OUT OF THE COMMUNITY

Abstract

This paper looks at the establishment of Women's Studies programs in selected Australian universities. It highlights the resistance to Women's Studies as an academic knowledge by some feminists outside of the academy as well as non-feminists within the academy. This paper argues that connections to the Women's Liberation Movement and the difficulties encountered by feminists when introducing Women's Studies into the academy made some feminists suspicious of the value of theory for feminism, especially in relation to a political agenda.

Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. (Austen, Persuasion ([1818] 1946)

Notes

I would like to thank Kay Schaffer, Chilla Bulbeck, and the staff and students in the discipline of Gender, Work and Social Inquiry at the University of Adelaide for their critical feedback. Also thank you to the anonymous readers who provided excellent feedback.

1. For a more detailed version of this paper see From Revolution to Deconstruction: Exploring Feminist Theory and Practice in Australia (Papadelos 2010).

2. Many changes occurred during the Whitlam era. Two significant events for women included changes to the Family Law Act (no fault divorce) and the impact of the Women's Electoral Lobby on decision-making within government, which included action on equal pay and the removal of a luxury tax on the contraceptive pill.

3. This is not to say that women were not organising in groups all over Australia before 1969 but, according to Anne Summers (1999), 1969 marked an important coming together of feminists from different states of Australia to mark the beginning of the WLM, as it has come to be known today.

4. See also Phillipa Rothfield, who claims that the Women's Liberation Movement ‘inspired the theoretical and scholarly pursuit which we now call (academic) feminism’ (1987, 525).

5. For the purpose of this paper, a ‘course’ refers to a semester-long subject.

6. While the academy saw Women's Studies as having a political goal, feminists from within the movement debated about whether academics ‘could be truly political’ (Bulbeck 2001, 24).

7. As discussed elsewhere in this paper, some aspects of Marxism also challenged the university ethos, but it was taken up in philosophy, politics, and sociology departments.

8. For a more chronological account, see for example, Magarey, Ryan and Sheridan (1994). In brief, such accounts relate that: the first semester subject taught in Women's Studies emerged from philosophy at Flinders University in 1973; second was Kay Daniels’ honours course taught in history, University of Tasmania, in 1973; third was Margaret Power's interdisciplinary unit offered at the University of Sydney in 1974; and the fourth was the Women's Studies program offered at the Australian National University from 1976 (Jones 1998, 123). This description is disputed (for example, see Thornton 1999) and does not take into account courses taught within the CAE sector.

9. The origins of Women's Studies in the university is not clear, but the few recorded histories make the following (disputed) claims: Flinders University offered a subject ‘actually named Women's Studies’ in 1973, and Thornton was teaching a Women's Studies course at the University of Queensland in 1973 (Thornton 1999, 33).

10. In 1996, Betty Fisher described her significant involvement in the Women's Electoral Lobby (WEL) and the Women's Information Switchboard in South Australia (Fisher 1996). She was also an early graduate of Flinders University's Women's Studies program.

11. In 1987, Lyndall Ryan, based at the School of Social Sciences at Flinders University, proposed the establishment of an Australian Women's Studies Association (AWSA). There was strong support from Women's Studies scholars and academics, thus the Inaugural Australian Women's Studies Association Conference was held in July 1989 (Bulbeck 2006, 1). AWSA is now known as AWGSA. ‘Gender’ is included in the title to reflect the interest in gay, lesbian, transgendered studies, masculinity studies and the renaming of Women's Studies to Gender Studies in some universities.

12. Both academics were associated with magazine Quadrant and held right-wing sympathies.

13. While women students were increasing in numbers in the 1970s (29.5 per cent undergraduate enrolment and 24.5 per cent post-graduate enrolment), few women were employed as academics (Over 1981, 166). According to Over, in 1978, ‘16 per cent of academic appointments were held by women’ in Australian universities (Over 1981, 166). Moreover, at the University of Sydney only 10.5 per cent of women were employed at lecturer and above (Over 1981, 168). Of the 16 per cent of women employed as academics, most were in lower status positions or positions lacking tenure.

14. While according to Franklin the course that led to the strike was titled ‘The politics of sexual oppression’ (Franklin 1999, 3), Anna Coombs claims it was called ‘Philosophical Issues in Feminist Thought’ (Coombs 1996, 278).

15. Jack Mundey was the secretary of the Builders’ Labourers Federation.

16. Student action, possibly less dramatic than the University of Sydney strike, was not restricted to Sydney. In her account of the first Women's Studies program at the Australian National University (ANU) in 1975, Magarey states that: In 1974, what was later euphemistically termed a ‘student education campaign’—during which students occupied the offices and committee rooms of the university's administration building continuously for several days and nights—called for action on four demands. The fourth was the establishment of a Women's Studies course. (Magarey 1986, 196)

17. Indeed, Neale states that women were told that it would be ‘ “tactically disadvantageous” to bring in sexism’ (Neale 1973, 28).

18. As there are no published accounts of the introduction of Women's Studies at the University of Adelaide, I am largely relying on interview material from Kay Schaffer and email comments from Myra Betschild.

19. After the 1982 merger of the CAEs, Salisbury expanded the team to include Women's Studies lecturers and courses from other campuses, particularly Magill (formerly Hartley) where there was a strong team and an undergraduate Women's Studies course.

20. The Research Centre for Women's Studies was established in 1984; it was closed down in 2001. It ran independently of the Women's Studies department, although staff attended seminars run by the Research Centre and Susan Magarey, the director, did some teaching in Women's Studies.

21. Chilla Bulbeck retired as Chair in 2008. There is no longer a Chair of Women's Studies at the University of Adelaide, and the future of the department is tenuous.

22. The ‘Women and Labour’ Conferences were very important. Ostensibly, socialist feminists attended but, according to Levy, these conferences attracted approximately 1500 women and gradually included new perspectives from other disciplines (Levy 1984, 105). See also Murdolo (1996) for a multicultural perspective of the impact of the Women and Labour Conferences.

23. It is important to stress that it is not simply a matter of policing boundaries; that is, defending or keeping modernism or post-modernism pure from contamination. Most feminists working with post-modern theories recognise that post-modernism is intimately connected to modernism.

24. Post-doctoral fellowships and graduate scholarships enabled a number of post-graduates to study abroad. Many like, Diprose, Gibbs, and Sophia studied in France under the supervision/ tutelage of theorists like, Irigaray, Cixous, Kristeva, Foucault and Derrida.

25. For a discussion of other threads that can be traced, see Papadelos (2010).

26. More recently, Matthews has shifted away from the position discussed above towards a more sympathetic relationship with post-structuralism; for example see Matthews (2005).

27. For a detailed account of some feminist concerns with contemporary feminist praxis, see Summers (2004).

28. According to Kerri Watson, ‘Women's Studies in the university represents an anomaly in the system—an alternative to the highly specialised and discipline-oriented world of academe. A larrikin in the field of learning’ (Watson 1987, 125).