collectivism and consensus decision-making, processes that were ‘so alien to the conventional, hierarchical public service culture it was like a foreign body, which had to be expelled if it were not to corrupt the entire culture’.49 At the international level some of the recent forms taken by feminist institution-building include the adoption of electoral quotas for women in more than 100 countries, the adoption of women’s policy machinery in more than 165 countries, the creation and public funding of feminist services to address genderbased violence and the creation of parliamentary bodies with a mandate to focus on gender issues.50 Feminist advocacy from both inside and outside has resulted in new normative regimes, enshrined in instruments such as the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), Security Council Resolution 1325 or the UN Millennium Development Goals. While all such gains involve compromises, they create space for further feminist claims-making. One of the distinct and enduring features of the Australian women’s movement has been its close and even embedded relationship with the state. The generations before and after the arrival of the ‘second wave’ were linked by the belief that equal opportunity for women required action by the state, and that only the collective effort and concerted pressure of women’s organisations would focus the attention of political leaders sufficiently for such action to occur. While hostility towards the state was expressed in the early years of Women’s

Finding the women’s movement 15 Liberation, there was not the more sustained commitment to be the ‘sand rather than the oil in the machinery of government’ found in the German movement.51 Beginning at the federal level in the 1970s Australia developed a unique model of women’s policy machinery, devised by feminists and promoted by organisations such as WEL. A reforming Labor government (led by Gough Whitlam) had responded to claims presented on behalf of the women’s movement with a commitment to address issues of concern to women as the business of government. The model of women’s policy machinery that resulted, the ‘hub/ spokes’ model, was based on the feminist insight that because of the gendered division of labour, no government policy was likely to be gender-neutral in its effects. As mentioned in the Preface, this gave the rest of the world the word ‘femocrat’, a term applied to feminists when appointed to the new women’s unit positions in the bureaucracy. As is often forgotten, many of the first femocrats came directly from Women’s Liberation although it was WEL that helped promote the hub/spokes model in all Australian jurisdictions. The focus on analysing the impact of policy on women across all portfolios was the forerunner of the women’s budget statements introduced at the federal level in 1984 and subsequently in all Australian States and Territories. At the international level such gender disaggregation of budgets became known as ‘gender-responsive budgeting’ and was promoted from the 1990s as a bestpractice example of gender mainstreaming. Meanwhile, back in Australia, women’s policy co-ordinating agencies were being moved out of their central location in government and women’s budget statements were being dropped. As we shall see, however, this was not really a story of ‘feminist fading’ caused by institutionalisation but owed more to a neoliberal distaste for disaggregating the outcomes of cuts to the public sector. International Women’s Year in 1975 had coincided with a return to popularity of neoclassical economics when Keynesianism no longer seemed to have the answers to the ‘stagflation’ experienced by Western economies. The consequences for women’s movements of state engagement have been much debated in the West.52 In Australia, as well, the taking up of opportunities for entry into government in the 1970s has been blamed for depleting the energies of the women’s movement. Some have seen the process of negotiation and compromise required by state-focused strategies as contributing both to the dilution of feminism and its loss of visibility.53 Already by 1976 one prominent member of Women’s Liberation was complaining that ‘The women’s movement in Canberra seemed to have shrivelled into an informal branch of the federal bureaucracy’.54 On the other hand, as noted in Chapter 5, the number of national women’s organisations continued to grow in the decades following the arrival of the ‘second wave’ as well as becoming both more diverse and more closely networked at national and international levels. Despite professionalisation, corporatisation and the dominance of neoliberal discourse, particularly in the Howard era, feminist agendas were still being pursued through women’s agencies inside government and by women’s organisations and services outside. For example, despite pressure from the Howard government to degender domestic violence as

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‘family violence’, government-funded women’s violence services continued to frame the issue in terms of gender inequality. The harvest of the second wave is all around us,55 waiting to be identified and understood. Tracing these positive outcomes is one of the key tasks of this book.

So is the women’s movement over? As we have seen, suggestions that women’s movements are over may derive from particular theoretical or methodological positions. Some authors share the negative assumptions concerning institutionalisation discussed above. Sabine Lang, in ‘The NGOization of Feminism’, saw the institutionalisation of the German feminist movement as having led to the proliferation of women’s equality offices inside the state and, outside the state, to more specialisation, professionalisation and focus on funding issues and obtaining state resources.56 Institutional strategies had been adopted at the expense of broader feminist mobilisation and were ultimately responsible for the lack of identification of young women with feminism. Whether social movements indeed engage in this form of strategic choice between repertoires, and whether institutionalisation can bear this kind of explanatory weight, is discussed further in Chapters 5 and 6. Kate Nash, in another approach to the question, cites Alberto Melucci to the effect that a social movement requires both a common identity and a common adversary; in the absence of these a movement is over and replaced by micropolitics.57 Nash suggests that in the UK, or at least in the English part of it, the mobilising of collective identity as women has been actively rejected, particularly by young women. Gendered claims-making is viewed as necessarily involving the suppression of multiple identities such as ethnicity, race and class, as well as the construction of men as the enemy – the image of the feminist as a ‘man-hater’, as discussed above. The argument that a social movement requires a common adversary is appealing on one level – for instance, the pro-choice and pro-life movements are said to derive strength from each other. However it is too simple to suggest that the common adversary of women’s movements is men. Over time the women’s movement has engaged with a range of adversaries, from the institutional conservatism of church and state to the neoliberal push to deregulate the labour market. In Sydney the F Collective simply names the enemy as patriarchy. The idea that the mobilisation of a collective gender identity required the suppression of competing claims arising from social and racial diversity is again an interesting one. Yet as Margaret Henderson has shown in relation to Australia, this is a retrospective reading of the nature of 1970s feminism.58 Gendered claimsmaking then, as now, included demands that government consult with diverse communities of women, for example Indigenous and immigrant women, as a routine component of policy development. Once feminists entered government, one of their priorities was strengthening the voice of marginalised women,

Finding the women’s movement 17 whether through grants programmes or the bringing of community representatives into bodies such as the Commonwealth-State Council on Non-English Speaking Background Women’s Issues.59 Nonetheless, it is clear that in Western democracies the inroads of neoliberalism have weakened many forms of collective identity, including that of the women’s movement, offering in their place the chimera of individual choice and consumerism. These discursive shifts are explored further by Sarah Maddison in Chapter 3. The lack of visibility of the women’s movement has weakened the political base for women’s policy at the national level, even while important international gains are being made. In the following chapters we shall explore further the trajectory of the Australian women’s movement and the implications of our large-scale empirical findings both for theorising of women’s movements and for social movement theory more generally. Yet we maintain that the women’s movement is not dead. While the movement has changed and evolved, it has hidden in some unexpected places and taken on new forms, making it unrecognisable to some who are only too happy to proclaim its early death.60 Sometimes we need to turn to other social movements, such as environment and social justice movements, into which feminists have migrated, taking feminist values and ways of organising with them. But we have also been exploring the forms taken by what we define as the women’s movement today, its continuity with past claims-making as well as its new manifestations and practices. Like the Fawcett Society, we see the women’s movement as ‘closing the gaps since 1866’, while also finding new ways to challenge the gendered expectations that limit women’s lives.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

Erica Jong, quoted in Baumgardner and Richards, Manifesta, p. 93. Walby, The future of feminism, p. 2. For example, Tarrow, Power in movement, p. 4. See, for example, Katzenstein, ‘Feminism within American institutions’; Rucht, ‘Interactions between social movements and states in comparative perspective’; Bagguley, ‘Contemporary British feminism’. See Melucci, The process of collective identity’; Melucci, ‘The new social movements revisited’; Melucci, Challenging codes. Staggenborg and Taylor, ‘Whatever happened to the women’s movement?’. McBride and Mazur, ‘Women’s movements’, p. 226. See also Beckwith, ‘The comparative politics of women’s movements’, p. 585. Tarrow, Power in movement. Tilly and Tarrow, Contentious politics, p. 101. Today there is a Muriel Matters Society based in her home town of Adelaide and supported by the Australian Governor-General. www.murielmatterssociety.com.au [visited 4 April 2012]. This is the account given by the journalist concerned (van Gelder, ‘The truth about bra-burners’, p. 81). In the same year the Canberra Rape Crisis Service in Australia ceased using it, believing it to be too confrontational. Poloni-Staudinger and Ortbals, ‘Gendered political opportunities?’ Morgan, Sisterhood is powerful, p. xxxvi.

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15 Facebook post by Colectivo Mujer 23 September 2011. www.facebook.com/colectivomujer [visited 4 April 2012]. 16 See www.atn.edu.au/Wexdev/news/burton.htm and www.pameladenoonlecture.net/ [visited 4 April 2012]. 17 Mendes, Feminism in the news, p. 139. 18 Sawer, ‘Wearing your politics on your sleeve’, p. 53. 19 This was interesting as the WSPU colours were only adopted in the UK some six years after the achievement of women’s political rights in Australia. 20 Goldstein’s diary, quoted in Gowland, ‘The Women’s Peace Army’, p. 227. 21 Steinem, ‘Sisterhood’. 22 Sawer, Making women count, p. 251. 23 For critique of conceptions that nothing happened between the waves see Lake, Getting equal. 24 Bomford, That dangerous and persuasive woman, p. 66. 25 Moore, The censor’s library, p. 294. 26 Hawkesworth, ‘Western feminist theories’, p. 199. 27 Caine, ‘Women’s studies, feminist traditions and the problem of history’, pp. 6–7. Nonetheless, Hamilton was very active in the suffrage movement, writing a play to promote the cause as well as the lyrics for ‘The March of the Women’. 28 Boxer, ‘Rethinking the socialist construction and international career of the concept “bourgeois feminism” ’. 29 Strachey, Our freedom and its results, p. 10. 30 Beaumont, ‘Citizens not feminists’, p. 422. 31 Brittain, ‘The bogy-feminist’. 32 Rolfe, ‘Whatever happened to feminism?’ 33 Bagguley, ‘Contemporary British feminism’, p. 174. 34 MacKenzie, Women in Australia, p. 342. 35 Kaplan, The meagre harvest, p. 34. 36 Summers, Ducks on the pond, p. 265. 37 Curthoys, ‘Doing it for themselves’, p. 441. 38 For critiques of these ideas see Dux and Simic, The great feminist denial, p. 73; Campo, From superwomen to domestic goddess. 39 Kinchen, ‘Death of the feminist dream’. 40 Maddison, ‘Why feminism is a dirty word’. 41 Holli, Discourse and politics for gender equality in late twentieth century Finland, p. 16. 42 Dean, Rethinking contemporary feminist politics, p. 83. 43 Smeal, ‘The art of building feminist institutions to last’. 44 Dean, Rethinking contemporary feminist politics, p. 151. 45 Henderson, Marking feminist times, pp. 177–179. 46 http://fcollective.wordpress.com/about/ [visited 4 April 2012]. 47 Morgan, ‘On political institutions and social movement dynamics’, p. 274. 48 Katzenstein, ‘Stepsisters’. 49 Kedgely, ‘Heading nowhere in a navy blue suit’, p. 28. 50 Sawer, ‘Women and elections’, p. 205. 51 Ferree, Varieties of feminism, p. 109. 52 See, for example, Walby, The future of feminism, p. 9. 53 Maddison and Jung, ‘Autonomy and engagement’, p. 33. 54 Eade, ‘Now we are six’, p. 8. 55 For contrasting views of this harvest see Ferree and Martin, Feminist organizations and Kaplan, The meagre harvest. 56 Lang, ‘The NGOization of feminism’. 57 Nash, ‘A movement moves . . .’, p. 320. 58 Henderson, Marking feminist times.

Finding the women’s movement 19 59 The official term non-English Speaking Background (NESB) was replaced in 1996 by the term Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) to indicate barriers other than linguistic ones to access and equity. 60 Walby, The future of feminism, p. 1.

2

Disruption, continuity and waves in the feminist movement Drude Dahlerup

The feminist movement is like the sea: it comes in waves and cannot be stopped.1

Is the feminist movement dead – again? Throughout history, after a period of feminist mobilisation with intensive debates and visible protests in the streets, a discussion emerges in the media about the fading away of the feminist movement, that is, collective action to change male dominance in society. After the comprehensive feminist mobilisations of the 1960–1980s all over the Western world, we see a renewed discussion about the possible withering away of the feminist movement in the new millennium, as described by Marian Sawer in the previous chapter. In contrast, among feminist activists and scholars, it is common to regard the feminist movement as one long and continuous struggle for women’s rights. Ever since the first feminist organisations arose in the second half of the nineteenth century, there have, it is argued, always been women who have joined together in a collective effort to better women’s position and to challenge male supremacy. The actual rise and fall of feminist mobilisation is usually described in terms of ‘waves’: the first wave of feminism, the second wave, and maybe a third wave. However, the theoretical foundation of this continuity thesis needs to be clarified.2 Organisational as well as ideological continuity is at stake here. Contrary to the present preference for ‘feminisms’ rather than ‘feminism’, this chapter will be looking for the common core in feminism. I will argue that if we cannot identify a common core of feminism, then we cannot talk about one continuous feminist movement. Further, without an identifiable common core, feminism cannot be conceptualised as an ‘ism’, i.e. a political ideology in its own right, parallel to liberalism and Marxism, but only as a current within liberalism, Marxism or socialism (e.g. feminist liberalism rather than liberal feminism). The claim that the feminist movement has existed for more than one hundred years challenges the argument put forward by the New Social Movement (NSM) theory, which maintained that the movements of the 1960s–1980s represented something fundamentally new in history, having no class base and expressing post-material values. How is it possible to see the rebellious new feminist

Disruption, continuity and waves 21 movement in the 1960s–1980s as part of the expression of a whole new social order, as many researchers have done, if the feminist movement has existed for more than one hundred years? In arguing for continuity, feminist movement research thus contributes to the critique and eventual demise of NSM theory. Given the dominance of the ‘newness’ idea, however, a critical discussion of the NSM approach still seems highly relevant to me. First, the recurring argument that we are witnessing a totally new era has become even more prevalent with the poststructuralist debate. That contemporary society represents something totally new seems in fact to be a recurring argument in history. Second, for feminist scholars, this discussion underscores the need to clarify theoretically what constitutes the feminist movement and its cycles in history. The ‘newness’ discussion raises the fundamental question of what we mean by ‘the feminist movement’. On what theoretical grounds can we speak of a long history of the feminist movement? Three dimensions of continuity are discussed in the first part of this chapter. It is argued that it is possible to speak about one continuous feminist movement in terms of identity and ideology, even if organisational continuity is lacking. In the second part, the concept of waves in social movement theory is discussed. What is a ‘wave’? The third and last part of the chapter presents a different perspective – the long tradition of ‘emancipation movements’. The methodological consequences for social movement research will then be discussed. The empirical data used in this discussion derives from various studies of Western feminism, as well as from my own studies of the feminist movements in the Nordic countries and especially from my comprehensive study of the Danish Women’s Liberation Movement, The Redstockings, 1970–1985.3

Three dimensions of continuity On what grounds do we speak of one continuous feminist movement spanning the last 150 years? Three criteria are discussed in the following: organisational continuity, shared identity over time and, last but not least, ideological continuity, that is, the question of a common core of all feminisms. Organisational continuity? In many countries in Eastern and Western Europe, in the United States and in many other parts of the Western world, the most prominent feminist organisations were closed down after the vote was won. However, studies have revealed that some feminist organisations and groups continued their work and new groups emerged.4 In the Nordic countries, the original feminist organisations that before the turn of the previous century started the struggle for women’s access to education, for the legal rights of married women, and later for suffrage, still exist, although presently at a low level of activity. Feminist magazines that are over one hundred years old are still being issued. In Denmark, the oldest feminist

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organisation, Dansk Kvindesamfund (Danish Women’s Society), founded in 1871, is still active, and has since 1885 issued the magazine Kvinden og Samfundet (Women and Society), probably the oldest feminist magazine in the world. In Sweden, the journal of the women’s section of the Social Democratic party, Morgonbris, has been issued ever since 1904. Also still active are the Norwegian, Icelandic and Finnish Women’s Rights Associations, founded more than 100 years ago. In the United Kingdom the leading women’s advocacy organisation, the Fawcett Society, dates its origins to 1866 and the mobilisation around John Stuart Mill’s suffrage amendment. At the international level, the International Alliance of Women, IAW, founded in support of women’s suffrage in 1904, is still very active as is the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom dating from 1915. These are, however, exceptions. Consequently, the conclusion is that a claim for the historical continuity of the feminist movement cannot in general rest on the same feminist organisations still being active, on organisational continuity. The metaphor of ‘waves’ has, since the 1960–1980s, frequently been applied to the history of the feminist movement. The argument is that while the feminist movement has been very strong during certain historical periods, at other times in history feminists have engaged in more quiet, though persistent, work towards feminist goals. Shared identity over time? Shared identity is another aspect of the concept of continuity. Can we find evidence that women who worked in various feminist movements also experienced a sense of shared identity with a long historical chain of feminists themselves? Do feminists talk about the feminist movement in the singular? Interesting research projects are buried here. My analysis of the Danish Women’s Liberation movement 1970–1985, which was called ‘The Redstockings’, shows that there was a clear sense of belonging to a historical feminist movement among the young activists. But there was also disagreement. Feelings of dissent as well as of cooperation were directed at other feminist groupings of the same historical period. I have used specific policy issues like equal pay and abortion and events like 8th March and the large Women’s Festivals to trace patterns of cooperation and conflict among feminist groups between 1970 and the 1980s. Which feminist groups joined forces in organising the 8 March events in the 1970s and 1980s? Further, the logistics of the large, open door Women’s Festivals in Copenhagen at the end of the 1970s reveal which were considered the central groups of the new radical and leftist feminist movement. The central groups were allowed to have their booths in the central ‘red circle’, while women’s sections and groups in the political parties and the traditional women’s rights organisations were placed in the outer ‘blue circle’. In short, this study shows cooperation as well as severe conflicts, partly over ideology and organisational principles, partly over protest repertoire.5

Disruption, continuity and waves 23 It seems to be a fact that every new wave of feminist protest starts out from a sharp critique – not just of the male-dominated society, but also of contemporary feminist organisations, which were often perceived as ‘bourgeois’, hence their early reluctance to adopt the label ‘feminist’. In fact, my study also shows that in the beginning, many Redstockings were fairly unaware of the activities of feminist organisations of their mothers’ generation. The Danish Redstocking movement arose partly in opposition to the old women’s rights organisation, Dansk Kvindesamfund, which was considered too cautious, too moderate and too bourgeois.6 However, the longer history of feminism soon became part of the common knowledge of the new activists through their intense study and new interpretations of their feminist foremothers. Interestingly enough, the studies concentrated on the history of their grandmothers’ or great-grandmothers’ generation – women like Clara Zetkin, Alexandra Kollontai, Emma Goldman and other leftist feminists. Feminism in their mothers’ generation was not as interesting for the young Redstockings. Further studies are needed about this dimension of shared identity. But it seems to be a fact that the new feminist protest of the 1960s–1980s in the West identified itself as part of a long, continuous feminist movement. At the same time, the point of departure was a sharp critique of contemporary feminism and the activists’ immediate predecessors, even if broad coalitions indeed were established on issues like equal pay, political empowerment of women, fighting violence against women and abortion on demand.7 A common core of feminism? The third aspect of continuity or discontinuity to be discussed here is the ideological aspect. Of the three dimensions, the question of ideological continuity is the most salient. Today it is common to talk about ‘feminisms’ in the plural, indicating that there are many different types of feminism – which of course is true.8 However, the task here is not to characterise different types of feminism within the long history of feminist ideas, such as classic liberal feminism, classic and modern Marxist feminism, utopian socialist feminism, modern equal opportunity feminism, modern socialist and/or radical feminism and poststructuralist feminism.9 These various types of feminism are not our concern here. Rather, the question is whether we can identify a common core of feminism. I see feminism as the ideology of the women’s movement as well as that of certain individual writers. It is my claim that if we cannot identify a common core of feminism, then feminism cannot be labelled an autonomous ideology, an ideology in itself. In that case, feminism would be reduced to serving as a sub-ideology to other doctrines. Then we should speak of feminist liberalism and feminist socialism, instead of socialist or liberal feminism. Liberalism could be taken as a parallel example: even if liberalism can be divided into several subcategories such as classic liberalism, social

