Our remembered selves: oral history and feminist memory

This is the Published version of the following publication

Stephens, Julie (2010) Our remembered selves: oral history and feminist memory. Oral History, 38 (1). pp. 81-90. ISSN 0143-0955

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Downloaded from VU Research Repository https://vuir.vu.edu.au/15542/ OUR REMEMBERED SELVES: ORAL HISTORY AND FEMINIST MEMORY Julie Stephens

In retrospective accounts of the women’s movement, personal memories of ABSTRACT feminists have taken on a public and collective significance. What has come to count as an official memory and what has been forgotten is invariably KEY WORDS: contested. Oral history interviews with Australian feminists looking back on the , women’s movement challenge sanctioned accounts of second wave feminism memory studies, and raise important questions about memory and oral history. This article composure, explores some of the creative possibilities of interlinking memory theory, oral cultural scripts, history and feminist reminiscence. In examining oral testimonies about mid- maternalism twentieth century feminism, a more multifaceted and ambivalent dialogue about the women’s movement emerges than that found in memoir and auto- biography. Oral reminiscences resist some of the pressures to conform to domi- nant representational frameworks.

In retrospective accounts of mid-twentieth movement. This includes writers, historians, century feminism, debates about history and academics, public commentators, activists and memory intersect. The personal recollections of those who achieved considerable success in the feminists have taken on a public and collective political and executive arenas. The oral history significance, informing conferences, journals, unit of the library continues to build its strong memoir, autobiography and of course, popular collection of interviews documenting discourse.1 Efforts to stabilise or selectively Australian feminism and the history of the shape these memories into a sanctioned version women’s liberation movement in Australia. of the past are always fiercely debated. By exam- While some of the interviews to be discussed ining an oral history collection held at the here were conducted with this aim firmly in National Library of Australia, I will suggest that view,2 others were part of oral projects on interpretative approaches from oral history and Australian historians,3 political activists, acad- memory studies can work against fixed versions emics or women members of parliament and of feminism’s history and allow more ambiva- the senior bureaucracy. In the course of a wider lent dialogues to emerge. While there is an project researching the political consequences overlap between the oral record and written life of the different ways feminism has been narratives, attention to oral history can chal- remembered,4 I grouped together eighteen lenge some of the dominant public memories of recorded interviews with prominent Australian second wave feminism. feminists that share the characteristic of The National Library of Australia Oral ‘looking back’ and remembering the early History Collection contains a wide range of women’s liberation movement.5 These inter- interviews with well-known Australian women views have not been assembled in this way who were active in the women’s liberation before or analysed collectively.

Spring 2010 ORAL HISTORY 81 The interviews not only provide retrospective bration of subjectivity12 as an important tool of narratives of the women’s movement but also analysis, rather than as a shortcoming of share a certain generational perspective. With research. Many of the interviewers are also active few exceptions, the interviews are with women participants in the Australian women’s move- who ‘discovered’ the women’s movement at ment and often friends of the interview subjects. similar ages or life-stages. Significantly, most As examples of feminist rejection of the separa- interviews were conducted at the turn of the tion between researcher and researched, these century between 1998-2003. As narratives are very dynamic and interactive interviews. recorded at the end of the twentieth century, They follow informal conversational idioms with they mirror the widespread view at the time that interjections, qualifications and even at times something had passed and was lost — never to disputes over respective memories of particular be retrieved again. In the Australian political dates. Consequently, the kind of oral testimony context, this perspective was reinforced by an to be discussed in what follows, also provides increasing hostility to John Howard’s conserva- pointed insight into the relationship between tive government during this period. The inter- personal and public memory. views also coincided with and reproduced an I will argue that interpreting these interviews emerging cultural interest in memory, a ‘memory through the lens of memory studies and oral wave’ reflected at the time in films, novels, history theory highlights different ways these popular discourse and the rise of the memoir. oral narratives resist dominant representational The revived intellectual interest in memory also frameworks. First, they avoid the binary logic of shaped the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of many historical and popular accounts that tally- memory studies. Accordingly, a compelling way up the successes and failures of feminism. of viewing these oral history interviews is to see Secondly, they acknowledge and dramatise the them as end of millennium narratives conducted affective dimensions of the women’s movement during a personal testimony epidemic. and the role of the emotions in the formulation My approach to these oral sources shares of activist strategy and identity. This is in some methodological characteristics with what contrast to the flattening out of emotion in is currently known as a secondary analysis (even certain feminist memoirs. And finally, I will though no primary analysis of this material has propose that these interviews contest dominant been done before). This method is defined by cultural representations that naturalise an oppo- Janet Heaton as the study of ‘artefactual data sition between feminism and motherhood. This derived from previous studies, such as field- article will explore each of these areas and the notes, observational records and tapes and tran- creative possibilities of interlinking memory scripts of interviews’.6 Joanna Bornat and Gail theory, oral history and feminist reminiscence. Wilson build on this definition in ‘Recycling the Where appropriate, contrast will be made with Evidence’ and outline some of the ethical and written memoir and biography. conceptual issues posed by the re-analysis of interviews and life histories.7 Elsewhere, Bornat ‘THE WOMEN’S MOVEMENT IS MY shows how the relationship between the COUNTRY’13 meaning and context of an interview can be illu- The poetic and political force of oral narratives minated by re-analysis. Inevitably, ‘second takes’ often resides in what Daniel James calls their at interviews bring ‘additional theoretical frame- ‘messiness’, their paradoxical and contradictory works to bear on the data’.8 While my approach nature.14 Certainly, some interview subjects to the National Library of Australia interviews attempt to shape reminiscences about their lives feels like a ‘first-take’, it is important to into neat, coherent and somehow instructive acknowledge that my re-grouping of these inter- accounts, such as what they may have learned views in a different context does open up possi- from their experiences or how present circum- bilities in the recorded material that could fall stances appear to have logically emerged from outside the original purpose for which the inter- their past. In a searching interview, however, views were conducted. such attempts are never entirely successful. This As Alistair Thomson reminds us, oral history process has been theorised by oral historians as (like memory) is shaped by particular social and the seeking of composure15 or as the need to intellectual forces.9 As well as reflecting a gener- construct a ‘safe and necessary personal coher- alised interest in life narratives and memory ence out of risky, unresolved or painful pieces of research,10 these particular oral histories are past and present lives’.16 The concept of shaped by earlier ideas about the radical poten- ‘composure’ has a dual meaning. Following tial of allowing women to ‘speak-for-them- Graham Dawson, it refers to both the process selves’.11 The interactive approach to of composing a life story and to the narrator interviewing also dramatises later feminist striving to be composed, calm and coherent.17 critiques of positivism in the 1980s and the cele- A struggle for personal coherence is clearly

