Damned Whores and God's Police

Damned Whores and God’s Police

ANNE SUMMERS was born in Deniliquin, New South Wales but grew up in Adelaide. She attended Cabra Convent and the University of Adelaide before moving to Sydney, where she became active in the women’s movement, obtained a PhD and began her writing career. In 1975, after the publication of this book, she joined The National Times as a feature writer where she won a Walkley Award. In 1979 she was appointed political correspondent for the Australian Financial Review. In 1983 she was appointed to head the Office of the Status of Women in the Prime Minister’s Department. From 1987 to 1989 in New York she was editor-in-chief of Ms. magazine and co-owner of Matilda Publications Inc., which owned Ms. and Sassy magazines.

She returned to Australia to become a political consultant to Prime Minister Paul Keating. From 1993 to 1997 she was editor of Good Weekend magazine. In 1989 she was made an Officer of the Order of Australia for services to journalism and to women.

Anne is the author of Her Story: Australian Women in Print (1980), with Margaret Bettison; Gamble for Power (1983); Ducks on the Pond (1999); The End of Equality (2003); On Luck (2008); The Lost Mother: A Story of Art and Love (2009); and The Misogyny Factor (2013). She is the editor and publisher of Anne Summers Reports. She lives in Sydney.

[T]he damned whores the moment that the[y] got below fel a fighting amonst one a nother and Capt Meridith order the Sergt. not to part them but to let them fight it out ...

– Lt Ralph Clark of the First Fleet, The Journals and Letters of Lt Ralph Clark 1787–1792  

If Her Majesty’s Government be really desirous of seeing a well-conducted community spring up in these Colonies, the social wants of the people must be considered. If the paternal Government wish to entitle itself to that honoured appellation, it must look to the materials it may send as a nucleus for the formation of a good and great people. For all the clergy you can despatch, all the schoolmasters you can appoint, all the churches you can build, and all the books you can export, will never do much good, without what a gentleman in that Colony very appropriately called ‘God’s police’ – wives and little children – good and virtuous women.

– Caroline Chisholm, Emigration and Transportation Relatively Considered, 1847

Damned Whores andGod’sPolice

The colonisation of women in Australia

AnneSummers

A NewSouth book

Published by

NewSouth Publishing

University of New South Wales Press Ltd

University of New South Wales

Sydney NSW 2052

AUSTRALIA

newsouthpublishing.com

© Anne Summers 2016

First published 1975. This new edition published 2016.

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

National Library of Australia

Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Creator: Summers, Anne, 1945– author

Title: Damned Whores and God’s Police: The colonisation of women in Australia

ISBN:      9781742234908 (paperback)

9781742242361 (ebook)

9781742247731 (epdf)

Notes: Includes index

Subjects: Women’s rights – Australia

Women – Australia – History

Dewey Number: 305.420994

Design Jo Pajor-Markus

Cover design Sandy Cull, gogoGingko

Cover image Portrait of Anne Summers 1974 by Carol Jerrems (1949–1980), gelatin silver photograph. Collection: National Portrait Gallery, Canberra.

Purchased with funds provided by Tim Fairfax AC 2012. Reproduced with kind permission of Ken Jerrems and the estate of Lance Jerrems.

All reasonable efforts were taken to obtain permission to use copyright material reproduced in this book, but in some cases copyright could not be traced. The author welcomes information in this regard.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction to the 2016 edition

Author’s note to the second revised edition [2002]

Author’s note to the new edition [1994]

Introduction to the new edition [1994]

Introduction [1975]

PART ONE | The nexus of oppression

1    A sexist culture

2    Manzone country

3    The sporting wife

4    The ravaged self

5    The poverty of dependence

6    The family of woman

7    A colonised sex

PART TWO | Sexist stereotypes past and present

8    ‘Damned whores’

9    ‘God’s police’

10  Education for motherhood

11  Feminism and the suffragist

12  The mobilisation of mum

13  Suburban neurotics?

14  Prospects for liberation

Letter to the next generation [1994]

The march of women [2002]

Timeline of achievements by and for Australian women 1788–2015

Notes

Index

To my mother

Acknowledgements

Over the past four decades hundreds of thousands of people have read this book. They have talked and argued about it, studied it, shared it with friends and family members. It became a consciousness-raiser and a call to arms for at least two generations. This kept the book alive, even for those sad seven years when it was actually out of print. So much so that in September 2015 we held a three-day conference about the book, addressing its impact and the question of what is still needed to achieve equality for women in Australia. Not bad for a book that, technically, did not exist.

I am most indebted, therefore, to all of you who have read this book and talked about it. Without you, we would not be back in print, in a volume that brings together each of the previous editions, with their updates that took stock of where we were in 1994 and in 2002, and which tries to assess where we are now, forty years on. It’s been an amazing journey. We started it in 1975 and now in 2016 we are still going. Thank you all for being part of it.

I also thank Kathy Bail and Phillipa McGuinness of NewSouth for their courageous decision to undertake the hugely ambitious task of publishing a book that has now grown to over 750 pages. I salute them for going where other publishers feared to tread. I also thank Emily Stewart for her meticulous edit and Sandy Cull for her inspired cover.

In 1974 Carol Jerrems photographed me for a book of portraits of Australian women. She was just starting to make her mark as a talented photographer and I was struggling to finish this book. She took a series of pictures, most of them in the room where I did my writing. Six years later, Carol died aged just 30, but she left behind an extraordinary body of work. Most of her portfolio was portraits of women, young and old, most of them not well known, many of them, like me, just starting out. Carol caught something in me that day. I look ruminative, brooding, slightly sceptical. It’s as if I am wondering where this whole women thing is going to end up. I still am, so it is fitting that on the cover of this new edition is the young me, photographed by that insightful young woman.