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liberalism and neoliberalism, an identifiable common core, ‘liberalism’, unites all tendencies. Reading the nineteenth-century feminists, it soon becomes clear that while fighting narrow sex roles, the early feminists’ ideas of women’s and men’s different biological constitutions are very far from contemporary feminist thinking about the social construction of gender. The question of gender and/or class has been subject to recurring conflicts. The goal of feminism has found its expression in concepts as different as equal opportunity, equality of result, different but equal, emancipation, liberation, transgender and many others. Is it the same movement? Is it the same ideology? I will argue that it is possible to identify a core of feminism. The external boundaries are not discussed here, even if that is a delicate matter. Which organisations and authors should we select for scrutiny in search for a common core? Sometimes feminism is identified with the autonomous women’s movement. A broader definition of the women’s movement also includes women’s sections or activities in political parties, trade unions, the peace movement and so on. Even housewife organisations may be included in the category of women’s movement. In order to avoid arguing in circles – feminism is the ideology of those groups which have a feminist ideology – I will define feminism theoretically. The basis of my reasoning is, however, an analysis of the ideas of the autonomous women’s movements and the ideas of those who call themselves feminists or the equivalent in their own language. It is not an easy task to define the common ideological core of feminism. A political ideology may be identified as a coherent system of normative and descriptive elements, including shared understandings of human nature, shared ideas of justice, property rights, equality and inequality, of the relation between state, market and civil society, as well as a shared vision for the future. From the writings of those who call themselves feminists, it soon becomes evident that feminist utopias are seldom found in the movement literature, that no common utopian vision is spelled out, and that there is no such vision which could be the object of widespread consensus. Rather, we may speak of partial visions.10 Defining feminism In general, it is in fact easier to define feminism by what feminists are fighting against. Consequently, in my minimalistic definition, feminism is an ideology that has as its basic goal to fight against male dominance, and against the discrimination and degradation of women and of the tasks predominantly performed by women.11 In her recent book, Sylvia Walby also uses a minimalistic definition of feminism as the goal of ‘reducing gender inequality’.12 Expressed in a more positive way, Imelda Whelehan, based partly on Evans, states that all feminist positions are ‘founded upon the belief that women suffer from systematic social injustices because of their sex and therefore any feminist

Disruption, continuity and waves 25 is, at the very minimum, committed to some form of reappraisal of the position of women in society’.13 So the core of feminism is the protest against male dominance, a dominance that implies the degradation of women. This implies that gender is seen as one of the most significant, if not the most significant, social cleavage.14 In an attempt to define feminism positively, in terms of the partial visions, I will point to fundamental feminist visions of autonomy and of equality. Feminism involves a vision of women as autonomous beings and of a relation between men and women based on equality. ‘Autonomy’ is here preferred to ‘individualism’, because individualism is so strongly associated with liberalism. The concepts of autonomy and equality are, as we all know, defined differently by various feminisms, but it seems adequate to include the vision of autonomy and equality (in a very broad sense) in the definition of feminism. This combination of protest against male dominance and of positive partial visions of autonomy and equality is the defining characteristic of feminism, the common core. With this definition of feminism, it is possible to support the continuity thesis that a feminist movement has existed for more than 150 years. Even if feminists themselves often talk in terms of shared identity, as noted above, the question of the shared identity of women, of women as a group, nevertheless constitutes both the raison d’etre of the feminist movement and its Achilles’ heel. The American historian, Nancy Cott, has formulated a ‘working definition’ of feminism, which explicitly is not tied to any historical period and has the following three components: • • •

opposition to sex hierarchy; belief that women’s condition is socially constructed rather than predestined by God or nature; identification with ‘the group called women’.15

Cott’s first point runs parallel to the one about ‘breaking male dominance’ used above. A feminist sees a systematic gender hierarchy in society. The second point, that it is possible to change the oppressive gender regime, must obviously be a common idea of feminism. Otherwise any attempts to change women’s position in society would be in vain. Also religious feminists revolt against traditional gender ideologies, which defined women’s proper position in society as exclusively predestined by biology or old religious texts. The third point is a very important, yet controversial, position. It may be questioned whether Cott’s third point, some identification with women as a group, should be employed in the very definition of feminism. First, it cannot be applied to individual male writers, who like John Stuart Mill or August Bebel stood up for women’s rights against the ‘Subjection of Women’. Some researchers have suggested solving this problem by using concepts like ‘anti-sexist’ or ‘profeminist’ men, thus reserving the term ‘feminist’ for women.16

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Second, and more importantly, can women work for bettering women’s position without identifying with women as a group? Did upper-class women, who in the name of the women’s rights movement organised education for servant girls, identify with those girls? Do working-class women or ethnic minority women’s groups, who work hard to change the position of women of their own kind, identify with all women? Does post-colonial feminism agree with Cott’s third point? Can post-feminist women, who do not want to talk about women as a group at all, then be labelled feminists? Does the fact that women do have multiple identities constitute a barrier to achieving a common struggle undertaken by all women, or to the formation of grand coalitions on certain vital issues for all women? These are and have been burdensome questions for feminist movements. Some of the most severe conflicts between different parts of the feminist movement derive from these very questions. I thus disagree with Judith Butler, when she in the first edition of Gender Trouble writes that ‘feminist theory has assumed that there is some existing identity for whom political representation is pursued’.17 Rather, the feminist movements have in most cases been very well aware of the lack of common identity among women – more in line with Simone de Beauvoir, who stated that women are considered a group by society (women are so and so), but that ‘contrary to the proletariat’, women do not say ‘We’.18 No doubt, the construction of women as a collective subject (or several collective subjects) has been essential for all feminism. But Cott’s ‘identification with the group women’ may be misleading, if it presupposes an existential common identity, rather than just political alliances across differences. In general, the concept of ‘identity movements’ is dubious, and is mostly used by its critics.19 Instead of going into endless discussions about whether this criterion should be considered definitive of feminism or not, I suggest more empirical studies of women as a group should be undertaken. When in history has it been possible to form broad coalitions between many women’s organisations and groups? What feminist issues have brought diverse women’s groups together? Seen from this perspective, the splits between women in terms of class, urban/rural splits, generation, ethnicity and sexual preference are the theoretical point of departure, while collective feminist actions become the object of empirical study. The conclusion is that it seems possible to define a meaningful common core of feminism, a feminist ideology, even if history has witnessed many competing feminisms, over time and usually also within the same historical periods. Of the three discussed dimensions of continuity, the first, organisational continuity, could be found only in a few countries, among them the Nordic countries, but should not be applied as an exclusive criterion for continuity. On the basis of the other two dimensions, ongoing activities and pressure based on a common core of feminist ideology and some degree of shared identity among feminists, it is concluded that it does makes sense to talk about a continuous feminist pressure or movement spanning the last 100 to 150 years. From the discussion about what constitutes feminism as an ism, we will now turn to a discussion of feminism as a movement.

Disruption, continuity and waves 27

Cycles and waves of protest The continuity and change of the feminist movement is beautifully described in the quotation at the beginning of this article: ‘the feminist movement is like the sea: it comes in waves and cannot be stopped’. Implicit in the wave metaphor is the concept that a feminist movement has existed all the time, but that its strength and visibility varies. But how should we understand the concept of wave in social movement studies? I define social movement waves in terms of activities, mobilisation and visibility. One might also add impact. During every new wave of the feminist movement, mobilisation is running high, many new organisations are being created and a comprehensive debate concerning women’s position makes it on to the public agenda. If successful, the movement contributes to changing the norms and values in society. But also within each wave, a movement experiences ups and downs, seeming to have a life cycle of rise, peak and decline. Further, social movements seem to emerge in parallel waves, with many new movements rising at the same time. So many concepts of waves or cycles are involved. Three dimension of ‘waves’ ‘Cycles of protests’ or ‘protest waves’ have long been subject to discussions by historians, sociologists, political scientists and many other scholars. One can identify at least three dimensions of this discussion: • • •

Do individual movements have life cycles? Do social movements come in waves, that is, do many new movements emerge at the same time in history? Can we identify regularly recurring cycles?

Social movements are here defined as collective activities with the purpose of creating social change, working within a common ideological framework, with a certain degree of organisation and with the commitment of participants as the main resource. This definition is by and large in accordance with most social movement research.20 I add to this definition that the main asset of social movements is their ability to develop ‘new thinking’, i.e. the challenging of established norms and values through new thoughts and new practices.21 All social movements, including the feminist movement, are in constant process of change. In moving society they are themselves moved. The life cycle of individual movements The feminist movement at large has had its cycles throughout history. The wave metaphor implies that although the feminist movement has existed continuously, it has had its ups and downs within that frame. Thus continuity as well as change

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prevails. Instead of ‘rise and fall’, the concepts of ‘peaks’ and ‘doldrums’ are preferable. The feminist movement of the 1960s–1980s was therefore both new and old. It has become common to characterise this movement as ‘second-wave’ feminism or ‘new’ versus ‘old’ feminism.22 Other researchers have, however, identified three waves of feminism in their respective countries, and consequently the new feminist protest of the 1960s– 1980s becomes ‘third-wave’ feminism.23 The argument is that the nineteenthcentury struggle for women’s right to education and positions, as well as legal maturity for married women, constitutes the first wave, while the later campaign for suffrage around and after the turn of the century was the second. The two distinct waves were separated by a period of quieter feminist work. After the suffrage was won there again came a new period of more muted and dogged feminist activity. It is also disputed as to whether the interwar period, during which a backlash against feminism emerged, should be labelled a silent period.24 The fact is that many new women’s organisations, such as housewife associations, women’s temperance organisations, social organisations and women’s sections within the political parties, were formed in most Western countries during this very period. New issues like contraception and abortion reached the political agenda. In the same period, married women’s right to hold jobs such as, for example, teachers was questioned, because of the severe high unemployment of men during the economic crisis. In my opinion, the critique that the interwar period also experienced extensive feminist activities does not falsify the thesis that the feminist movement has had its ups and downs in terms of activity, mobilisation, visibility and impact. Rather, it shows the need for more empirical studies about women’s organisations, their aims, activities and impact in various historical periods. Within each wave, a movement also has its rise, peak and decline. Movements are fluid, as the American scholar Jo Freeman argues.25 In the words of Manfred Kuechler and Russell J. Dalton, key representatives of the NSM approach: ‘All movements ebb and flow.’26 A social movement represents a protest against the established order, and the commitment of the participants is by definition a movement’s main resource.27 A social movement consists of many organisations and groups under a common ideological umbrella. These movement organisations and groups tend to have a temporary character. Some movements transform into a political party or an interest organisation, in which case they by definition are no longer ‘movements’. Others might turn into specialised institutions, or ‘alternative institutions’. Still others simply fade away. While the rise of social movements was a popular subject in social movement research previously, movement transformation and movement decline is a key research topic today, following the actual transformation of the earlier movements. Why and how do movements change? Recent studies of the transformation of the feminist movement have preferred a resource mobilisation perspective.28 My own study of the development of the Redstocking movement challenges Offe’s

Disruption, continuity and waves 29 three-stage model of social movement transition. According to Offe, social movements tend to develop through three stages, from the take-off phase, over a phase of stagnation, to a third phase characterised by the ‘attractions and temptations of institutionalization’.29 This model is based on the development of the environmental movement in Germany, which transformed itself into a political party. By contrast, the Redstocking movement in general resisted the ‘temptations’ of institutionalisation. The final conclusion of my study is that the very ideology of the Redstockings, and the flat structure that was an integral part of it, prevented the institutionalisation of the movement.30 Only in Iceland did the Women’s Liberation movement transform itself into a political party.31 Why did the 1960s–1980s wave of the feminist movement decline? After the middle of the 1980s, the radical and leftist Women’s Liberation type of feminism, in my interpretation, no longer existed as a collective force. But many specialised or even professional activities like gender studies, shelters for battered women and projects for unemployed women emerged out of the movement in all Western countries. My survey of 1,300 former feminist activists reveals that the lack of new recruits was one of the factors that led to the demise of the movement. The new specialised activities did not invite newcomers to join.32 The change of political atmosphere and the decline of the New Left in general also contributed to this downturn, even if the feminist movement survived longer than most other movements of the New Left from the 1960s–1980s. The sharp division between Women’s Liberation feminism and the more moderate modern liberal and social democratic equal opportunity feminism gradually disappeared in most Western countries. The development of women’s policy agencies, later gender equality institutions, gender equality legislation, gender mainstreaming, in short state feminism, became the new trend. This institutionalising was not what the radical and leftist Women’s Liberation with its strong anti-state ideology would have wanted, but indirectly the strong pressure from the radical grass roots movement no doubt contributed to the relative success of the more moderate feminist agenda and its legitimisation inside the political institutions.33 Today, some observers see the feminist movement as dead, as discussed in Marian Sawer’s chapter in this book, while others tend to label the new and young feminist writers and bloggers a third (or fourth) wave of feminism. The many new forms of feminist activities, internationally, nationally, locally and in cyberspace, do challenge the concept of social movements as Frances Shaw shows in her analysis of feminist blogging in Chapter 8. No doubt, there has been feminist pressure throughout the last 150 years, but can we really say that there has always been a feminist movement in the last 150 years? The many individual feminist writers and bloggers of today represent new feminist discourses and pressure to change society, but in some cases a lack of collective activities distinguishes them from the social movements in the classic sense defined above. They are not a movement per se, but should rather be seen as movement intellectuals.34 Movement intellectuals are important for the activists in movement organisations, but they are not the movement. On the other

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hand as Merrindahl Andrew and Marian Sawer detail in their chapters, there may be more women’s services and women’s advocacy organisations than ever before, which identify as part of the women’s movement, even if their forms of engagement differ from those of the 1960s–1980s. Recently, we have also witnessed, not least during the ‘Arab Spring’, how new social media can develop into a protest movement, active in real locations as well as in cyber space. Do social movements come together in waves – and why? In general, social movements often seem to emerge at the same time. Hence feminist mobilisation has often started side by side with the emergence of other movements. In most Western countries – and this book is limited to those countries – the older feminist movements emerged in periods of general mobilisation. In Scandinavia, the last part of the nineteenth century represented a period of general upheaval – the development of the labour movement, the agrarian movements, co-operative movements, new religious movements – and the feminist movement. Therefore, it makes sense to speak of general waves of protest. But what does this metaphor of general waves of protest signify? Two of the major schools within social movement theory interpret this historical coincidence differently. The New Social Movement school (NSM) with its structural focus, tried to explain the rise of the many new movements that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s by a common cause: the conflicts of postindustrial society.35 It is a central argument in NSM theory, that the many new movements of the 1960s–1970s in the Western countries represented something qualitatively new: representing post-material values, non-class based participation and a flat, antihierarchical structure. Contrary to the ‘old’ movements, the ‘new’ movements were not motivated by self-interest, but work for the common good.36 The ecological movement, the feminist movement and the peace movement were not just new in a chronological sense, it was argued, they are considered qualitatively different from ‘older’ movements. In the NSM theory of the 1980s and 1990s they represent a totally new historical period, created by (or representative of ) new structural conflicts in society.37 The feminist movement proves to be a critical case for NSM theory. How is it possible to see the rebellious new feminist movement of the 1960s–1980s as part of the expression of a whole new social order, as many researchers have done, when the feminist movement has existed for more than one hundred years? The peace movement of the 1980s does not seem to fit into the theory either, since peace movements had already emerged in the 1890s, around World War I, and again in the 1950s. This contradiction may explain why so few scholars have studied the feminist movement within a new social movement approach – it does not seem to fit. Resource Mobilisation (RM), another major school in social movement theory, takes a different point of departure. The main interest is not ‘why’, but ‘how’ movements emerge. Thus mobilisation, strategy, organisations and social

Disruption, continuity and waves 31 entrepreneurship become the focus. Studies of the importance of opportunity structures might be combined with the RM perspective. The basis of RM theory is that social conflict exists in all societies and at all times. Consequently, the existence of social conflict cannot per se explain why new waves of movements occur. It thus becomes even more important to study when and how it becomes possible to mobilise sufficient resources for action.38 The resource mobilisation approach has been used in several studies of the feminist movement, first in Jo Freeman’s classic work on the new American feminist movements in the 1960s and 1970s, The Politics of Women’s Liberation (1975). Among books using an RM approach is Barbara Ryan’s book on the long history of the American women’s movement, Feminism and the Women’s Movement (1992). From an RM perspective, Leila Rupp and Verta Taylor show in their book, Survival in the Doldrums (1987), how the American feminist movement survived the period 1945 to the 1960s, when the general mood was anti-feminist. Myra Marx Ferree has also made use of this perspective.39 In my own study of the Danish Women’s Liberation Movement, ‘The Redstockings’, I opted for a combination of a resource mobilisation perspective with a social constructionist approach.40 Critique of theories of common waves and common causes The concept of waves and the theory of common causes behind such waves do have their limitations. Five points will briefly be discussed in the following, of which the last three are typical for the resource mobilisation approach. First, not all movements come as part of a common protest wave. Throughout history, many movements have not followed such a pattern, and even within a specific period’s ‘movement family’, some movements live much longer than others. Second, the theory of common causes needs further discussion. Even if it seems obvious that there are some common structural roots underpinning a whole group of parallel movements, for instance the movements of the 1960s–1980s, different movements are still reactions to different circumstances. In this way, both the peace movement in the 1890s and the one in the 1980s emerged as reactions to current foreign policies, while other contemporary movements arose out of socioeconomic conflicts. ‘Feminism did not grow out of the left, feminism grew out of women’s oppression’, Petra de Vries wrote, stressing this point.41 Third, actual parallel emergence does not necessarily imply that common causes are involved at all, or are the most significant. Sidney Tarrow has pointed out that one group of protests may simply pave the way for the next, because the cost of protesting is lowered.42 Fourth, the study of the feminist movement shows a specific kind of link at the level of the actors. Feminist groups have often emerged because women who worked together with men for some common cause have experienced discrimination because of their sex. This happened to women in the abolition movement in nineteenth-century America, as well as to women in the New Left of the 1960s and early 1970s, who eventually refused to ‘make tea for the revolution’.

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Here, the cost of participating actually rose for women, and consequently, these women went out and started their own feminist movements. The fifth and last qualification to the theory of common causes to be discussed here is that of international learning. Even the old feminist movement was very internationally orientated, and victories in one country were quickly reported to other countries in a cross-country learning process. For the feminist movement of the 1960s–1980s, mass media coverage of feminist actions abroad gave lots of impetus, and activists from different countries often visited each other. Consequently, the common style, ideological similarities and the widespread use consciousness-raising groups in most Western countries noted by Sarah Maddison in Chapter 3 may not just be seen as a reaction to the same structural factors in each and every country. The feminist movement has also been based on extended international learning. With the increase in international mass media coverage and not least with the massive expansion of continental and international organisations and meetings in the new millennium this factor will no doubt grow in importance. Can we identify regularly recurring cycles of protest? In his study of the cyclical aspect of new social movements, Karl-Werner Brand traces a picture of historical ups and downs since 1800 for many movements such as the feminist movement, the peace movement, the ecological movement and what he labels ‘alternative movements’. He concludes that these movements seem to re-emerge in cycles of 40–50 years. The first wave came around the 1840s, the second around the turn of the twentieth century, while the third wave came in the 1960s–1970s. He tries to link these movement waves to the regular occurrence of economic waves, but finally rejects the connection.43 Many other scholars have also worked with theories of regularity in social movement waves. Harrington argues that the interval between waves of protest has decreased at the end of the twentieth century, partly to be explained by the fact that the movements have become increasingly self-conscious and analytical regarding their own development.44 In my opinion, such theories of regularly reccurring waves of protest lack any theoretical base. Why should waves of new movements return at regular intervals? Such a theory would imply that 30 years in the nineteenth century would be identical to 30 years in the twentieth century. Why 30 years? Only one researcher, the American feminist sociologist Alice Rossi, has come up with a theory of regular intervals that makes any sense. According to Rossi, writing in 1970s, the American feminist movement has developed in three waves, not just two: 1840–1860, 1900–1920 and 1960 onward. The interval between these three waves corresponds to around 50 years or two generations. Not the daughters, but the granddaughters continue the feminist movement, according to Alice Rossi.45 Along similar lines, a Swedish scholar, Helena Streifert has argued that the feminist movement more than any other movement experiences disruptions –

Disruption, continuity and waves 33 instead of processes of collective learning from one generation to the next. The reason for this, Streifert argues, is that generational differences are greater among women than among men, because segregation by age is especially strong in women’s lives.46 These theses ought to be tested upon various countries. Even if such regular intervals may be difficult to identity – depending on how the waves are delimited – the generational conflicts have no doubt been important in the history of the feminist movement, because of the crucial importance in feminism of changing identities. Generational conflicts in the feminist movement have often been played out around the dubious dichotomy between equality and difference, and about women as a group. From the 1990s, younger feminists have started talking about a new ‘third wave’ of feminism (a fourth wave if Rossi’s periodisation is accepted, as above). The feminist movement of the 1960s–1980s is criticised for being ‘essentialist’ and ‘colonialist’, not seeing the diversities and conflicts among women. Consequently, post-colonial and post-modern feminists stress the different positions of women stemming from ethnicity, sexual differences, being immigrants versus native-born etc, usually stressing the intersections between various structures of domination and discrimination in society. The reasons younger feminists chose to differentiate themselves as ‘third-wave’ feminists is explored further by Sarah Maddison in Chapter 9 of this book. Paradoxically, class cleavages were more in the centre of feminist discussions in the 1960s–1980s than today, when social cleavages are growing. The generational conflicts within the feminist movement over time has no doubt lead to passivity among many younger feminist inclined women, a conflict maintained by recurring construction in the media of feminists as man-hating, un-feminine women: ‘uncharming spinsters’ (the suffrage campaign) and ‘manhating lesbians’ (in the 1960s–1980s). However, generational conflicts have also been an important driver for new feminist activities. Jonathan Dean suggests that the wave metaphor is an ‘empty signifier’, which indicates new space for young women.47 This is no doubt an important function of the use of the wave metaphor in the feminist movement. It is, however, my argument that seen from a social movement perspective, the degree of feminist activities, new mobilisations and new ideological controversies within feminism do vary over time in every country. That is why empirical analyses of movement organisations and groups are so important.