82 ORAL HISTORY Spring 2010 evident in some of the recorded interviews with Australian feminists in the National Library of Australia oral history collection. Yet, the inter- active nature of the interviews, the friendships and familiarity between the interviewers and interviewees, the breaks and interruptions, the interjections and shared involvement in memory production means there is ample space for contradictions, paradoxes and discontinu- ities. This closely accords with Penny Summer- field’s observation that composure is always provisional in life narratives and that feminist oral history practice may be more conducive to producing and revealing discomposure.18 In this respect, the strength of oral testimony can be its failure to entirely control the process of remembrance. In the case of these interviews, singular readings of key historical events become much more difficult with oral evidence. The tally sheet logic often underpinning public discussions of the legacy of second wave femi- nism (quantifying successes and failures) is never wholly reproduced. A memory can invoke manifold responses, some of which are outside say that they are sometimes connected with Getting it together the dominant cultural scripts. Suzanne Bellamy, themselves and then they’re sometimes (A Women’s artist, radical feminist and writer, uses the disconnected with themselves…But in an Liberation metaphor of the mosaic in her oral history inter- historical sense, that’s often a useful creative Conference) 1979 view to describe the in tool for looking at movements of change, screenprint, printed in colour, from Australia: that they draw to them – first of all they multiple stencils, draw to them a really disparate group. I National Gallery of This was never a period of unity. This was mean, you know… that we drew to us the Australia, . not a period in which everyone sat down best and the worse, worse in inverted Purchased 1982 © and all agreed. It was a period of creative commas and best, because I think that we Toni Robertson. struggle out of the fantastic. It’s like the were the cream of our generation and also palette was endless. The palette was, you some of the most loopy.20 know, it was a mosaic…You can’t set it up. But it was an explosive, creative struggle An example of the interactive nature of the period.19 interviews in this archive and the often reflec- tive and irreverent approach to memory is in the At other points in this interview she remem- following exchange. Bellamy is discussing with bers women’s liberation as ‘an egg-laying extrav- the interviewer Biff Ward, the relationship aganza’ and ‘one of those epoch breaking between the verbal and the visual in the periods that can only be sustained briefly, but women’s movement, in poster art and in the within which everything is born’. Her recollec- layout of the first Australian women’s liberation tions depict the ‘explosive spontaneity’ of the newspaper Mejane.21 time as both ‘really precious’ and as having ‘wounded everyone in various ways’. Refusing BW. My memory of it, just as you speak is the role of the auditor, retrospectively calculat- that it always had in terms of layout a kind ing the achievements or shortcomings of femi- of space – and it wasn’t that there was a nism, Bellamy instead embraces the shortage of material, of blank spaces, but it ‘disconnects’ of the day and resists the tempta- wasn’t as dense visually as everything else tion to seek the ‘composure’ or ‘safety’ that was at that time. It was almost as though some interpreters of oral history see as charac- there was room to breathe. teristic of personal testimony. This gives her particular interview an almost meta-narrative SB That’s good. That’s good that that’s your quality, where memories are recalled and theo- memory. I dare say I think that probably isn’t rised at the same time. true, but that’s a wonderful memory, because the breadth was in there, in the idea There’s a sense if you’re only going to look – wasn’t it? That’s why you’ve got that at a person’s life as, like messy, that you’ll memory possibly.22

