‘How Much Longer Will We Allow This Country's Affairs to be Run by Radical Feminists?’ Anti-Feminist Activism in Late 1970s Australia

Abstract

The historiography of Australia's feminist and sexual revolutions has focused on activists who articulated new claims for rights and protections on the basis of gender and sexuality. Very few scholars have investigated anti-feminist women's groups as part of this history. This article focuses on two anti-feminist women's groups in late 1970s Australia: Women's Action Alliance, and Women Who Want to Be Women. It argues that they adapted the women's movement's slogan ‘the personal is political’, using their identities as wives and mothers to authorise their political campaigns and contesting structures designed to facilitate women's access to policy-making. Finally, the article argues that while these groups were small, they did influence Federal politics. The rapidly changing economic orthodoxies of the late 1970s exerted particular pressures on women. Feminists and anti-feminists both offered a similar analysis of these economic pressures, even though the solutions they advanced were very different.

I would like to offer sincere thanks to Penny Russell, who invited me to present this work at the ‘Sexual Revolutions’ workshop that she convened with Jane Kamensky at the University of Sydney in 2018. I would also like to thank the La Trobe history department who offered very helpful feedback on an earlier version of this article, and, as always, to acknowledge the collegiality and encouragement provided by my co-investigators, Robert Reynolds, Leigh Boucher and Barbara Baird.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

This research was funded by an Australian Research Council grant, DP170100502.

Notes

1 The quote in this article's title comes from Betty Hocking, letter to the editor, Canberra Times, 26 April 1981, 2; Babette Francis often criticised the Whitlam government's funding of events for International Women's Year. Babette Francis, ‘A Birds Eye View’, Toorak Times, 14 July 1976, 2; 4 August 1976, 2. Information on the Toorak Times (1972–92) is scarce, but Damien Murphy's obituary of Pacholli is one of the best sources: ‘A Midas Touch for Failure’, 11 December 2004, www.smh.com.au/national/a-midas-touch-for-failure-20041211-gdkalm.html (accessed 30 August 2020).

2 ‘A special writer’, ‘Radical Wins Libel Action against Liberal’, Nation Review, 1 March 1979, 357.

3 Marian Sawer, Sisters in Suits: Women and Public Policy in Australia (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1990), 162.

4 Tim Colebatch, Dick Hamer: The Liberal Liberal (Melbourne: Scribe, 2014), 330.

5 Nancy Dexter, ‘The Penny Ryan Row’, The Age, 26 May 1976, 18; Nancy Dexter, ‘Two Sides of Penny’, The Age, 29 May 1976, 12.

6 ‘Feminist Attacked’, Tribune, 4 August 1976, 10.

7 ‘Feminist Driven Out of P.S.’, Tribune, 8 September 1976, 11.

8 Colebatch, 331; ‘“Hampered” Adviser to Go’, Canberra Times, 6 September 1976, 1.

9 ‘Women Resign over Hamer's Tokenism’, Tribune, 15 September 1976, 3.

10 On maternal citizenship, see Marilyn Lake, ‘Childbearers as Rights-Bearers: Feminist Discourse on the Rights of Aboriginal and Non-Aboriginal Mothers in Australia, 1920–50’, Women's History Review 8, no. 2 (1999): 347–63. On the ways women's liberation challenged maternal citizenship identities, see Michelle Arrow, ‘“Everyone Deserves a Holiday from Work, Why Not Mothers?”: Motherhood, Feminism and Citizenship in the Australian Royal Commission on Human Relationships, 1974–1977’, Women's History Review 25, no. 2 (2016): 320–36. On sexual citizenship, see Diane Richardson, ‘Rethinking Sexual Citizenship’, Sociology 51, no. 2 (2017): 210–12. Also see Michelle Arrow, ‘“These Are a Few of Our Daily Oppressions”: Speaking and Listening to Homosexuality in Australia's Royal Commission on Human Relationships, 1974–77’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 27, no. 2 (2018): 234–63.

11 On the Lusher motion, see Erica Millar, ‘“Too Many”: Anxious White Nationalism and the Biopolitics of Abortion’, Australian Feminist Studies 30, no. 83 (2015): 82–98.

12 Irene Webley, ‘The New Right and Women Who Want to Be Women in Australian Politics in the 1980s’, Hecate 9, no. 1–2 (1983): 7–24.

13 Sara Dowse, ‘The Women's Movement's Fandango with the State: The Movement's Role in Public Policy since 1972’, in Women, Social Welfare and the State, eds Cora V. Baldock and Bettina Cass (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1983), 205–26.