Emancipation, anti-modernism and postmodernism At the start of the 1990s, environment movement scholar Karl-Werner Brand put forward the interesting argument that social movements ever since the nineteenth century have been based on a critique of modernity. They represent resistance to the whole modernist project: industrialisation, bureaucratisation, political centralism and pluralism. In line with New Social Movement theory, Brand argues that the Western movements of 1960s to 1980s ‘were borne by a revival of broad currents of modernization critique’.48

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The novelty theory of the New Social Movement school has been overhauled by postmodernist theory, which is also based on an idea that contemporary society, that is the late 1980s, the 1990s and on, is exceptionally new. It is in fact amazing with what frequency scholars eagerly characterise their own time as extraordinary. This discussion touches upon our general understanding of history. With the concept of emancipation movements, I want to stress a different understanding of movement history. I see a long line of movements, which in spite of their differences, have all been fighting for human rights, equal worth and individual autonomy for an excluded group. They have struggled for the recognition of the members of their group as human beings of equal value. These movements have worked hard to obtain full citizenship – against discrimination, degradation and exclusion. In their work, they have all tried to construct their group as a political subject, as a group fűr sich (for itself and not just in itself ). Included in the family of ‘emancipation movements’ are the labour movement, agrarian movements, the civil rights movement and other minority movements, the feminist movement, Indigenous rights movements and, in contemporary society, gay and lesbian emancipation movements. Newer mobilisation of immigrants in defence of multiculturalism might be added to the list. In spite of their obvious differences, they have all demanded that the classic liberal idea – that all human beings are born equal – come true. Therefore, they do not, as Brand claims, represent a protest against the ideas of the Enlightenment – the ideas of equality and freedom. On the contrary, they demand that the promises of the French revolution and the American Declaration of Independence be fulfilled in reality. Whether the realisation of this ideal can be obtained within contemporary social structure or whether it implies an overturning of the whole social order, is, and has always been, a contentious issue for these emancipation movements. There have been numerous conflicts between these different movements, for instance between the labour movement and feminism. But history has also witnessed many processes of collective learning from one movement to the other. The protests by young people demonstrating in Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen during the Arab Spring took place within a different environment and history, but the demands brought forward by these important new social movements resonate with universal claims for freedom, equal rights and democracy known from social movement history all over the world.

Conclusion: new waves of an old movement The metaphor of ‘waves’ implies continuity and change. The methodological consequence is that a diachronous as well as a synchronous perspective is needed when studying the feminist movement, because of its roots in the past as well as in the present. Even if the focus of this chapter is the feminist movement, the same methodology will probably also prove relevant for other movements with a long history.

Disruption, continuity and waves 35 The diachronous perspective: the continuity argument does not imply that the same feminist organisations have existed during the last 150 years. This has only been the case in a few countries. The continuity argument is based on the identification of a common core of the feminist project, shared over time and across borders, and to some extent on identification by newer movements with their predecessors. Within this overall ideological framework, the actual feminist agenda changes from generation to generation, and also among feminist groups within the same generation. But it does make sense to maintain that new feminist mobilisations often represent a new wave of an old movement. New waves of feminist mobilisation should be studied in their relation to – as inspired by and/ or as a reaction to – previous feminist movements. This does not, however, imply that all feminist activities deserve the movement label. Feminist pressure has existed throughout the last 150 years in all Western countries, but with large variations as to the degree of mobilisation, the level of organisation, the degree of institutionalisation and transformative force. The synchronous perspective: very often, we have seen a connection between new feminist protests and the emergence of other movements in the same historical period – the synchronous perspective – even if there are exceptions to this rule, as for instance in the 1980s. The synchronous perspective should also imply studying processes of transnational inspiration and learning processes – as well as the active use of the experience of other countries in national campaigns. The feminist movement has always had an international outlook as we saw during the suffrage campaigns. Today, all feminist debates have a national as well as a regional and an international dimension. More comparative studies of the feminist movements in a selected number of countries, including the process of transnational learning, would be fruitful. In general, for the study of emancipation movements with a long history, a combined diachronous and synchronous perspective is recommended.

Notes 1 A quotation from a private letter from Dorthe Gjørup, member of a women’s group in the Danish town of Skive, to Elin Appel, a feminist author and also my mother, 26 August 1979. 2 This chapter is an up-dated and revised version of Dahlerup, ‘Continuity and waves in the feminist movement’. 3 Dahlerup and Gulli, ‘Women’s organization in the Nordic countries’; Dahlerup, The new women’s movement; Dahlerup, Rødstrømperne. 4 Rupp and Taylor, Survival in the doldrums. 5 Dahlerup, Rødstrømperne. 6 Ibid. 7 Schrenk, Die feministische Herausforderung; Ferree and Hess, Controversy and coalition; Dahlerup, The new women’s movement; Dahlerup, Rødstrømperne; Rupp and Taylor, Survival in the doldrums; Klandermans, ‘Linking the “old” and the “new” ’; Kaplan, Contemporary Western European feminism; Lovenduski and Randall, Contemporary feminist politics; Threlfall, Mapping the women’s movement. 8 Kemp and Squires, Feminisms.

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9 Tong, Feminist thought; Evans, Feminist theory today; Dahlerup, Rødstrømperne; Whelehan, Modern feminist thought; Bryson, Feminist political theory. 10 Bammer, Partial visions. 11 Dahlerup, The new women’s movement, p. 6. 12 Walby, The future of feminism, p. 3. 13 Whelehan, Modern feminist thought, p. 25. 14 Heywood, Political ideologies. 15 Cott, The grounding of modern feminism, pp. 4–5. 16 Batiot, ‘Radical democracy and feminist discourse’; Lønnå, ‘Waves in the history of feminism’. 17 Butler, Gender trouble, p. 3. 18 Beauvoir, Le deuxième sexe, p. 11. 19 Dahlerup, ‘Engendering representative democracy’, p. 150. 20 della Porta and Diani, Social movements. 21 Dahlerup, Rødstrømperne. 22 Schenk, Die feministische Herausforderung; Outshoorn, ‘A distaste of dirty hands’; Ryan, Feminism and the women’s movement; Evans, Feminist theory today; Brenner, ‘The best of times, the worst of times’. 23 Rossi, ‘Contemporary American feminism’; McGlen and O’Connor, ‘Women’s rights’; Dahlerup, The new women’s movement; Dahlerup, Rødstrømperne. 24 Rupp and Taylor, Survival in the doldrums; Lønnå, ‘Waves in the history of feminism’. 25 Freeman, Social movements of the sixties and seventies, p. 4. 26 Kuechler and Dalton, New social movements and the political order, p. 284. 27 Dahlerup, The new women’s movement, p. 9. 28 See Rupp and Taylor, Survival in the doldrums; Ryan, Feminism and the women’s movement; Ferree and Martin, ‘Doing the work of the movement’. 29 Offe, ‘Reflections on the institutional self-transformation of movement politics’, p. 240. 30 Dahlerup, Rødstrømperne. 31 Styrkarsdottir, ‘Breaking male dominance by extraordinary means’. 32 Dahlerup, ‘From movement protest to state feminism’; Dahlerup, Rødstrømperne. 33 Dahlerup and Leyenaar (eds), Breaking male dominance in old democracies. 34 Eyerman and Jamison, Social movements. 35 Touraine, ‘La Voix et le regard’. 36 Dalton, Kuechler and Burklin, ‘The challenge of new movements’. 37 Dalton and Kuechler, Challenging the political order; Larana, Johnston and Gusfield, ‘New social movements’. 38 See McCarthy and Zald, ‘Resource mobilization and social movements’; Tarrow, Democracy and disorder. 39 Ferree and Hess, Controversy and coalition; Ferree and Martin, ‘Doing the work of the movement’. 40 Dahlerup, Rødstrømperne. 41 Vries, ‘Feminism in the Netherlands’, p. 391. 42 Tarrow, Power in movement, p. 7. 43 Brand, ‘Cyclical aspects of new social movements’, p. 34. 44 Freeman, Social movements of the sixties and seventies, p. ix. 45 Rossi, ‘Contemporary American feminism’. 46 Streifert, Studier i den svenska kvinnorörelsen. 47 Dean, Rethinking contemporary feminist politics. 48 Brand, ‘Cyclical aspects of new social movements’, p. 33.

3

Discursive politics Changing the talk and raising expectations Sarah Maddison

The emergence of the second wave of the women’s movement also saw the creation of consciousness-raising groups, which sprang up rapidly and provided many women with their first experiences of feminism. Consciousness-raising allowed women to develop an understanding of the ways in which the problems that they experienced as individuals were both shared by many other women and socially produced. By thinking and talking together feminists developed new discourses, and in doing so they developed a new view of themselves and the world. This was the work of making the personal political, which, as Raewyn Connell has suggested, ‘was a matter of tearing existing parts of yourself up by the roots’ to forge new understandings of gender and sex, and women’s place in the world.This ‘transition to feminism’ involved more than a shift in attitudes, it was ‘a transforming and tough personal experience’, which has shaped feminist scholarship and activism ever since.1 The production of feminist discourse has not been without profound challenges, most notably the challenges associated with articulating a movement identity for a movement marked by profound differences among and between movement actors. No sooner had the second-wave movement produced the discourse of ‘sisterhood’ then women who felt excluded from the sort of ‘sameness’ that sisterhood implied began to issue their challenge. Working-class women, lesbians, Indigenous women, women from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds and women with disabilities all articulated their concerns about a movement that appeared to speak for them without understanding the specificity of their experiences. For some in the movement, such challenges were personally disappointing, producing a loss of impetus in wider movement mobilisation. For others, however, hearing these critiques marked a moment of ‘growing up’ for the movement, in which simplistic ideas had to be replaced by more nuanced representations of women’s identities, needs and interests. In many ways these debates continue to mark women’s movement discourse today. Without disregarding these challenges, this chapter will argue that feminist discursive politics is every bit as important as institutional or statefocused politics. Feminist discourse has had a profound effect on women’s expectations for their own lives. Although women today still struggle towards many of the same aspirations articulated by second-wave feminists, they do so within a framework

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of profoundly changed expectations – about work, autonomy, safety and political representation among other things, although – perhaps ironically – many women now blame this same discourse for complicating their lives. Thus, where much in this book will highlight the legacy of the second wave in institutions and organisations, this chapter considers the significance of the discursive legacy of second-wave feminism.

Discursive politics In her study of feminist activism within institutions in the United States, Mary Katzenstein defines two types of politics, namely interest group politics, which many see as ‘politics-as-usual’, and discursive politics.2 Although she acknowledges that there is ‘no neat line’ between the two ideal types, she distinguishes discursive politics as: . . . the politics of meaning making . . . [involving] the effort to reinterpret, reformulate, rethink and rewrite the norms and practices of society and the state . . . Its premise is that conceptual changes directly bear on material ones.3 Feminist writers, for example, ‘[p]ublish their work in an effort to bring their insights to bear on other women’s lives, and on the women’s movement’s analyses and agendas’.4 As Stacey Young argues, discursive production is, and always has been, central to women’s movement activity, and is a particularly important site in ‘struggles to expand our understanding of differences among women, their relationship to the construction of women’s subjectivity and identity, and their relationship to feminist resistance’.5 More recent definitions have narrowed the concept, for example in Lombardo et al.’s definition of discursive politics as ‘the intentional or unintentional engaging of policy actors in conceptual disputes that result in meanings attributed to the terms and concepts employed in specific contexts’.6 Policy actors may certainly be one focus for feminist discursive politics, but they are most definitely not the only – or even the most important – target of feminist struggles over meaning making. Indeed, this chapter is concerned more with the role of discourse in creating meaning and shared understanding within the women’s movement and in women’s everyday lives. These discursive struggles may or may not have direct policy outcomes. Stacey Young contends that discursive politics is as important as formal electoral politics in the struggle to transform power relations and social structures and, in relation to feminist politics in particular, suggests that a great deal of feminist politics is discursive in that it occurs ‘at the level of daily life’.7 Women’s movement groups, networks and organisations come to embody feminist discourse in a process of continually making and remaking the women’s movement from the bottom up, in word, text and action.8 This has been true throughout the history of women’s movements all around the world. Feminist

Discursive politics 39 discourse through consciousness-raising has not been without problems, as will be discussed below, but it has nevertheless profoundly changed women’s expectations about their own lives and the lives of all women.

New discourse, changing expectations In Australia, Women’s Liberation groups emerged from the New Left and the anti-Vietnam war movement during the late 1960s, as many women found themselves dismayed by the unchallenged sexism that they perceived among men on the left. Amid strident criticism that they were splitting the New Left movement, these women forged ahead to form their own autonomous women’s groups. While not discarding liberationist ideology, language or tactics these early second-wave feminists believed that to truly be liberated, and to develop their ‘revolutionary potential’, they had to be free from oppression by men.9 It is probably true to suggest that the women who were a part of the early Women’s Liberation groups did not yet grasp the enormity of what they were beginning, nor did they grasp the significance of the place in history they were creating for themselves. As Anne Summers has recalled: In 1970 I had no idea just how subversive the ideas of women’s liberation would turn out to be. At the time it appeared merely logical, a matter of simple justice, that women be liberated from constricting domestic roles and be able to move beyond the confining stereotypes that seemed to reduce everything to sexual attractiveness or maternal status.10 Nonetheless, the new discourses of feminism and women’s liberation began to take hold and the time seemed right for change.11 Along with what was happening in local protest movements, early secondwave Australian feminists were strongly influenced by the ideas that landed on Australian shores from the American and British Women’s Liberation movements. Many women in the New Left were inspired by the discursive activism of the growing women’s movements overseas, and increasingly demanded the specific insights of feminist theory rather than a purely Marxist analysis to explain their oppression and to propose revolutionary actions to end it. Feminist writing including early works such as Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1953) and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) followed by the newer texts including Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1972), expatriate Australian Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970), Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex (1970) and Juliet Mitchell’s Women: The Longest Revolution (1974) provided a new analytic framework for Australian feminists. Zelda D’Aprano remembers that these new ideas ‘exploded our minds’ in the Women’s Action Committee, with the women in that organisation coming to realise that they were ‘liberationists’ by the time the group was only one year old.12 This new and exciting discourse ‘bound the women’s movement together, across Australia and around the world’ and spread through the Australian women’s movement via discussions,

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newsletters and journals.13 As Suzanne Bellamy recalls, women in the secondwave women’s movement ‘talked and read and listened all at once, hungry for everything from the new American women’s movement, yet inspired by our original selves’.14 Along with the books and ideas from overseas came the idea of Women’s Liberation houses, which were quickly established in major cities around Australia. These houses became central to the dissemination of ideas and the emerging discourses of Australian feminism. The Canberra house, for example, ‘became the explosive centre of an explosive new movement’, and a centre of feminist discursive production.15 For Pat Eatock, who actually lived in the meeting room of the Canberra Women’s House for several weeks, it seemed that: Hardly an evening passed without some sort of meeting, with twenty to sixty women. Consciousness-raising was a twice-weekly event. General meetings, action groups, and the embryonic Women’s Electoral Lobby had a weekly time and space. Days were filled with the comings and goings of newsletter production, the preparation of leaflets, classes in screen printing, the establishment of the feminist library, or just dropping in.16 To really take its place as a force for social, cultural and political change in Australia, however, the second-wave women’s movement had to ensure that its discourses and ideas were spread to the wider community. The discourses of the new movement were spread through the media, via word of mouth, in consciousness-raising sessions, and in the literature produced by the movement itself including journals such as Mejane, Refractory Girl, Vashti’s Voice, Hecate and Scarlet Woman, as well as the regular newsletters produced by the various Women’s Liberation groups around the country.17 Zelda D’Aprano recalls that women ‘depended on’ the Women’s Liberation newsletter in Melbourne, contending that engaging with the content of the newsletter strengthened feminists’ ‘feeling of belonging, our feeling of togetherness, and enhanced our bond with one another’.18 The discourses of women’s liberation also began to flow into the public domain through a turbulent relationship between the movement and the media (that continues in Australia and elsewhere to this day) and also through a renaissance of feminist culture including fiction, poetry, visual arts, film and theatre, as is discussed further in Chapter 7 of this book.19 Suzanne Spunner recalls the feeling of ‘solidarity and discovery’ that arose in the audience of the 1975 Women’s Film Festival as it dawned on participants ‘how politicising an effect cinema can have’.20 For Summers such events provided the: . . . sheer relief of having the world interpreted through women’s eyes in writing, songs, paintings and films, especially when the works were wickedly iconoclastic, [and] was a mighty antidote to a lifetime of seeing everything through the male gaze . . .21

Discursive politics 41 This publicity and artistic expression enabled the spread of feminist ideas to women outside the early circles of women’s liberation. It was from this early engagement in feminist discourse and cultural production, that in sessions devoted to consciousness-raising that women often made the ‘transition to feminism’ suggested by Connell above.

Consciousness-raising Another idea to arrive from North America and Britain along with the radical insights of feminist theory was the ‘new feminist political form’ known as consciousness-raising, as noted in Chapter 1.22 Consciousness-raising groups sprang up rapidly all over the country, providing many women with their first experiences not only of feminism, but also of commonality and a tentative solidarity with other women that often spurred them into action.23 The purpose of consciousness-raising was to allow women to develop an understanding of the ways in which the problems that they experienced as individuals were both shared by many other women and socially produced.24 This ‘new interpretive framework’ allowed many women to make sense of their lives in new ways and in terms that did not degrade their feelings and experiences.25 Soon known simply as CR, consciousness-raising allowed women to discuss deeply personal issues, involving taboo subjects such as sex and sexuality, marriage, and moral values.26 D’Aprano recalls the impact that CR had for the women in her networks: We had to acknowledge all the shit we carried around in our heads and hearts and, in doing this through CR, we were able to come to life . . . [W]e realised that our pain was not a personal problem but a social problem and therefore political; we realised this could only be changed when working together. It was our sharing of intimate experiences which bonded us together.27 This new mode of discursive production was powerful. Summers remembers that while there were many variations in the way that consciousness-raising was organised, it was ‘the outcome [that] counted: women redefining themselves and their possibilities, learning who they really were and could become. . . .’28 For women new to the movement consciousness-raising meant ‘taking ourselves seriously as women’ (emphasis in original) for the first time.29 Many women found that consciousness-raising delivered the liberation that the Women’s Liberation movement promised, at least in their own psyches. Some, like Eatock found that through consciousness-raising she came to ‘realise a new and autonomous self ’.30 Consciousness-raising worked not only to develop the discursive politics of the women’s movement, but also to fundamentally change women’s expectations of their lives in ways that would leave a lasting, if complicated, legacy.

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Sisterhood and the intersectional challenge One highly significant aspect of women’s movement discourse to emerge in the 1970s was the ideal of sisterhood. In part this early emphasis on sisterhood was due to the perception that it was politically necessary to speak with a united women’s voice; to speak as ‘sisters’ who shared common experiences and challenges. But the goals of sisterhood were also seen as an end in themselves. Gisela Kaplan argues that developing a sense of sisterhood was a core aspiration from the beginning of the movement to ‘unite women, to create an egalitarian, horizontal network of sisterhood, of bonds that would be emotional, social and political and would transcend traditional status associations’.31 For many women being a part of the ‘sisterhood’ was emotionally exhilarating and, as the slogan suggested, very powerful. According to Katy Reade the concept and practice of sisterhood was ‘seductive’ to many women who came to believe that the way to overcome women’s oppression was through the creation of unity among all women.32 Anne Summers recalls the significance that the notion of sisterhood had for her in the early 1970s: As we met and talked and planned and did things together, something surprising began to happen. It became apparent that we were leaving behind our traditional, instilled competitiveness and even dislike of most other women and were learning to value and appreciate each other. We began to seek out and take pleasure in each other’s company, often in preference to men’s, and to hold women-only social events. Not just conferences and meetings but dances and parties, too. This was more than just friendship. It was – there was now a word for it – sisterhood . . . there was an exponential political benefit from women coming together to fight their oppression.33 Yet while sisterhood proved to be exhilarating for many women, it did not take long for problems with this ideal to emerge in consciousness-raising groups and other forums. Underlying the notion of sisterhood was a belief in ‘the sameness of all women’s experiences of oppression at the hands of men’, enhanced, for example, by experiences such as working-class Women’s Action Coalition activist Zelda D’Aprano’s discovery (and surprise) that a middle-class university Women’s Liberation group shared the same concerns as the members of her organisation.34 Such insights led to the ideology of sisterhood becoming dominant in many Women’s Liberation collectives. Oppression on the basis of sex and gender was believed to be experienced in a similar way by all women, and was considered more central and important than class or race-based oppressions. Thus, other voices were not heard; ‘Differences and dissension from the dominant were defined as being threatening to the supposed solidarity of “sisters” .’35 Even in the often antagonistic relationship between Women’s Liberation and the Women’s Electoral Lobby, both groups ‘sought an adherence to the principle of an all-embracing sisterhood’ in order to play down any public or media perception of dissension and difference within or between groups in the women’s movement.36 Bellamy points out, however, that even at the time:

Discursive politics 43 Our feeling and belief in sisterhood and support for one another was a tactical necessity, rather than a practical reality. We were none of us in such good shape to offer the kind of caring you need in such times. We did what we could, found our priorities, acted out our differences from one another.37 But while some deep differences between women may have been ‘acted out’, as Bellamy suggests, it is also evident that in some profound ways these differences were suppressed, creating tension and resentment among women in (and outside of ) the movement who felt that their experiences were being ignored or marginalised. What the discourse of sisterhood ignored is that any social movement collective identity is contingent, created discursively and politically among and within groups of activists. Tensions around movement identity, as ‘sisters’ or any other collective, is not just a feature of feminist movement identity, but a feature of any social movement. The discursive production of the ‘sisterhood’ was thus as partial as any other movement identity, and as vulnerable as any other to reproducing wider social oppressions no matter how much care was taken by movement participants to avoid just that. Over time, the desire for a discursive sisterhood in the women’s movement gradually came to be understood as an untenable and even undesirable proposition. At meetings and other gatherings, more and more women found that the dominant perspectives expressed by the early second-wave movement did not include them nor reflect their experiences. Bulbeck describes the resulting debates over whether the women’s movement had served women other than those of Anglo, middle-class backgrounds as some of ‘the most vitriolic and long-lasting . . . within feminist scholarship’.38 The auto-critique that emerged from this new understanding, and that characterised later second-wave feminism, was profound and difficult but also resulted in what Reade describes as a: . . . metamorphosis of the overall politics of the women’s movement from one which assumes a homogeneity of all women’s experience of oppression at the hands of a common enemy, to one which acknowledges, in a positive way, the existence and significance of difference.39 In the 1970s, however, as Lake (among many others) notes, ‘claiming to speak for women, feminists inevitably courted objections from all sorts of women that they didn’t speak for them’.40 The recognition of differences among women, particularly differences to do with class, sexuality and ‘race’ made manifest the differences in power and privilege that existed as much in the women’s movement as they did in the rest of the community. While ‘Sisterhood is powerful’ remained a potent political slogan, Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval-Davis have also pointed out that ‘ “Sisterhood” can also be misleading unless contextualised’.41 In Australia and elsewhere, black women, women of colour, Indigenous women, migrant women, working-class women, lesbians, women with disabilities and women of other minorities pointed out the multitude of ways in which the language of ‘sisterhood’ marginalised and invisibilised the specificity of their lived experiences.

