Sisters in Suits
by Marian Sawer,
Allen and Unwin: Sydney, 1990.
&
Bureaucrats, Technocrats, Femocrats
by Anna Yeatman,
Allen and Unwin: Sydney, 1990.
Playing the State
Sophie Watson,
Allen and Unwin: Sydney 1990.
To outsider, the bureaucratic and legislative achievements of feminism in Australia seem very great; so great, indeed, that feminism appears to be part of the New Establishment. From a miniscule advisory unit in the Prime Minister's Department during the Whitlam years, feminism's presence in the bureaucracy has spread to every Commonwealth Department, as well as into the States. It has created a raft of positions occupiable only by women with feminist credentials, and it has successfully guided the enactment of laws compelling other institutions of society (businesses, universities) to establish similiar women-oriented positions. It has also diverted public monies to support its own favourite projects in the community.
The view from within the feminist movement is rather different; just how different can be grasped from three recent books dealing with the "femocracy": Marian Sawer's Sisters in Suits, Anna Yeatman's Bureaucrats, Technocrats, Femocrats, and Sophie Watson's collection, Playing the State. These books recognise the gains feminism has made, but see them as being over-shadowed by the expectations that have been dashed, the battles lost, the positions captured by non-feminist women, by the threat from an anti-feminist backlash growing just at the time when feminism is suffering from exhaustion. As Sawer comments, "the older generation of political activists worries about how to "hand on the torch". Feminists inside the bureaucracy bemoan the lack of organised pressure from outside". The effusion of soul-searching, stock-taking and strategic reassessment spawned by this crisis of morale should be of interest to us all, for it offers us fascinating insights not only into feminism but also the ALP's style of government, the politics of the media and the general nature of contemporary Australian politics.
Hester Eisenstein, one of the contributors to Sophie Watson's volume, writes that "the strategy of creating a femocracy has gone hand in hand with a strategy of alliance with the Labor Party". As the 1980s rolled on, however, the ALP became increasingly obsessed with loyalty to itself, and those femocrats who were not members of the Party found themselves somewhat frozen out.
The case of Mary Draper is instructive. According to Marian Sawer, when Draper took over Victoria's Office of Women's Affairs (as it was then known) in 1983, she found the ALP's women's policy "very thin" and therefore set about developing an agenda of her own. Because party committees in that State played an important role in the operation of the government, however, the Status of Women Policy Committee had to have Draper's initiatives "retrospectively legitimised through the party conference". This made her unpopular with party women. As Sawer comments, "women without strong links with the party found it difficult to succeed in senior positions in Victoria".
At the Federal level, the obsession with loyalty saw the Office of the Status of Women select staff of non-women's movement backgrounds (and even non-feminist backgrounds!). The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet -- a department notable for its sensitivity to political imperatives -- became a major source of recruits. One recounted to Sawer that she had been "surprised to find there were very few in NSW who regarded themselves as feminists".
When the veteran feminist Anne Summers left the office in 1986, she was replaced by Sue Brooks, who had previously worked for the State Bank of Victoria and the Victorian Treasurer. Brooks lacked "shared experience in the women's movement", which created some problems over consultative mechanisms. While she found the post a "radicalising experience", the office showed an increasing concern with "second-guessing" PM & C's economic rationalists, and a tendency to submit to the government only those policy options which it was thought likely to accept. The emphasis on being "on side" with PM & C even led to men being appointed to the office!
MODERATES AND EXTREMISTS
The influx of ALP women into the femocracy exacerbated a pre-existing division between relatively moderate and extreme femocrats. A similar division has existed in the general feminist movement virtually since the beginning, although the bureaucratic factional alignments have not always corresponded to those in the movement as a whole.
