I wheeled away from the screen and looked at her for a long minute. A colleague was passing and I called her into my office. “That,” she declared, peering over my shoulder, “is someone I’d want to know more about. She is a real person.”

What does that mean — a “real” person? To begin with, I think, Mary (as I’ll call her from now on) presents a face quite unlike the idealised female faces we see in magazines, movies, the media, advertising and, regrettably, AI-generated images. She had dark hair, sloping deep-set eyes, a wide mouth, and a broad forehead tapering to a small chin. This foreshortening of her face meant those ridiculous hats of her era were entirely wrong for her.

The little there is to know about Mary suggests she was intelligent, energetic, determined and practical. She and husband Joe (as he was widely known) were English, both having been born in Staffordshire. Mary (then Mary Turner) was a schoolteacher before their marriage in 1885. Joe came from a mining family that had known poverty and distress — his father’s death in a mining accident left Joe the main family breadwinner at just twelve. Mary’s brother William had emigrated to New South Wales and settled in Lithgow, and his letters home persuaded Mary and Joe that they too might have better prospects in Australia.

With Mary pregnant, Joe went first, in December 1885, following his brother-in-law to Lithgow where he quickly found work as a miner and built a four-room timber house for his family. Mary eventually arrived in 1887, having made the journey alone with baby George Sydney (known as Syd), the first of the couple’s nine children. All their children survived infancy, which has to be a testament to Joe’s ability to provide and Mary’s skilled parenting and management of the household.

Joe was elected to the NSW parliament in 1891 and to federal parliament in 1901. And so, for thirty years until he left politics in 1921, he was constantly away from home for parliamentary sittings, either in Sydney when the family was in Lithgow, or in Melbourne after the family had moved to Sydney. The rearing of their quiver-full of children fell mainly to Mary.

Mary and Joe must have corresponded during their separations but none of their letters appear to have survived. But among the scattering of records preserved in the National Archives of Australia and the National Library of Australia are many photographs of Mary, more than you might expect. (For comparison, no photograph appears to have survived of Ada Watson, prime minister Chris Watson’s first wife.)

I’ve studied them all, for it turns out that Mary Cook is one of those women, like Mary Gilmore, Kathleen Fitzpatrick and Margaret Walkom, with whom I long to spend time. I don’t go searching for these ghosts, they find me. Mary Cook looked me directly in the eye with the gentle but firm expectation that her story is important and worth sharing.

And so, if the textual evidence is slender but the photographic evidence is plentiful, let’s go with the latter. I’ve selected the three photographic portraits that seem to me to offer the richest insights into her life.

The photograph at the top of this essay was taken by renowned Sydney photographer May Moore. She and her photographer-sister Mina, based in Melbourne, were both known for their skill in creating dramatic effects with light and shadow, and May’s portrait of Mary Cook is a beautiful example.

I never tire of observing how the light gathers at the top of Mary’s head and slides down through the parting of her hair. The photographer has permitted the light to define the merest sliver of the sitter’s profile — her forehead, cheeks, nose, lips, even the eyelashes of her left eye. It pools softly on her shoulder to illuminate the pearls at her ears and throat, and to touch the lace on her dress and the posy of flowers Mary has inclined her head to examine.

The archival description dates the photograph to 1918, when Mary would have been fifty-five, but she looks much younger. It can’t have been taken any earlier than 1910 because that was when May Moore established her Sydney studio, but it’s possible that it was taken in 1913 to mark Joe becoming prime minister. (He was the leader of a recent fusion of several non-Labor groups calling itself the Liberal Party, only distantly related to today’s Liberal Party.) It was the high point thus far in Mary and Joe’s long, upwardly mobile journey from the coal-mining towns of Staffordshire.

As a young man, Joe had become a follower of Primitive Methodism, a sect of Methodism that aimed to “uplift” the working classes and advocated the right of everyone, by self-improvement, to use their own talents to improve their station in life. This exactly what Joe had done. Although opposed to gambling and the consumption of alcohol, he had no objection to the display of worldly success and, according to his principal biographer John Murdoch, was vain of his personal appearance and loved to mix with rich, distinguished people.

Possibly, then, the photograph reveals as much about Joe as Mary: that Joe was proud of his life and proud of his wife, proud of the jewels he could give her and proud that he could afford such a fashionable studio. The sweet moment of repose captured in May Moore’s photograph renders it unlike the style of Mary’s later portraits and I wonder whether she saw herself in it or felt she was being assigned a part to play. The Moore sisters did, after all, specialise in portraying performers and writers.

With nine children swarming around her Mary certainly had little time for sitting about staring at flowers, though by then, fortunately, Joe had sufficient means to pay for domestic help for her. His burgeoning career had enabled the Cooks to move from their original cottage in Lithgow into a large, two-storey house on the main street. When they sold up in Lithgow in 1901 the inventory of their possessions shows how quickly they had covered themselves with the comforts and conveniences of Victorian middle-class existence. Their ever-increasing social status can be tracked from their subsequent moves through some of Sydney’s more salubrious suburbs: Marrickville, Baulkham Hills, Summer Hill and finally, in retirement, Bellevue Hill.