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In response, from at least the 1970s, the women’s movement encouraged the organisation of what at the time were called ‘double-disadvantaged’ groups of women, in order that their voices could be heard in the policy process. These efforts were evident in consultation and advisory structures set up by femocrats. The National Women’s Consultative Council, for example, was the first federal government advisory body to reflect the proportion of Australians of non-English speaking background in the wider population.42 Continuing to simply call for unity and sisterhood came to be seen as a dangerous strategy that was blind to the power relationships between women with differing experiences of oppression and exclusion. Class was certainly one axis of difference between women that was hotly debated in the movement. It has been widely argued that the Australian women’s movement was predominantly middle-class in constituency and therefore primarily represented the interests of this group.43 But arguments such as that made by Kaplan, that ‘enlisting working-class women in their struggle lent weight to the cause’ but did little to benefit them are contested by others such as Sue Wills, a long-term member of the Sydney Women’s Liberation collective.44 Wills argues that: Such speculation either writes out of the history of the women’s movement altogether the actual active involvement of working-class women or, perhaps more offensively, reduces their involvement to the role of dupes, conned by their more educated sisters into lending their working-class credentials to the movement. It is also hard to see how equal pay, changes to sexual assault laws, and access to safe, affordable abortions for example, benefit middle-class women only.45 Zelda D’Aprano argues that it was in the act of joining the women’s movement that working-class women became invisible: As more and more women enter the Movement and become aware and articulate, they cease to be seen as working class and the cry continues, ‘Where are the working-class women?’46 Despite this view, however, some working-class women who did join the movement still found that where they had joined to ‘struggle in solidarity with women against women’s oppression’ they were actually struggling ‘against some women over class oppression’, and the emergence of academic feminism had the effect of reinforcing the image of feminism as a middle-class concern.47 Alongside these concerns with class, the presence of lesbians in the women’s movement posed another significant challenge to the idea of a feminist sisterhood. Many lesbians in the movement felt that their presence and their perspectives were denied due, in part, to what they saw as the heteronormativity, even homophobia, of many heterosexual feminists. There was a strong desire by many non-lesbian women to hide the presence of lesbians altogether ‘in the interest of being taken

Discursive politics 45 seriously by the media, and hence the general public’.48 This issue came to a head at the Women’s Liberation Conference held at Mount Beauty in Victoria in 1973, at which the Hobart Women’s Action Group presented a paper charging their heterosexual ‘sisters’ with sexism and homophobia. The authors provided a ‘catalogue’ of their experiences of sexism within the women’s movement: 1 Being called a bull dyke for speaking out at Gay Lib/Women’s Lib session on sexism. 2 Having one’s consciousness ‘raised’ by a discussion on how to cope with being called ‘that horrible name’ at our first women’s lib meeting. 3 Being told to keep out of the movement because ‘some women won’t come if lesbians are there, and those women shouldn’t be put off because Women’s Liberation is for all women.’ 4 Having to change the pronouns at consciousness-raising meetings (or just shut up) for the above session. 5 Being told you’re simply a media problem. (Remember?) 6 Standing on the edge of the dance floor at a Women’s Lib party knowing that sisterhood is only for straight sisters. 7 Throwing yourself into the child care/pram, bus, struggle to prove you haven’t got any interests of your own. 8 Being told to ‘come out’ and risk your job (if you’re honest) and then working flat out to help other women get jobs of their own. 9 Being told lesbianism is a ‘passing phase’ in women’s lib. 10 Finding out that the lady you’re in bed with is a ‘real woman’ (liberated variety) and you’re only a hardened lesbian (sick variety).49 The paper was received with anger and hostility and many women at the conference were ‘shocked at the possibility that they had assumed the role of possible oppressors of women’.50 Some women felt that the influence of American lesbian feminist theory was having a destructive effect through its assertions that heterosexual women could not be proper feminists because their sexuality demanded that they continue to put men first. This theoretical position proposed that lesbianism had ‘political implications’ and that rather than a mere choice it should be understood as ‘a revolutionary rejection of all male-defined institutions’.51 Some heterosexual feminists felt that they were being labelled as ‘traitors’ because they continued to have personal relationships with men. The Hobart women, however, felt that the ‘near-hysterical reception’ that the paper received at Mount Beauty in itself ‘confirmed the allegation of sexism’ that they had made.52 Certainly the reaction to the Hobart women’s paper was a watershed that marked what Elizabeth Reid (who attended the conference) calls: . . . an important milestone in the growing-up of the movement. There [at the conference] we had attempted to clarify the meaning for us of notions of sisterhood, of claims that the personal is political . . . It was the beginning of the formulation of an ideology of praxis.53

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But Anne Summers, who was also at the Mount Beauty conference, remembers the feeling that: The euphoria arising from the shared experience of self-discovery, which had characterised some earlier Women’s Liberation meetings had been shattered. Most of us left Mount Beauty feeling deeply troubled; we were beginning to realise that many of the pat theories and ideas we had entertained for the past two or three years were no longer adequate.54 With these challenges from working-class women and lesbians came further challenges from women who felt that the women’s movement did not – and should not – speak for them. The feminist commitment to developing new understandings of the nature of women’s oppression as women often led to a distinct colour blindness regarding the ways in which groups like Aboriginal women and women from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds were oppressed, excluded and discriminated against on the basis of their racial or cultural backgrounds. The membership of both WEL and Women’s Liberation was predominantly Anglo-Celtic and many women who had just learned how to articulate their own status as the oppressed were unable to see themselves in the role of oppressors to other groups of women. Early second-wave Australian feminists seemed unable to see feminism as ‘historically embedded in white/Western/ liberal culture’ and the historically specific power relationships that that implies.55 While Lake maintains that ‘those in the 1970s women’s movement agonised about their own privilege and the clear differences in condition between women . . . and they were always keen to bring them into their ranks’56 (emphasis added), she, like many others, goes on to acknowledge that the women’s movement was simply irrelevant for many women who were ‘more interested in liberating their own people’.57 Many Indigenous women were able to articulate quite clearly what was wrong with the white feminist analysis for ‘other’ women. Jackie Huggins, for example, has argued that white feminists demonstrated insensitivity towards Australia’s colonial history: In asking Aboriginal women to stand apart from Aboriginal men, the white women’s movement was, perhaps unconsciously, repeating the attempts made over decades by welfare administrators to separate Aboriginal women and use them against their communities. While there were Aboriginal women who were deeply aware of the politics of sexism, many reacted with anger at the limited awareness of racism shown by the white women’s movement.58 For many white women in the women’s movement this point of view seemed threatening, and in their rush to deny their racism they often ignored what women in other movements were telling them. As Lynette Morris argues, white feminists did not recognise ‘the majority of Indigenous women who actively

Discursive politics 47 fight each day of their lives to keep their families and communities together’.59 Heather Goodall and Jackie Huggins point out that ‘in their enthusiasm to be anti-racist, white women simply invited Aboriginal women to join their movement, with little apparent recognition of the full horror of racism in Australia’.60 Aileen Moreton-Robinson points out that despite these ‘overtures . . . whiteness remained centred and dominant’ in the women’s movement.61 As Lilla Watson remembers: Women’s liberation voices got louder, they were heard more clearly, their messages straighter. I listened, got it straight in my head but not my heart; there was something wrong . . . Then it finally began to dawn on me that when white women speak of women’s liberation, they speak only of white women’s liberation, and rightly so. But they don’t make it clear. They talk and write as if they are speaking for all women.62 White feminists were not deaf to these concerns, and once they realised that joining existing organisations did not accord with Aboriginal women’s political aspirations, many white women’s organisations made efforts to support Aboriginal women to form their own organisations, although with mixed results. Still, organisations like the Women’s Electoral Lobby ‘remained persistent’ in their efforts to support Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women’s political struggles.63 Over time, criticisms of the women’s movement as exclusionary, manufacturing an artificial sisterhood that ignored the specificity of many women’s experiences, came together in what has become known as the intersectional critique. Intersectional analysis helped to ‘illuminate the complex relationship between gender, race, class, and the democratic state’.64 The theoretical formulation of intersectionality first emerged in the United States, where black women and women of colour were articulating similar criticisms to those articulated by Indigenous women, immigrant women and lesbians in Australia. In 1991, Kimberlé Crenshaw’s groundbreaking formulation of ‘intersectionality’ gave a name to these critiques, highlighting the challenges involved in intersectional activism, where ‘ignoring difference within groups contributes to tension among groups’.65 Intersectionality theory suggested new ways to set the political agenda for the women’s movement, and intersectional theorists were critical both of ‘additive strategies’, such as the ‘double-disadvantaged women’ discussed above, as well as of discursive strategies such as consciousness-raising, which, they contended, had ‘brought attention to the disadvantaged aspect of middle-class, white women’s lives while mostly leaving the privileged aspects as “invisible norms” ’.66 Thus, a discursive strategy intended to build the movement’s strength had the unintended consequence of threatening feminists’ ability to create ‘transformative egalitarian coalitions’.67 As Ange-Marie Hancock has argued: . . . while consciousness-raising worked phenomenally well for white, middle-class women, many other women who were poor, women of color,

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Sarah Maddison lesbians, or any and all of the above were demobilized by such activities. Women of color in particular resisted the notion that gender functioned analogously to race. They did not believe that a movement that focused only on gender applied to them.68

The intersectional critique does not quite capture the whole story of diversity and collective identity in women’s movements. For example, Myra Marx Feree and Beth Hess point to a more complicated scenario, drawing on public opinion data from the 1970s and 1980s that showed greater numbers of AfricanAmerican women holding favourable views towards the women’s movement than did white women, although this in turn is likely to be based on another subgroup of women, sole parents, who benefited from feminist policy reforms.69 Nevertheless, as S. Laurel Weldon argues (based on analysis of US data), it seems there is a positive relationship between separate organising by women of colour and other minority groups, and the overall strength of the women’s movement, which, in turn, produces greater policy responsiveness from government. This confounds some critics of the intersectional paradigm, who have suggested that so-called ‘identity politics’ has a fracturing and weakening effect on movements and movement outcomes.70 But while the political effect of intersectional organising may be positive, the impact of intersectional thinking on women’s movement collective identity (in Australia and elsewhere) was profound. New understandings of difference and diversity were crucially important, but at the same time they led many to question the viability and sustainability of a collective feminist identity and movement. For Australian feminists, the political implications were complex. On the one hand, feminist activists recognised the political imperative of a single entity known as ‘the women’s movement’ that could continue to lobby government and have a voice in the media. At the same time, the overwhelming desire for sisterhood and solidarity that had characterised the second-wave movement’s early days became quite stifling for many women, and the divisions that had always existed along the faultlines of class, ‘race’ and sexuality appeared to some to pose a threat to the movement as a whole. Feminist activists had to grapple with the reality that a useful strategic unity could only ever be partial, that it would often necessitate exclusions, and that the need to acknowledge intersecting experiences of disadvantage among women would require a more nuanced and sophisticated discourse than was often possible in the heat of political struggle. But this more nuanced discourse was not without beneficial political effect. Feminist activists in the 1980s and 1990s worked to bring together broad coalitions of women’s organisations, representing a great diversity of women, in order to highlight the differential effects of various policy regimes – such as the introduction of a consumption tax, or the impact of enterprise bargaining – in the lives of differently positioned groups of women. At the same time, academic feminism took up the challenges of intersectionality with gusto, stimulating a project of feminist auto-critique that became a hallmark of the women’s

Discursive politics 49 movement in the 1980s and 1990s. While the more straightforward discourse of ‘sisterhood’ may have contributed to the appeal and visibility of the early second wave, greater attention to diversity and difference in the decades that followed, saw the growth of separate organising among different group of women, with lasting, and positive, outcomes. Nevertheless, despite the many challenges and stumbles that a discursive feminist politics encountered, and with which many feminists still grapple, it seems evident that the work of the movement to change women’s understandings of the world and their experiences through talk and text has also profoundly changed their expectations about women’s lives. It would be true to say that this effect has not been experienced by all women in the same way or to the same extent; the intersectional challenge remains. But for very many women, and not only white, middle-class, heterosexual women, expectations of what life should be like are profoundly different now than they were in the 1960s and 1970s, not least because the women’s movement has changed the way that women think and talk about their lives.

Changed expectations Contemporary studies of feminist generational change suggest that during the 1970s and 1980s women continued to feel constrained by the mere fact that they were women. Life choices and opportunities appeared limited by gender constraints and, for many, feminist politics was a means of challenging these constraints, both in their own lives and for their daughters in the future.71 From the expanding awareness that blossomed in consciousness-raising sessions and through other modes of feminist discourse, women’s movement activists began advancing cultural and institutional agendas that would fundamentally change both the political landscape and women’s expectations for their own lives. Everingham et al. draw on empirical data to suggest the changing expectations of women who came of age before and after the second wave of the women’s movement in Australia.72 For the older cohort, their research found that: The majority of older women, across social strata, grew up expecting that they would be mothers and that their early jobs after leaving school would simply fill the gap until then (cf. Bulbeck, 1997). They did not, in general, look past being mothers when they chose their first job. Getting a job after school was simply a way of getting money and some degree of economic independence from their families until marriage.73 Many of these women did go on to work after becoming mothers, but faced a range of social pressures in doing so, tending to shoulder the ‘double burden’ so that ‘nothing changed at home’ in order to ensure that any impact on husband or children was minimised. There was little expectation that they could be both mothers and workers, and if they were, their role as working women remained subordinate to their domestic lives.

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Sarah Maddison In contrast, women in the younger age cohort: . . . across all social strata, left school expecting to do both – work and be a mother. Unlike their mothers’ generation, these young women did not expect that a man was going to provide for them economically for the rest of their lives. If well educated and aspiring towards a career, they expected that this would continue after motherhood. Young women without career aspirations also expected to work after becoming mothers, to contribute to their family’s income. The roles of ‘mother’ and ‘worker’ are not understood by this generation of young women as separate, but enmeshed.74

Interestingly, however, the young women in this study did not use feminist gender equity discourse to explain the multiple pressures and continuing constraints in their lives as, for the most part, they no longer saw these as gendered. Indeed, younger women tended not to explain the constraints on their choices as related to their gender. Rather, changed expectations meant it was taken for granted that gender was not, or at least should not, be a factor that limited their lives in any way.75 Rather, feminism and the women’s movement were sometimes blamed for these stresses, with an homogenous and oppressive notion of feminism now associated with a view that everyone, including mothers, had to work. Thus, rather than being understood as having expanded life choices, the women’s movement was blamed for creating ‘unrealistic expectations’ that women ‘should do everything’.76 Or, as Deborah Siegel has suggested, while the women’s movement remains evident in both organisations and activism, younger women today may not ‘experience the direct support of a movement behind them’. Without this sense of belonging to, or being backed by, a wider movement ‘the reasons women still can’t have it all – fulfilling career, committed relationship, kids – seem, as in the days before Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique, merely “personal” ’.77 This more critical contemporary interpretation of feminist discursive politics does not, of course, mean that gendered inequalities are no longer relevant in women’s lives. Structural inequalities remain that have profound effects on women’s lives, particularly on the lives of women with children. Stevenson et al. found that among the cohorts in their research, young mothers tend to express a belief in gender equality while also continuing to organise their working lives around the needs of their children, in much the same way that earlier generations of women did. What has changed for them are the social expectations and negative perceptions concerned with combining paid work and motherhood, which young women no longer experience as a collective. Rather, the young women in Stevenson et al.’s study experience the tensions associated with juggling work as family as ‘individuals who happen to be women’.78 They cite research by Rich, who suggests that young women are more likely to adopt the individualistic discourse of neoliberalism, while simultaneously advancing a feminist discourse.79 As Everingham et al. note: . . . the role of gender in defining young women’s life choices is more complex than it was in their mothers’ day. The very success of the women’s

Discursive politics 51 movement has opened up a greater diversity of lifestyle choices, which interact with gender identity and class factors in ways that make the gender equity discourses of their mother’s generation unconvincing as a narrative to explain the constraints on their life choices.80 This suggests that young women are not necessarily hostile to feminist politics, as will be discussed further in Chapter 9 of this book. But it does underscore that the discursive legacy of the second-wave women’s movement is a complex phenomenon. While women’s expectations have change profoundly since the 1970s, their lived experiences are still marked by structured gender inequalities, even though these are not necessarily recognised as such. Rather, feminism is sometimes blamed for putting too much pressure on women to ‘do it all.’ As Chilla Bulbeck argues, representations of women’s equality in the mainstream media are often bound up in images of the ‘can do’ girl or ‘top girl’, reveling in educational achievement and a stellar career.81 The ways in which these changed expectations have played out in the media, however, has tended to diminish the women’s movement’s appeal to younger women, many of whom buy the media message that the goals of the women’s movement have now all been achieved, rendering the movement a thing of the past.

Conclusion Feminist activists do not make a choice to engage in either discursive politics or institutional politics. It is more likely that women involved in one type of activism will also be involved in the other. The same women’s movement activists may be organising festivals and other cultural events, volunteering in a women’s movement organisation, and lobbying to change some aspect of government policy.82 Changing the discourse and changing policy can go hand in hand, and the legacies of both kinds of activism are felt throughout women’s movements today. But cultural activism and discursive political engagement should also be recognised as important and valid activism in and of themselves. Feminist discourse has been powerful in changing women’s expectations for their lives. These means of engagement can be highly accessible, creating room for debate and contestation among a wide range of women, even when some of this debate suggests that feminism is now ‘blamed’ for some of the struggles that women are experiencing in combining paid work and family responsibilities. Critical discourse such as this suggests an important terrain for movement contestation, ensuring that feminist discourse will continue to push at the edges of the social constraints on women’s lives.

Notes 1 Connell, ‘Long marches across the landscape of gender’, p. 380. 2 Katzenstein, ‘Discursive politics and feminist activism in the Catholic Church’; Katzenstein, Faithful and fearless.

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3 Katzenstein, Faithful and fearless, p. 17; Katzenstein, ‘Discursive politics and feminist activism in the Catholic Church’, p. 35. 4 Young, Changing the wor(l)d, p. 13. 5 Ibid., p. 23. 6 Lombardo, Meier and Verloo, ‘Stretching and bending gender equality’, p. 10. 7 Young, Changing the wor(l)d, p. 17. 8 Mansbridge, ‘What is the feminist movement?’, pp. 28–31. 9 Reade, ‘Struggling to be heard’, p. 203. 10 Summers, Ducks on the pond, p. 259. 11 Kaplan, The meagre harvest, p. 33. 12 D’Aprano, Zelda, p. 220. 13 Lake, Getting equal, p. 233. 14 Bellamy, ‘Freedom from unreal loyalties’, p. 189. 15 Ryan, Catching the waves, p. 127. 16 Eatock, ‘There’s a snake in my caravan’, p. 25. 17 Curthoys, ‘Doing it for themselves’, p. 435; Lake, Getting equal; Reade, ‘Struggling to be heard’. 18 D’Aprano, Zelda, p. 314. 19 Curthoys, ‘Doing it for themselves’. 20 Spunner quoted in D’Aprano, Zelda, p. 353. 21 Summers, Ducks on the pond, p. 284. 22 Lake, Getting equal, p. 233. 23 Bulbeck, Living feminism, p. 129. 24 Curthoys, ‘Doing it for themselves’. 25 Lake, Getting equal, p. 233. 26 Kaplan, The meagre harvest, p. 78. 27 D’Aprano, Zelda, pp. 312–313. 28 Summers, Ducks on the pond, p. 271. 29 Ward, ‘On being late’, p. 78. 30 Eatock, ‘There’s a snake in my caravan’, p. 26. 31 Kaplan, The meagre harvest, p. 16. 32 Reade, ‘Struggling to be heard’. 33 Summers, Ducks on the pond, pp. 270–271. 34 Reade, ‘Struggling to be heard’, p. 205. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid., p. 208. 37 Bellamy, ‘Freedom from unreal loyalties’, p. 191. 38 Bulbeck, Living feminism, p. 6. 39 Reade, ‘Struggling to be heard’, p. 199. 40 Lake, Getting equal, p. 266. 41 Anthias and Yuval-Davis, ‘Contextualizing feminism’, p. 62. 42 Sawer, Sisters in suits, p. 119. 43 Dixson, ‘Gender, class and the women’s movements in Australia 1890, 1980’; Kalantzis, ‘Ethnicity meets gender meets class in Australia’; Kaplan, The meagre harvest. 44 Kaplan, The meagre harvest, p. 200. 45 Wills, ‘Review of The meagre harvest: The Australian women’s movement 1950–1990 by Gisela Kaplan’, p. 6. 46 D’Aprano, Zelda, p. 332. 47 Reade, ‘Struggling to be heard’, pp. 216–217. 48 Ibid., p. 213. 49 Hobart Women’s Action Group, ‘Sexism and the women’s liberation movement’, pp. 30–31. 50 Reade, ‘Struggling to be heard’, p. 213.