Major institutions, including the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra, collect Jerrems’ work and I wish to thank them and Carol’s brother, Ken Jerrems, for giving permission to use this photograph.

A number of people helped me bring this updated book into being. Rowena Johns researched the updates to the Time-line of women’s achievements with flair and creativity; Foong Ling Kong’s expert eye made sure we had not forgotten anyone; Dennis Altman suggested some additional achievements; Meredith Burgmann and Philippa Hall provided last-minute research assistance on equal pay; and Jenna Price, in being a driving force behind the Damned Whores and God’s Police at 40 conference at UTS in September 2015, helped create the momentum to have this book back in print which, fortunately, became unstoppable. I thank them each most sincerely. Without the assistance of Christine Howard I would not be able to manage my workload. My gratitude to her is boundless. Every writer is better off for having a soulmate and a sounding board and I am very fortunate, and thankful, to have Chip Rolley, my companion in life and love.

Introduction to 2016 edition

We have changed a lot. But we have not changed enough.

On the morning of Monday, 21 September 2015 I stood in front of a capacity crowd in a stylish new lecture theatre at the University of Technology Sydney and prepared to deliver the first keynote of a three-day conference to mark 40 years since the publication of Damned Whores and God’s Police. The audience was mostly women, ranging in age from 11 years to almost 90, who were eager to explore the question that would absorb us throughout the conference: how much has changed for Australia and, more particularly, for Australian women, in the past four decades. And, just as importantly, what is left to do – and how will we make it happen?

It was a remarkable gathering. The speakers over the three days included people who are well-known (among them former governor-general Quentin Bryce, former chief of army General David Morrison, former Sex Discrimination Commissioner Elizabeth Broderick and Indigenous academic and writer Professor Larissa Behrendt) alongside those who are just starting out or whose names are not as well known as they deserve to be. The range of people, again most of them women, who took part reflected the wonderful and challenging diversity of our country and was a glowing affirmation of the strength and tenacity of the women’s movement. I felt honoured that the ideas I had put out into the world 40 years earlier were still seen as meriting discussion – especially as the book had been out of print for seven years – but this conference was not about me. It was not even about the book, although that, of course, had provided the springboard, and the excuse, for the conference. The gathering, and the amazing amount of media attention it attracted, shows that the great project to achieve women’s equality is still so necessary – and still so far from completion. Bringing this book back into print in 2016 is part of that project, and offers a further opportunity to learn from our past as we go about reinventing our future.

The Australia I wrote about in the early 1970s has not changed totally beyond recognition, but I expect young people today might be astonished to learn what life used to be like for women. Even as late as 1975, when this book was first published, there were so many things women were unable to do. Some of these restrictions were self-imposed, cultural restraints, but in many cases they were underpinned by an absence of laws to enforce equality.

Even though in 1975 we were three years into the Whitlam government – the first federal government to commit to and legislate for women’s equality – there was still no federal anti-discrimination legislation. Nor were there any state laws outlawing discrimination. It seems almost unbelievable today, but until the late 1970s it was perfectly legal for women in Australia to be treated as inferiors. Jobs were classified by sex and advertised as being for ‘Men & boys’ or ‘Women & girls’. There was rarely any overlap between the offerings, which meant that women were excluded from even applying for many positions.

And there were certainly no laws governing how women were treated in the workplace. A woman had no legal redress if, for instance, the boss asked her to sit on his knee to take dictation. Like many terms I used in the book, or situations I described, ‘taking dictation’ is now archaic. For those of you who have never heard of it, let me explain: It meant you had to write down, usually in a special language known as short-hand, the words the boss – who was, of course, a man – wanted written in a letter or other document, which you would then type, on a machine called a typewriter, for him to sign.

The people who did this work were called ‘typists’. There also used to be a special term to describe the place where the typists – all of whom, without exception, were women – used to sit. They were lined up in rows at their desks in a configuration that was referred to as ‘the typing pool’. Along with many other totally sexist jobs, this one thankfully no longer exists. Bosses have had to learn to type. Even if only so they can text.

People of my generation might remember sardonically many of these details of the bad old days – and be eternally thankful that they are over. It is difficult not to seethe with anger, even all these years later, when recalling the multitude of ways in which we were humiliated and degraded. I found it quite illuminating myself when I re-read this book recently and was reminded just how bad the everyday constant, and institutional, denigration of women used to be. (Although the television series Mad Men is a painfully accurate reminder.)

When we compare then and now, the changes are impressive. Many of the statistics, on such things as employment, welfare payments, prescription drug-use and other contemporary matters that I set out in the book, are now almost quaint in how little bearing they have on how things are today. Parts of the book read rather like an historical archive. It is a snapshot of how things were in 1975, and in the convict, colonial and other periods that I wrote about.

I think it is well worth revisiting those eras to recall, or learn for the first time, our history and the story of Australian women’s evolution towards equality. But reading the book also reminds us how different much of our language is now. We can reflect on attitude changes of course, how we have enlarged our understanding of things, but our shifts in language also represent our progress in identifying, through naming, issues and forms of oppression that we did not fully grasp 40 years ago.

It is almost disconcerting to realise how ill equipped we were back then to talk about many key issues. We now understand the importance of language in political struggle. Once you have a name for something, you can start to understand it, and to address it. Looking back, it is fascinating to see how much our language has changed as we have identified new issues and found ways of talking about them.

