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Abstract
Recent international accounts of gender and governance have highlighted complexities surrounding the political mobilization of women on the one hand, and the reconfiguration of the state on the other. The trajectories taken by women's movements have intersected and interacted with a rapidly changing political opportunity structure and with increasingly unfavourable shifts in dominant discourses. In the past, Australia has been heralded as a woman-friendly state, complete with femocrats overseeing gendered policy analysis of mainstream programmes as well as a broad range of women's service. Recent discursive shifts, however, combined with the changing architecture of the state and a women's movement largely in abeyance, have resulted in the ‘fall of the femocrat’ and increasing marginalization of feminist agendas. As observed elsewhere, such shifts position women in ways that only selectively recognize them and their capacities and needs. We extend such critiques by mapping over time the engagement with the state of a particular group of rural women. This case study enables us to identify both the heterogeneity of contemporary governance, and the complex, multi-level responses to farm women's agitation for greater industry recognition.
Notes
1. In this article we capitalize State when we are referring to a unit of a federal system and contrast this with the general concept of the state.
2. Gatherings is a term used to refer to meetings of rural and farm women at various locations in country Australia. Gatherings involve training and education sessions, storytelling, personal development and social activities.
3. WEL was founded with an eye firmly on the opportunities provided by the forthcoming Australian federal election, and it became ‘the political bombshell of 1972’ (Ryan Citation1990: 72). WEL's nation-wide interviewing and rating of election candidates on their knowledge of and commitment to women's issues changed the political landscape.
4. See Elson Citation(2004) for a contemporary critique of attempts to ‘engender’ government budgets.
5. The WOFG received diverse support from a wide range of public and private sector organizations.
6. For instance the RWN drew on the insights of its Advisory Group of women from across Victoria, and the Department of Agriculture Women in Agriculture staff supported the emerging State-wide Women in Agriculture group meetings which were later to incorporate independently as Australian Women in Agriculture.
7. There had already been a strong rural component in the federal government's national domestic violence (‘Break the Silence’) programme of the late 1980s. However, The Invisible Farmer differed in that it gave specific attention to farm and rural women and their needs.
8. This included the official opening by the Governor General of Australia, speeches by State and federal Ministers and politicians and the strategically staged media release by the Attorney General referring the legal status of farm women to the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) for review.
9. It is likely that this re-identification caused tensions within the families/relationships of some of the women, but this was not a subject canvassed in interviews. Future work could consider the ways in which women's politicization impacted on the micro-politics of the family unit and community.
10. Following this inaugural conference, a second International Conference for Women in Agriculture was held in Washington in 1998 and a third in Madrid in 2002. A fourth conference was planned for 2006 in South Africa, but did not eventuate. As one of its recommendations for action, members at the 1994 conference called for the establishment of ‘an international network of women in agriculture’ but no formal organization was ever formed (Women in Agriculture International Conference CommitteeCitation1995: 300).
11. Chappell (Citation2001: 59) has stated that there is a ‘long standing’ argument that federalism inhibits progressive social policies. She counters this orthodoxy with reference to policy on violence against women in Australia. Our analysis of the women in agriculture movement in Australia supports Chappell's Citation(2001) thesis.
12. As Walby Citation(2005) has noted gender mainstreaming is a complex and contested notion which is used differently in different contexts. For a more detailed discussion on mainstreaming see Daly Citation(2005).
13. The Rural Women's Unit established in 1995 was restructured in 1999 and many of its functions were moved from the agricultural portfolio to the Department of Transport and Regional Services (DOTARS). The new unit was entitled the Regional and Rural Women's Unit. The remaining agriculture-related policy foci remained in the Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry Australia (AFFA) and this was restructured initially as the Women in Rural Industries Unit.
14. In the past it would have been expected that such analysis of the gender effects of policy changes would have been undertaken within government, but, as we have seen, such policy expertise had already been dispersed.
15. This article reflects our diverse past research (Liepins Citation1998a, Citation1999; Pini Citation1998; Pini and Brown Citation2004; Panelli and Pini Citation2005; Sawer Citation2006, Citation2007, Citation1999; Pini Citation1998; Pini and Brown Citation2004; Panelli and Pini Citation2005; Sawer Citation2006, Citation2008) as well as recent interviews from a study funded by the University of Otago. This latter project was conducted by Panelli and involved twenty interviews from activists and key informants. Data were collected via semi-structured, in-depth interviews conducted by telephone or in person. These interviews were taped and transcribed. Data were read for factual content as well as evidence of discursive changes for analysis of the 2004 material acknowledged that the interviews were explicitly reflective narratives. Interviewees were consciously and actively constructing their own commentary of ‘what had happened’ both to the movement and the wider rural and federal contexts.
16. The case of Australian Women in Agriculture illustrates this situation. Previous grants had helped this organization establish itself since traditionally, farmer organizations operate from substantial membership fees which male farmers traditionally paid as a legitimate part of their farm business costs (see Grace Citation1997).
17. We are not suggesting here that farm women are without agency or that there are not alternative strategies for activism outside of government channels. However, examining such strategies was not the focus of our research. Future research that takes up the issues raised in the article could usefully examine the ways in which women's groups could avoid/counter the vagaries of the variable/varying state.