Discursive politics 53 51 Ibid., p. 214. 52 Hobart Women’s Action Group, ‘Sexism and the women’s liberation movement’, p. 30. 53 Reid, ‘The child of our movement: A movement of women’, p. 13. 54 Summers, Ducks on the pond, p. 283. 55 Lake, Getting equal, p. 275. 56 Ibid., p. 248. 57 Ibid., p. 250. 58 Huggins, Sister girl, p. 27. 59 Morris, ‘Black sistas’, p. 203. 60 Goodall and Huggins, ‘Aboriginal women are everywhere’, pp. 401–402. 61 Moreton-Robinson, Talkin’ up to the white woman, p. 106. 62 Watson, ‘Sister, black is the colour of my soul’, p. 51. 63 Sawer, Making women count, p. 58. 64 Weldon, When protest makes policy, p. 83. 65 Crenshaw, ‘Mapping the margins’, p. 1242. 66 Hancock, Solidarity politics for millenials, p. 47. 67 Ibid., pp. 9–10. 68 Ibid., p. 9. 69 Ferree and Hess, Controversy and coalition, p. 89. 70 Weldon, When protest makes policy, pp. 126–127. 71 Stevenson, Everingham and Robinson, ‘Choices and life chances’. 72 Everingham, Stevenson and Warner-Smith, ‘Things are getting better all the time?’ 73 Ibid., pp. 424–425. 74 Ibid., p. 427. 75 Stevenson, Everingham and Robinson, ‘Choices and life chances’, p. 135. 76 Everingham, Stevenson and Warner-Smith, ‘Things are getting better all the time?’ pp. 430–431. 77 Siegel, Sisterhood, interrupted, p. 5. 78 Everingham, Stevenson and Warner-Smith, ‘Things are getting better all the time?’ 79 Rich, ‘Young women, feminist identities and neo-liberalism’. 80 Everingham, Stevenson and Warner-Smith, ‘Things are getting better all the time?’ p. 421. 81 Bulbeck, ‘You learn about feminists but they’re all like years old’; Harris, Future girl; McRobbie, ‘Postfeminism and popular culture’. 82 Redfern and Aune, Reclaiming the F word, p. 191.

4

Taking to the streets Catherine Strong and Kirsty McLaren

When and why have women taken to the streets? Over the life of the women’s movement in Australia, there have been thousands of protests across the country, covering a wide array of issues. From dressing as men and staging noisy sit-ins in bars that refused to serve female patrons, to creating a women-only peace camp at a missile base in the outback, to more straight-forward marches on any and all issues relating to women’s rights, Australian women have been creative and passionate about bringing their causes into the public eye. The previous chapter explored the discursive aspects of the women’s movement: the ideas and meaning created by women’s movement actors over time. This chapter examines the embodiment and communication of those ideas through protest. It draws on a new protest event database to present both a bird’s-eye view of feminist protest between 1970 and 2005, and case studies of specific events. As protests are a vital part of the story of the women’s movement, this chapter seeks to address three interrelated questions: When and how have women protested publicly? To what extent were those protests noticed and reported? And how can social scientists reconstruct and analyse those protests? Protests are a public and disruptive demonstration of political dissent. They are the most dramatic and visible way for social movements to make their claims, and to assert themselves in the public sphere. Yet the public sphere – both the literal public spaces and the figurative dimensions of the media – is a huge realm, and one that everyone encounters differently. This makes historical and wide-ranging comparisons difficult: how do we know whether an observer’s sense of continuity or change in the prevalence of protest is accurate or representative? To map the four decades’ worth of protests that have been the focus of our research, we have used a quantitative method from the field of social movement studies known as protest event analysis.1 This method allows us to step back and see the wider patterns of protest around the country, observing continuity and change over the years. Our database has been constructed using the archives of the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) from 1970 onwards, and other similar publications accessible through the Factiva database, as well as the less mainstream publication Tribune. The Sydney Morning Herald is the oldest and one of the most widely-circulated Australian papers. Tribune, as described elsewhere in this chapter, was a publication of the Australian Communist Party.

Taking to the streets 55 Our method is further discussed in the Appendix. Analysing the protest database that we created allows us to identify when women’s movement protest has waxed and waned. For instance, the database shows us that feminist protest in Australia peaked in 1975 and 1982–1983. By the early 1990s, feminist protest was waning, but it has never disappeared. The database also illustrates the diversity of the Australian women’s movement, and the changing patterns within it. It shows, for instance, that feminist mobilisation has been especially strong in relation to reproductive rights, employment rights and peace and disarmament, and also highlights the places where there have been significant intersections between the women’s movement and other social movements. Scholars of social movements offer a number of different explanations to account for the changing levels of protest activity, and these data allows us to consider which explanations might be most accurate. However, the data collected also tell us a lot about whether and how the media reports protest events and what types of events are reported. To provide further understanding of the way women’s protest events were reported, a qualitative analysis of the articles on International Women’s Day has also been included in this chapter as a way of illustrating how the media framed these events. Although we are analysing media coverage here, it is worth noting that protest also has internal meanings that go beyond the desire to achieve that coverage. Donatella della Porta has written of the cognitive, relational and emotional mechanisms that combine to create the ‘transformative capacity of protest’.2 Participants may be motivated by a sense of moral duty, or the ties of collective identity, at least as much as they are by the desire to publicise the movement’s demands. For example, Kirsty McLaren found that Right to Life activists seemed fulfilled by the sense that they were doing their duty, even while they knew their protests were unlikely to persuade others to share their convictions.3 Deborah Gould4 has challenged the dichotomous view of political goal-seeking versus emotional meaning in her insightful analysis of HIV/AIDS activism, arguing that standing vigil for deceased friends was both a public and emotional act that could not be reduced to instrumental politics. It is not only that the moral, social and emotional dimensions of protest coexist with the instrumental goal of publicising the movement’s concerns, but in many cases these dimensions are inextricably combined.

The rise of feminist protest The database depicts the rapid – and visible – rise of women’s movement protest during the early 1970s. Protest events, as reported in the Sydney Morning Herald, peaked in 1975 and again in 1982–1983 (Figure 4.1). The 1975 peak in reported events was clearly linked to the fact that it was International Women’s Year. Projects associated with the year, which were relatively well funded by the Australian government, appear to have brought about a new level of media awareness as well as sustaining momentum within the women’s movement. In fact, at times during the year the media was directly targeted by protesters in an attempt to change the way women and women’s issues were reported. For

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Figure 4.1 Women’s movement protest events reported in the Sydney Morning Herald, 1970–2005.

example, in September 1975 women occupied the offices of the Canberra Times to protest against sexist reporting on a conference being held on Women in Politics. This resulted in the paper printing the women’s response to the initial coverage. However, the trends in the reporting of women’s movement events in alternative media, as discussed below, are very different to the mainstream media, suggesting it was media attention rather than actual volume of protest that produced the peak in mainstream media during International Women’s Year (Figure 4.1). The second peak in activity in 1982–1983 was associated strongly with the activities of the women’s peace movement. The number of reported protests declined rapidly after the late 1980s, but protest events were still reported every year until 2005, the year our data collection ends. Employment issues, especially equal pay and equal opportunity, and reproductive rights, such as contraception and abortion, were major demands of the early 1970s (Figure 4.2). That these issues were central to women’s protest is unsurprising, given the importance of these concerns to the Australian women’s movement more generally. Topics such as equal pay and easy access to contraception and abortion were consistently central to the demands of women’s groups,5 and abortion in particular has continued to be a mobilising issue through to the present day. The peaks in protest activity around these issues often reflect women’s reactions to political events: for example, the 1982 peak on reproductive rights came from protests against NSW state government cuts to health services. This shows the way the database can be used to generate fine-grained analysis around particular issues. For further examples of this, please refer to the MAWM (Mapping the Australian Women’s Movement) website.6 Overwhelmingly the events in our database were reported in a way that suggested they were best characterised as ‘demonstrations’, that is, ‘standard’ protests,

Taking to the streets 57 30 Other issues Reproductive health

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Figure 4.2 Women’s movement protest events about reproductive rights and health, compared to other issues, Sydney Morning Herald, 1970–2005.

often using banners, placards, chants and speeches to communicate ideas. Of the 526 events recorded, 417 were demonstrations, with the remaining 109 being divided between vigils (n = 39), occupations (n = 29), civil disobedience (n = 8) and theatre (n = 5), with 29 protests not falling in one of these categories and being classified as ‘other’. This suggests that for the most part the women’s movement in Australia adopted tried and true methods of protesting in their attempts to disseminate their messages. While it is possible that non-conventional methods of protest may have been less likely to be reported, the peak of media interest that accompanied the peace protests of the early 1980s (discussed below) suggests that the opposite is true – at least if the non-conventional protests are confrontational and challenging to conventional gender roles. Of course, some women have taken to the streets in defence of the traditional gender order. The database used a slightly different definition to search for women’s protest than that used in the book as a whole to define the women’s movement (see Chapter 1 and the Appendix). Consequently, the database captured a small number of events such as an October 1983 demonstration at Parliament House in Canberra by ‘Women for the Family’, who were protesting against the Sex Discrimination Bill. There are other examples of women mobilising around traditional roles such as wives and home-makers, but the majority of events recorded are women’s movement events.

Visibility and invisibility: what factors influenced media coverage? Media coverage is fundamental to how the public and political actors perceive social movements’ presence. The 1983 peak in Sydney Morning Herald reports

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illustrates the way that different factors influence media coverage. The majority of the reported events were about the women’s peace movement, as the breakdown of issues shows (Figure 4.3). The women’s peace movement provides an excellent example of how social movements intersect and inter relate. The early 1980s saw high levels of mobilisation in the broader peace movement, and women’s peace protests attracted disproportionate media attention: the peaks in articles covering or discussing peace protests are even more pronounced. Sometimes this is because of the confrontational tactics used by protesters. This was the case when women used Anzac Day marches to highlight the issue of rape in war. Anzac Day commemorates an ill-fated landing by Australian and New Zealand troops at Gallipoli in 1915 and is regarded as one of the most solemn days of the year, a major celebration of patriotism. The appearance of women carrying banners about rape in war provoked strong reactions, including an ordinance to make it an offence to ‘give offence or cause insult’ to those taking part in an Anzac Day observance and the arrest of many of the women involved.7 The women’s peace movement used the repertoires of the wider peace movement, especially peace camps and vigils. However, women’s peace camps were regarded as especially noteworthy, and especially radical. Although in the SMH there were always slightly more articles than reported events, in 1983 this was exaggerated, with twice the number of articles than events. The very high number of articles in 1983 is attributable to women’s peace movement events of that year, which garnered a lot of coverage because of their use of novel forms of protest. The women’s peace camp at Pine Gap in 1983 was successful in gaining media attention partly because of the perceived sensation of activists declaring a ‘women only’ zone, as well as the ‘disorderly’ conduct of the women .

Taking to the streets 59 protesters and the exotic and highly symbolic location of the camps.8 One of the media reports described the women’s actions as follows: About a quarter of the women who have been demonstrating outside the gates (of the Pine Gap base) climbed the fence and held a mock Boston Tea Party singing ‘Tea for Two and We are Women, We are Strong – We say No to the Bomb’ and chanting ‘Take the Toys from the Boys and Take back Pine Gap’. After the women had held the tea party inside the fence they made a huge circle with others outside holding hands through the barbed wire. They sang and chanted . . .9 In their large-scale review of coverage of social movement organisations, Amenta et al. identified three criteria that usually determine whether an organisation’s concerns will be reported: size or scale; disruptiveness; and the political and policy context. They defined disruption as ‘illegal collective action or disruptive action such as strikes, boycotts, occupations, and unruly mass protests drawing the reaction of authorities, or collective action in which violence was involved, whether by the movement, authorities, or opponents of the movement’.10 As Paul Bagguley argues, this kind of disruptiveness is conventionally masculine, and thus women’s movement events, less likely to use such tactics, may not be covered.11 Yet this disproportionate coverage of women’s peace movement events shows that disruption of gender roles or social norms may also be sufficiently transgressive to gain media attention. Although quite small, the women’s peace movement was able to achieve high visibility. If the ‘political gimmick’ can be effective in evoking shock and hence publicity,12 disrupting gender norms has proven a sure way to shock. This is not to say that such shock has been a mere tactic. Gender norms have often been the very matters being challenged, and the ‘shocking’ acts perform or enact this challenge. Nonetheless, as well as attracting initial coverage, these novel or disruptive events almost demanded further analysis and comment, leading to repeat coverage in feature and opinion articles. A final factor to consider is the gender of journalists themselves. Bagguley hypothesises that the mostly male journalists might have their own selection bias, and be less likely to report on the women’s movement.13 Our database indicates that although historically under-represented in the profession, women journalists have been disproportionately involved in reporting on women’s movement events. This reflects international trends.14 Partly, this may be due to supervisors assigning ‘women’s issues’ to women; it may also indicate active attempts by women journalists to cover those events because of their belief that the events were newsworthy. Further research would be needed to gauge the relative impacts of these factors. It is important to remember that social movements are amorphous and intangible, large numbers of individuals and groups who share collective identities and ideas. Journalists, editors and media organisations are themselves part of society, and thus may be influenced by – or be part of – social movements. So

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media biases are important in shaping media reporting, but this analysis shows that these influences may operate in multiple ways.

A different story? Tribune Tribune was the weekly newspaper of the Australian Communist Party until the latter’s dissolution in 1991. As such, it had a very different agenda and audience than the SMH or other commercial mainstream newspapers, as well as having a considerably smaller circulation. Data from Tribune has not been incorporated into the main database for the analysis undertaken here; instead it has been kept separate to provide an alternative perspective on the information gathered. Comparing the events reported in Tribune to the events reported in the SMH, both in terms of numbers of events and their focus, gives greater insight into the activities of the women’s movement and the types of biases that may exist in reports on it. Figure 4.4 shows a comparison of women’s protest events reported on in Tribune as compared to the SMH data from the same period. The difference between the two is quite striking. Tribune consistently reported on more events than the SMH, in some years doubling or tripling the number in the SMH. The most marked differences in the overall trends of the two publications can be seen in the late 1970s and late1980s, when Tribune continues to report high numbers of events after the ‘peaks’ that occur in the SMH. Although Tribune and the SMH both show a decline in numbers of events towards the end of the 1980s the drop is far less severe in Tribune. The most obvious conclusion to be drawn from this data is that there were in fact many more protest events being held by women than the mainstream media reported. However, Figure 4.5 shows a somewhat different trend when the number of articles in each publication is compared. Although Tribune reported on many more events, for most of the years surveyed the overall number of articles in Tribune is quite close to, and often fewer than, those in the SMH. Until 1982 the women’s movement received very similar amounts of coverage from the two publications, as the SMH over-reported a smaller number of events while Tribune often covered a number of events in one article (see the IWD case study below for an example of this). After the very high level of coverage in the SMH in 1983 (associated with protest over uranium mining as discussed below) both publications begin to trend towards printing fewer articles on the women’s movement. However, the drop for Tribune is more gradual, and at this point the tendency for the SMH to have more articles on the women’s movement overall is reversed. This may suggest a certain amount of ‘fatigue’ with coverage of the women’s movement in the mainstream media, despite the fact that Tribune data show women continuing to stage events. The most important point from these comparisons is that the decline in mainstream media coverage preceded the decline in events. The fall in numbers of events being staged by women may have partly come about because their usefulness as a way of drawing attention to women’s issues was not as great if they had

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no impact beyond the actual participants and the immediate audience. For example, as we shall see below, continuing and sizable International Women’s Day marches ceased to attract significant coverage in the Sydney Morning Herald after 1975. For this reason, a shift in repertoires may have come about not because of ‘NGOization’ or entanglement in the state, as has sometimes been suggested, but because of the decline in media interest in women’s movement protest activity. Deprived of the reinforcing effects of publicity, numbers participating eventually fell. When looking at other aspects of the coverage of events in Tribune, there are similar trends in the themes that are reported there and in the SMH. As noted elsewhere in this chapter, the main themes noted in SMH reports are reproductive rights, employment and peace, and these are also the main themes in Tribune reports, although ‘equality’ also has high numbers. These trends are also similar to those observed in the SMH – for example, there are peaks for peace in 1983–1984, and reproductive rights are the focus of events mainly in the 1970s and early 1980s, but decline as an issue after this time. Tribune, unsurprisingly given its links to the Communist Party and labour movements, more often and more consistently reports events as having employment as their main theme, but the difference between the coverage of this issue in the two publications is not as great as may have been expected. This suggests that the issues that are being taken to the streets by the women’s movement are being more or less accurately reported when the events are given coverage.

Protest and institutions The decline in protest events charted in this database is reflected across society, affecting other social movements also. The disappearance of women from the

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streets, however, leads to questions about whether feminism is ‘over’, or about whether the women’s movement has lost its radicalism. It has also been suggested that the institutionalisation of the women’s movement can explain the decline of protest, because new institutions correct the previous failings of the political system, so that protest is no longer necessary. Moreover, it can be argued that formal institutions and professionalisation lead to ‘feminist fading’ (see Chapter 5). However, comparison of the protest database with Merrindahl Andrew’s institutions database, for example comparing the datasets for NSW, calls this into question. The peaks in protest and the establishment of new institutions in NSW seem roughly to correlate. That is, one did not follow the other. However, the database contains numerous examples of events that were supported by institutions, especially by sexual assault centres. Looking at protests about sexual assault and violence against women, and comparing these to the establishment and cumulative numbers of sexual assault centres and women’s refuges, shows a different picture (Figure 4.6). On this issue, protests increased after the establishment of institutions, so the story is more complicated than might at first appear. These data suggest a need to question any direct relationship between women’s movement institutionalisation and a decline in protest activity. At least some of the time, institutions have participated in and even sustained protest events. Indeed a trend observed in the media coverage of giving advance notice of events seems to be linked to the role of women’s institutions in organising and publicising events such as International Women’s Day and Reclaim the Night. The professionalisation and resources that accompanied institutionalisation, whether in the form of women’s policy agencies or funded women’s services, have likely made it easier for the women’s movement to garner coverage. 60

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In South Australia, for example, the Office for Women was largely responsible for the revival of Reclaim the Night marches in 2006 (Figure 4.7).

International Women’s Day International Women’s Day has been celebrated annually for over 100 years, usually around 8 March. While the form of IWD activities and the main message associated with the day has shifted over time, during the time covered by this database IWD has been closely linked to the concerns and goals of the women’s liberation movement.15 We have analysed the data on IWD in two ways: first, in a quantitative manner by looking at the number of events reported, in which years and in which publications; and second in a more qualitative manner by using discourse analysis to examine the contents of the articles from the mainstream publications only, to determine how IWD was framed and how this might have changed over time. From 1970 to 2005, there are reports on IWD in 31 years, with a total of 104 events recorded, almost all of which were demonstrations. However, coverage in the Sydney Morning Herald and other mainstream papers is quite sporadic, despite increasing after the Factiva database allows searching of publications beyond the SMH. There is coverage of IWD in almost every year; however, no mainstream publications cover IWD every year, and on only three occasions does the same publication publish on the event two years running (the SMH in 1975 and 1976, then 1991 and 1992 and the Illawarra Mercury in 2002 and 2003). Coverage in Tribune is much more consistent, which is unsurprising given the close links between IWD and the Communist movement.16 The paper

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tends to run multiple stories on IWD each year, a minority of which are articles noting that events are upcoming. Overall, Tribune covered 86 events until its closure in 1991, as compared to only 30 in mainstream papers across the entire time covered. Tribune’s coverage of IWD is one of the reasons the paper has so many more events reported than the SMH, as each individual march or event is counted (that is, if there are reports on IWD events in five cities across Australia, in the database this counts as five events). The inclusion of Tribune data here gives a clear demonstration of the way continuing feminist activity may not be at all accurately reflected in media coverage, and also of the way the agenda and background of a media source can have an impact on what it publishes. The information from the Factiva database and Tribune shows IWD related activities occurring in diverse geographical locations across Australia, from capital cities (where events are most often reported on) to rural areas such as the small town of Taree, suggesting that the number of IWD events in the country probably vastly exceeds the number that have been reported in the media. This supposition is supported by evidence such as a Sydney IWD collective calendar from 1997, which shows rallies planned in ten locations around the country, despite only two events being reported in the media used for the database. Analysis of the themes of the events (at the level of the first theme) shows that by far the most common theme was ‘equality’, with 58 of the 104 events having this as their main theme. This theme was also represented regularly throughout the years being examined (although no theme appeared every year). Childcare was the focus of 13 events, mainly between 1975 and 1982, while the remaining events were divided almost evenly between employment (nine events, mainly in the late 1970s and early 1980s), violence (nine events), reproductive health (eight events, seven of which were clustered between 1972 and 1976) and peace (six events, discussed further below). Given the quantity of articles collected for this section of the project, it would have been very difficult to do any sort of qualitative analysis of the content of all of these. Using the IWD articles as a subset allows us to examine more closely the rhetorical strategies deployed in the media when discussing the activities of the women’s movement, and how these might have shifted over time in relation to this one recurring event. Thirty-five articles from the mainstream press have been used, as these may give us more insight into how IWD, and the women’s movement more generally, was framed in the public imaginary. To begin with, when conducting a discourse analysis the significance of the sporadic coverage of IWD is something that needs to be addressed. Teun van Dijk notes that power can be measured in some part by looking at who has the ability to set agendas and decide what will and will not be the subject of discussion.17 The media can play this role in society, and by contrasting the occasional coverage of IWD with, for example, the predictably thorough coverage of occasions like Anzac Day, we can immediately see the difficulty IWD has had in developing a meaningful and consistent ‘public identity’18 through the media.