Spring 2010 ORAL HISTORY 83 If there is a particular ‘template of remem- of a collective, social memory.28 Green convinc- brance’ informing how feminism is recalled, ingly argues against the automatic conflation of Suzanne Bellamy refuses to follow it. More than individual and collective memory. In reference any other in these interviews, Bellamy rejects to the wider field of cultural history, Wulf official versions of the women’s movement in Kansteiner also suggests a widening unease with Australia as a story just about nation building or the failure of memory studies to sufficiently the integration of women into a nationalist conceptualise individual autobiographical narrative. Her reference points are not legisla- memory as distinct from collective memory.29 tive changes or policy battles but the relation- Turning back to the interviews, there is no ship between feminist anarchist guerrilla doubt that at certain points in the oral narra- activism and art movements such as dada and tives, cultural scripts do seem to emerge. In my surrealism. She refers to a secret history of femi- view, this is more likely to be the case when nism that has not yet been documented about interviewees are asked sweeping chronological such direct actions and the difficulty in finding questions. The questions themselves follow a an intellectual language creative enough to template. This is evident in questions about a capture the underground narratives of the move- person’s first encounter with feminism. The ment. This accords with views expressed by interviewee is prompted to tell of a ‘conversion- some radical feminists in Australia that their like’ experience. Going to the first women’s history has been overshadowed by more main- liberation meeting, for instance, is remembered stream accounts of the achievements of liberal as being ‘totally new’, like nothing ever experi- feminism. enced before. Sara Dowse, writer and the inau- The other oral history interview in this collec- gural head in 1974 of the Women’s Affairs tion which both recalls the early days of Section of the Australian Department of Prime women’s liberation and views personal and Minister and Cabinet remembers being ‘truly collective experience through a different cultural blown away [at] that first meeting’.30 Julia Ryan, lens is that of Jill Matthews, Professor of History feminist, educator and a founding member of at the Australian National University. Memories the National Foundation For Australian Women, of music and cultural protest, the different depicts her first meeting with the women’s liber- expressions of lesbian culture in the Australian ation group in Canberra in 1970 as being like cities of Adelaide and Melbourne and the details ‘hearing the word. It was very much a feeling of of the first women’s liberation posters are richly that’.31 Deborah McCulloch, feminist and drawn in this interview. Matthews recalls the Women’s Advisor to the South Australian times, not as ‘the unfolding of activism into a Premier (1976-1979) echoes this interpretation: career path’,23 but rather as a period when, Matthews declares, ‘we were absolutely rabid’.24 In later years, looking back it was like what The extent to which Australian feminist cultural happened to St Paul. It was a total, total radicalism has been eclipsed, or to use terms conversion. I was then dedicated [raucous from memory theory, ‘actively forgotten’ is a laughter] oh my God, to the women’s move- topic for another paper. I concur with Margaret ment and I was! Everyone else came a very Henderson’s persuasive observation that the bad second.32 autobiographies and histories of Australian feminism that emerged in the mid to late 1990s Biff Ward, along with Sara Dowse is one of tend towards a persistent ‘othering’ of radical the key oral history interviewers in this collec- politics.25 tion. She was prominent in the women’s move- Oral historians grapple with questions about ment in Canberra, the women’s refuge the relationship between individual and collec- movement and the women’s peace camps at the tive memory and whether personal recollection American base at Pine Gap in the 1980s and always follows a cultural script.26 The oral narra- recalls her emotional response to her first tives of Bellamy and Matthews, and many others women’s liberation meeting in above in the National Library of Australia collection, Bob Gould’s first bookshop: illustrate that there is ‘space for the consciously reflective individual’, to use Anna Green’s I had an epiphany of extraordinary propor- words, and that oral reminiscence is not always tions, in that I was almost winded. I felt like determined by a pre-existing cultural script.27 I had been hit by a huge implement in the Green raises questions about cultural theorisa- gut in recognition that that’s how I always tions of memory that devalue or reject notions of had lived and that at some level, that meant individual memory. She argues that the cultural that I hated what I was, which was and linguistic turn in memory theory has risked woman….So I got completely turned a form of cultural determinism where personal around and came out of that meeting just reflection is always subsumed under the rubric gabbing.33

