http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2028-0666
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ABSTRACT
This article discusses Martha Ansara and Elaine Welteroth, two US born feminists who came to Australia during two key moments in feminist history, as a way of thinking about the relationship between feminists and fashion. Ansara arrived in Sydney in 1969 carrying women’s liberation literature in her suitcase; she became an important generative figure in the Australia’s women’s liberation movement, particularly as an independent filmmaker and proponent of consciousness raising. Welteroth arrived in 2017 to speak at the Sydney Writers’ Festival during a period of international resurgence of feminist activism. She brought with her images of women of colour she had featured in Teen Vogue and she invoked second wave consciousness raising, albeit in a remodelled, corporate-led form when she talked about the title’s plans to bring young girls around kitchen tables to ‘solve’ political problems. The article uses comments both women have made in relation to fashion and beauty, close readings of their works, and a discussion of their respective feminist milieus to suggest a trajectory of feminism’s relationship to the fashion industry that appears to have changed from a position of opposition to one of open embrace. It also complicates this reading by pointing to the resonances between these women of different feminist eras.
Acknowledgements
A paper presented by Susan Magarey at the How the Personal Became Political Symposium, held at the ANU Gender Institute, 6–7 March 2017, and later published as ‘Beauty Becomes Political: Beginnings of the Women’s Liberation Movement in Australia’ in Australian Feminist Studies, was a formative influence for this article, and I am indebted to Susan for her work. I am also grateful to the blind reviewers of this article, and to my supervisor Dr Margie Borschke, for their invaluable comments and suggestions.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Ethics
Interviews conducted by the author with Martha Ansara and Jeni Thornley were approved under Macquarie University’s Human Research Ethics procedures.
Notes on contributor
Kath Kenny is currently a doctoral candidate and Australian Postgraduate Award recipient at Macquarie University in the Department of Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies. She is researching feminist film and theatre in Australia in the early 1970s women’s liberation movement. She is President of the Sydney Writers’ Room and an associate member of the Centre for Media History.
ORCID
Kath Kenny http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2028-0666
Notes
1 The five million estimate comes from the US-based organisers of the Women’s March (see www.womensmarch.com).
2 Martha Ansara dates the rally as 15 December.
3 The trend of feminists coming to Australia from the US had precedents as early as 1892, when Jessie Ackerman toured Australia (Lake Citation1999, 25). And the flow has never been one way: in the period Ansara first moved to Australia, Australian feminist Germaine Greer was based in the UK and touring the world, including the United States, publicising The Female Eunuch.
4 Brownmiller credits Friedan’s key role in inspiring a mass form of consciousness raising: ‘A revolution was brewing, but it took a visionary to notice … although Friedan had defined the problem in terms of bored, depressed, middle-class suburban housewives who downed too many pills … I saw myself on every page’ (Citation1999, 3).
5 Earlier, Simone de Beauvoir (Citation1949/1972, 692) linked women’s status as objects to, in no small part, the construction of femininity, ‘artificially shaped by custom and fashion’.
6 Annemarie Strassel (Citation2013, 38) locates an even earlier interplay between feminism and fashion in the bloomers advocated in the mid 1800s by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and Amelia Bloomer.
7 Ansara related the same anecdote to Felicity Collins (Citation1995, 14) in an interview Collins conducted for her PhD research.
8 Petra Mosmann (Citation2016, 83) makes a related point that the paisley coat Germaine Greer wore on the covers of 1971 issues of Vogue and Life magazines was part of a ‘counter culture protest’, but nevertheless still part of ‘creating a fashion trend’, one quickly taken up by the fashion industry and ‘commodified’ (Citation2016, 88–89).
9 This picture is reproduced in Jennifer Stott’s (Citation1987, 119) overview of the feminist filmmakers, including Ansara, who were associated with the Sydney Filmmakers Cooperative.
10 Gloria Steinem has said to assign credit to anyone for coining the phrase ‘the personal is political’ would be as absurd as assigning credit to someone for inventing the phrase ‘World War 11’ (Burch Citation2012, 139), however its first use in a publication is commonly cited as the headline of an article by activist and writer Carol Hanisch in Notes from the Second Year (Shulamith Firestone and Anne Koedt Citation1970).
11 Recent Teen Vogue covers have featured Zoë Kravitz (March 2016), actress and singer Willow Smith (May 2016) gymnasts Simone Biles and Gabby Douglas (August 2016) and actress Yara Shahidi (December 2016).
12 Here Welteroth is, in Mimi Thi Nguyen’s words, ‘permit[ing] us to see what we have not been allowed to see’ (quoted in Minh-Ha T. Pham Citation2011, 17).
13 They are careful to say scholars should not make too firm distinctions between second and third wave feminism: many second wave feminists can sound very third wave at times—for example, Germaine Greer tasting menstrual blood, and Susie Orbach writing Fat is a Feminist Issue (Fixmer and Wood Citation2005, 249).
14 In a flyer written to accompany Film for Discussion at consciousness raising sessions (“Winners/Losers”, undated) the Sydney Women’s Film Group says their work encourages active viewers, and was made in opposition to ‘a profit-orientated society [where film] contests are used to promote and sell commodities to consumers’.