Maternity and freedom: Australian feminist encounters with the reproductive body

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Notes

For further analysis, see Josie Castle and Helen Pringle, ‘Sovereignty and Sexual Identity in Political Cartoons’ in Susan Magarey, Sue Rowley and Susan Sheridan (eds), Debutante Nation: Feminism Contests the 1890s (Allen & Unwin) Sydney, 1993.

For further discussion see Judith Allen, Rose Scott: Vision and Revision in Feminism (Oxford University Press) Melbourne, 1994; Pat Grimshaw, Marilyn Lake, Ann McGrath and Marion Quartly, Creating a Nation (McPhee Gribble) Ringwood, Victoria, 1994.

See Grimshaw et al., Creating a Nation; Catherine Kevin, ‘A Genealogy of Pregnancy in Medicine and the Law: Australia, 1945–2000’, chapter 6, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Sydney, 2003.

Natasha Cica, ‘What's with the Fertility Panic?’, On-Line Opinion, 15 September 2002.

Anne Summers, The End of Equality: Work, Babies and Women's Choices in 21st Century Australia (Random House) Sydney, 2003.

For discussions of Australian feminist responses to de Beauvoir, see Hecate: Simone de Beauvoir in Australia, vol. 26, no. 1, 2000.

Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, H.M. Parshley (trans. and ed.) (Penguin) Harmondsworth, 1972, p. 277.

Ann Curthoys makes this point while addressing the impact of de Beauvoir's autobiographies on young women in the 1960s who came to be women's liberationists of the 1970s. See ‘Adventures of Feminism: Simone de Beauvoir's Autobiographies, Women's Liberation, and Self-fashioning’, Feminist Review, no. 64, 2000, pp. 3–18.

De Beauvoir, The Second Sex, pp. 512–13.

De Beauvoir, The Second Sex, p. 515.

De Beauvoir, The Second Sex, p. 514.

Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: the Case for Feminist Revolution (The Women's Press) London, 1970, pp. 232–7.

Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex.

For further discussion see Susan Magarey, ‘Internationalism and Post-colonialism in Feminism: Reading and Re-reading Metropolitan Feminist Texts in Australia: Shulamith Firestone’, paper presented at the 10th Berkshire Women's History Conference, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. This paper is cited by Ann Curthoys in Barbara Caine et al., Australian Feminism: a Companion (Oxford University Press) London, 1998, p. 45.

Marilyn Lake, Getting Equal (Allen & Unwin) St Leonard's, NSW, p. 233.

The International Women's Day website's picture gallery, 17 December 2002, available at: <http://www.isis.aust.com/iwd/stevens/gallery/_4.htm>.

Scarlet Woman, no. 9, September 1979, p. 23.

Scarlet Woman, no. 8, April 1979, p. 24.

Scarlet Woman, no. 8, April 1979, p. 24.

See, for example, the introduction to Janet Balaskas, Natural Pregnancy: a Practical Holistic Guide to Well-being from Conception to Birth (Simon & Schuster) Australia, 1990, p. 8.

Kerreen M. Reiger, Our Bodies, Our Babies: the Forgotten Women's Movement (Melbourne University Press) Carlton, Victoria, 2001, p. 167.

Reiger, Our Bodies, Our Babies, pp. 168–9.

Reiger, Our Bodies, Our Babies, pp. 168–9.

Kerreen Reiger, ‘Sort of Part of the Women's Movement, But Different’: Mothers’ Organisations and Australian Feminism’, Women's Studies International Forum, no. 6, 1999, p. 587.

Reiger, ‘Sort of Part of the Women's Movement’, p. 589.

Sara Ruddick, ‘Preservative Love and Military Destruction: Some Reflections on Mothers and Peace’, and Sara Ruddick, ‘Maternal Thinking’, both in Joyce Trebilcot (ed.), Mothering: Essays in Feminist Theory (Rowman & Allanheld) New Jersey, 1984, p. 234.

Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born (Bantam Books) New York, 1976.

Most notably, from within the Anglo-American School, Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering (University of California Press) Berkeley, 1978.

Moira Gatens, ‘A Critique of the Sex/Gender Distinction’, J. Allen and P. Patton, ‘Beyond Marxism? Interventions after Marx’, Intervention, no. 17, 1983, and other essays collected in Moira Gatens, Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality (Routledge) London and New York, 1996; Elizabeth Grosz, Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists (Allen & Unwin) Sydney, 1989; Elizabeth Grosz, Jacques Lacan: a Feminist Introduction (Allen & Unwin) Sydney, 1990; Roslyn Diprose, The Bodies of Women: Ethics, Embodiment, Sexual Difference (Routledge) London and New York, 1994; Roslyn Diprose and Robyn Ferrell (eds), Cartographies: Poststructuralism and the Mapping of Bodies and Spaces (Allen & Unwin) Sydney, 1991; Catherine Waldby, Aids and the Body Politic: Biomedicine and Sexual Difference (Routledge) London and New York, 1996; Catherine Waldby, The Visible Human Project: Informatic Bodies and Posthuman Medicine (Routledge) London, 2000.