84 ORAL HISTORY Spring 2010 Margaret Bearlin, teacher, educator and tantly, there is space for individual reflection and Women on the march social activist echoes this collective memory by resistance to unitary cultural scripts where the wave their placards remembering her first meeting as being ‘like a personal is erased by dominant notions of the at the International bombshell’ where she was ‘learning to see with collective view. Unlike historians or memoirists, Women's Day march, Melbourne, 8 March new eyes and to listen with new ears’.34 Yet, the the oral history interview subjects have more 1975. Photographer: space is created in these interviews where a control over when, how and to whom the oral John McKinnon. memory can also embody two things at once. record of their interview is released. This may National Library of Other prominent feminists describe their first mean there is less pressure to regulate or tone Australia women’s liberation meeting as more like a home- down discomforting reminiscences or to try and [http://nla.gov.au/ coming. Joan Russell, member of the Women’s fit them into an existing dominant representa- nla.pic-vn3510654]. Electoral Lobby, public servant and the first tional framework. woman leader at Casey Station in Antarctica in Binary logic, however, seems to unwittingly 1991 recounts both the newness and the famil- infuse academic debate about feminism’s legacy iarity: ‘It was like one of those instantaneous or the trajectories of women’s history. Take for feminist conversions. These women speak my example Susan Magarey’s otherwise illuminat- language, they feel the way I do, this is where I ing analysis of four interweaving strands in the belong – a coming home feeling’.35 development of women’s history in Australia in These recollections conform more to a recog- Women’s History Review 16.36 Her analysis is nisable public discourse about the ‘before’ and framed by a perceived conflict between a cele- ‘after’ of a conversion experience. Similar bratory view of women’s history and what she ‘templates of remembrance’ would be apparent views as a more negative perspective. She cites in written biographies and memoirs. However, Stuart MacIntyre’s claim that women’s history the ‘both at once’ characteristic of these marks one of the most significant changes to the personal testimonies underscores the value of discipline in the last twenty years, as represen- oral records as less ready to adopt binary modes tative of the former, and Jill Matthews’ comment of thinking about collective experience. Impor- that feminist historians should now turn their

Spring 2010 ORAL HISTORY 85 the early days of the women’s liberation move- ment. has long been predicated on an interest in the emotional lives of women. Yet, feminist histories and memoirs of the women’s movement can also be strangely devoid of affect. This is all the more puzzling given the genuinely passionate commitment to the idea of the personal as political at the time. The reflections of Lynne Segal, Australian-born Professor of Psychology at Birkbeck College London, in her Making Trouble: Life and Poli- tics are a case in point. It is a book opening with the provocation: ‘This is not a memoir’.42 Segal rejects popular and scholarly assessments of second wave feminism as a form of historical revisionism and tries to do something different in recalling her own political journey. She offers a ‘portrait of a political moment, placing oneself within it, however cautiously, knowing the limits of retrospection’.43 Her detailed reminis- cences make compelling reading partly because her experiences are so unconventional on the one hand, and so typical of the day, on the other.

Understanding life backwards the spirit of each decade I entered in my adult life appears, remarkably, in perfect harmony with my needs of the moment. I embarked hands to other things, as representing the latter, on sexual life in the Sixties, in the growing ‘an occasion to fall on one’s sword’.37 It should clamour for sexual liberation. I became a be noted that this binary approach appears single mother in the Seventies, as feminism uncharacteristic, as elsewhere Magarey cele- bloomed again. In the late 1980s, I began a brates the disorderly conduct associated with retreat into the responsible shores of women’s liberation and its various forms of academe when, if you were lucky, you could cultural expression.38 Yet, the impulse to defini- be both paid (though increasingly poorly) tively capture and pin down the legacy of diverse and acclaimed for performing your ‘opposi- and disruptive forms of protest seems difficult tional’ politics on lecture circuits, just at the to resist in retrospective analyses of social move- moment when Left and feminist activism ments. It is an impulse that is rejected in were largely vanishing from more accessible Bellamy’s use of the metaphor of the women’s public forums, in preparation for the dismal movement as an endless ‘mosaic’. Similarly, decade of the 1990s.44 Todd Gitlin, activist and commentator, uses the idea of a ‘sand painting’ to indicate that the This narrative could easily fit the lives of outcomes and meanings of social movements many of the feminist oral histories recorded by are always provisional and shifting in historical the National Library of Australia. Yet, does the time.39 Interpretive strategies from memory conventional shape of this narrative illustrate studies and oral history provide a useful frame- Summerfield’s observation that in reproducing work for keeping this provisionality firmly in the self as a social entity, we necessarily draw on view. If memory is seen as a narrative, a form of familiar public renderings of history?45 Unlike interpretation, not a replica, as Marita Sturken the oral testimonies discussed here, Segal reminds us,40 then tally sheet versions of history chooses to recall the details of campaigns and are less likely to surface. struggles more than the feelings and emotions they inflamed. Aside from the extracts from ‘WOUNDS IN THE TISSUE OF other people’s letters and memoirs, Making MEMORY’41 Trouble is notable for, and perhaps limited by, its Aside from the manifold dimensions of memory relatively impersonal voice. While Segal is being recorded in the oral testimony of adamant that her book is not meant to be a Australian feminists, the National Library confessional narrative, the silence around her collection richly documents in more detail than interior life (the exception being a brief section most written accounts, the emotional charge of on ageing), can work to undermine the gendered

