1 Chapter 1: Introduction When Australian television journalist Virginia Haussegger dashed off an impassioned article to the Age newspaper in July 2002, she was driven by grief at her childlessness. But Haussegger also had a grievance. She was angry at feminists, those “outspoken women who demanded a better deal for all women” but who had lied when they promised women could “have it all”: The point is that while encouraging women in the ’70s and ’80s to reach for the sky, none of our purple-clad, feminist mothers thought to tell us the truth about the biological clock...I am childless and I am angry. Angry that I was so foolish to take the word of my feminist mothers as gospel. Angry that I was daft enough to believe female fulfilment came with a leather briefcase. It was wrong. It was crap. 1 The article triggered a media frenzy, as commentators variously applauded and derided Haussegger’s intervention. Feminists who had been active in the 1970s and 1980s felt aggrieved in turn: “We were there,” they protested, “and we never said that!” Perhaps unintentionally, Haussegger’s article and subsequent book joined an already lively body of commentary in Australia about the “failures of feminism.” At its more outlandish extremes, this body of commentary blames feminism for all kinds of problems, from binge-drinking to anorexia. At is core, though, are concerns about work, care, motherhood and fertility. The claim most often repeated is that second-wave feminism over-emphasised paid work at the expense of women’s caring roles. 2 As a consequence, it is argued, women are now finding that they have “left it too late” to have children after devoting their most fertile years to education and a career, or are 1 Virginia Haussegger, ‘The Sins of our Feminist Mothers’, Age , 23 July 2002, <http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/07/22/1026898972150.html?oneclick=true> (accessed 28 May 2007). See also Virginia Haussegger, Wonder Woman: The Myth of “Having it All” , Crows Nest, New South Wales (NSW): Allen and Unwin, 2005. 2 Examples include: Alex May, ‘The Feminists Kept Mum on the Real Story of Motherhood’, Sydney Morning Herald , 27 June 2002, p. 18; Joanna Murray-Smith, ‘Feminism’s Booby Trap’, Age , 19 Nov. 2004, p. 15; Jane Fraser, ‘An Inconceivable Dilemma’, Australian , 11 Jan. 2005, p. 11; Hugh Mackay, ‘I Want It All…’, Sydney Morning Herald , 12 June 2004, Spectrum section, p. 4. 2 becoming disillusioned by the struggle to integrate motherhood with ever more demanding work roles. More sophisticated analyses recognise the complexity of demographic change and individual choices while calling for a new approach that values care. Yet such analyses also tend to contrast their vision with “1970s feminism” and its supposedly mistaken emphasis on women’s access to employment. 3 As Haussegger has pointed out, her article resonated with so many women because there is a problem. Exhaustion, guilt and disappointment accompany many women’s attempts to create fulfilling lives that include motherhood and meaningful paid work. Many women are all too aware that making motherhood their primary occupation is likely to diminish their status and independence. These experiences might be expected to generate frustration among women that the broadest aims of feminism have not yet been achieved, and perhaps even anger at the governments, businesses and individuals who have resisted change. Yet in the popular debate, women’s grievances are not typically represented in gender-based claims for justice or a better deal — claims we might describe as feminist. Rather, the “failures of feminism” commentaries, which dominate public debate, turn away from any such implied identification with feminism as a (potentially) continuing political project. Instead, feminism is portrayed as an entity that had enormous power over society but which wielded this power in a wrong way, making wrong decisions about what to value and what to pursue. This thesis is a response to the “failures of feminism” commentaries. It argues that portraying feminism as an entity that made bad decisions about work and care misrepresents historical experience. For those who wish to transform the politics of work and care, portraying feminism in this way leads us in the wrong direction: away from detailed understanding about how social change can be envisaged and achieved. Conversely, developing a more concrete account of “what feminism has done,” and in particular a better account of feminist decision-making, can help us to reflect more intelligently on the possibilities for agency in social change. 3 David McKnight, Beyond Right and Left: New Politics and Culture Wars , Crows Nest, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 2005, pp. 172–201. 3 To develop a better account of feminist decision-making we need more than popular images of feminism, which lack historical grounding. We need a concept of feminism that enables us to consider the deliberations and actions of individual participants and collectives, as well as feminism’s broader meaning. “The women’s movement” is such a concept. Examining feminism as the women’s movement — as a social movement — allows us to build a more realistic and dynamic picture than the empty figure invoked by the “failures of feminism” commentaries. In these commentaries, the emphasis is often on the “messages” that feminism supposedly gives to women (as in Haussegger’s “reach for the sky”). The implication is that feminism should somehow simply decide to change its messages. When we focus our attention on the women’s movement, we find that we cannot properly describe feminism through the metaphor of a public-relations manager issuing media releases. In a social movement, multiple individuals and groups engage in different but linked projects in ways that are more complex than can be expressed by the idea of “sending a message.” Accordingly, the prospects for deciding to “change the message” of feminism are not so straightforward. While there was no simple message, the second-wave women’s movement did develop a generally consistent position on the issues of work and care. The movement emphasised women’s access to employment as a high priority, above any need to support women to be “stay-at-home mums.” There is little doubt that this emphasis was influential both in policy terms and in terms of widespread perceptions about women’s roles and the women’s movement. Even though there was no central body controlling the movement’s direction, it would seem misleading to say that the movement’s direction was unintentional. When we no longer rely on the simplistic image of feminism deciding to act in a certain way or deciding to send a particular message, the question then becomes how the movement’s position on work and care was developed. In criticising the movement’s emphasis on employment, commentators of the “failures of feminism” school invoke the idea that there were risks that second-wave feminists should have been foreseen and avoided. The most important of these is the risk that emphasising employment would reinforce the under-valuing of women’s caring roles and hence the gendered division of labour. Critics believe feminists failed to understand that the movement could damage the prospects for the achievement of an important 4 feminist goal (the valuing of women’s caring roles) by choosing to pursue a relatively more limited and less promising objective (access to employment). This is not the first time feminists have been accused of damaging the prospects for more fundamental feminist change by taking certain positions on issues of work and care. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, maternal feminists elevated women’s supposedly innate capacity for mothering to the status of a global program of reform for peace and justice. As part of this program, in the interwar years (1919–1938) feminists campaigned for the state to introduce motherhood endowment to recognise the contribution of mothers and to give them a source of income separate from the men on whom they were generally forced to depend. Especially since the second-wave women’s movement, however, these reformers have often been viewed unfavourably, as having helped to lock women into the maternal role by relying on the social value of motherhood in their claims-making. The evaluation that emerges from each of these criticisms is that the movement was ineffective as a strategic actor. In the first case, the argument is that in choosing a strategy of labour force participation, second-wave feminism failed to foresee and prevent the outcome: that such an extension would simply further integrate women into the capitalist economy without transforming the gendered division of labour or valuing women’s caring work. That is, this strategy offered women a place in the labour market, but on terms still defined as masculine. In the second case, the argument is that, in staking claims for women’s citizenship on their function as mothers, maternal feminists failed to comprehend that this would further lock women into a restrictive stereotype of motherhood. While campaigns such as motherhood endowment held out the hope of independence for women, they reinforced the idea of motherhood as the socially appropriate role for women, indeed as the essence of womanhood — an idea that came to be understood as oppressive to women. To what extent, though, could the women’s movement in either of these periods have made decisions to strategically avoid such discursive risks? An obvious weakness of these criticisms of past feminism is that they are insufficiently attentive to the political contexts that women’s movement actors faced in each period. “Different times” produce different ideas about what to do. Difference, though, does not 5 necessarily mean discontinuity.