Taking to the streets 65 Examining the articles reveals that there has been much variation in how IWD has been framed over the period being examined. Although studies have shown that the women’s movement tends to be treated negatively or trivialised in the print media,19 the coverage of IWD did not entirely fit this pattern. Rather, the reports were more in line with the findings of Sheridan et al. in their study of the reporting of women’s issues in the Australian media, where they noted that ‘media representations of feminism are plural and various, the varieties not necessarily compatible with one another’.20 There were articles – in particular opinion pieces by women’s movement scholars and activists – that were unambiguously positive, about both IWD and the women’s movement in general, and others that were clearly negative. There were also a number of ‘neutral’ articles that reported information such as where and when upcoming events would be held without any commentary, although the positioning of these sometimes had an impact on how they would be perceived. The greatest coverage given to IWD was in 1975, which, as noted above, was also International Women’s Year. The Sydney Morning Herald (and its Sunday edition the Sun Herald) gave substantial coverage to the Sydney rally, which was held on 8 March that year. This coverage included articles advising that the march was coming up, including a detailed, factual piece on 7 March that outlined the groups involved in the march and the claims they were making. This apparently neutral piece appeared, however, next to an article headlined ‘Women’s Rights: Can the family cope?’. The Herald covered the actual march with a frontpage headline (‘5000 Women on the March’) and an article that emphasised the inclusiveness of the march, particularly in relation to men. At the same time, however, it also included trivialising remarks from attending police officers (‘I like ladies’), and gave very little space to the claims being made by the marchers. This type of coverage, which gives space to the women’s movement while simultaneously ignoring or undermining the movement’s claims, has been well documented by the Australian National Advisory Committee on International Women’s Year as being a feature of the media’s response to the year more generally. However, the Committee also noted that by the end of the year media coverage had improved, and ‘the words ‘sexist’ and ‘sexism’ began to be used in news reports in a way that suggested some understanding of the concept’.21 By the following year, however, coverage of IWD had decreased substantially, and headlines such as ‘Yes, we’re still around’ (7 March) suggested a sense of either boredom with, or surprise at, the continuation of protests by women activists. IWD then almost disappears from the SMH for six years. The 1979 march in Brisbane is mentioned, but only because of an incident involving a member of the Queensland police ‘rescuing’ his girlfriend from being arrested; all the coverage of the march focuses on this and the state of the Queensland police. This lack of coverage occurs despite marches taking place throughout this period often having turnouts equal to that of 1975 (see Figure 4.8). When IWD starts to reappear after 1982 two definite trends can be seen to be emerging. First, there is a trend towards what might be called a ‘historicisation’ of IWD that begins as early as 1984 and increases over time, whereby IWD is

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Figure 4.7 2006 Reclaim the Night poster designed by Katrina Allan Design for the Office for Women, Government of South Australia.

presented as having existed for a long period and on an international scale, thereby forging links between women across time and space. It is these articles that present IWD in the most unambiguously positive light, and this seems to stem in part from the authors or sources for the articles, who tend to be scholars or leaders in other fields and as such are granted legitimacy and authority to speak in their own voices (for example, Marian Sawer on 17 February 1997; Alison Mackinnon on 7 March 2003). These articles often mention other IWD related activities such as breakfasts, dinners and seminars. What may have been missed by the database, with its focus on protest events, is an increase in nonprotest activities such as these. These events may be another indicator of an ‘abeyance’ period in the women’s movement, as women gather to consolidate the legacy of what they have achieved, and maintain their connections and

Taking to the streets 67 networks in the absence of high levels of visible activity.22 The history-making in the newspaper articles could be seen as one aspect of this. The second trend, evident particularly after 1991, concerns the way the events that are reported on are linked to other important current issues in the media. IWD marches often focused on specific current issues. In 1979 they were attacking the ‘Lusher motion’ in federal parliament that was trying to cut public funding for abortions, while in 1988 the Sydney march highlighted Indigenous land rights as a counterpoint to celebrations of the bicentenary of white settlement. In the mainstream media this may have influenced decisions to cover the event. For example, the relatively well-reported protests in 2002–2004 had peace as their main theme, and the organisers used the marches to focus attention on the plight of women in the Middle East affected by war, particularly the war in Afghanistan and threatened war in Iraq. As shown elsewhere in this chapter, the women’s movement has often had strong links to the peace movement, as well as being active in promoting rights for other disadvantaged groups. The establishment of strong connections between IWD and other high-profile issues may reflect attempts on the part of organisers to increase interest in the event by tapping into topical events, or alternatively (or in conjunction with this) it may show an increased likelihood that journalists will cover a protest event involving women if it is in some way linked to other current affairs. This trend reflects the findings of Sheridan et al. who suggest that coverage of the women’s movement is often reliant on other political trends.23 One of the most interesting uses of language in the articles on IWD is in relation to the word ‘feminism’ (or ‘feminist’). The ‘f ’ word crops up surprisingly infrequently in the coverage, and when it does appear it is only ever used in a negative or disparaging manner, or in a way that uses such negative connotations

Figure 4.8 International Women’s Day march, Sydney 1977: the Tribune reported that 3000 people marched in Sydney. The SMH, on the other hand, did not report on any IWD marches that year. Courtesy SEARCH Foundation/Tribune/State Library of NSW.

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as presupposed readings of the word. For example, on 3 March 1976 the SMH refers to a rally with ‘speakers including lesbian feminists, Trotskyists and Australia Party members’, imbuing the term with a certain amount of deviancy by association. Feminism is mentioned more often in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but in a way that is either directly attacking feminists or asking women about feminism. The extent and nature of media attacks on feminists has been well documented24 – for example, feminists are attacked for being too educated and out of touch with ‘ordinary’ women, or younger women (8 March 1995), or for being too radical and anti-men (4 March 2005). Feminism is framed in a very negative way, and the women involved in the events are then put in a position of either denying being feminist or having to defend feminism. Either way, this makes the supposed shortcomings of feminism the focus of what is written, even if the women being spoken to are supportive of it (23 February 2002). On the whole, with the exception of a period in the mid-1970s, the information we have about IWD marches is more likely to come from newspaper reports that focus on other events, or where IWD is used as a type of segue to discuss ‘women’s issues’, whether these be to do with employment, pay or women’s identities as feminists. Detailed information on marches is rarely given, particularly in relation to the claims being made; when these are given, they are more likely to be related to other political issues (such as war) than to systematic inequalities suffered by Australian women. IWD – and the claims that women are making in relation to it – therefore tends to be sidelined, even as it is being reported. This, in combination with the sporadic coverage it attracts (even when it is well-attended), may be part of the reason IWD has never gained a strong hold in the imagination and memory of the Australian public. For feminists, on the other hand, the space that is made available in the media to commemorate and celebrate IWD, limited though it is, still plays a role in maintaining the movement.

Is women’s protest finished? The picture that is painted by the protest events database in many ways tells a disheartening – yet familiar – story. It shows an acute decline in protest events, and an even more acute decline in media interest in protest events. The IWD case study also reiterates the difficulty that protesters encounter in having their activities and claims-making reported accurately or in a positive light. Our database provides important information about the wide-ranging activities and scope of issues that have been the focus of women’s protest. There are also useful lessons that could be drawn from the database regarding the types of protest activities that are most likely to gain media attention, as well as the difficulty of holding this attention. Our findings showed that media coverage waned even as women were still staging large protest events. This is one likely reason for a shift from this repertoire. The decline in visible activism also needs to be approached in a critical manner. As is indicated elsewhere in this book, a decline in media reporting of

Taking to the streets 69 events that can be clearly defined as being about women’s protest does not equate to a clear suggestion that the women’s movement is over. The locus of activism has in many cases shifted elsewhere, with blogs and online communities (as discussed in Chapter 8) providing spaces for women to ‘talk back’ to the media, and create their own media content, rather than waiting for the media to report on their activities and hoping the reporting is favourable. As we see in Chapter 9, women, and particularly younger women, have not completely abandoned the idea of disruptive protest. Regardless of whether they are on the street or elsewhere, whether the media finds them or not, women will continue to challenge the gender roles allotted to them.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

Koopmans and Rucht, ‘Protest event analysis’. della Porta, ‘Eventful protest, global conflicts’. McLaren, ‘Imperative images’. Gould, ‘Passionate political processes’. Sawer, Making women count. http://cass.anu.edu.au/research_ projects/mawm Dowse and Giles, ‘Australia’. Murray, ‘Taking the toys from the boys’. Buckley, ‘Invasion of Pine Gap’. Amenta et al., ‘All the movements fit to print’, p. 648. Bagguley, ‘The limits of protest event data and repertoires for the analysis of contemporary feminism’. Scalmer, Dissent events. Bagguley, ‘The limits of protest event data and repertoires for the analysis of contemporary feminism’, p. 618. Mendes, Feminism in the news. Stevens, A history of International Women’s Day in words and images. Sawer, ‘Revolutionary to respectable’. van Dijk, ‘Principles of critical discourse analysis’. van Zoonen, ‘The women’s movement and the media’. Ashley and Olson, ‘Constructing reality’. Sheridan, Magarey and Lilburn,‘Feminism in the news’, p. 25. Australian National Advisory Committee, International Women’s Year, p. 65. Sawer and Grey, ‘Introduction’. Sheridan, Magarey and Lilburn, ‘Feminism in the news’. Ashley and Olson, ‘Constructing reality’.

5

Hiding in plain sight Australian women’s advocacy organisations Marian Sawer and Merrindahl Andrew

As in many Western countries, the Australian women’s movement tended to drop out of sight in the 1990s. The reduced level of public protest and media coverage together with other factors such as the advance of neoliberalism led to a loss of interest by governments in courting the women’s movement. We noted in Chapter 1 how some social movement scholars (and social movement activists) blamed this loss of influence on entanglement in the state, leading to cooption and displacement of goals. Women’s advocacy organisations were viewed as becoming dependent on state funding and increasingly professionalised to satisfy the requirement of the state for expert knowledge.1 This chapter will investigate changes that have taken place in women’s advocacy organisations since the 1970s, including changes in organisational philosophies, increased specialisation and professionalism, increased diversity, the rise of vocationally based organisations in non-traditional areas of employment and greater national and international networking. It will illustrate these changes through three case studies, of Women’s Electoral Lobby (WEL), Women With Disabilities Australia and the Australasian Council of Women and Policing. It will ask whether these changes resulted from state entanglement or from a changing discursive environment, differing partisan attitudes towards the role of NGOs, new communication technology, generational change among feminist activists or from a combination of these and other influences perhaps not yet identified.

Background The trajectory of women’s advocacy organisations in Australia needs to be viewed in the context of how governments relate to the community sector more generally. Particularly from the 1970s, Australian governments have provided funding for community-based peak bodies (bodies performing a representative role for a section of the community) to enable them to participate more effectively in the policy process and public inquiries. A Royal Commission into Australian Government Administration found that business and professional groups were much better represented in the policy process than other sections of the community. From that period, Australian governments have provided public

Hiding in plain sight 71 funding for non-profit advocacy groups representing sections of the community strongly affected by policy changes but with a relatively weak voice in the policy process. Equality-seeking groups have been encouraged to develop peak bodies that can engage in consultation and provide a channel of communication with government. New peak bodies enabled groups previously marginalised in public decisionmaking, whether immigrants from non-English speaking backgrounds, people with disabilities (rather than service providers), single mothers, intravenous drug users or other stigmatised or disadvantaged groups, to be represented in ways not possible through majoritarian political institutions.2 However, as in comparable countries such as Canada, the provision of operational funding to strengthen the policy voice of disadvantaged sections of the community soon came under threat. Governments discomforted by criticism or seeking to ensure singlechannel communication from different sectors introduced new frameworks for NGO interface with government and placed greater emphasis on project rather than operational funding. Reinforcing this trend was the increased influence of neoliberalism, which had a negative rather than a positive view of the role of non-government organisations (NGOs) in the policy process. Public choice theory warned that providing NGOs with access to government would lead to ‘agency capture’ by groups with a vested interest in increased public expenditure.3 From the 1990s women’s NGOs in Australia were increasingly constrained on the one hand by corporatist frameworks imposed by government and on the other hand by being labelled as ‘special interests’ or ‘rent-seekers’ to be held at a distance from policy processes. Both the constraints of corporatism and the rise of neoliberal discourses contributed to movement organisations becoming less effective as a political base for feminist initiatives in government.4 While there are arguments over the relative importance of levels of institutionalisation as against levels of activism, feminists inside the state have relied on the continuance of a visible women’s movement outside, to which political leaders feel they have to respond.5 As we saw in Chapter 4, the reporting of women’s protest events peaked in the early 1980s, although women’s services, in particular, continued to sustain annual events such as Reclaim the Night marches.

Shifts in organisational philosophies There have been a number of shifts in the organisational philosophy of women’s advocacy organisations over time, irrespective of state entanglement. The arrival of women’s liberation in 1969–1970 brought new commitments to providing an alternative to masculine hierarchies. All decisions would now be taken collectively and all tasks shared or rotated, to avoid the re-emergence of hierarchies through functional specialisation. We saw in Chapter 1 that the form taken by the new collectives was one of the points of difference with earlier women’s NGOs, which had more traditional structures.

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Within the collectivist ethos of the early 1970s, even reform-oriented secondwave organisations in Australia like WEL were determined to avoid mirroring masculine organisational hierarchies. This was a different pattern to that found in the USA.6 Despite the received wisdom on effective lobbying, which suggested that organisations should mirror the agencies of government they were trying to influence, WEL activists called on women to ‘stop mirroring men’s institutions and behaviours’.7 When eventually some compromises had to be made, there were still strenuous efforts to avoid the hierarchical connotations of terms like ‘president’ or ‘chief executive officer’. As we shall see in our case studies, this kind of organisational philosophy retreated after the 1970s in Australia as in other countries – partly because of ‘state entanglement’ and demands by funding bodies for clear accountability structures and partly because of the increasing dominance of neoliberal discourse. Time-poverty and increased impatience at the time needed for collective decision-making processes were yet another factor not directly related to state entanglement. While no longer agonising over flat structures, feminist organisations did, however, still have a distinctive approach to organising and leadership, with much more recognition of the emotion work required to maintain organisations and more emphasis on holistic relations with members. Feminists also took this organisational philosophy into other social movements in which they were assuming major roles, like the environment movement.

Increased diversity and specialisation Entanglement with the state and access to state resources did contribute to increased diversity of the women’s movement in the 1980s. Funding programmes initiated by femocrats enabled new groups of women to achieve their own peak bodies. Seed funding was provided for the establishment of a Federation of Aboriginal and Islander Women, which first met in 1982, but this body proved to be short-lived. On the other hand, an historic Immigrant and Refugee Women’s Speakout of 1982 led to the establishment of the NSW Immigrant Women’s Resource Centre, which in turn served as a base for further organising of migrant and Muslim women and their participation in government advisory bodies. At the national level the Office of the Status of Women (OSW) helped fund the creation of the Association of Non-English Speaking Background Women of Australia in 1986.8 In the early 1990s OSW provided seed funding for the creation of other new peak bodies, including those representing lesbian women and women with disabilities. The 1980s and 1990s also witnessed increased specialisation of women’s advocacy as women’s legal services, women’s emergency services, sexual assault services and women’s health centres all developed their own peak bodies. Increased specialisation of advocacy organisations was encouraged, as in other countries, by the increased demand by government for expert policy knowledge. Emphasis on provision of expert policy advice to government with the help of paid executive officers contrasted with feminist organisational philosophy of the

Hiding in plain sight 73 1970s, which, as we have seen, emphasised collectivism, speaking from personal experience and avoiding hierarchies of any kind including those implicit in functional specialisation. In the 1990s vocational bodies also became of increasing importance, whether older organisations such those representing women lawyers or newer ones such as the National Association of Women in Construction (established 1995), EMILY’s List (supporting feminist Labor MPs, 1996), the Australasian Council of Women and Policing (1997, see more below) or Women and Firefighting Australasia (established 2007). One group that became highly visible in the 1990s was the women in agriculture movement. While there had been a long history of women organising in rural areas through the Country Women’s Association (CWA), the new movement and its organisations were based firmly on women who identified as farmers rather than farmers’ wives. This diverse constellation of movement organisations had varying levels of access to government, often depending on which parties were in power. The rise of more specialised and vocational women’s organisations also tended to be at the expense of older more generalist organisations, including those dating from well before the second wave such as the Australian Federation of Business and Professional Women and the Australian Federation of Graduate Women (previously University Women). Nonetheless, the number of national women’s organisations recorded by the Office of the Status of Women/Office for Women was continuing to grow, rising from 50 in 1998 to 92 in 2003 and around 180 in 2013. The increased diversity and specialisation of women’s organisations in the 1990s did not necessarily mean increased fragmentation of the women’s movement as it was accompanied by more intensive networking. While the idea floated by government of a single peak body was treated with suspicion, a national network called the Coalition of Participating Organisations of Women (CAPOW!) was created by women’s NGOs in 1992. Individual organisations no longer had the resources to respond to the plethora of demands from government for expert policy submissions to inquiries. CAPOW! was intended to facilitate information sharing and co-ordination, enabling multiple organisations to sign off on a submission prepared by one. It was notable for the extent to which it brought together newer and older organisations, with their differing organisational histories and traditions. The increased contact between ‘traditional’ and ‘second-wave’ organisations was mediated by government consultation mechanisms as well as specific campaigns.9 While the Internet had not yet arrived, CAPOW! was able to provide enhanced sharing of information through the communication technology of the day – a weekly ‘faxstream’. By the time CAPOW! lost its government funding in 1997 it could be replaced by the cheaper PamelasList, which networked national women’s organisations by email and still continues to do so. In addition to such networking structures initiated from below came the new structures introduced by government, which are discussed further in the section on corporate frameworks. These government-initiated structures also promoted the networking of women’s organisations: in 2010 one of the performance

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indicators used by government in their evaluation of funded bodies was ‘demonstrated collaboration’ between them to achieve ‘improved coordination of the women’s movement’.10

Increased international linkages Another change that occurred in the decades from the 1970s, observed internationally, is the increased number of transnational women’s advocacy organisations and the increased international linkages of women’s movement organisations in both older democracies and developing democracies.11 As we shall see from our case studies, organisations established in the 1990s tended to have more international partners in their work than those established 20 years earlier. There are a number of possible explanations for this shift. While some may link fairly directly to ‘entanglement with the state’ others relate more to the communications revolution and to the changing locus of governance and advocacy brought about by globalisation. In Australia there has not been a direct financial stimulus to transnational networking like the priority given to it in awarding project funds within the European Union.12 However it is true that some stimulus for international linkages is provided by greater government support for gender equality work at regional or international levels than at the domestic level. Of course women’s movements have always had a strong international dimension and enfranchised Australian and New Zealand women were strongly linked into the international suffrage movement. By the 1880s organisers had arrived from elsewhere to help establish organisations like the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA). The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF ) had its origins in women’s peace groups founded during World War 1, including the Sisterhood of International Peace in Australia. Both the YWCA and WILPF still play important roles in the Australian women’s movement as well as being closely linked to their international bodies and hence the UN. This is particularly the case with the YWCA, which has played a major organisational role in helping co-ordinate gender equality advocacy by women’s NGOs since the 1990s. But WILPF also continues its distinctive peace advocacy, promoting implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on women, peace and security. Even WEL, an example of the more local focus of second-wave women’s movement organisations, has been since 1982 the Australian affiliate of the International Alliance of Women. The following case studies illustrate the changes taking place in women’s NGOs in the decades following the arrival of the ‘second wave’ and perhaps shed light on whether entanglement in the state has resulted in feminist fading.