86 ORAL HISTORY Spring 2010 and embodied, and in short, the ‘feminist’ char- culturally forgotten and are absent from the acter of the narrative. The struggle for composure public discourse then there is little wonder that or personal equanimity can be at the expense of current media representations of feminism take registering the emotional texture of the experi- such firm hold. ences that are remembered. Margaret Henderson highlights this contra- ‘ALTERNATIVE DREAMS OF MUTUALITY diction in her analysis of the autobiographies of – BACK THEN’50 notable Australian feminists. She offers a Clearly, attention to oral history can work to persuasive critique of three memoirs by femi- challenge some of the sanctioned public memo- nists who were prominent in government, the ries of feminism. We are all familiar with media, education and the corporate sector in popular culture representations that naturalise Australia (Susan Ryan’s Catching the Waves, an opposition between feminism and mother- Wendy McCarthy’s Don’t Fence Me In and Anne hood. Feminism is remembered as having been Summers Ducks on the Pond). Henderson turns anti-child, of promising that women could ‘have to a review by celebrated novelist Drusilla it all’ and of producing a work-obsessed career Modjeska, who observes that in these memoirs, woman. In the early part of the twenty-first it is possible to get a good sense of what these century, anxieties about the historical accuracy women have done but ‘not much of who they of these representations have been played out in are’.46 Henderson carefully details the way a the opinion pages of newspapers in Australia. specifically masculine kind of subjectivity is Perhaps the pertinent question here is not fashioned from the ‘limited engagement with the whether feminism failed motherhood, but why intersection of fantasy, desire, the irrational and is feminism remembered as having forgotten the emotional in the subject of women’s move- motherhood? Listening to the dramatic oral ment politics’.47 She asks the important question recollections of this period, I was more than of how might a feminist activist’s life be narrated once struck by the memories of women strug- in a feminist mode?48 gling to tackle issues that affected the lives of Listening to oral accounts, where the mothers and young children. Moreover, these emotional intensity of feminist recollection is so memories were not recounted in abstract, palpable, a very complex history of the women’s gender-neutral policy language. Instead, liberation movement emerges. As all oral histo- campaigns around women’s refuges, violence rians would know, the aural experience of listen- against women, rape crisis centres or childcare ing to the interview is crucial to this complexity. were rendered as emotionally fraught, disturb- A written transcript does not provide access to ing and often very contradictory experiences. A the wild laughter provoked by particular memo- history of affect was being recorded as well as a ries, or the performative aspects of an interview. narrative of key events. Moreover, in my view, Listening to the interviewee struggle with the this oral record unearths a maternalist ethos contradictory emotions produced by the process forgotten or hidden in many contemporary of recall and the effort to compose a coherent renderings of feminism. narrative of disparate fragments, provides rich While Sara Ruddick reminds us of the signif- insight into the personal and public stakes of icance of ‘maternal thinking’ to feminist politics feminist involvement. This is not always evident and theory,51 others depict the women’s move- from reading written records (histories or ment as a repudiation of maternalism. For memoirs) of the women’s movement and as instance, in Australian Feminism: A Companion, Henderson contends, a toned-down, domesti- Marilyn Lake divides the Australian women’s cated rendering of feminist lives can be the movement into five overlapping phases. She result. The implication is that a more direct traces the way a maternalist orientation was engagement with the emotional would allow discarded in the struggle for equal opportunity different forms of subjectivity to surface. (1940s-1960s) and replaced by the language of The ‘affective turn’ in cultural and critical citizenship and then by the language of revolu- theory is evident in recent attempts to theorise tion in the 1970s.52 Maternalism is a complex and the way emotion works to ‘inform and inspire ambiguous political configuration, as Lake deftly action’.49 The oral histories of the Australian illustrates in Getting Equal.53 Even Ruddick women’s movement are stories of passionate describes maternal politics as always ‘partial, attachments: to political ideals, to activist iden- imperfect and limited by context’.54 Yet, she tities, to utopian senses of feminist community, makes a powerful case for maternal thinking as to other women and to particular forms of a constitutive element of a ‘feminist standpoint’.55 cultural expression. They are also stories of loss, This is evident in the interviews under review. A of political and personal rivalries, of anxieties, form of maternalism surfaces in memories of an angers and disappointments. If these affective activism which had, as its central aim, to trans- dimensions of the women’s movement are form the concerns of mothers and children from

