Welcome to the electronic edition of Dangerous Ideas: Women’s Liberation — Women’s Studies — Around the World. The book opens with the bookmark panel and you will see the contents page. Click on this anytime to return to the contents. You can also add your own bookmarks. Each chapter heading in the contents table is clickable and will take you direct to the chapter. Return using the contents link in the bookmarks. The whole document is fully searchable. Enjoy. Susan Magarey Susan Magarey has degrees from the University of Adelaide and the Australian National University. At ANU she was Lecturer-in- charge of the Women's Studies Program 1978-1983. At Adelaide University, where she is now Professor Emerita, she founded the Research Centre for Women's Studies 1983-2000 and the journal, Australian Feminist Studies 1985- . In 2006, she was made a member of the Order of Australia for her work in establishing Women's Studies as a field of intellectual endeavour. Susan Magarey, 2013 Photograph courtesy of Susan Magarey Other books by this author: Unbridling the tongues of women: a biography of Catherine Helen Spence, 1985, revised 2010 Roma the First: A Biography of Dame Roma Mitchell, 2007, revised imprint 2009, with Kerrie Round Looking Back: looking forward. A century of the Queen Adelaide Club 1909-2009, 2009 Passions of the first wave feminists, 2001 Contents Acknowledgements vii Preface ix Part I — Women's Liberation 1 1 The sexual revolution as big flop: Women's Liberation Lesson One 15 2 Sisterhood and Women's Liberation in Australia 25 3 'Holding the Horrors of the World at Bay': 'The Feminist Food 43 Guide', 1972-75 4 And now we are six: a plea for Women's Liberation 57 5 Feminism as cultural renaissance 73 6 Does the family have a future? 87 7 Women and technological change 107 8 Dreams and desires: four 1970s feminist visions of utopia 121 9 The tampon 147 Part II — Women's Studies: Introduction 159 10 Women's Studies — towards transdisciplinary learning? 175 11 Are we changing paradigms? The impact of feminism upon the 183 world of scholarship 12 Setting up the first Research Centre for Women's Studies in 195 Australia, 1983-86 v Susan Magarey 13 The role of a Women's Studies Centre in the university 205 14 Outsiders inside? Women's Studies in Australia at the end of the 217 twentieth century Part III — Around the World 229 15 The position of women in China: 1978 235 16 A milkrun in the United States of America: 1986 245 17 'Perestroika has been bad for women': Russia 1991 253 18 Scholarship for a cause: San José, Costa Rica, 1993 263 19 'Gender Studies: Towards the Year 2000': Greece 1993 267 20 Looking at the world through women's eyes: United Nations in 271 Beijing, 1995 References 285 vi Acknowledgements To everyone involved in Women's Liberation and Women's Studies — in Australia, and around the world — a thousand thanks for all that you taught me. Especially I offer my profound gratitude to all the people who contributed to the tales told here: friends, colleagues, sisters, comrades, intellectual and political inspirations. I learned much from you all. My debt to some will shout from these pages: to Daphne Gollan, Julia Ryan, Kay Daniels, Margaret Power, Anna Davin, Marian Quartly, Drusilla Modjeska; to Genevieve Lloyd, Carole Pateman, Marilyn Strathern, Terry Threadgold; to Sara Dowse, Elizabeth Reid; to Raewyn Connell, to Marion Halligan — I owe most of my intellectual and political formation and all that followed from it. I must thank, too, people who have worked with me as students for insights, argument and opposition enough to prove an important goad. Some of the pieces reproduced here are preliminary efforts towards the history of the Women's Liberation Movement in Australia. A few quote from interviews recorded during the early days of research for that project, the interviews carried out by splendid Research Assistants Kate Borrett, Liz Dimmock, Ruth Ford, Ann Genovese, Judith Ion, Tristan Slade, Lizzie Summerfield, Inara Waldron, Deborah Worsley-Pine, and Sarah Zetlein who — to our enduring sorrow — took her own life at the end of 1996. That history has not yet been written. I had designed it as a collaboration with Ann Curthoys and Marilyn Lake, whose influence also shapes these pages. We did take a trio of papers to the Berkshire Conference on Women's History in North Carolina in 1996; Ann used them in her highly praised article for the Oxford Companion to Australian Feminism, 'Cosmopolitan Radicals'. And Marilyn says that without the research for that project she could not have written the relevant chapters in her wonderfully encompassing and incisive work, Getting Equal: The History of Australian Feminism (published by Allen & Unwin in 1999). I vii Susan Magarey want to thank those splendid historians — colleagues all, these days — and the many people who agreed to be interviewed, to check the transcripts of their interviews and to correct them. Mary Lyons deserves an avalanche of thanks; she transcribed all of the interviews. I promise, now that I have put this present collection together, I will return to that project. It has been waiting for attention since the late 1990s; it is time it became a book which could perhaps be called A History of the Women's Liberation Movement in Australia's World. For their contributions to this book I must thank the brilliant Mary Leunig for allowing the University of Adelaide Press to reproduce the cartoon on the cover, and John Emerson for an array of assistances that he has provided as Director of the University of Adelaide Press. To my partner, Susan Sheridan, who helped me invent the title of this collection, I am also grateful for quality control — among many other things. Figure 1: Ann Curthoys and Marilyn Lake, Sydney University, c. 1996 Photograph by Susan Magarey viii Preface I used to describe my life as 'ambivalent, ambidextrous, ambiguous, androgynous, ironic'. This book is similarly unorthodox: plural, haphazard and conjectural. It is a memoir, a — highly selective — curriculum vitae, and a history. However, there is some order in it. Each element is focused on the history and politics of the Women's Liberation Movement in Australia, on some of what we learned and thought in Women's Studies, and on some of what I learned about women and the conditions of their lives around the world during the last thirty years or so, partly in the course of editing a feminist journal. These are serious matters; they are about how people's lives and ideas changed, too little remembered or understood any longer, worth recalling for that reason alone. These ideas might well not seem dangerous any longer, but they certainly did when we first formulated them. They can be great fun, too — as I hope you will agree. Looking into the rear-vision mirror at the roads that my life has travelled, I think I can spot the crossroads where I first encountered the possibility of such changes. I was walking along a corridor at the Australian National University past the offices that housed the people who taught history. I met Daphne Gollan, coming towards me. I had been so inspired by her teaching of Russian history, to say nothing of her wit and charm, that I had undertaken a research paper on the collapse of the western front during the First World War, a subject that allowed me to read about the Russian revolutions of 1917 in English-language sources. Subsequently, though, I had embarked on research on an Australian subject, the nineteenth-century Scottish South Australian, Catherine Helen Spence. I wasn't liking Miss Spence very much, at that time, and doing Australian historical research did not bring me into contact with Mrs Gollan much, either. So, that day in the passage in the middle of 1970, I greeted her enthusiastically. (Daphne was to say that I was like a big waggy dog who ix Susan Magarey would bound up to you saying pat me, pat me.) She said, 'There's a meeting that I think you should come to'. It was a gathering in a student house in Canning Street in the northern suburbs of Canberra: the first meeting of what became the Canberra Women's Liberation group and its dream of an entirely reordered world. To appropriate the words of North American political philosopher Wendy Brown, it was a dream of transformation that would bring into being 'a radical reconfiguration of kinship, sexuality, desire, psyche and the relation of private to public'.1 It was a dream of an entirely new and different politics. It was a dream of friendships. It was a dream that also taught me to understand Catherine Spence better, to admire her, even to like her. I dubbed her 'Australia's first feminist'. 1 Wendy Brown, 'Feminism unbound, revolution, mourning, politics', in Wendy Brown, Edgework: critical essays on knowledge and politics, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2005, p. 106. x Part I Women's Liberation The first section of this book is concerned with the history of the Women's Liberation Movement in Australia. These chapters are about sex, politics, joy and anguish. They are not in the order in which I wrote them, but, instead, in an order approximating a chronology of the Women's Liberation Movement. Chapter One is concerned with the pre-history of the upsurge of activist feminism at the beginning of the 1970s, and argues against the widespread contention that its single cause was the appearance of the contraceptive pill on the mass market.