14 Susan Magarey, ‘Australia’, in Companion to Women's Historical Writing, eds Mary Spongberg, Ann Curthoys and Barbara Caine (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 46–8.

15 Carol Johnson ‘Gough Whitlam and the Labor Tradition’, in The Whitlam Legacy, ed. Troy Bramston (Sydney: Federation Press, 2013), 357–65.

16 Lyndall Ryan, ‘Feminism and the Federal Bureaucracy, 1972–1983’, in Playing the State: Australian Feminist Interventions, ed. Sophie Watson (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1990), 71–84.

17 See Michelle Arrow, The Seventies: The Personal, the Political and the Making of Modern Australia (Sydney: NewSouth, 2019).

18 See, for example, Graham Willett, Living Out Loud: A History of Gay and Lesbian Activism in Australia (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2000).

19 Judith Brett, Robert Menzies’ Forgotten People (Sydney: Sun Australia, 1993), 53.

20 Marilyn Lake, Getting Equal: The History of Australian Feminism (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1999); Marian Sawer and Marian Simms, A Woman's Place: Women and Politics in Australia (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1984).

21 Warwick Eather, ‘The Liberal Party of Australia and the Australian Women's Movement against Socialisation 1947–54’, Australian Journal of Politics and History 44, no. 2 (1998): 191–207.

22 Ibid., 192.

23 Judith Brett, Australian Liberals and the Moral Middle Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 146.

24 Ibid., 134.

25 Marian Sawer with Gail Radford, Making Women Count: A History of the Women's Electoral Lobby (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2008), ch. 1.

26 See, for example, Margaret Fitzherbert, So Many Firsts: Liberal Women from Enid Lyons to the Turnbull Era (Sydney: Federation Press, 2009); Michael McKernan, Beryl Beaurepaire (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1999); Don Harwin and Jenny Gardiner, ‘Women in the NSW Coalition Parties’, in ‘No Fit Place for Women’? Women in NSW Politics, 1856–2006, eds Deborah Brennan and Louise Chappell (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2006), 111–30.

27 Brett, Australian Liberals and the Moral Middle Class; Paul Strangio, ‘Instability, 1966–82’, in The Cambridge History of Australia, Volume 2: The Commonwealth of Australia, eds Alison Bashford and Stuart Macintyre (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 135–61.

28 On the archiving of second-wave feminism in Australia, see Alison Bartlett, Maryanne Dever and Margaret Henderson, ‘Notes Towards an Archive of Australian Feminist Activism’, Outskirts 17 (May 2007), www.outskirts.arts.uwa.edu.au/volumes/volume-16/bartlett (accessed 30 August 2020).

29 For some pathbreaking work on anti-abortion politics, see Judy McVey, ‘The Right to Life Offensive since 1969’, Hecate 9, no. 1–2 (1983): 35–43; Erica Millar, ‘Mourned Choices and Grievable Lives: The Anti-Abortion Movement's Influence in Defining the Abortion Experience in Australia since the 1960s’, Gender & History 28, no. 2 (2016): 501–19; Rebecca Albury, The Politics of Reproduction: Beyond the Slogans (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1999).

30 Gerard Henderson, Santamaria: A Most Unusual Man (Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, 2015).

31 Marian Sawer, Australia and the New Right (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1982); Marian Simms, ‘Malcolm Fraser and the Emergence of the New Right’, in Liberal Nation: The Liberal Party and Australian Politics, ed. Marian Sawer (Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1982), ch. 8; Ardel Shamsullah, ‘Fraserism in Theory and Practice’, in For Better or for Worse: The Federal Coalition, ed. Brian Costar (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1994), 19–30. Dominic Kelly's Political Troglodytes and Economic Lunatics: The Hard Right in Australia (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2019) focuses on hard right advocacy groups but not in women's policy.

32 Lake, Getting Equal; Gisela Kaplan, The Meagre Harvest: The Australian Women's Movement 1950s–1990s (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1996); Sawer with Radford, Making Women Count; and Susan Magarey, Dangerous Ideas: Women's Liberation – Women's Studies – Around the World (Adelaide: University of Adelaide Press, 2014).

33 Irene Webley, ‘Women Who Want to Be Women’, in Sawer, Australia and the New Right, 135–6. See also Webley, ‘The New Right and Women Who Want to Be Women’, 7–24.

34 Robyn Rowland, Women Who Do and Women Who Don't Join the Women's Movement (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984).