Spring 2010 ORAL HISTORY 87 a private responsibility into public policy.56 The just saying ‘my grief in looking at these chil- nurturing impulses of this kind of activism seem dren is too great and I can’t bear it’.61 to have been overshadowed or buried in sanc- tioned cultural memory. It is as though there has Julia Ryan speaks in her oral history inter- been a cultural forgetting of the nurturing femi- view of how emotionally damaging it was to nist,57 so much so that even putting the two terms work at the refuge: ‘Although I was not actually together feels distinctly uncomfortable. However, directly involved in any terrible incidents with cross-generational examples from the oral history guns or violence, just the whole feeling of record illustrate that the language of love and tension all the time, and the misery and the protection (seen to be a characteristic of the hardness of it, I found it very, very demoralis- maternal phase of Australian feminism) is not ing’.62 She remembers how one of her roles was neutralised by the emergence of other more self- to provide statistics at the end of each month, consciously political calls for equality, citizenship calculating the number of women and children or revolution. who had come to the refuge in search of a safe Observe, for example, Ann Turner’s inter- environment. She would frequently be unwell view with Phyllis Johnson in 1995. I have during this time and only later realised the included this interview in the group under connection between her empathy for the women scrutiny because it illustrates a feminist activism and children, and her physical illness. Both inter- which spans the whole of the twentieth century. views, in recording the affective dimensions of Johnson, who describes herself as a ‘lifelong feminist activism, open a space where sanc- campaigner for women’s equality’, was born in tioned cultural memory can be challenged. 1917 and went on her first International The lens through which feminism is viewed Women’s day March in 1936. In her oral history backwards, is not that of the contemporary interview, Johnson describes the ‘tender loving ‘work/family divide’. Sara Dowse not only care’ that was given to the women and children speaks very movingly about the birth of her son who came to the Betsy Women’s Refuge in Sam when interviewed but of children being a Bankstown in 1975.58 While she discusses the distinct advantage in the policy arena when she rallies and protests outside Parliament that were was head of the Women’s Affairs Section of the organised at the time and the slogan ‘no silence Australian Department of Prime Minister and against domestic violence’, Johnson’s language Cabinet. is expressly maternal. She describes how she and Frankie Oats would cook meals for the women There were two things that helped me – and children when they first arrived at the apart from my feminism and being, if you refuge. Her words and her emphatic tone reveal like, an expert because nobody else in the a different picture to that of militant feminist department had a clue. First, I had no ambi- ideologues discussing patriarchal power rela- tions in this area at all. I was truly a disin- tions and women’s collectivities with the victims terested public servant. I didn’t envisage of domestic violence.59 Johnson exclaims, ‘Oh spending the rest of my life as a bureaucrat. the love, the love that we gave the children – the I was surprised to discover what a good cuddles and the cosseting’.60 bureaucrat I could be, but I had no ambi- Not surprisingly, the term ‘cosseting’ does tions there. The second thing was having not recur in the other later interviews. However, kids ...You know, if you have to go home the nurturing impulses do resurface. Biff Ward and cook the dinner, you can’t take yourself recalls how ill-equipped many feminists were all that seriously. It’s a grounding…You can when working in the first refuges and unpre- be in an absolutely tremendous combat, a pared for the experiences that would confront subtle but nonetheless tremendous combat them. She discusses the grief she and others felt in an interdepartmental committee, and go about the children of women who came seeking home and have to look for the frozen peas! protection from violence: I knew that there was nobody else in the department that had that experience. If they Another memory I have is of a meeting, a had to go home to dinner their wives would staff meeting, where we decided, we had a just present it to them. Although it made it major topic for this weekly meeting and we easier in some ways, it isolated them terri- were going to finally really talk about the bly and did bad things to their egos. So you children…Virtually everybody in the room know, I think that those things did see me had enormous distress around these chil- through what proved to be a very, very dren and could hardly bear to look at them, hectic, dynamic time.63 and tried to kind of look over their heads all the time and to avoid…I mean, everyone Dowse makes it clear that she did not invest had different things, but all of them were her sense of identity in paid work and in 1977