See, for examples, Lake, Getting Equal, and Zora Simic, ‘A Hall of Selective Mirrors: Feminism, History and Identity 1919–1969’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Sydney, 2003.

The school was MacRobertson Girls High School, Melbourne, one of only two exclusively selective schools in Victoria.

Pamela Bone, Age, 22 July 1999.

Anne Summers, The End of Equality: Work, Babies and Women's Choices in 21st Century Australia (Random House) Sydney, 2003. For a discussion of the Women's Emergency Services Network see pp. 96–7. For discussion of funding for childcare see pp. 57, 145–6.

In 2000 Leesa Meldrum successfully challenged the Victorian Infertility Treatment Act, which was found to be inconsistent with the Federal Sex Discrimination Act in refusing her access to treatment on the grounds of marital status. In 2002 the case went to the High Court where the Catholic Bishops’ Conference challenged the 2000 ruling and lost. This was seen as a loss for the Catholic Church and the government, and John Howard threatened to give States powers to restrict treatment for single and lesbian women.

Cossimer Marriner and Nick O'Malley, ‘Value in Abortion Film says Abbott’, Sydney Morning Herald, 10 July 2004, p. 3.

In March 2004 Minister Tony Abbott suggested to an audience at the University of Adelaide that the rate of abortion in Australia highlighted our moral failings. See Australian, 17 March 2004.

Marriner and O'Malley, ‘Value in Abortion Film says Abbott’. For a number of weeks anticipation of the screening of this film on 8 August 2004 focused and intensified the renaissance of a moralised discourse of abortion in which Abbott has been a key public voice during his term as Health Minister.

David Wroe, ‘PM Accuses Play School over Gays’, Age, 7 June 2004.

Julie Smith, Simon Lambert and Gillian Beer, Taxing the Individual or the Couple: a Distributional Analysis, Discussion Paper no. 15, September 1998; Ross Gittins, Sydney Morning Herald, 26 June 2004.

Smith et al., ‘Taxing the Individual’, p. 7.

She made this statement on Insight's ‘Status Anxiety’ forum on Tuesday 25 May 2004.

A transcript of this speech can be found at <http://www.liberals.net/theforgottenpeople.htm>. For further analysis of this speech see Judith Brett, ‘Menzies’ Forgotten People’, Meanjin, vol. 43, 1984.

Peter Costello, ‘Rejuvenating Christian Foundations Should Help Stop Moral Decay’, On-Line Opinion, 9 June 2004.

In addition to the examples mentioned, see Barry Maley, ‘Why Howard has the Better Grip of Kitchen Politics’, Australian Financial Review, 21 August 1998; Miranda Devine, ‘Why Women Can't Beat the Biological Clock’, Sydney Morning Herald, 9 August 2001; Janet Albrechtson, ‘No Commitment to Breed’, Australian, 3 July 2002; Daniel Lewis, ‘Youth Still Paying for Sexy '60s: Anderson’, Sydney Morning Herald, 17 June 2002.

Pamela Bone, ‘Changing Work to Suit a Growing Family’, Age, 10 February 2000.

Bone, ‘Changing Work’.

Cited by Deborah Cassrels, ‘Cry Friedan: Forty Years of Feminism and the Women Who Started it All—Unfinished Business’, Australian Magazine, 31 May 2003.

See, for example, Adèle Horin, ‘Backlash at the End of the Women's Century’, Sydney Morning Herald, 18 December 1999, p. 35; Nadine Williams, ‘Imbalancing Act’, Advertiser, 15 March 1997.

Albrechtson, ‘No Commitment to Breed’.

Virginia Haussegger, ‘The Sins of Our Foremothers’, Age, 23 July 2002.

Virginia Trioli, ‘The Work Illusion’, Bulletin, 6 August 2002, p. 35.

Jennifer Buckingham, ‘Now is the Time for Fecund Thoughts’, Australian, 18 July 2002, p. 11.

Jennifer Buckingham, ‘The Parent Trap: Will Paid Leave Really Lift the Birthrate?’, Australian Financial Review, 20–21 July 2002.

Heather Rideout, ‘The Parent Trap: Will Paid Leave Really Lift the Birthrate?’, Australian Financial Review, 20–21 July 2002.

Adèle Horin, ‘Open-Plan, No Place for Family Lore’, Sydney Morning Herald, 15 May 2004.

Cica, ‘What's with the Fertility Panic?’

Barbara Pocock, The Work/Life Collision (The Federation Press) Sydney, 2003. Pocock explores the dissonance and instability that characterises contemporary Australian culture in which changed work and consumption patterns have not been met by corresponding changes in institutional practices and social values relating to ‘ideal workers’ and parenting. While Latham acknowledges the need to resolve such dissonance, thus far it has been difficult to see where this rhetoric might translate into concrete change through policy making, except for a proposed inquiry into the affect of insecure employment on workers and their families outlined in the Australian Labor Party's industrial relations policy.

Op. Ed., ‘Edging towards Paid Maternity Leave’, Age, 3 April 2004.

AAP, ‘Boys Suffering Crisis of Masculinity, Says Latham’, Sydney Morning Herald, 18 February 2004.

This is reported on the Women's Electoral Lobby website: http://www.wel.org.au/issues/pml/.