There are many instances in the book of archaic language and usage. ‘Gay’ meant something else then. We used the term ‘domestics’ to refer to violence in the home. It was standard to use the term ‘Blacks’ rather than Indigenous Australians. Reading the book today is like taking an historical excursion, in time and place, but also into how we talked and the things that mattered to us back then. It seems extraordinary today, but in the mid-1970s we did not use terms like ‘domestic violence’, ‘sexual harassment’, ‘date rape’ or ‘glass ceiling’ – let alone ‘same-sex marriage’ – because they had not yet been coined. We had not yet given names to some things even though they certainly existed. It is astonishing that I devoted almost a page in the book to the setting up of Elsie Women’s Refuge in 1974 and never once used the word ‘violence’, let alone ‘domestic violence’.

We did not use the term ‘gender’, let alone ‘gendered’; we did not talk about ‘gender equality’ the way we do now. We had yet to discover ‘the gender pay gap’; instead we talked about ‘equal pay’. We also talked about ‘women’ and ‘sex’ and ‘sex roles’ and other terms that have fallen into disuse today.

We did not use the term ‘equality’. We preferred ‘liberation’ to ‘feminism’. In the early 1970s we called ourselves ‘women’s liberationists’ and got annoyed when the media dumbed it down to ‘women’s libbers’. When we did refer to ourselves as feminists, it was always qualified by another word. We were ‘radical feminists’ or ‘socialist feminists’ or ‘lesbian feminists’. We felt ‘feminist’ was a rather incomplete description.

I have no intention of updating the language in this new edition of the book. Not only would it require me to completely rewrite the book but, more importantly, it would alter the context and undermine the authenticity of what I wrote in the early 1970s. We need to understand how it was then, partly so we can see how much we have changed.

Today we also argue endlessly and, in my view, rather point-lessly, about ‘feminism’. What is feminism? What does it mean? Who calls themselves a feminist and what do we think about those women who won’t? (Julie Bishop, the first woman to become Australia’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, managed to trigger acres of coverage over her refusal, in response to questions at her address to the National Press Club on 29 October 2014, to call herself a feminist.¹ No-one actually reported her speech, which contained a lot of feminist assumptions and policy announcements.²) I think our energies would be better directed towards addressing the issues of inequality and actually changing them, rather than worrying about what people do or do not call themselves. We would do better to measure women’s representation – be it in boardrooms or on bookshelves – and to concern ourselves with the substance of women’s equality and how we can accelerate its pace.

We are entitled to take pride and comfort from the barriers that have been broken and the triumphs of individual women in expanding the possibilities for all of us: the first prime minister or state premier, governor-general, High Court judge, CEO of a major corporation, the first jockey or football umpire or chemical engineer.³

All of these triumphs were over the horizon in 1975. It was only with the laws designed to end legal discrimination against women that they even became possible.

In the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s – some states were slower than others – we saw the passage of various anti-discrimination laws that were intended to provide a legal basis for equality. These included the landmark federal Sex Discrimination Act 1984, which outlawed discrimination against women on the grounds of their sex (as we used to say then, rather than gender), marital status or condition of pregnancy, in employment, in education and the provision of goods and services. It is almost impossible to convey today just how hard-fought that legislation was, how formidable the opposition to it was and how much changed once it finally became the law of the land (and, over the decades since, has been amended and strengthened). For instance, in 1983, when Australia first ratified the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, which provides the legal basis for the Sex Discrimination Act, the government secured agreement to exempt two provisions of that Convention: paid maternity leave and allowing women to serve in combat roles in the military. Both those exemptions are now redundant, with a Paid Parental Leave scheme introduced by the Rudd Government in 2009 and all positions in Defence finally being opened up to women in 2011 by the Gillard Government.

With discrimination finally against the law, things changed – big and small. A small example: the signs on the toilet doors in the federal parliament had to be repainted. Women or Men – instead of Senators or Members. A bigger one: Deborah Wardley, seeking a job with the now defunct Ansett Airlines, won an anti-discrimination action, which took four years and went all the way to the High Court, before she was eventually employed as a commercial pilot in 1979. (Of course, she could not have launched the action – or won it – without the Victorian anti-discrimination laws.)

These laws have not solved everything. Despite numerous laws and court decisions stipulating equal pay, women continue to be paid an average of 18 per cent less than men. A 2012 NATSEM report calculated that over her lifetime, a 25-year-old woman with postgraduate qualifications would earn $2.49 million whereas the man who sat beside her in class would, over his lifetime, earn $3.78 million.⁴ The persistent gender pay gap, together with women’s often-interrupted workforce participation, due to taking time out when their children are young, also produces discrepancies in women’s retirement income. Recent calculations put women’s average superannuation balance at retirement at $112 600 compared with $198 000 for men.⁵ One in three women have no superannuation at all.

Because we have become so concerned with measuring change, we may have lost sight of some of the important concerns I tried to address when I wrote this book. These days we are preoccupied with ‘how far have we come’ and, its corollary, ‘how far we have left to go’. Of course, I agree that we need to measure progress, and to call attention to backsliding and backlash. I have done this myself in subsequent books, namely The End of Equality (2003) and The Misogyny Factory (2013). I felt it was necessary to write these books because our progress has been so uneven; it was important to document the many ways our previous gains were under threat. But I never wanted this running the ruler over legal, economic, political and other easily measurable forms of progress to be the only way we looked at ourselves.

If we only do that, we lose sight of the truth.

I think it is widely agreed that Damned Whores and God’s Police told a truth that all of us recognised, and that is why the book lasted so long and why it continues to resonate today, even though it has been out of print for so long. It confronted us with something we knew to be true. It was an uncomfortable truth, but it explained a lot of things.