Women's Liberation groups began to spring up in 1969, first in Sydney and Canberra, then spreading rapidly to the other capitals. Focusing initially on "consciousness raising" and "personal transformation" with a view to making revolutionary changes, these groups were amorphous and anarchic. Many of these groups developed an enthusiasm for socialist ideologies, separatist lifestyles and paranoid, rancorous protests against the insidious "patriarchy". They also seem to have furnished many of the staff (at least in the initial stages) for women's refuges, rape crisis centres and women's health centres.
The more pragmatic organisation was the Women's Electoral Lobby (WEL), which coalesced in 1972. WEL adopted the same six-point agenda as Women's Liberation -- free, "safe" abortion on demand; 24-hour childcare; Equal Employment Opportunities; equal access to education; free contraceptives; and equal pay. But WEL was more interested in getting "runs on the board", as it were, than in making symbolic gestures or spouting revolutionary rhetoric. Using the expertise of professional women -- female journalists, sociologists, economists, political scientists -- WEL mounted a sophisticated campaign and became, as Lyndal Ryan puts it (in Watson), "the political bombshell of 1972".
Within the bureaucracy, the moderatelextreme division has revolved around the competition between the Office of the Status of Women (earlier known as the Women's Branch and then the Office of Women's Affairs) and the older Women's Bureau of the Department of Employment and Industrial Relations. In the late Whitlam and early Fraser periods, the Women's Bureau was "not headed by an SES officer and its actions were partly dictated by an extremely conservative branch head". It was also somewhat jealous of the Women's Affairs Branch. By contrast, the Women's Affairs Branch was headed first by Elizabeth Reid and then by Sara Dowse, both of whom were in WEL as well as Women's Liberation.
By 1988, the relative inclination of the two units had been reversed. Now the Women's Bureau viewed itself as more in touch than the Office of the Status of Women (OSW) with the interests of working-class women. Between 1983 and 1986 (i.e. Anne Summers' period at OSW), bureau staff referred disparagingly to the "Office of Women of Status". One reason for this (which became more pronounced after 1986) was that the Bureau used the euphemistic employment criterion of "knowledge of women's issues" to recruit movement-feminists while OSW was recruiting non-activists and non-feminists. The tensions persisted despite, according to Sawer, "deliberate efforts to recruit heads of the Women's Bureau who would be able to work more co-operatively with the office".
Relations between femocrats and feminists in the community have often been severely strained. For example, when the first ever Prime Ministerial advisory position on women's affairs was created by the Whitlam Government, and filled by Elizabeth Reid, there was uproar in the "women's" movement. The editorial collective of one Sydney journal circulated a protest letter declaring that "no woman chosen by men to advise upon us will be acceptable to us". An accompanying leaflet attacked the applicants, "pointed out that all the women on the short list were white, hlghly educated, socially adept and heterosexual, and asked how they would resolve conflicts of loyalty between the PM and women".
The case of Anne Summers is also interesting. In 1969 she was a founder of Women's Liberation in Australia. At a Women's Liberation conference in Melbourne in 1970, she was abused for daring to wear make-up. Then in 1973, she was one of the unsuccessful applicants for Elizabeth Reid's position. She also helped establish a radical journal called Refractory Girl. 1974 saw her participate in the "squat" which established "Elsie", believed to be the country's first women's refuge. In 1975 she published the controversial book, Damned Whores and God's Police, and was at the forefront of a hostile Balmain Town Hall crowd that confronted Elizabeth Reid's spokeswoman over International Women's Year funding. Then, after completing a PhD and working as a journalist, she emerged as head of OSW in 1983. Summers had thus passed from an early radicalism to an interest in the femocracy, then from radical criticism of the femocracy to being the nation's leading femocrat!
One twist of Summers' career draws our attention to the media's political role. The distinct lack of interest in "feminism" shown by young women nowadays is often blamed, by feminists, upon the prejudicial outpourings of the "masculinist" media. But how anti-feminist really is the media? True, Sawer notes the "unremitting press hostility", the trivialisation and personal innuendo practised on Elizabeth Reid (and some others). On the other hand, we see that of 164 press articles about WEL during 1972, only three were unfavourable. And when refuge funding seemed threatened in the early Fraser years, "Lyndal Ryan, who had left the Office [of Women's Affairs] contacted Paul Lyneham and arranged for a Four Corners program on the refuges". On top of this, we learn from Sawer that at one stage the Federal Parliamentary Press Gallery was so anti-feminist that it elected Anne Summers as its President!