Case study 1: Women’s Electoral Lobby The history of WEL demonstrates some significant shifts in organisational practices between the 1970s and the 1990s. These shifts can be seen both in the

Hiding in plain sight 75 methods of organising and the way WEL engaged with the political arena. Viewing WEL in the context of the broader women’s movement, we can see how WEL’s establishment, and the intensification of its engagement with ‘official’ politics, was part of a developing impetus within the movement towards ‘practical’ action. Two streams of practical action can be identified: on the one hand, services (including refuges and women’s health services); on the other lobbying and policy development, which was undertaken mainly by WEL and the ‘femocrats’. In part this shift occurred because the movement quickly broadened its base to include more women who had feminist commitments, skills and energy but were less oriented to the personal-transformative change characteristic of women’s liberation groups. Similar patterns of movement development have been identified in other western countries.13 The case of WEL shows that even reform-oriented activism was influenced by a decentralist philosophy of encouraging individual women and small groups to determine their own actions. This has also been true of the much larger National Organization for Women (NOW) in the United States, where a role as a national political lobby for women has been combined with structures that privilege participation over hierarchy and provide a major role for grassroots activism.14 WEL’s first national conference was held at the beginning of 1973, immediately following its highly effective intervention and agenda setting in the federal election campaign of the previous year. WEL groups had been asked to prepare papers on how WEL should be organised. The NSW paper reported that: ‘We are determined to avoid having leaders – either convenors or permanent spokeswomen or any form of power hierarchy.’15 Conferences and meetings were marked by intense discussions about what models of organising would best fulfil feminist principles of anti-hierarchy, while still enabling the kind of policy changes that WEL was established to achieve. It was, in fact, a hybrid model that WEL developed, allowing convenors but attempting to avoid entrenched hierarchies by changing personnel frequently and by having multiple spokespeople. Over time, however, the roles of convenors and spokespeople became somewhat more official and less fluid, while meeting procedures settled into more formal patterns (involving minutes, chairpeople, agendas and so on), albeit with considerable scope for unstructured discussion, personal friendships and humorous anecdotes. Interestingly, one of the challenges to WEL’s nonconformist model of organising came not from shifts in organisational philosophy but from the declining numbers of active members: with fewer people to fill positions, the ‘usual suspects’ often continued to hold positions of responsibility while trying to recruit new participants and convince them to take on roles within the organisation. One of the distinctive features of WEL’s approach in the 1970s was its generalist orientation, which reflected a lively disregard for expertise and professional boundaries. WEL enthusiastically commented on any area of interest to women, and gave women a chance to develop skills and knowledge through its electoral and policy activities. A good example is WEL’s surveys of political candidates, which drew women into the political process as interviewers and analysts, giving

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them a sense of power and efficacy that in many cases the participants had not previously experienced. Allied to this openness and energy was a belief that no woman was automatically entitled to speak for any other. This made representation difficult, particularly when engaging with the media. However, WEL groups did recognise the need to present a united front. This applied to WEL itself, but also led WEL to represent its actions as being on behalf of the women’s movement, or women’s interests more generally. In NSW its placards read ‘WEL Stands for Women’ – although they had the subtext ‘who are concerned about equal pay, fertility choice, child care, safeguarding women’s rights’. Joan Eveline recalls how WEL WA operated: You had lots of different groups . . . For the sake of some of the campaigns we projected it as if we were all going in the same direction. The issue there of course is that there were people coming along behind us and the media and all, believed that! They believed that; we did a really good job of convincing them that there was a kind of unified movement.16 While the second-wave women’s movement has been criticised since the 1980s for allegedly assuming the universal common interests of women, as Jill Vickers has shown, the process of engaging with political systems entails a powerful imperative to construct interests to represent.17 In the case of WEL, its lobbying and submissions resulted in the achievement of a distinctive model of women’s policy machinery in government that in turn supported the representation of a diversity of women’s voices in the policy process. It was Labor Governments, however, which were most responsive to WEL advocacy and most inclined to support NGO participation in the policy process. This created political dangers for WEL, which after receiving some operational funding in the 1980s lost it again under a conservative government in 1999. Its national office closed three years later. The creation of a national office had been a matter of contention from the start, despite the strong arguments for an office and paid staff in Canberra with ready access to parliament and government. Similar tensions were experienced by national advocacy groups in other countries, torn between the localism of feminist organisational philosophy and the desire to exercise feminist policy influence on central government.

Case study 2: Women With Disabilities Australia Twenty years later, new women’s organisations were still being created, but they differed in many ways from the kind of enthusiastic amateurism and collectivist organisational philosophy we saw with the beginnings of WEL. Exemplifying the increased diversity of the women’s movement is Women With Disabilities Australia (WWDA), incorporated in 1995. WWDA grew out of dissatisfaction with the lack of gender equality within Disabled People’s International Australia (DPIA). Although a national women’s network was established within DPIA in

Hiding in plain sight 77 1985, dissatisfaction continued to grow. At the same time the network was disillusioned by the treatment of its representatives at a National Agenda for Women conference funded by government and organised in Canberra by WEL – travel subsidies that should have been available had been swallowed up by the arrival of a larger than expected number of Aboriginal women from remote communities. As Margaret Cooper, founding chair of WWDA remarked, the issue rankled: ‘I don’t think any of us renewed membership with WEL for at least a decade or so, if at all.’18 Representatives of the DPI Women’s Network joined forces with representatives of the Federation of Aboriginal and Islander Women and the Federation of Ethnic Communities Councils of Australia to pass a protest resolution at the National Agenda conference. They asked for recognition that Australian women were ‘not a homogeneous, monocultural, monolingual group’ and for government to fund more adequate consultation with women representing that diversity. Some resources were duly committed by the Office of the Status of Women and in the meantime Robin Wilkinson of DPI was asked to chair the final session of the National Agenda conference.19 The increased dissatisfaction with the capacity of either the women’s movement or the disability movement to recognise and address issues specific to women with disabilities was a catalyst for the creation of an independent organisation. In 1994 the Network was successful in obtaining seed funding from the Office of the Status of Women to create a disability women’s peak. It was based on a philosophy of self-advocacy, the need for women with disabilities to be seen as a collectivity, with common experiences of marginalisation and discrimination and to be able to speak and/or act in their own interests. The incorporation required by government funding more or less determined a formal governance structure for WWDA, although it grew from state-based networks more likely to have management collectives. Members of the WWDA governance structure must all be women with disabilities. This means additional meeting costs and makes face-to-face meetings very expensive. From 1996 operational funding for WWDA came from the Office of Disability in the Department of Health and Family Services but reservations about funding a women’s disability peak meant funding was at first on a six-monthly basis, only becoming regular annual funding in 1998. WWDA also won project funding, from different areas of government for work on how domestic violence affected women with disabilities, on issues around forced, non-therapeutic sterilisation and on access of women with disabilities to telecommunications. In 1999 it won the National Violence Prevention Award sponsored by Australian Heads of Government and worth $10,000. Contributing to the award was ‘More than just a ramp’ – a model process developed by WWDA for women’s refuges to remove discriminatory barriers in access, attitudes and work practices. WWDA now (2013) receives a $163,000 per annum operational grant, the same as other national disability peaks. Some of its affiliates receive funding from State or Territory governments, for example Women with Disabilities Victoria is funded as part of women’s health services and Women with Disabilities

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ACT received in 2010 a three-year grant auspiced by the Women’s Centre for Health Matters. Women With Disabilities ACT was also engaging in some awareness-raising performance events, such as a ‘flash mob’ in March 2012. WWDA participates in broader national women’s peak bodies, currently the Equal Rights Alliance and the Australian Women against Violence Alliance. The initial funding provided by the Office of the Status of Women to WWDA followed a pattern whereby the Office had provided seed funding to assist in the creation of national bodies so that women with special needs but few resources could be heard in the policy process. As we have already noted, funding was also provided to create a Federation of Aboriginal and Islander Women and a national body for non-English-speaking background women. The disability rights movement has received strong impetus from the development of new international norms, particularly through the UN. In Australia, as elsewhere, a primary catalyst was the UN’s International Year of Disabled Persons in 1981 and the development of an international human rights instrument dedicated to people with disability was an important source of legitimacy and leverage for domestic organising. It is notable how central human rights discourse is to the gender claims-making of WWDA and indeed it positions itself as a national human rights organisation as well as a national disability organisation and a national women’s organisation. Winning a national human rights award in 2001 was helpful for WWDA as it built its presence during a very conservative period of government. At the international level, WWDA was able to take part in the decade of negotiations over the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities along with representatives of other disability peaks.20 Thanks to this presence on the ground, WWDA contributed to the historic achievement of Article 6, which addressed the multiple discrimination experienced by women and girls with disabilities and Article 16, which recognised and required policy and legislative responses to the gender-based aspects of violence and abuse. This achievement was despite the opposition of the Australian government to the inclusion of an article on women in the Convention. WWDA has been an active participant in delegations to the UN Commission on the Status of Women and has also taken on the silence concerning women with disabilities in the CEDAW reporting process. One example cited by WWDA was the combined Fourth and Fifth CEDAW Reports of Australia, which suggested there was ‘a general upward trend in the labour force participation rate of all women (15 years and over), which was 67.5 per cent in March 2003’.21 The WWDA submission (published by the CEDAW Committee on its website) commented as follows: However, in 2003 the labour force participation rate of women with disabilities was only 46.9%. The Women in Australia report provides no information at all on the status of women with disabilities in relation to employment, despite their obvious marginalisation and exclusion in the labour market.22

Hiding in plain sight 79 This kind of international intervention was very brave, considering that organisations involved in an earlier CEDAW shadow report had been accused by the minister of ‘bagging their country from overseas’ and had promptly been defunded. WWDA survived, however and has continued to take up critical positions, for example in systematically lobbying for national uniform legislation to prohibit the forced, non-therapeutic sterilisation of women and girls with disabilities. WWDA’s actions on forced sterilisation have attracted international recognition and it has joined in international action on the issue.23 In 2012 WWDA representatives were attending the 56th UN Commission on the Status of Women meeting in New York and helping present a side event on rural women with disabilities. WWDA was also collaborating with the Canadian Disabled Women’s Network (DAWN), the closest equivalent national body, to conduct a round table at the Second World Conference of Women’s Shelters in Washington. WWDA epitomises the strong international linkages of current women’s advocacy organisations and has also demonstrated the ability to retain a strong and independent voice, despite reliance on government funding.

Case study 3: Australasian Council of Women and Policing Another example of a 1990s women’s NGO, this time illustrating increased vocational focus, is the Australasian Council of Women and Policing (ACWAP). The Council was established in 1997 following an inaugural Australasian Women and Policing Conference the previous year. Initial impetus came from the realisation that women in two jurisdictions still had no access to paid maternity leave but the sexual harassment of women police quickly became another headline issue. The organisers of the inaugural conference were themselves victimised, with one being transferred from the Australian Bureau of Criminal Intelligence to a livestock squad and the other only avoiding a similar fate through union intervention. In the run up to the conference the Victorian Chief Commissioner banned the distribution of the newsletter Women Here in Policing (The Whip) because of a cartoon depicting a dog trying to have sex with a man’s leg. The cartoon likened the experience to how women felt when harassed at work. The Chief Police Reporter for the Sydney Morning Herald wrote that there were ‘muffled jeers’ when the Commissioner tried to defend his decision at the conference.24 The aims of the new Council were to improve the policing services provided to women, to improve the opportunities and outcomes for women within policing and to participate in the global network of women and policing. Its founders identified it as a feminist organisation, dedicated to improving the quality of policing for women in the community, particularly on issues of domestic violence and sexual assault, as well as making the policing profession more womenfriendly. The Second Women and Policing Conference was on the theme of violence against women and brought together police and women’s services. To ensure that ACWAP doesn’t become too ‘self-serving’, as a purely vocational

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organisation, there are always non-police members on its Executive Committee. The feminist identification extends to using the colour purple for its website and it was also used for an international conference hosted by the Council in 2002. One of the non-police participants subsequently wrote: if the colour is used vividly and strongly, as it was for all the bags etc of the Women in Policing Globally Conference held in Canberra in October 2002, that is a sign of being a consciously assertive feminist organisation, as indeed it is. I felt that the women in this organisation were at the stage of the struggle that most women in Australia were in 20 years ago and with good reason.25 The use of purple by policewomen to denote feminism or sisterhood was interesting, given its history (as discussed in Chapter 1). Nonetheless there was some ambivalence about feminist identification, given the very conservative traditions within policing and the reactions to an independent women’s organisation, let alone a feminist one. This ambivalence is reflected in the absence of the word ‘feminist’ in the website description of the organisation. It is, however, to be found in the advice for the annual Excellence in Policing Awards organised by the Council, one of its major activities. The advice reads: ‘a supporting statement from a nominated officer’s supervisor, women’s network, union, feminist or other supporting organisation would be useful in assisting the selection panel’.26 It is notable that some members of the ACWAP Committee were not comfortable with the feminist reference and said ‘shouldn’t we take that out?’27 While the ACWAP has identified as feminist, it did not debate the kind of structure appropriate for a feminist organisation (see Table 5.1). While the ACWAP founders were committed to relatively informal organisation, they were comfortable with some formal leadership positions. This no doubt related to more general shifts away from collectivist models as well the significance of police hierarchies. The Council has benefited from support from senior figures in Australian policing, particularly Christine Nixon, who became the inaugural ACWAP president and continued in this role for ten years while also Victoria Police Commissioner. Such senior and very public support was vital in overcoming the reactions to the prospect of an independent women’s organisation noted above and expressed in terms such as ‘has this been approved?’ or ‘who gave permission for this?’ One of the ACWAP founders, Helen McDermott, was strategically placed to assist with acquiring resources: as an official of the Australian Federal Police Association she was able to convince the publisher of the police union journals to take on the new Journal for Women and Policing. This provides a physical manifestation of the Council as 3,000–4,000 free copies of the journal are distributed to all police stations. Some of the advertisements are somewhat startling, such as those for Hellweg ‘redesigned body armour, specifically designed for women’ but the journal also runs an Ethical Shopping list so that readers can avoid products from companies found to be non-compliant with equal opportunity legislation.

Date founded

1995

1997

WWDA

ACWAP

Women’s 1969–1970 liberation groups WEL in 1970s 1972 WEL in 1990s 1972

Organisation

No Yes

Hybrid Hybrid/some formal features

Formal governance Project/event funding

Formal governance Yes

No

Govt funding

Collective

Org style

Table 5.1 Organisational features of women’s NGOs over time

No

Some

No No

No

Overseas funding

N/A International Alliance of Women International Network of Women with Disabilities International Association of Women Police

No

International affiliation

Yes

Yes

No Yes

No

Member national wmn’s peak

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The other major activity of the Council, apart from the Excellence in Policing Awards and the journal, consists in the biennial women and policing conferences referred to above, held each time in a different capital city. While the creation of a feminist police NGO might have come 20 years later than the creation of other ‘second-wave’ feminist organisations, ACWAP activists saw themselves as being ten years ahead of women firefighters, who came for advice on how to set up their own organisation and have continued to receive support from ACWAP. Like other women’s NGOs in the 1990s, ACWAP was globally and regionally connected, working with the International Association of Women Police and supporting regional initiatives such as a conference on gender responsive policing in the Islamic world held in Islamabad in 2011. Like WWDA, it has also been a member of successive national women’s umbrella organisations, currently the Equality Rights Alliance and the Australian Women against Violence Alliance.

Corporate frameworks and the Howard Government Together with increased specialisation and diversification of women’s organisations in the 1990s came increased corporatisation of relations with government. At first this was through ‘ministerial round tables’ to which a plurality of women’s organisations were invited, some in receipt of operational funding for their advocacy work. At the same time, as we have seen, women’s organisations had engaged in their own coalition-building and CAPOW! arranged NGO conferences before the Ministerial Round Tables to help settle on priorities. From 1999, however, the federal government established a more formal corporatist structure. Three ‘national secretariats’ were funded, to convey women’s views to government. Loosely, these were to represent young women, older women and businesswomen. The secretariat funding for older women went to the National Council of Women, an umbrella organisation long associated in Australia with the conservative side of politics. National women’s organisations objected that the new structure for funding women’s advocacy meant: ‘a loss of pluralism and diversity in the voices being heard by government. In particular the most disadvantaged groups have the right to autonomy of voice, for example women from non-English Speaking Backgrounds, Indigenous women and women with special needs.’28 But while the Howard Government remained unpersuaded of the need for designated structures to represent Indigenous or refugee and immigrant women, the presence of a rural-based party in the governing coalition did mean success for another group. Rural women were successful in their lobbying over lack of representation in the new corporatised structure for women’s movement interface with the federal government and a fourth national secretariat serving a National Rural Women’s Coalition was funded from 2002.29 While women’s NGO access to government was being channelled through the new secretariats, some significant peak bodies were losing their access to policy processes. The Howard Government appeared to agree with the views of men’s rights groups that feminists had enjoyed far too much policy influence.

Hiding in plain sight 83 This was clear in the areas of family law and violence against women, where the peak bodies representing women’s refuges (WESNET) and rape crisis centres (NASAV) were denied operational funding and were no longer wanted at the policy table.30 To address a perceived ‘gender imbalance in policy development’ in areas such as family law, the government provided operational funding for the Lone Fathers Association Australia, while simultaneously reducing the standing of the National Council for Single Mothers and their Children. And while rural women had made a successful claim on the state, success was very much on the government’s terms, as with the other sectors. The operational funding for women’s secretariats was not intended to give them public voice there was to be no public comment without prior notice to government and, as was made clear from 2005, neither was any of the money to be spent on researching the gender impact of government policy. So while women’s units in government were being closed down, together with their capacity to commission research, there was also a tightening of control over non-government women’s groups and their capacity to take over the conduct of such research. Channelling and control over NGO input into policy processes and increased diversity amongst women’s NGOs themselves did not necessarily mean a weaker movement. As we have seen, women’s NGOs undertook new coalition-building activities, assisted by new information and communication technologies. The fortnightly fax-stream used by CAPOW! to disseminate information about threats and opportunities was replaced by the email network Pamelas-List. Another electronic initiative, designed to link activists, academic policy experts and feminists in government, was Ausfem-Polnet, a moderated electronic list created in 1996. By 2003 it had some 900 subscribers. Vigorous debates were conducted on issues such as prostitution and trafficking, on which there very different positions among women’s movement actors. Ausfem-Polnet also played an important role in the retraction by the Australian Bureau of Statistics of a misleading summary of the 2006 Personal Safety Survey, which appeared to confirm the beliefs of men’s rights groups that similar proportions of men and women engaged in domestic violence.31 The election of the Rudd Labor Government in 2007 brought some immediate changes to the relations between NGOs and government. Acting Prime Minister Julia Gillard said that NGOs had been operating in a climate of fear and promised the new government would remove the contractual clauses that gagged debate.32 The ‘gag clauses’ in funding contracts were duly withdrawn and there were no longer the same constraints on funded NGOs participating in advocacy activities. While NGOs were relieved that the period of active repression was over, they had to relearn how to become advocates again. A new corporate structure was set up for the interface between women’s NGOs and government, the Women’s Alliance structure established in 2010. The six funded Alliances now included designated representation for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Women and Immigrant and Refugee Women, as long sought by the women’s movement. The largest of the Women’s Alliances was the Equality Rights Alliance (ERA), based in the YWCA and with 58 affiliated

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bodies in 2013. It combined the professionalism and expertise of a peak advocacy body with commitment to process and diversity, particularly help for the newly established Alliances, and uses the characteristic purple, green and white on its website. The YWCA had received funding under the previous government to auspice a similar umbrella body, WomenSpeak, being seen as a safe and longestablished service provider for women, with its own independent financial resources. However, it had also been radicalised in the 1970s and provided employment for young feminist leaders. Its ‘Settle Petal’ website is a model in terms of providing safe but lively online space for debate among young feminists. While the increased membership of alliances such as ERA was a source of pride, it may also have reflected the reality that many women’s NGOs had little chance of access to government except through the corporate structure.33 At the same time, the practice of advocacy itself has become more complex and resource-intensive. One of the tensions experienced by feminist advocacy organisations from the 1990s onwards has been the pull between the demands of the public policy process for statistically-supported evidence and reasoning on one hand, and the media’s insistence on personal stories and a ‘human face’ on the other. Meanwhile, despite continuing attitudinal support for equal opportunity initiatives among the general population, the opportunity to influence policy had largely dissipated by the 1990s.34 There was no longer the combination of a visible women’s movement, receptive political parties and effective women’s policy agencies within government. The Labor Party’s national status of women policy committee was ‘mainstreamed’ in the 1990s and high-profile women’s policies were no longer produced for elections by either of the major parties. Many women’s policy agencies, including the Women’s Bureau in the employment portfolio dating from the 1960s were abolished and the Office of the Status of Women was removed in 2004 from the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet and exiled to a line department dealing with families and communities services. The portfolio is no longer carried by the Prime Minister or even by a Cabinet Minister but is relegated to a junior minister. Famously, the allocation of the status of women portfolio was also initially forgotten in the announcement of portfolios after the 2010 election. It was almost forgotten again when the new intergovernmental Council of Australian Governments (COAG) structure was established. At the last minute a Select Council was added to replace the superseded Ministerial Conference on the Status of Women, but this time with a sunset clause.35

Conclusion Are women’s movement organisations to blame for this decreased government interest in gender equality? In the 1970s and 1980s women’s movement organisations (together with women in political parties and trade unions) served as a political base for gender equality initiatives within government. Can such a

Hiding in plain sight 85 political base be provided within the corporatist structures that now channel the relationship between women’s movement organisations and government? One of the current alliances funded by the federal government, the Equality Rights Alliance, has taken a lead in reviving gender audit of election policies and in coordinating pre-Budget submissions to government. It has also provided training for newly organised groups of women in the preparation of such submissions, but continuing policy activism is not sufficient to disprove existing propositions concerning feminist fading. A change back to conservative Coalition government is likely to see renewed restrictions on public comment by bodies funded to represent women to government. Despite these corporatist constraints, the developments in women’s advocacy organisations outlined in this chapter do not support the proposition that the women’s movement is over. The number of women’s advocacy organisations has continued to grow and they represent increasingly diverse constituencies of women. At the same time fragmentation has been avoided as these organisations have stronger linkages with each other and their international counterparts than ever before, thanks to new communication technologies and flexible network structures as well as incentives provided by government. Specialised policy expertise is also much greater than 40 years ago, although the ability to be heard by governments is often much less, thanks to the shift towards neoliberal policy regimes. Nonetheless, victories continue to happen, sometimes after very long campaigns. A recent example is the 2012 equal pay victory for community service workers, when Fair Work Australia awarded an increase in pay of between 19 and 41 per cent, in recognition of the traditional undervaluing of work in this feminised industry. Another example is the long and ultimately successful campaign by Women’s Legal Services to roll back changes to the Family Law Act instigated by men’s rights groups under the conservative Howard Government. The new amendments, prioritising the safety of children, came into effect in 2012. Most importantly, perhaps, women’s advocacy organisations continued to sustain women-focused policy discourse. While they exist largely under the radar in terms of media coverage, ‘hiding in plain sight’, they signal the ongoing presence of the women’s movement and its extension into non-traditional occupations and professions.