88 ORAL HISTORY Spring 2010 resigned from public office to devote herself to memoir and autobiography. While the written her writing. Other interviews with prominent record tends to skirt around the emotional Australian women in the National Library of dimensions of feminist activism, oral accounts Australia oral history collection,64 also cut through frequently focus on feelings and emotions and the conventional ‘women as nation-builders’ provide a significant alternative, affective history version of feminist history and frequently run of the women’s movement. Interpretative frame- counter to public discourses about the historical works from oral history and memory also high- legacy of mid-twentieth century feminism. light some of the ways these oral narratives resist dominant representational frameworks and do CONCLUSION not follow accepted cultural scripts. This is Personal memories of second-wave feminism are particularly evident when these interviews often given public prominence in popular depart from culturally prevailing assumptions discourses about motherhood, work and the about work-centered feminism. The interviews contemporary legacy of the women’s movement. can be interpreted as unearthing a forgotten Oral history recollections of women’s liberation maternalist ethos in early feminist activism and in Australia both reflect and critique these domi- questioning popular representations that natu- nant narratives. By engaging in a secondary ralise an opposition between feminism and analysis of a group of oral history interviews motherhood. Green calls on oral historians to from the National Library of Australia, I have pay closer attention to the ways individuals attempted to show how oral accounts can work negotiate competing belief systems or find against ‘tally sheet’ versions of the successes and spaces between dominant discourses.65 In the failures of feminism and move towards more case of the oral testimonies discussed here, this multivocal, self-questioning and open-ended interpretative approach creatively opens a space dialogues. Different forms of subjectivity emerge for oral history to provide different insights into in oral narratives to those expressed in feminist feminism, history and memory.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Australia, 2002, ORAL TRC 4911. Analysis of Elite Life Histories’ in Rosalind This research was conducted as part of a 4. To be published as Post-Maternal Thinking: Edwards (ed), Researching Families and Harold White Fellowship at National Library of New Questions of Feminism, Memory and Communities: Social and Generational Change Australia. Particular thanks go to Kevin Bradley, Politics, New York: Columbia University Press London: Routledge, 2008, pp 95-111. Margy Burn and Marie-Louise Ayres at the (forthcoming). 8. Joanna Bornat, ‘A Second Take: Revisiting National Library. I appreciate the warm support 5. My arguments in this article were informed Interviews with a Different Purpose’, Oral I received from interviewees and interviewers by the following interviews from the National History, vol 31, no 1, 2003, p 50. from the Oral History Collection at the NLA, Library of Australia Oral History Collection: Eva 9. Alistair Thomson ‘Four Paradigm especially Suzanne Bellamy, Biff Ward and Cox interviewed by Ann Mari Jordens, 2002; Transformations in Oral History’, The Oral Sara Dowse. Sara Dowse interviewed by Ann Turner, 1998; History Review, vol 34, no 1, 2007, p 50. Sara Dowse interviewed by Biff Ward, 1998; 10. As discussed by Anna Green, ‘Individual NOTES Deborah McCulloch interviewed by Biff Ward, Remembering and “Collective Memory”: 1. See for example Susan Magarey, ‘Feminism 2000; Anne Summers interviewed by Sara Theoretical Presuppositions and Contemporary as Cultural Renaissance’, Hecate, vol 31, no 1, Dowse, 2002; Jill Julius Matthews interviewed Debates’, Oral History, vol 32, no 2, 2004, 2004, pp 23-46; Natasha Compo, ‘Having It by Biff Ward, 2000; Marian Sawer p 35. All or “Had Enough”: Blaming Feminism in The interviewed by Sara Dowse, 2002; Anne 11. See Joanna Bornat and Hanna Diamond, Age and the Sydney Morning Herald 1980- Curthoys interviewed by Susan Marsden, ‘Women’s History and Oral History: 2004’, Journal of Australian Studies, Issue 85, 2002; Meredith Burgmann interviewed by Ann Developments and Debates’, Women’s History 2005, pp 63-72; Susan Magarey, ‘Memory Turner, 2000; Suzanne Bellamy interviewed by Review, 16 (1), 2007, p 21. and Desire: Feminists Re-membering Feminism’, Biff Ward, 2000; Biff Ward interviewed by 12. See for example, Liz Stanley and Sue Lilith, vol 14, 2005, pp 1-13; The ‘Living in the Sara Dowse, 1998; Julia Ryan interviewed by Wise, Breaking Out: Feminist Consciousness Seventies’ issue of Australian Feminist Studies, Sara Dowse, 1990; Elizabeth O’Brien and Feminist Research, New York: Routledge, vol 22, Issue 53, July 2007. interviewed by Biff Ward, 2000; Joan Russell 1983. 2. For example, in the oral history interview Biff interviewed by Biff Ward, 2000; Lyndall Ryan 13. This is a quotation from Suzanne Bellamy Ward does with Suzanne Bellamy, she explicitly interviewed by Sara Dowse, 2000; Margaret in Biff Ward’s interview with her for the National opens with the following: ‘this archive has so far Bearlin interviewed by Biff Ward, 2000; Phyllis Library of Australia Oral History Collection, 10th been mostly concerned with political reform. It’s Johnson interviewed by Ann Turner, 1995; March, 2000, ORAL TRC 3988. been interviews with women who’ve struggled Mavis Robertson interviewed by Sara Dowse, 14. Alistair Thomson citing Daniel James’ and had successes and failures in the political 2003. Written permission has been given to Dona Maria’s Story: Life History, Memory and executive arenas, the feminist women who’ve quote from the interviews I discuss here. Political Identity, in ‘Four Paradigm worked there’, National Library of Australia, 6. Janet Heaton, Reworking Qualitative Data, Transformations in Oral History’, p 64. 2000, TRC 3988. London: Sage, 2004, p 6. 15. For a discussion of the idea of composure 3. See for example Susan Marsden’s interview 7. Joanna Bornat and Gail Wilson, ‘Recycling and how gender intersects with culture and with Anne Curthoys, National Library of the Evidence: Different Approaches to the Re- memory see Penny Summerfield, ‘Culture and