But today we do not talk so much about what in the book I called the ‘invisible barriers’ – the ways women limited themselves and collaborated with the culture of oppression. We need to resume that conversation because while we might have made major changes and mapped a path to full equality, I am not sure if we have sufficiently reinvented ourselves.

The core argument of the book was that Australian women had been defined and constrained by stereotypes that both prescribed and proscribed certain ways of behaving. I drew on Australian history to find the terms ‘Damned Whores’ and ‘God’s Police’ so that the classic madonna/whore dualism resonated with our own story and our own experience. My argument was that women in Australia had been kept in check by the God’s Police stereotype, both by the ways women were deemed by society to see motherhood and family as their ultimate aspiration, and by the social exclusion they suffered as a result of being castigated as a Damned Whore if they refused.

I wrote:

The major impediment to female rebellion, and that which keeps women physically and psychologically bound to their family-centred roles, has been the absence of any cultural tradition that approved of women being anything else.

We should be asking: is this still true today? Are Australian women still constrained by the social imperatives of motherhood? Are women expected to fit everything else they do around this, still primary, role as mothers? Are most, if not all, of the measures ostensibly designed to promote equality in the workplace in effect measures to make it easier for women to add this economic role onto their, still primary, role as mothers? Are flexible work policies all about making it easier for women – not men – to juggle kids and jobs? Why does the cost of child care invariably come from the woman’s salary? Do women feel guilty about being in employment? Do men?

We have not fully confronted these fundamental questions. Women are still expected to do more, but men are not required to change. We have not said: women might be the ones who bear the children, but their entire lives should not be defined by that one capability. We have changed a lot, but we have not changed this. We are ready for women to do more, so long as they first of all fulfil their primary role. There is still no expectation, let alone demand, that men’s employment lives ought to be disrupted when they have children as women’s inevitably are. Women themselves do not expect or demand this of the fathers of their children. Why not?

Many, if not most, women still accept, deep down, that it is their role to be God’s Police. They believe they are responsible for the emotional, as well as the physical, running of the family; it is their job to manage and monitor and, where necessary, censor the behaviour of their husbands and their children. And there is wide consensus, in Australia and elsewhere, that this is the way things should be. Many women today want to add to, and modernise, the God’s Police role rather than redefine, let alone abandon, it completely.

I am struck by how many women today, aged in their 30s and 40s with big, full-time jobs and two or three children, have chosen to take on additional domestic roles such as baking, sewing, preserving or other time-consuming (and, I would argue, unnecessary) tasks that once fully occupied women who had no choice but to be what we today like to call ‘domestic goddesses’. Why do these women feel the need to do this? Is it atonement for not being full-time mothers? Is it to demonstrate that their economic role outside the home does not come at the cost of domestic accomplishments? Is it to head off criticism that they are neglecting their nurturing roles? How to explain the often torrid criticisms of working mothers by their stay-at-home counterparts over such issues as tuckshop rosters? Why on earth do so many women feel so compromised or defensive simply because they are exercising their option to pursue equality?

Of course, it is true that women do have more choices today. We can decide to not marry, to not have children, to live openly in a same-sex relationship, to live happily alone – ‘spinster’ is another word that has, thankfully, pretty much disappeared from our vocabulary. Our choices – whatever they are – are more likely to be accepted now than was the case four decades ago. But we have not overcome the dualism.

We have not disavowed that motherhood is still the central, preferable and most admired option for women. We might not overtly punish women who are not mothers but we have our ways of letting them know they have fallen short of the ideal. For instance, by calling them ‘deliberately barren’⁶, as a Liberal Party Senator accused Julia Gillard, who was then the deputy leader of the Labor Party and about to become deputy prime minister.

We still differentiate between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ women. Emily Maguire, the writer, examined this proposition in Princesses and Pornstars (2008) and concluded that the stereotypes have not vanished, they have merely been updated:

Young women are told they can be and do anything, yet in the eye of the media and mainstream culture the choices are still either/or. You can be a mother or have a proper career. You can have orgasms or respect. You can be independent or adored.⁷

This conclusion is depressing because it confirms the enduring nature of these cultural shackles.

And it has been recently re-confirmed. Take the example, again, of Julia Gillard who became our first female prime minister in 2010. This was a significant milestone in the march of Australian women towards equality but, it turns out, as a nation we were incapable of embracing it. Instead, Gillard was subjected to a sordid and disgraceful barrage of pornographic, sexist and misogynist commentary from the Opposition, the media, members of her own party, and the general public, which undermined her legitimacy and succeeded in generating such widespread doubt about her ability to govern that she was unceremoniously dumped by her party.⁸

Gillard herself drew on the damned whores and God’s police stereotypes to describe the situation she found herself in as prime minister when she wrote in her memoir in 2014:

It felt to me as prime minister that the binary stereotypes were still there, that the only two choices available were good woman or bad woman. As a woman wielding power, with all the complexities of modern politics, I was never going to be portrayed as a good woman. So I must be the bad woman, a scheming shrew, a heartless harridan or a lying bitch.⁹

It is clear that the stereotypes persist well into the 21st century.

Another recent and telling example of how we still expect women to play the role of God’s Police was the federal government decision in September 2015 that Australia would accept a large number of Syrian refugees.

In making this announcement, the then prime minister Tony Abbott said:

… our focus for these new 12,000 permanent resettlement places will be those people most in need of permanent protection – women, children and families from persecuted minorities … I do want to stress women, children and families – the most vulnerable of all.¹⁰

As the media was quick to point out, this was code for ‘No single men’.