Notes 1 2 3 4

Lang, ‘The NGOization of feminism’, p. 115. Sawer, ‘Governing for the mainstream’, pp. 39–40. Sawer, ‘From women’s interests to special interests’. Transcript, Workshop for Commonwealth/State Women’s Advisers on the Future of Women’s Policy Structures, Political Science Program, RSSS, Australian National University, 12 February 1998. 5 Outshoorn, ‘Social movements and women’s movements’, p. 161. 6 Ferree and Hess, ‘Controversy and coalition ‘, p. 56ff. 7 Weeks, ‘Feminist principles for community work’, p. 10; Sawer and Groves, ‘ “The women’s lobby” ’, p. 441.

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8 Sawer, Sisters in suits, p. 118. 9 Sawer and Groves, ‘ “The women’s lobby” ’. 10 Evaluation Framework for the National Women’s Alliances, Department of Families and Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, 29 July 2010. 11 For example Keck and Sikkink, Activists beyond borders; Outshoorn, ‘Social movements and women’s movements’, pp. 157–159. 12 Lang, ‘Assessing advocacy’, p. 329. 13 Banaszak, Beckwith and Rucht, ‘When power relocates’, p. 21. 14 Barakso, ‘Governing NOW’. 15 Quoted in Sawer, Making women count, p. 94. 16 Andrew, ‘Interview with Joan Eveline’. 17 Vickers, ‘The problem with interests’. 18 Cooper, ‘The Australian disability rights movement’, p. 93, pp. 96–97. 19 Cooper, ‘Women from Disabled People’s International (Australia) turn conference around’. 20 Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, adopted by the General Assembly 2006, opened for signature and ratification 2007. 21 Women with Disabilities Australia (WWDA), ‘Submission to the Australian Government on the “Chairman’s text for a comprehensive and integral international convention to promote and protect the rights and dignity of persons with disabilities” ’, p. 7. 22 Ibid. 23 Interview with Sue Salthouse, WWDA president, 15 February 2012. 24 Bearup, ‘Organisers of women police conference “harassed” ’. 25 Sawer, ‘Wearing your politics on your sleeve’, p. 53. 26 Australasian Council of Women and Policing (ACWAP), ‘2011 Excellence in Policing Awards’, p. 2. 27 Interview with Helen McDermott, ACWAP management committee member and former president, 20 January 2012. 28 AWOC, ‘Media release’. 29 Pini, Panelli and Sawer, ‘Managing the woman issue’. 30 Sawer, ‘Wearing your politics on your sleeve’. 31 Flood, ‘Violence against women and men in Australia’. 32 Franklin and Lunn, ‘Critics in “climate of fear” ’. 33 Interview with Kathy Richards, Manager Equality Rights Alliance, 21 September 2010. 34 McAllister, The Australian voter, pp. 118–119. 35 Sawer, ‘The political architecture of gender equality’.

6

The institutional harvest Women’s services and women’s policy agencies Merrindahl Andrew

From its resurgence in the 1970s, the Australian women’s movement has given rise to a vast array of service providers and agencies, from refuges, sexual assault services and women’s health centres to women’s policy units, women’s information services and inter-governmental committees. Although these institutions are not always understood as forms of feminist activism, they can be seen as sustained attempts to achieve social change by making gender equality part of the business of government and by delivering services to women in a way that helps to transform gender relations. For this reason the proliferation of these institutions, and the extent of their survival, needs to be analysed as part of the movement.1 This chapter examines the place of such institutions in the literature on social movements generally and women’s movements in particular, identifies key research questions concerning the interaction of protest and institutionbuilding and the effect of the political context on establishment and longevity, and presents findings from a groundbreaking institutions database. Thanks to this new database, created as part of the Evolution of Social Movements project,2 we find that institutions established in government such as women’s policy agencies have been, perhaps unexpectedly, more vulnerable than those established outside government such as women’s services. Changes of government have frequently led to departmental restructuring that has intentionally or unintentionally fragmented and interrupted the work of women’s policy machinery. The Australian version of gender ‘mainstreaming’ has provided the pretext for the abolition or downgrading of many women’s policy agencies. Yet women’s policy machinery persists in some form in all Australian jurisdictions. Services in the non-government sector, which might be assumed to be more vulnerable due to resource constraints and generational changes, have actually proven to be surprisingly resilient: a very large number of non-government women’s services have survived from their inception to the present, with a sustained feminist focus.

Organisations, institutions and women’s movements The kinds of institutions that grow out of social movements represent attempts to create relatively enduring structures for the pursuit of social change. Organisations and institutions do not signify a static end-point of change but contain

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within them the seeds of further change.3 In the case of those organisations both within government and beyond that have arisen out of social movements, the impetus to further social change is ‘institutionalised’ as the rationale for the organisation’s existence. The institutional forms that are created by and in response to a social movement are not only legacies of that movement but are also, ideally, agents of it.4 As discussed by Marian Sawer in Chapter 1, social movement scholarship has traditionally viewed institutionalisation in negative terms. The transformation of a social movement into established organisations, legislative agendas and more predictable forms of protest might achieve some tangible gains, but is also seen as signalling a loss of radical ‘edge’ and the risk of co-option.5 There is a strong tradition of inquiry that defines social movements as inherently, and valuably, non-institutional.6 These accounts suggest a link between the movement’s ability to resist the institutionalisation of its organisational forms, and its ability to resist the co-option of its claims by the existing social order.7 The gains of institutionalisation are seen as particularly meagre when institutionalisation is ‘premature’; that is, when an issue’s too-early incorporation in public policy agendas causes the end of street mobilisation.8 Social movement theorists have often assumed a limited life cycle for social movements, with the energies of participants being exhausted in a relatively short period. Over time, however, the forms taken by the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s have converged with the traditional forms of civil society organisations, challenging such distinctions. Some scholars, for example, have described ‘the social movement society’ in which protest has become part of the ordinary way of doing politics,9 while others have addressed the dilemmas facing advocacy organisations in their engagement with government.10 Still others have explored the way social movements and organisations overlap.11 However, the fates of those institutional structures and organisations that grow out of social movements have been neglected by social movement scholars, who tend to see these dynamics as ‘out of scope’. For example, a number of works addressing the institutionalisation of state responses to social movement activity focus almost exclusively on the policing and regulation of protest events.12 This focus neglects the proliferation of special-purpose agencies and legislation that respond to the issues initially raised by protest. In contrast, scholars of ‘state feminism’ have often analysed the extent to which women’s policy agencies reflect women’s movement demands and integrate them into public policy – rather than conceiving of them as part of the women’s movement. Making women’s policy agencies into an ‘intervening variable’ between the women’s movement and the state recreates the divide between movement and institutions, rather than looking at how women’s movement actors operate in differing institutional spaces.13 Instead of following through on analysing the semi-institutionalised fates of mature social movements such as feminism, many social movement scholars have preferred to focus on other, newer, and perhaps more colourful waves of protest activity. Anti-globalisation movements have proved particularly attractive as

The institutional harvest 89 examples of ‘contentious’ politics. While feminist (and other) scholars studying institutions do consider dynamics relevant to social movements, they tend to focus on theorising change and innovation. Broad, empirically-based studies of the institutional structures produced by social movements have until now been lacking. As a movement becomes institutionalised, it forms relatively clear and durable structures that are identified as arising from the movement. This can be seen as ‘a continuation of the movement by other means’. In the US context, Myra Marx Ferree and Patricia Yancey Martin have described feminist organisations as the ‘harvest of the new women’s movement’ and as ‘doing the work of the movement’.14 The formation of such organisations can be a way to build stability, durability and sustainability into the movement, after the first energy has gone (and after early participants have died, moved on into jobs made possible by the movement, become ‘time-poor’ and so on). Some activists have always been resistant to attempts to achieve permanent structures and norms. In the second-wave women’s movement, these issues were addressed through debates about ‘structurelessness’.15 Some participants in the second wave were deeply committed to a particular ethic of practice, in which they would first explore ‘what is the personal’ in an issue, and only on that basis proceed to develop and share an analysis and then, finally, decide on some form of action.16 A focus on the experience of protest and the production of emotion, rather than any permanent or formal outcome has also been observed in some recent social movement activism.17 Despite the misgivings of some activists, most of the major social movements of the mid-late twentieth century, including the women’s movement, the environment movement, and the civil rights movement, have led to the creation of institutional forms. These include advocacy organisations ‘outside government’, usually known as social movement organisations or SMOs. As discussed in the previous chapter, these have been widely studied by social movement scholars and, increasingly, by scholars in the field of organisational analysis.18 In contrast, while feminist scholars such as the late Wendy Weeks have studied non-government women’s services as forms of feminist activism,19 the political dimensions of community services have largely been neglected by broader scholarship. Meanwhile, the government bodies arising out of social movement activism have mostly been studied through separate streams of scholarship on the way states incorporate different issues.20 Most political actors both within and beyond the state tend to agree that the creation or abolition of such structures sends important signals about the extent to which governments support social change projects, whether or not these political actors agree about the effectiveness of the agencies in question. But ongoing engagement and support from social movement actors remains equally important for institutional survival. Institutionalist scholars James Mahoney and Kathleen Thelen have made the astute observation that: ‘Institutional stability is a function not simply of positive feedback but of active, ongoing political mobilization.’21 This observation accords closely with the

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finding by scholars of state feminism that the maintenance of feminist institutional structures (such as women’s policy agencies) and their continued effectiveness as agents of social change depend heavily on the continued mobilisation of activists and opinion-shapers in civil society and within the state.22 Studies of social movements such as the women’s movement can show how activism may give rise to a variety of institutional forms, with varying degrees of success (the definition of success being always a matter for contention). Feminist scholars have developed detailed case studies of the persistence or demise of women’s policy machinery in various national and sub-national settings.23 Until now, however, there have been no attempts of which the author is aware to enumerate the various institutional forms, both government and non-government, that have grown out of the women’s movement (or any other social movement), and to track these over time.24 This chapter reports on an innovative attempt to do just that.

Feminist activism and institution-building: the Australian case The Australian case study is internationally significant because women’s movement activities were institutionalised in the state and in non-government services at a relatively early stage in Australia – and because in Australia numerous feminist institutions have been dismantled in recent years, at the same time as many other countries have begun to develop similar agencies and systems. One of the reasons suggested to explain why governments have found it fairly easy to downgrade and dismantle Australian women’s institutions is because of a lack of visible opposition from autonomous women’s movement groups.25 By mapping the development (and dismantling) of feminist institutions over time against the pattern of visible protest events, the current paper offers the possibility of observing such dynamics. One theory that has been advanced in the Australian context, and elsewhere, is that directing activists’ energies into institution-building within the state has depleted the autonomous, and more radical, parts of the movement.26 This may be true of the collectives that grew up spontaneously in the late 1960s and early 1970s and which now rarely operate in those forms. But the women’s nongovernment services created by those collectives have, in the Australian context, continued to foster and mobilise feminist ideals.27 Since the 1970s, there has been a proliferation of these services, particularly in the areas of violence, housing, sexual assault and health. They are now mostly funded by government but operate as largely independent bodies, forming part of Australia’s network of non-government services, to which government has increasingly devolved social support functions over the last three decades. Have these services fared better or worse than women’s agencies within government, in terms of their durability? While government and non-government bodies may at times be in conflict and may be characterised by different cultures, goals and management structures, they can still be viewed as part of a single organisational field defined by

The institutional harvest 91 the issues of concern to the movement. This may be particularly true in the case of the Australian second-wave women’s movement, where, from an early stage, feminist goals and processes were institutionalised in receptive governments at the same time as practical projects concerning women’s rights and wellbeing began to be organised into ongoing services. In many cases, the same groups and individual women were involved in activity across all of these sectors, linking these different worlds in a way that was consistent with their view of an autonomous women’s movement reaching into various settings.28 It is notable how different this vision is from the view of social movements ossifying as they fall prey to hierarchy and bureaucracy. This institutional flourishing was, to a large extent, made possible by sympathetic political contexts: there was a reforming Labor government at the national level, left-wing political activity in the various burgeoning social movements, and new participatory approaches to the delivery of social services. When these conditions changed, there emerged grave challenges to the survival and power of feminist institutions and groups.29 Significantly, many of the feminists who embraced the opportunity to build institutions within the state had taken it as given that their work would continue to be supported by – and connected to – a visible and oppositional women’s movement. In fact, it proved impossible to sustain, in the same form, the movement collectives that took so much energy and relied on the maintenance of strong personal bonds. Yet feminist activity continued in the institutions and organisations that were built by the early movement and by those who identified with it. A particularly difficult issue has been what role changes of government played in the story that unfolded. The election of left-wing governments has been associated with a more powerful role for women’s movement institutions, but Kathy Teghtsoonian and Louise Chappell have also questioned whether feminists should put any faith in parties of the left, particularly given the rise of neoliberalism across mainstream politics in countries such as Australia and Canada.30 Their comparison of the fates of the main women’s policy agencies under various governments in two subnational jurisdictions (New South Wales and British Columbia) adds weight to these concerns. In Australia, however, the network of feminist institutions extended well beyond those central agencies, encompassing many less visible women’s units in line departments such as health, education and employment, which were intended to operate as ‘spokes’ to the central ‘hub’. It would be useful to know what kind of effects partisan changes of government might have had on these agencies, as well as on the nongovernment women’s services that, increasingly, are tasked with advancing governments’ social objectives. Teghtsoonian and Chappell conclude that ‘feminists would be well advised to avoid putting all their eggs in the basket of the bureaucracy’, and should instead take action ‘in multiple locations outside the state’.31 Given that feminist nongovernment services now constitute a major element of the movement in its current form, it is worth considering how these services have fared over time in comparison with women’s policy agencies.

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To answer such questions, the Evolution of Social Movements project has developed an institutions database recording the establishment and survival or demise of 475 feminist institutions in the government and non-government sectors (for details, see Appendix). For the first time, we can begin to observe patterns and trends in Australian women’s institutions in the period 1970–2005, quantifying the institutional forms arising from a social movement over time, and comparing these with patterns of protest events and partisan changes in government at various levels. In this way the database enables us to see more clearly the ways in which institutional settlements depend on ongoing political mobilisation.

The trajectory of institution-building: findings Peaks in institutional development There have been two peak periods of institution-building associated with the ‘second’ wave of the Australian women’s movement. These occurred in the mid1970s and again in the mid-1980s, with some establishment events continuing to occur between the late 1980s and mid-1990s, but relatively few after the mid1990s (see Figure 6.1). Conversely, the abolition or dis-establishment of institutions occurred mainly in the period after 1980, and at a somewhat higher rate after around 1990. This pattern broadly corresponds with findings on patterns of protest events in the Australian women’s movement: the protest event analysis

35

Establishment events Abolition/end events

30

Events

25 20 15 10 5

2004

2002

2000

1998

1996

1994

1992

1990

1988

1986

1984

1982

1980

1978

1976

1974

1972

1970

0

Figure 6.1 Women’s institutions (government and non-government) (n = 475) – Australia – Number of establishment events and abolition/end events, by year 1970–2005.

The institutional harvest 93 indicates that there were peaks in protest activity in the mid-1970s and the early 1980s, with many fewer such events from the late 1980s on.32 Changes of government The election of left-wing governments has been associated with a more powerful role for women’s movement institutions,33 and our emerging evidence on the establishment and abolition of agencies provides some limited support for this pattern.34 In some jurisdictions, peaks in the establishment of institutions have coincided with periods of Australian Labor Party (ALP) government (NSW, QLD, SA). However, this pattern is weak overall, particularly for smaller jurisdictions with fewer institutions. Slightly more compelling is an analysis of the average rate of establishment events per year of Labor government compared with conservative government. In the 160 jurisdiction-years during which the Labor Party held government across the whole of Australia in the period 1970–2005, there were 280 institutions established (an average of 1.7 per year in government), compared with 200 establishment events that occurred during the 164 jurisdiction-years in which Liberal/Country/National parties held government (an average of 1.2 per year). Notably, there was little difference between the average rate of abolition/end events under conservative and under Labor governments (0.3 per year and 0.4 per year, respectively). There has been no pattern of pronounced peaks in abolition/end events coinciding with conservative periods of government across jurisdictions. Rather, abolition/end events have simply been more likely to occur later in the survey period (particularly after the late 1980s), irrespective of the partisan complexion of government during this period in the jurisdiction in question. In interpreting these findings, the one exception is illuminating: in the Commonwealth jurisdiction, there were 20 abolition/end events during the 20 years of Coalition government (an average of 1 per year) compared with only four such events under the 16 years of ALP government (an average of 0.25 per year). Unlike the other jurisdictions, the only institutions included in the Commonwealth analysis are Commonwealth women’s policy machinery: the dataset does not include women’s services operating at a national level, as women’s services are generally local or state-based organisations. As discussed below, women’s policy machinery generally appears to be more vulnerable to abolition than non-government women’s services. Thus, if conservative governments are hostile to women’s movement institutions, we would expect that their influence would show more directly at the Commonwealth level than at the state/territory level, and indeed this appears to be the case. Significantly, women’s services operate at the local/state level but tend to rely on a mix of state/territory government and Commonwealth government funding (as well as unpaid labour and in-kind support). It is likely that this mixture of influences dilutes the aggregate effect of partisan changes of government for all of the jurisdictions except for the Commonwealth, where the institutions being

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analysed rely solely, by definition, on the single government in power in that jurisdiction at any one time. As scholars studying multi level governance and feminism have argued, it is likely that federalism can protect some gains of feminist institution-building, even as it creates barriers in other respects.35 These findings suggest that partisan changes of government may affect, but do not determine, the fates of women’s movement institutions. We must look further afield to develop a fuller picture of why these institutions flourish when they do, and dwindle at other times. Relationship between protest events and institutional development It is widely agreed among women’s movement scholars that for feminist organisations within the state to flourish they need a vocal and visible base of activist support in the grassroots women’s movement.36 The same reasoning may be extended to non-government women’s services. For the first time, this claim can be assessed using evidence from the quantitative analysis of protest event data together with data on institutional development and survival. As noted above, the data in this case appears to be broadly consistent with the claim, in that peaks in the establishment of institutions have tended to occur at around the same time as, or only slightly after, peaks in protest event activity. If the fates of women’s organisations were independent of protest activity, we would not expect to find any correspondence between the chronological records. Similarly, abolition/end events have tended to occur after protest activity dropped off (noting, though, the relatively small number of abolition/end events overall on which this observation is based). Durability Despite an apparent correspondence between protest activity and institutional development/decline, the data does not support the view that women’s movement institutions cannot survive a decline in protest activity, and this is particularly true of non-government women’s services. While, as noted, abolition/end events were more common in the period after the late 1980s, when protest activity was also observed to be less widespread, the large majority of women’s organisations have survived through to the end of the survey period and beyond. Of the 469 institutions established between 1970 and 2005 (excluding the six Women’s Advisers later converted into Central Women’s Policy Coordination/ Offices), 356 were still in existence in 2005: a ‘survival rate’ of around 76 per cent. The survival and longevity of organisations is summarised in Table 6.1. These findings suggest that while there have been areas of vulnerability, women’s institutions as a whole have been fairly resilient (in terms of sheer survival) despite the adverse environment of the last 15 years.37 Clearly, questions remain, both methodological (can we be sure that this finding is not a case of ‘the victors writing history’, in that there may have been institutions established that did not survive to record the fact that they had ever existed?) and interpretive (what is the real significance, in feminist terms, of the simple survival of institutions,

The institutional harvest 95 Table 6.1 Longevity of second-wave women’s institutions: those still in existence in 2005 and those that ceased to exist before the end of 2005, Australia

30+ years 20–29 years 10–19 years