35 J. Clarke and K. White, Women in Australian Politics (Sydney: Fontana Collins, 1983), 196.

36 Kim E. Nielsen, ‘Doing the “Right” Right’, Journal of Women's History 16, no. 3 (Fall 2004): 169.

37 Donald Critchlow, Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman's Crusade (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).

38 Babette Francis, in Rowland, 137.

39 See, for example, Stacie Taranto, Kitchen Table Politics: Conservative Women and Family Values in New York (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017); Critchlow; Catherine Rymph, Republican Women: Feminism and Conservatism from Suffrage through to the Rise of the New Right (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

40 Kathleen M. Blee and Sandra McGee Deutsch, eds, Women of the Right: Comparisons and Interplay across Borders (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012), 2.

41 Webley, ‘Women Who Want to Be Women’, 135.

42 ‘Final Report from the Status of Women Committee’, Women's Action Alliance Newsletter 10 (December 1976): 6.

43 ‘Newsletter Fee’, Women Who Want to Be Women Newsletter, November 1979, 3.

44 Diane Boland cited in Barbara Hooks, ‘Catchcry Is Freedom, But with Some Limits’, The Age, 14 January 1976, 14.

45 Jackie Butler, letter to editor, Canberra Times, 3 May 1980, 2.

46 Francis, in Rowland, 131.

47 Errol Simper, ‘Feminists “Herding All Women into Huge Refuge”’, The Australian, 21 February 1980, 5.

48 Editorial, Women Who Want to Be Women Newsletter 16 (July 1982): 1.

49 Rowland, 27–8.

50 See Catherine Kevin, ‘Maternity and Freedom: Australian Feminist Encounters with the Reproductive Body’, Australian Feminist Studies 20, no. 46 (2005): 4.

51 Linda Gordon and Allen Hunter, ‘Sex, Family and the New Right: Anti-feminism as a Political Force’, Radical America 11, no. 6 (Winter 1977–78): 17.

52 Rowland, 23; Prudence Flowers, ‘“Voodoo Biology”: The Right-to-Life Campaign against Family Planning Programs in the United States in the 1980s’, Women's History Review 29, no. 2 (2020): 336.

53 Eric C. Miller, ‘Phyllis Schlafly's “Positive” Freedom: Liberty, Liberation, and the Equal Rights Amendment’, Rhetoric and Public Affairs 18, no. 2 (Summer 2015): 277.

54 Maureen Bang, ‘Mothers Are VIPs’, Australian Women's Weekly, 18 June 1975, 9.

55 Rebecca Jo Plant, ‘Anti-Maternalism: A New Perspective on the Transformation of Gender Ideology in Twentieth Century US’, Social Politics 22, no. 3 (2015): 288.

56 Ibid.

57 Taranto, 12.

58 Valerie Renkema, letter to Robert Ellicott, undated c.1979, in ‘National Women's Advisory Council – Women Who Want to Be Women’, National Archives of Australia (hereafter NAA) A463/70, 1980/63 Part 1.

59 Nance Cotter, in Rowland, 96.

60 Taranto, 12.

61 Arrow, The Seventies, 90–100.

62 ‘Report on Attendance at the Coordinated Women's Group “Women's Protest Rally” at Gunnedah, NSW, on Saturday 9 November 1974’, in Elizabeth Reid papers, National Library of Australia, MS 9262, Box 72, Folder 340, ‘Public Enemies’. Published information on Claire Isbister, a notorious anti-feminist public figure, is scarce, but this obituary provides some important details: www.smh.com.au/national/fount-of-knowledge-on-mothercraft-20080826-gdssfw.html (accessed 30 August 2020).

63 McKernan, 138.

64 ‘The Voice of Australia's Women’, Australian Women's Weekly, 18 July 1979, 71–80.

65 Webley, ‘Women Who Want to Be Women’, 135.

66 Rosemary Munday, ‘Two Years’ Hard Work But Still a Lot to Be Done’, Australian Women's Weekly, 2 July 1980, 19.

67 Webley, ‘Women Who Want to Be Women’, 139–41.

68 Munday, 19.

69 ‘A letter from Mrs Babette Francis’, Women Who Want to Be Women Newsletter 2 (August 1979): 18.

70 Katharine Betts, ‘Attitudes to Abortion in Australia: 1972 to 2003’, People and Place 12, no. 4 (2004): 23.

71 Glenda Balantyne, ‘Who Decides? Perspectives on the Abortion Campaign’, Scarlet Woman 8 (1978): 23–4.

72 McKernan, 185.

73 Valerie E. Renkema, letter to Prime Minister, 11 April 1979, in National Women's Advisory Council – Abortion 1979–1983, NAA: A463, 1979/909; Beryl Beaurepaire, letter to the editor of The Age, 21 November 1979, in National Women's Advisory Council – Abortion 1979–1983, NAA: A463, 1979/909.