We did not want our society disrupted by an influx of uncontrollable men who, the assumption goes, would be an unruly and disorderly presence in our society.

Caroline Chisholm could hardly have put it better herself. She did not use the language of national security as Tony Abbott did, and she was referring to immigrants rather than refugees, but the assumptions were the same when she referred to ‘God’s police – wives and little children – good and virtuous women’.¹¹

The media made no comment about whether single women would be included in this refugee intake. In fact, if you just went on media reports, you could conclude there are NO single Syrian women. Just ‘families’ or ‘single men’. The unspoken message here was that ‘single men’ could include jihadists and terrorists among their number whereas ‘families’ – ‘wives and little children’ – posed no security threat to our country. There is, unfortunately, plenty of evidence to contradict this assumption. ‘Black widows’ and other women, many of them mothers, have become suicide bombers or shooters. Categorising people according to their family status is delusionary and, quite possibly, dangerous. Yet another reason to stop doing it.

If we still have God’s Police, then we must also still have their opposite, the bad women. In 1975, I identified prostitutes, lesbians and women in prison as replacing the female convicts as the modern-day damned whores. They were then seen as the Other. They had transgressed. They were repudiated for their sexuality or for flouting other conventions of society. They were spurned for not being the way women were supposed to be: subservient, submissive, dependent.

Despite our claims to champion equality, and for all the progress we have made, we still punish women who are outspoken or contrarian, who step outside the modernised notion of God’s Police. So who are today’s bad girls?

You might argue that at a time when young women today march in Slut Walks, asserting their right to dress as whores once might have, this category does not make much sense any more. In fact, the opposite is true. It seems that the numbers and types of women who are today treated as the Other, as transgressors, as modern-day damned whores, are large and growing.

It is women online expressing provocative opinions – or, often, even any opinions. It is women occupying public spaces and asserting their rights to define their issues and themselves. It is women campaigning to keep abortion rights, or arguing for equal representation in every area of society. In fact, perhaps the easiest way to identify today’s damned whores is by the opposition they generate and by the sexualised nature of much of that opposition. ‘Slut-shaming’ – attacking women on sexual grounds, real or invented – epitomises the new weapon against women. It is new but it is also depressingly familiar to attempt to degrade women on sexual grounds. It confirms how entrenched the stereotypes still are. And how they have adapted to new realities; one of the most reviled groups of women in Australia today is those who cover their faces and their bodies. That the woman in the hijab or the burkha is, ironically, seen by many as more transgressive than the woman who walks semi-naked down the street to ‘reclaim the night’ is one measure of the persistence, and the evolution, of the ‘damned whore’ stereotype. The alarming increase in violence against women, so much of it fatal, is another measure.

In 1975 I had no idea that my analysis would resonate in the way it did.

It is certainly not something that I could have imagined while I was struggling to write the book.

In my autobiography Ducks on the Pond, I described my fears as I tried to write. I was afraid I could not finish it, I was afraid that no-one would read it, but most of all I was afraid that I was not up to the task that I had set out for myself, which was nothing less than to rewrite our history and our sociology so we could understand the place that women had been assigned in our national story.

Did I have the courage to ‘take on’ the grand old men of Australian history and literature? To attack them for what we used to call their ‘male chauvinist’ assumptions and to provide some markers towards a different story, one that shone a light on the mostly neglected achievements of women and that also asked why women had been so often overlooked in the past.

In the end, I found it in myself to do so and it was an important – and lasting – lesson, for me and, I hope, for others. I learned to be brave. I learned to shuck off the timidity that prevents so many of us from standing up and fighting. In mid-September 2014 in Melbourne, Quentin Bryce told a group of schoolgirls: ‘Be bold, be bold, be bold’.¹² This is the most important advice women of my generation can give to the young. Whether it is to ask for that pay rise, or that promotion, or that book review writing assignment, or to lobby politicians or hold one’s own in an argument with male colleagues, we have to be brave, we have to learn to take risks and we have to be confident about ourselves. And whenever we are wrong (as we sometimes will be) or make mistakes or suffer serious setbacks, we have to just get up and keep going.

I am reminded of the famous feminist song, ‘Don’t be too polite, girls’ by the late Melbourne singer-songwriter Glen Tomasetti. It was known as the Equal Pay Anthem and it began:

Don’t be too polite, girls, don’t be too polite

Show a little fight, girls, show a little fight.¹³

We need to know that, despite the palpable gains of the past 40 years, our fight is far from over. It is not just that we still have so much unfinished business: equal pay, equal representation in parliaments and elsewhere, freedom from violence, to name just a few of our important issues.

The frightening reality is that there are forces in Australia, and globally, that would strip away what we have already won. We see what is happening in the US to abortion rights, with a massive regulatory assault being mounted at state level to undermine or even totally prevent women exercising their constitutional right to abortion as set down by the 1973 US Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade.

It is sobering to realise that there has not been a UN conference on women since the landmark conference in Beijing in 1995 because of the realistic fear that the principles of the Beijing Declaration and Platform of Action¹⁴, especially those pertaining to women’s reproductive rights, would not be re-affirmed today. In other words, if there were to be a new global conference of women, as there used to be every five years between 1975 and 1995, we would lose ground. So for 20 years, we have stood still or been required to use other mechanisms, such as the Millennium Development Goals or, coming up, the Sustainable Development Goals, to maintain the global women’s agenda.