Spring 2010 ORAL HISTORY 89 Composure: Creating Narratives of the 32. Deborah McCulloch interviewed by Biff vol 8, no 3, 2007, p 345. Gendered Self in Oral History Interviews’, Ward, National Library of Australia Oral 50. Segal’s phrase, p 89. Cultural and Social History, vol 1, no 1, 2004, History Collection, 2000, ORAL TRC 4591. 51. Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Toward pp 65-93. 33. Biff Ward interviewed by Sara Dowse, a Politics of Peace, Boston: Beacon Press, 16. Alistair Thomson, Anzac Memories: Living National Library of Australia Oral History 1989 [1995]. See in particular the new With the Legend, Melbourne: Oxford University Collection, 1998, ORAL TRC 3764. Preface to the 1995 edition, p xx. Press, 1994, p 9 also cited by Green in 34. Margaret Bearlin interviewed by Biff 52. Marilyn Lake’s entry in Barbara Caine, ‘Individual Remembering’, p 40. Ward, National Library of Australia Oral Australian Feminism: a Companion, 17. Summerfield attributes the concept to History Collection, 2000, ORAL TRC 4553. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1998, Graham Dawson in Soldier Heroes, see 35. Joan Russell interviewed by Biff Ward, p 133. ‘Culture and Composure’, p 69. National Library of Australia Oral History 53. See Marilyn Lake, Getting Equal: The 18. Penny Summerfield, ‘Dis/composing the Collection, 2000, ORAL TRC 4593. History of Australian Feminism, Sydney: Allen & Subject: Intersubjectivities in Oral History’, in 36. Susan Magarey, ‘What is Happening to Unwin, 1999. Tess Coslett, Celia Lury and Penny Summerfield Women’s History in Australia at the Beginning 54. Ruddick, p xxi. (eds), Feminism and Autobiography: Texts, of the Third Millennium?’, Women’s History 55. Ruddick, pp 127-139. Theories, Methods, New York: Routledge, Review, vol 16, no 1, 2007, pp 1-18. 56. See for useful definitions of maternalism 2000, pp 91-107. 37. Magarey, p 2. Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, Mothers of a 19. Suzanne Bellamy interviewed by Biff 38. See for example Susan Magarey, New World: Maternalist Politics and the Ward, National Library of Australia Oral ‘Feminism as Cultural Renaissance’, Hecate, vol Origins of Welfare States, New York: History Collection, 2000, ORAL TRC 3988. 31, no 1, 2004, pp 231- 46 which includes Routledge, 1993, pp 4-5. 20. Bellamy interview. representations of songs, poster art and 57. For a discussion of a related cultural 21. Mejane was published from 1971-1974. examples of disorderly conduct associated with forgetting of the nurturing mother, see Julie 22. Bellamy interview. the women’s liberation movement. Stephens, ‘Cultural Memory, Feminism and 23. To borrow a phrase from Margaret 39. Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Motherhood’, Arena Journal, no 24, 2005, Henderson ‘The Tidiest Revolution: Regulative Days of Rage, New York: Bantam Books, pp 69-83. Feminist Autobiography and the De-facement of 1987, p 433. 58. Phyllis Johnson interviewed by Ann Turner, the Women’s Movement, Australian Literary 40. Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The National Library of Australia Oral History Studies, vol 20, no 3, 2002, p 186. Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic and the Collection, 1995, ORAL TRC 3304. 24. Jill Julius Matthews interviewed by Biff Politics of Remembering, Berkeley: University of 59. See for a contrast the language of Suellen Ward, National Library of Australia Oral California Press, 1997, pp 1-7. Murray, More Than Refuge: Changing History Collection, 2000, ORAL TRC 3967. 41. This beautiful quotation is from Luisa Responses to Domestic Violence, Perth: University 25. Henderson, p 187. Passerini’s Memory and Totalitarianism, 2005, of Western Australia Press, 2002, p 48. 26. See Anna Green ‘Individual Remembering p13 cited in Summerfield, ‘Culture and 60. Phyllis Johnson interview, 1995. and Collective Memory’, pp 35-44. Composure,’ p 93. 61. Biff Ward interview, 1998. 27. Green, p 36. 42. Lynne Segal, Making Trouble: Life and 62. Julia Ryan interview 1990. 28. Green, p 37. Politics, London: Serpent’s Tail, 2007, p 1. 63. Sara Dowse interview, 1998. 29. Wulf Kansteiner, Finding Meaning in 43. Segal, p 61. 64. For example, Ann Turner’s interview Memory: A Methodological Critique of 44. Segal, p 32. with Meredith Burgmann political activist and Collective Memory Studies’, History and 45. Summerfield, ‘Culture and Composure’, then President, NSW Legislative Council, Theory, vol 41, 2002, p 180. p 68. National Library of Australia, 2001, ORAL 30. Sara Dowse interviewed by Biff Ward, 46. Modjeska cited by Henderson, ‘The TRC 4656. National Library of Australia Oral History Tidiest Revolution’, p 183. 65. Green, ‘Individual Memory and Collection, 1998, ORAL TRC 3801. 47. Henderson, p 185. Collective Memory’, pp 35-45. 31. Julia Ryan interviewed by Sara Dowse, 48. Henderson, p 178. National Library of Australia Oral History 49. Kristyn Gorton, ‘Theorizing Emotion and Address for correspondence: Collection, 1990, ORAL TRC 2651. Affect: Feminist Engagements’, , [email protected]

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