HOSTILITY TO NON-FEMINISTS
The books reveal the existence within both feminism and the femocracy of a widespread antipathy towards non-feminist women. Anna Yeatman, using a species of post-Marxist class analysis, decides that "a dilemma appears for femocrats when it is appreciated that their feminism, when set to work in practical policies, usually turns out to be an effective ideology and class consciousness for them but not for the majority of women".
One of the most explicit cases of hostility to traditional women is revealed by Watson's contributor, Ludo McFerren: in 1976-77, it transpires, the women's refuge liaison officer in NSW's Department of Youth and Community Services persuaded her Minister to oppose the funding of church-run refuges on the grounds that only "women's groups should set up women's refuges". The pragmatic Premier, Neville Wran, over-rode this policy because of the political power of Catholics in the ALP, but the feminist opposition did limit the number of funded religious refuges in the State.
Now, if the objective is to help women in need, then surely the ideological pedigree of the helpers is irrelevant. If, however, the object is to gain power over other women, to close off their opportunities for living in ways which feminists dislike, then the drive to privilege feminist refuges makes perfect sense. She who offers the shelter calls the tune!
Some of the writers' off-hand remarks also reveal anti-traditional feelings. Anna Yeatman speaks of the ideology of "familism" and implies that the position of women in the home is inherently one of "exploitation". Ominously, she goes on to argue that "struggles against the exploitation of women by men are necessarily struggles over the extent to which women's work should be left to private choices ..." and that "femocrats seek to deprivatise this relationship ..." that is, to make people's private relationships the objects of "public" or political scrutiny. Judith Allen speaks of a "foetocentric backlash" that has forced women to pay 40 per cent of the cost of their own abortions. The comment most demeaning to home-making women, however, must surely be Marian Sawer's quip that National Party MP Tom McVeigh was "a Catholic father of five who also bred Clydesdales".
The wealth of information in the three books is so great that here I have merely presented some of the highlights. Researchers can find within these pages plenty of ideas for future work: they might consider the role played by Liberal Party women, as well as by pro-feminist male MPs and bureaucrats, in the femocracy's advancement; or they might ponder the relationship between bureaucratic and academic feminists (particularly since Anna Yeatman argues that the latter are fully-fledged "femocrats"); or they might study how the feminist movement has used the competing jurisdictions of Australian federalism to advance its own objectives.
This is not to say that the books have no faults. Yeatman's handful of prescient observations must be extracted from the convoluted prose so beloved of the modern social science academic. She accepts uncritically the caricatures of conservatism put about by radical intellectuals: neo-conservatives are "undemocratic", deregulators are "proto-fascists", etc. Watson's Playing the State suffers, as so many collections do, from the uneven quality of the contributions. Sawer's Sisters in Suits has suffered from its long gestation, and also from a fear of "economic rationalism" -- a fear which seems rather excessive when it is recalled that "efficiency" was one of the earliest stimuli for equal opportunities in the public service.
These books give us a glimpse of feminism's state of mind, which is not very healthy. However, the femocrats' bureaucratic achievements -- machinery, regulations, legislation -- have faired much better than their morale. Although some budgets have been cut back, some positions downgraded, a few planned programs put on hold, the essential structures remain in place. The femocracy is unlikely ever to shrink to its proportions of the Fraser era, let alone to the miniscule size of its Whitlam foundations. Feminism's biggest handicap must be its poor public reputation, and this, I would suggest, will only change when those women who are seen as feminism's leaders begin to show genuine interest in the aspirations of ordinary women. That, I would submit, means taking the desire for home, children and domesticity as seriously as the quest for a career.
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