What this means is that young women are going to have to take up that fight, and keep it going. They are going to have to fight to keep what we already have – what they grew up assuming was unassailable and irreversible – and they are going to have to fight to enable us to keep moving forward. They are going to need to be brave and to be bold and they certainly can’t afford to be polite! This is not a job for God’s Police.

The fight has become not just necessary but urgent because of the shocking increase in violence against women in Australia, more and more of it fatal. The Counting Dead Women site on the Destroy the Joint Facebook page put the number of women killed in Australia in 2015 at 79.

In 52 weeks 79 women died violent deaths – 17 of them in the final weeks of 2015 and most of them at the hands of their current or former partners. In addition, we know that every three hours around Australia, a woman is hospitalised with injuries inflicted by a partner or family member. We count the deaths, but we have not yet found a way to count the injuries, including the permanent physical and psychological wounds.

There is no doubt that this violence is due to a great many men being unable to accept women as equals or as independent beings. For these men, women belong – and should stay – in the pre- ordained and subordinate roles the stereotypes laid out for them.

As Rosie Batty, the 2015 Australian of the Year and a tireless campaigner on the issue of family violence, has pointed out, we cannot address violence without addressing gender inequality. Elizabeth Broderick, who until early September 2015 was Australia’s Sex Discrimination Commissioner, has made the same argument: ‘Men’s violence against women is Australia’s most significant gender equality issue. It’s both a cause and a consequence of gender inequality.’¹⁵

This is a startling, and sobering, assessment.

I could never have made such an assertion back in 1975. We had not yet made those kinds of connections. As I have already indicated, it was difficult back then to even speak about violence. It was beyond comprehension that we could have seen a casual connection between women’s inequality and the rise in violence against women. Yet Broderick has taken the argument even further, arguing that it is not only the most significant gender equality issue in Australia, but that it’s the most significant gender equality issue in the world.

Globally, around 900 million women are either currently or have recently lived in violent relationships; in Australia the figure is 1.2 million women:

Just think about that … that’s the Telstra Stadium 10, 15 times full of women. In fact, here in New South Wales, last week, we had two women murdered by their intimate partner. We’ve had 35 women murdered by their intimate partner in the first 14 weeks of this year. If there were 35 people being killed by terrorist attack or falling off a train or whatever, we’d be doing something about it.¹⁶

She said that on 7 May 2015 when 35 women had been killed. As Broderick said, if 35 Australians had been killed in any other way, there would be outrage. And there would be action.

In the seven months since then, another 44 women died violently.

Two young boys were killed as a result of random violence on my street in Kings Cross, Sydney, in 2014. As a result, the liquor laws were changed, venues have closed and there has been a dramatic decrease in violence in the area. When are we going to react in a similarly serious fashion to the ongoing deaths of women? Why do the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition attend the funerals of soldiers killed in war, but not the funerals of women killed as a result of domestic terrorism?

When are we going to treat this as the national emergency it is? Or are we in a continuing state of deep denial about the true causes of this violence? No amount of political window-dressing, or emergency packages of the kind that we saw from federal and state government in the latter part of 2015, will end the violence until we end the inequality. The two things are deeply and inextricably linked and we have to accept this – and act on it.

This book reflected the coming together of research and activism.

I spent many hours in libraries, reading documents and doing all kinds of primary and secondary research in order to understand the country and why and how it so deeply embodied and reflected masculine values. I also spent a great deal of time as an activist in the women’s movement and the resident action movement that was active in inner Sydney in the early 1970s. I was involved in setting up Elsie Women’s Refuge, the Sydney Rape Crisis Centre, the founding of Refractory Girl, the first women’s studies journal as well as numerous speakouts, meetings, marches and demonstrations.

I worried how my activism was taking me away from my writing and I was criticised by sister activists for running away from that work to bury myself in the library, but in the end, I realised that the two things were both essential to developing the framework for understanding Australian history and society. Each edition of the book – 1975, 1994, 2002 and now 2016 – similarly reflected that interaction between my research and my activism. I see the book as a living thing that has helped us to understand who we are and why we are the way we are. The activism provides the test cases of what we need to do to change, to complete our journey to equality by renouncing the stereotypes and enabling all women to flower as unique individuals able to participate fully and equally in all that society has to offer.

By focusing on the practical as well as the theoretical, we develop a greater understanding of what we need to change, as well as why it needs to.

Realising this ought to motivate us to start on the path to the deep cultural change that is necessary if we are going to subvert and destroy the stereotypes rather than merely continue to modernise them.

Not just our sanity is at stake but, in too many instances, our lives as well.

Sydney

January 2016

Author’s note to the second revised edition [2002]

Damned Whores and God’s Police was published in both hard cover and paperback in 1975, and reprinted many times over the next 19 years. In 1994, a revised edition was published that added a new introduction and replaced the original concluding chapter, ‘Prospects for liberation’, with a new one – ‘Letter to the next generation’ – which caused considerable controversy at the time. This latest, 2002, edition retains all these chapters and restores ‘Prospects for liberation’. It is therefore a compilation of the previous versions of the book, but as well it includes significant new material.

The major addition is the ‘Timeline of achievements by and for Australian women’, which follows the new essay ‘The march of women’. In compiling the timeline, I needed to revisit all our history since white settlement so that I could chart the milestones. Mostly I have concentrated on the political and economic achievements, but I thought the timeline needed to include other dimensions – as do our lives – and so I have also mentioned important accomplishments by women in the arts, in sport and in business.