74 McVey, 37; Babette Francis, in Rowland, 135.

75 Ibid.

76 Michael Barnard, ‘Is Women's Council out of Touch?’, The Age, 16 November 1979, 11.

77 McKernan, 190.

78 Lyndsay Connors, ‘The Politics of the National Women's Advisory Council’, Politics 16, no. 2 (1981): 241.

79 Webley, ‘Women Who Want to Be Women’, 148.

80 Connors, 241–2.

81 McKernan, 210.

82 Strangio, 156–60.

83 Marian Sawer, ‘Introduction’, in Australia and the New Right, viii.

84 Deborah Brennan, The Politics of Australian Child Care: From Philanthropy to Feminism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 96.

85 Anne Summers, ‘Women’, in From Whitlam to Fraser: Reaction and Reform in Australian Politics, eds Allan Patience and Brian Head (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1979), 199.

86 Ibid., 199.

87 Janet Ramsay, ‘The Making of Domestic Violence Policy by the Australian Commonwealth Government and the Government of the State of New South Wales between 1970 and 1985: An Analytical Narrative of Feminist Policy Activism’ (PhD thesis, University of Sydney, 2004), 127–8; Brennan, 118.

88 Women's Action Alliance Newsletter 11 (February 1977): 3.

89 ‘Women's Action Alliance’, Women's Action Alliance Australia 1 (June 1980): 2.

90 Carmel Flaskas and Betty Hounslow, ‘Government Intervention and Right-Wing Attacks on Feminist Services’, Scarlet Woman 11 (September 1980): 14.

91 ‘Positive Woman’, Women Who Want to Be Women Newsletter 10 (May 1981): 5.

92 Babette Francis, letter to the Director of the Business Research Centre, North Brisbane College of Advanced Education, 4 March 1981, cited in Webley, ‘The New Right and Women Who Want to Be Women’, 10.

93 Diane Boland, quoted in ‘We’re an Anti-Child Society’, Age, 5 December 1975. Also see Webley, ‘Women Who Want to Be Women’, 149.

94 Jocelynne A. Scutt, ‘Inequality before the Law: Gender, Arbitration and Wages’, in Gender Relations in Australia: Domination and Negotiation, eds. Kay Saunders and Raymond Evans (Sydney: Harcourt, 1994), 266–86.

95 Maureen Bang, ‘Mothers are VIPs’, Australian Women's Weekly, 18 June 1975, 9.

96 Babette Francis, letter to editor, Canberra Times, 8 May 1980, 2.

97 Webley, ‘The New Right and Women Who Want to Be Women’, 18.

98 Francis, in Rowland, 138. Similar stunts, involving the delivery of loaves of bread to state politicians ‘from breadmakers to the breadwinners’, took place in the United States as part of the campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment. See Robin Morris, Entering the Fray: Gender, Politics and Culture in the New South (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2009), 161.

99 Valerie E. Renkema, letter to Prime Minister, 11 April 1979.

100 See Louie Traikovski, ‘The Housewives’ Wages Debate in the 1920s Australian Press’, Journal of Australian Studies 27, no. 78 (2003): 9–13; and Janeen Baxter, ‘Domestic Labour’, in Australian Feminism: A Companion, ed. Barbara Caine (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1998), 69–74.

101 ‘I Realised I’d Been Working Hard for Years at Home … ’, Vashti's Voice 16 (1976): 5.

102 Merrindahl Andrew, ‘Questioning Women's Movement “Strategies”: Australian Activism on Work and Care’, Social Politics 15, no. 3 (Fall 2008): 382.

103 Brennan, 107.

104 Webley, ‘Women Who Want to Be Women’, 137.

105 Susan Ryan, ‘Women's Policy’, in The Hawke Government, ed. Troy Bramston (Melbourne: Pluto Press, 2003), 202.

106 Margaret Thornton and Trish Luker, ‘The Sex Discrimination Act and its Rocky Rite of Passage’, in Sex Discrimination in Uncertain Times, ed. Margaret Thornton (Canberra: ANU E-Press, 2010), 28–9. The group's newsletter ceased publication around 1985, though Francis was publicly identified as its spokesperson as late as 1989. The Endeavour Forum's website states that the organisation was founded as ‘Women Who Want to Be Women’: www.endeavourforum.org.au/about.html (accessed 30 August 2020).