‘Women are exploited way too often’:1

Comment by first-year Adelaide University female gender studies student in 2004, explaining her opposition to female nudity in advertising.

Feminist rhetorics at the end of equality

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

My thanks to the students, parents and teachers in the various participating schools: Adelaide High School (especially Colleen Tomlian), Christian Brothers College (especially Bob Bowes and the principal, Brother Patrick Cronin), Croydon High School (especially Annie Hanson and Tammy Edwardson), Gepps Cross Girls High School (especially Michael Darley), Marden Open Access College (especially Sharon Morrison), Mitcham Girls High School (especially Susanne Owen), Pembroke College (especially Erica Baker), Prince Alfred College (especially Dr Adrian Brown), St Aloysius College (especially Elizabeth Fitzgerald, Liz Kelton and Neville Stapleton), Wilderness School (especially the principal, Carolyn Grantskalns), Windsor Gardens Vocational College (especially Angela Falkenberg), Murray Bridge High School (especially Chris Searle), St John's College (especially Charlie Allen and Sharon Rouse) and the students in my social sciences class. Lara Palombo, Daniela Bogeski and Simon Davey undertook interviews with young people and kept the show on the road during my various absences. Assisted by Saul Steed, Jenni Rossi's careful coding and excellent production and management of the SPSS database has been a boon, while the whole project would have been impossible without financial support from the Australian Research Council.

Comment by first-year Adelaide University female gender studies student in 2004, explaining her opposition to female nudity in advertising.

Focus group member, Sydney woman in her late 20, in Anne Summers, The End of Equality: Work, Babies and Women's Choices in 21st Century Australia (Random House Australia) Sydney, 2003, p. 27.

Ingrid FitzGerald, ‘Feminist Glasses’ in Rosamund Else-Mitchell and Naomi Flutter (eds), Talking Up: Young Women's Take on Feminism (Spinifex) North Melbourne, 1998, p. 9, commenting on popular attitudes.

Surveys consistently report that feminists are popularly understood as man-hating, lesbian, boiler-suited, fat and ugly: the 224 women of ‘middle Australia’ in Barbara Riley-Smith, ‘The Women's View: Market Research Study on Women's Perceptions of Themselves and Government Programs and Policies’ (Office of the Status of Women, Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet) Canberra, 1992, p. 48; Natasha Walter, The New Feminism (Little, Brown and Company) London, 1998, p. 36.

While 27 per cent of people in the United States of America believe the earth has been contacted by aliens (a Gallup poll in 1990), only 18 per cent believe that ‘feminist’ is a compliment (a Time/CNN poll in 1990): Jodi Dean, ‘Coming Out as an Alien: Feminists, UFOs, and the “Oprah effect”’ in Nan Bauer Maglin and Donna Perry (eds), ‘Bad Girls/‘GoodGirls’: Women, Sex and Power in the Nineties (Rutgers University Press) New Brunswick, NJ, 1996, pp. 101, 105.

For a discussion of these issues and their protagonists, see Bulbeck and other contributors to Outskirts, vol. 8: Chilla Bulbeck, ‘Feminism by Any Other Name?: Skirting the Generation Debate’, Outskirts: Feminisms Along the Edge, vol. 8, 2001, available at <http://www.chloe.uwa.edu.au/outskirts/article3.html>.

Catherine Lumby, Bad Girls: the Media, Sex and Feminism in the '90s (Allen & Unwin) Sydney, 1997, p. 155.

On ‘entitlement feminism’, see Beverley Skeggs, ‘Women's Studies in Britain in the 1990s: Entitlement Cultures and Institutional Constraints’, Women's Studies International Forum, vol. 18, no. 4, 1995, p. 478; on ‘free market feminism’, see Helen Wilkinson, ‘The Thatcher Legacy: Power Feminism and the Birth of Girl Power’ in Natasha Walter (ed.), On the Move: Feminism for a New Generation (Virago) London, 1999, p. 29; on self-help or therapeutic feminism, see Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Commercialization of Intimate Life: Notes from Home and Work (University of California Press) Berkeley, 2003, pp. 16–27.

‘Postfeminism’ dates at least to 1987 when Judith Stacey is credited with its coinage: Catherine M. Orr, ‘Charting the Currents of the Third Wave’, Hypatia, vol. 12, no. 3, 1997, p. 34.

Summers, The End of Equality, p. 21.

FitzGerald, ‘Feminist Glasses’, pp. 11, 8, 10.

Susan Hopkins, Girl Heroes: the New Face in Popular Culture (Pluto Press) Annandale, Sydney, 2002.

Anthea Taylor, ‘What's New About “the New Femininity”? Feminism, Femininity and the Discourse of the New’, Hecate, vol. 29, no. 2, 2003, p. 184.

Taylor, ‘What's New’, pp. 186, 189.

Taylor, ‘What's New’, p. 188.

Taylor, ‘What's New’, p. 185.

Almost all the government schools I approached agreed to participate, as did the first Catholic schools I approached. A number of Protestant boys’ schools refused, while my old scholar status gained me access to the participating Protestant girls’ school.

The questions on attitudes to the women's movement were taken from a Time/CNN survey: Ginia Bellafante, ‘Feminism: It's All About Me’, Time, 29 June 1998, pp. 54–60; and the gender issues items were derived from a study of three generations of Welsh women: Jane Pilcher, Women of Their Time: Generation, Gender Issues and Feminism (Ashgate) Aldershot, 1998.