Part of my task in the early 1970s, when I first wrote this book, was to uncover the story of women who had, to use a phrase made famous by the British historian Sheila Rowbotham, been ‘hidden from history’. The occasional individual woman was singled out for her accomplishments by mainstream histories, but the vast majority of women’s lives might as well not have been lived if you were to take those histories as an accurate reflection of our past. One of the early excitements of the second-wave women’s movement 30 years ago was to discover how rich and diverse women’s history actually was. Many of the young women, like myself, who made up that second wave were students or otherwise interested in research and we spent a great deal of time in libraries learning about the activities of our feminist forebears. We were astonished to discover a rich trove of radical activism, much of which had achieved material changes in the lives of women.

It was sobering for us in the 1970s to realise that we were not the first feminists. Why didn’t we know about this history? we wondered. Why was it not taught in schools? Even more worrying, what had happened to these previous movements of women? If they had disappeared from history, was that also going to be our fate? Would a future generation of young women have to forage through information systems to retrieve data about the feminist revolution of the 1970s and 1980s? We did not think so for a moment, such was the self-assurance of the times! Yet, a mere decade or so later, many of the accomplishments of the second wave are forgotten while the earlier ones might never have occurred. I am not suggesting that we need to dwell obsessively on the past, nor that we should be overly preoccupied with our feminist heritage, but I am astonished at how quickly we have forgotten even our own recent past.

I frequently find myself having to check dates and events that not so long ago seemed permanently etched in my consciousness. This is not just a problem of memory fading with the years. The collective story of women is still not sufficiently integrated into the national story to be assured of being automatically passed on. It is incumbent upon those of us who think that we need to understand our past, in order to shape our future, to ensure that women do not once again disappear from history.

The new timeline, which appears at the end of the book, is not meant as a substitute for the narrative history that is the key to our story. It is intended to provide something of a skeleton for that narrative. Reading it, you will observe a trajectory of progress. What you will not find is the flesh on the bones of that skeleton. For that, you will need to read the whole of this book, or the various others that tell the story of women in Australia over the past 200 years. But it seemed to me that we needed an accessible reference tool that simplified the task of being able to check the dates of key events and milestones in that story. With this timeline you can quickly remind yourself, or learn for the first time, when Australian women won the right to vote, or the right to legal abortion; when the first woman doctor was able to practise, or the first woman pilot to fly. But the story is not complete. The timeline concludes with a check list of the barriers we have yet to breach, positions of power that have yet to be occupied by women. Eventually, this will happen and then perhaps we can conclude that most, if not all, of the legal and social obstacles to women’s equality have been overcome. But will this be enough for the lives of all women to be transformed? Does the success of a few individual women herald changes for all? That is the question for the future.

Sydney

January 2002

Author’s note to the new edition [1994]

When this book was first published, the reviews ranged from lukewarm to unremittingly hostile, but it quickly found an audience of women, and men, who were receptive to what was then a new way of looking at ourselves and our country. I was also pleased to learn that, although it was published only in Australia and New Zealand, the book managed to find its way into the hands of feminists around the world. I received enthusiastic letters from women in Canada, the US, England, South Africa and Nigeria. I was sorry it was never published in either Britain or the US, despite vigorous efforts on my part, but it is good to know that books have a way of finding their way around the world despite the decisions of international publishing houses.

This book would probably never have been written had it not been for the efforts of the late Professor Henry Mayer, who let me into his postgraduate program in the University of Sydney’s Government Department even though he knew I had a contract with Penguin Books, who gave my draft chapters attention worthy of a thesis and then, when the book was finally published, insisted I honour my undertaking to submit it for examination for a postgraduate degree. It took several years of negotiating our way around the labyrinthine university regulations to obtain agreement that, despite its most irregular title, I could submit for examination the published book – rather than have it retyped and bound into the usual thesis format. I happened to be in southern Africa, on assignment for the Australian Financial Review, for whom I worked by 1979, when I received a telegram from Henry informing me that I had been awarded a PhD for the book. He had only one request: that he not have to attend the graduation ceremony. We both stayed away, but I want to place on record here my immense debt to this extraordinary man who, sadly, died in 1991.

Most of the new material I have added to this book was written in New York City. Working on an Australian book from that distance was not easy, and it would have been impossible without the unstinting help of a great many friends, former colleagues and kind strangers who responded to urgent faxes seeking information. I would like to thank the people in the following government offices who helped by sending much of the documentation I required: the Office of the Status of Women, the office of the Sex Discrimination Commissioner, the Affirmative Action Agency and the Equal Pay Unit in the Department of Industrial Relations. I am especially grateful to Sue Binney, Kay Daniels, Liz Harvey, Mary Murnane, Angela Nordlinger, Lyndall Ryan, Gavin Souter and, most of all, Chris Ronalds, who collected and sent over reams of material and found a wonderful researcher, Jane Ellis, who did some last-minute checking. We tried hard to produce an error-free book; if we failed, the responsibility is mine.

I also want to thank those people in New York who stood by me while I rushed to finish these new chapters: Pat and Richard Cantor for generously giving me their apartment to work in while they were being initiated into the delights of Down Under; Anne Banks, Cate Breslin, Jane Ciabattari, Grace Lichtenstein, Robin Reisig and Marilyn Webb who invited me into their writers’ group and have been a great source of encouragement and friendship; Molly Haskell and Martha Lear for allowing me access to the Upper West Side Writers’ Studio, that haven of industry and solitude where it was impossible not to write; Clare O’Brien for reading more drafts than should have been necessary; and, above all, Chip Rolley for his unwavering support at all times.

What none of us knew in May 1992 as I rushed to meet my deadline was that I would have to set aside this work for almost a year because of an irresistible invitation from Prime Minister Paul Keating to return to Australia as a consultant in his office on women’s issues. This invitation provided me with the opportunity to put my money where my mouth was, so to speak, and give advice on implementing many of the policies women had long advocated. My return to Canberra, and to women’s policy issues, was especially helpful for this project as it enabled me to bring myself up-to-date on the reality, as distinct from the theory, of how these issues were developing. Altogether it was a rare and extremely enjoyable opportunity to work at a high political level with a man who, despite a prior reputation of having little interest in women’s issues, proved to be extraordinarily responsive and willing to instigate big political reforms. His election promises to women in the 1993 campaign were the most comprehensive ever made by an Australian political leader, and once they are implemented, Australian women will truly be able to say that much of the agenda we drew up 20 years ago has been accomplished.

Sydney

April 1993

Introduction to the new edition [1994]

Much has changed in the 20 years since I first began writing this book. Australia itself has altered in important ways; we are a more diverse and tolerant nation than we used to be. Women’s lives are different, and for the most part better; we have more choices, and more opportunities. Men’s lives, as a result, have changed too. But what can be said about the nature and, especially, the quality of these changes? To attempt to answer that question is both enticing and intimidating. How can 20 years of struggle and setback, trial and triumph be encapsulated in a few pages? How can we possibly assess and measure what has occurred, when we have witnessed and been part of nothing less than a revolution in the lives of women and men? How can we make sense of it all?

I believe that to address these questions adequately, a new book is needed and I hope that someone, somewhere, right now is hatching another ‘big book’, a sweeping feminist perspective on contemporary Australia, because we need another interpretation, a new perspective. I am happy to update my account, where it is now factually inaccurate, and to provide a perspective on some of the important changes of the past two decades, but we need new voices and new visions.

So much has changed since 1975, International Women’s Year, when this book first appeared. Parts of the book now seem antiquated and perhaps even irrelevant. For instance, the description in Chapter Five of the social security system and its impact on women no longer stands because of the many important (and continuing) changes to that system over the past two decades. Some of the book’s descriptions of contemporary culture, and even of the women’s movement, now seem quaint and outmoded. Much of the language we use today to describe everyday exploitation or abuse of women did not even exist then. The term ‘sexual harassment’ had yet to be coined; we had not begun to speak of domestic violence, although we were becoming depressingly aware of how widespread what we referred to as ‘wife-bashing’ was; what I clumsily called petty rape is now more accurately known as date rape or acquaintance rape. We had only just begun to grapple with barriers to employment opportunities such as sex discrimination and we had yet to discover the glass ceiling. The women’s movement is now 25 years old and is very different from the inchoate, youthful movement of the early 1970s. We now have our own story to tell, our history of what we thought and felt, and what we have achieved during a quarter century of struggle. So there is a great deal to examine, to reflect on and to make judgements about.

Despite all this, I feel the existing chapters offer a perspective on the period in which they were written and should stand. If we constantly rewrite history to fit how we see things now, we forget how things used to be and, equally important to future scholars, how we used to see them. So the core of the book remains intact, but I have added to it a new beginning and a new end. I decided not to add to the historical chapters, tempting though it was to re-enter the seemingly never-ending debate about the virtues or otherwise of the convict women. Since my efforts to rescue these women from the condescending moralism of previous (and mostly male) historians, a veritable industry seems to have built itself around the fate and fortunes of the somewhat fewer than 25 000 women who came to this country as convicts. A few of the more recent writers, Portia Robinson being a prime example, have sought to discount my account on ideological grounds. She attacks my interpretation as a guileless acceptance of the judgement of contemporary authorities that the convict women were whores (totally missing my point about the imposed sexual slavery that was de facto British policy at the time), and tries to tether to a few flimsy biographical sketches the unsustainable notion that most women in early Australia were virtuous wives and mothers.¹ But most have endorsed my premise and either, as in the case of Robert Hughes², added even more graphic documentation than I was able to muster from the secondary sources I mostly used or, as with Marian Aveling³, dispensed with my feminist preoccupation with the status of women in favour of a gender analysis of the power of the state.

While deciding not to engage with any of these theses, I am nevertheless obliged to correct an error that was brought to my attention by Robert Hughes some 12 years after this book was first published. Hughes pointed out that Lt Ralph Clark was on Norfolk Island on 3 June 1790 – the day the Lady Juliana sailed into Sydney Harbour – and could not, therefore, have made the famous remark about ‘not more of those damned whores’ on the day I said he did. I acknowledge this error, and having been unable to retrace the archival steps that led me to the quote in the first place, decided to replace it with another from Ralph Clark. His journals, having now been published, leave the reader in no doubt that he continually referred to the female convicts as ‘damned whores’.

This new Introduction updates the picture I presented in 1975, providing something of a measure of how much change has taken place, while also canvassing some of the things we still need to do. I begin with a few personal thoughts on how to achieve lasting change developed as a result of working in government and in the media, both here in Australia and in the US. The various jobs I have held inside these powerful institutions have given me the opportunity to test, often in a very direct and hands-on fashion, the question of how we expand women’s opportunities, and how governments and the media contribute – or impede – this process.

The rest of this Introduction largely follows the chronological sequence of the first half of the book, and I have used the chapter titles as subheadings to make it easier to refer back and forth. I have also introduced some new subjects, such as women in politics, which I did not deal with before, and have included random observations where relevant. I have replaced the previous last chapter, ‘Prospects for liberation’, which was a rather muddled attempt to look into the future, with a new section titled ‘Letter to the next generation’. Here, I tell the story of the women’s movement in Australia since the early 1970s and try to give young women