The essays written for Summers were: ‘It is [the year] 2036 and you are 70 years old—describe your life’ (the private school, N=24), ‘Reflections on my life’ (top stream and commercial stream in a high school, N=26 and 20) and ‘My life’ (technical school, N=43). The instructions given to my respondents were: ‘Imagine you are 70 or 80 years old and reflecting back on your life. Describe your life as you think or imagine it will be. When Anne Summers asked high school girls in 1970 to write this essay, they discussed romance, marriage and children, paid work or a career, further education, travel, personal crises, for example accidents and deaths to loved ones, sexual experiences, before, during and after marriage, world crises or technological changes that would affect their lives. … But you write your own story! What does life hold in store for you?’ Anne Summers, ‘Women's Consciousness of Their Role-structure’, thesis presented in partial fulfilment of BA Honours degree in Politics, University of Adelaide, 1970.

Summers, The End of Equality, p. 262.

Between 1989 and 1992, surveys reported that 40–60 per cent of respondents believed that a strong women's movement was needed. Elaine J. Hall and Marnie Salupo Rodriguez, ‘The Myth of Postfeminism’, Gender & Society, vol. 17, no. 6, 2003, p. 897. Since the 1980s, 30–40 per cent of women have called themselves feminists and in 1990 nearly 80 per cent favoured efforts to strengthen and change women's status in society. Pamela Aronson, ‘Feminists or “Postfeminists”? Young Women's Attitudes toward Feminism and Gender Relations’, Gender & Society, vol. 17, no. 6, 2003, p. 904.

Summers, The End of Equality, pp. 6–8.

As distinct from being perhaps part of a rich ‘family’: Narelle Hooper, ‘Up, Up and Away: the Rich 200’, Business Review Weekly, 25 May 1998, available at <http://www.brw.com.au/content/250598/rich016.htm>.

Women being about one-third of full-time workers between 1988 and 2003. Australian Bureau of Statistics, Women in Australia (Australian Bureau of Statistics) Canberra, 1993, p. 124; Australian Bureau of Statistics, Labour Force Survey (Australian Bureau of Statistics) Canberra, July 2003, accessed via Ausstats online.

Harriyat Babacan, ‘“Women Hold Up Half the Sky”: Gender Mainstreaming and Women's Equality in Australia’, Development Bulletin, no. 64, 2004, p. 49.

Pilcher, Women of Their Time, pp. 129–30.

Jane Hobson, ‘Non-occasion Greeting Cards and the Commodification of Personal Relationships’ in Maggie Andrews and Mary M. Talbot (eds), All the World and Her Husband: Women in Twentieth Century Consumer Culture (Cassell) London, 2000, p. 240.

The Virginia Slims advertisement suggested ‘Women are at their best slaving over a hot stove. We've come a long, long way. Virginia Slims. … At last, a cigarette we can call our own.’ Mary Talbot, ‘Strange Bedfellows: Feminism in Advertising’ in Maggie Andrews and Mary M. Talbot (eds), All the World and Her Husband, p. 180.

Summers, The End of Equality, pp. 22–3.

Summers, ‘Women's Consciousness’, tables 1–4, pp. 75–6.

Summers, The End of Equality, pp. 33–4.

In Australia, women's average paid work week has risen from 12 hours in 1974 to 19 hours in 1997, although men's has fallen from 45 hours to 36 hours, due to reductions in paid overtime and the increase in unemployment of ‘prime-age’ men from almost zero to 10 per cent. Michael Bittman and Jame Mahmud Rice, ‘The Spectre of Overwork: an Analysis of Trends between 1974 and 1997 Using Australian Time-use Diaries’, Labour and Industry, vol. 12, no. 3, 2002, pp. 5–24.

Barbara Pocock, The Work/Life Collision (Federation Press) Annandale, Sydney, 2003, p. 115; see also Summers, The End of Equality, p. 28.

Summers, The End of Equality, pp. 23–4.

A 1992 study in Brisbane found that almost one in three Year 9 boys said it was ‘OK for a boy to hold a girl down and force her to have sexual intercourse’ if he had been ‘led on’. A 1997 study of 15–25-year-old men found that one-third believed it was ‘OK for a male to force a female to have sex’. Summers, The End of Equality, p. 114. In the most recent survey, conducted in 1996, almost half a million women aged 18 and over (7.1 per cent of the population) had experienced an incidence of violence in the previous 12 months. Australian Bureau of Statistics, Australian Women's Year Book 1997, pp. 156, 158.

Rory Dicker and Alison Pipemeier, ‘Introduction’ in Rory Dicker and Alison Piepmeier (eds), Catching a Wave: Reclaiming Feminism for the 21st Century (Northeastern University Press) Boston, 2003, p. 21.

Several survey respondents compared Australia with other benighted cultures, for example: ‘women are treated terribly in many Muslim countries’.

Applied to discourses of equality concerning housework, even in families who do not share housework equally, by Michael Bittman and Jocelyn Pixley, The Double Life of the Family (Allen & Unwin) St Leonards, 1997, p. 155.

Donna Chung, ‘Violence, Romance, Control and Gender Equality: Young Women Negotiating Heterosexuality with a Male Gaze’, paper presented to the ‘Expanding our Horizons: Understanding the Complexities of Violence against Women’ conference, University of Sydney, 18–22 February 2002.

FitzGerald, ‘Feminist Glasses’, pp. 12–13.

Summers, The End of Equality, p. 262.