The Bellevue Hill house had expansive views over Sydney Harbour and was large enough to contain the lavish furniture the couple had accumulated over the years after they left Lithgow. They named it “Silchester” in memory of their Staffordshire home towns: Silverdale (Joe); Chesterton (Mary). Then they alighted upon a canny approach to downsizing. They demolished the house, built a block of luxury flats on the site, selected the best one for themselves, and rented out the rest.

If this woman was standing for prime minister you’d be interested, right? You want someone competent, experienced, trustworthy, tough but also empathetic? Yes you do, and that’s what I see in Mary here, but unfortunately it was still many years before women were elected to the Australian federal parliament, and in the meantime the talents of many were confined to the domestic sphere.

Lady Mary Cook, mid-1920s. National Archives of Australia M3606, 16

The photograph of Mary was taken between 1922 and 1927. Joe had left politics and accepted an appointment as Australia’s high commissioner in London. It was taken at Angus Faith’s studio in Hanover Square, and for the occasion Mary has had her hair waved (it was naturally straight) and has selected a silk blouse embellished with sequins, with her customary pearls. One necklace, which she also wore for the May Moore portrait, has two extra pearls suspended by what appear to be tiny strings of seed pearls. The viewer is drawn to Mary’s deep, thoughtful eyes (blue, according to her passport), but although she declines to meet our gaze, I feel comfortable with her.

The challenges Mary faced went further than providing a domestic haven for nine children and a busy husband. The defining feature of Joe’s political life was a complete shift in his principles and allegiances from Labor to conservative, from Free Trade to Protectionism, and from republicanism to ardent support for monarchy and Empire. Cook began public life as a trade unionist, and he was an obvious choice of local candidate in Lithgow when an infant Labor Party was being formed in New South Wales after the failed strikes of 1890. He became one of thirty-five new, inexperienced Labor men to take a seat in parliament in 1891.

Three years later Cook refused to commit to a pledge of caucus solidarity because, he said, he wanted to be free to represent the people in his electorate who had voted for him. In the election that year he stood as an “independent” Labor candidate and easily held his seat. Free Trader George Reid, needing Labor support to form government, offered Cook the post of postmaster-general on a salary of £1500 per year, and Cook accepted. This was what enabled the family to move to their fine new house and fill it with undreamed-of luxuries.

Cook’s political detractors were vicious in their condemnation of his apparent opportunism and surrender to self-interest, and from Labor there could never be any forgiveness: Cook was branded and is still remembered as a traitor, the original “Labor rat.” His most recent biographer, David Headon, notices that a significant absentee from Cook’s funeral in 1947 was the then-prime minister and undisputed hero of the labour movement, Ben Chifley. Never would Chifley’s “light on the hill” wrap its warmth around the reputation of Joe Cook.

How was Mary affected by her husband’s abandonment of all his early political beliefs and allegiances? Did she lose friends of her own? What was Joe like at home as he gradually became more irascible and virulent in his opinions? Did the children scatter to the back garden when he was in a temper?

None of Cook’s biographers — John Murdoch, Frank Crowley, Graham Bebbington, John Rickard, Zachary Gorman and David Headon — have bothered much with these questions. They nod respectfully to Mary by noting how, as a former teacher, she had greatly assisted her young, poorly educated husband by spending her evenings correcting his compound arithmetic and reading to him so he could practice his shorthand. But after that the biographers (Headon is an exception) have little further use for Mary.

John Murdoch does acknowledge that the linked decisions to marry Mary and emigrate to New South Wales “immeasurably enriched” Joe’s life. Mary created a home atmosphere of “rest and contentment,” he says, which was important to Joe who was often “tired” after prolonged work. She was a woman of “energy and resource” and the “ideal wife” for him throughout the sixty-two years of their marriage.

Murdoch will not allow that a mother of nine might also be “tired” and doesn’t pause to wonder if Joe was the “ideal” husband for Mary. And consider this: sixty-two years of marriage by itself signifies nothing in an era when divorce was difficult for everyone, and unthinkable for a man in Cook’s position. Some of those periods of “rest and contentment” no doubt resulted in the arrival of the nine children, but did Mary actually want to be nine times a mother? As with most women of her era, her choices were few. If there had been a divorce, what could she have done? Returned to teaching?

Interestingly, before Mary left Staffordshire in 1886 she obtained references from the education authority under which she had trained as a teacher, presumably to give her something to fall back on should she need it. One official noted that in her final year of training Mary had gained a pass rate of 96 per cent. None of Cook’s biographers have noticed this. Why would they? You don’t go looking if you haven’t asked the right questions.

This third photo shows Mary Cook in court dress. The photograph is dated 1926 but other evidence suggests it was taken for a court held at Buckingham Palace in the English summer of 1927. Joe’s appointment as High Commissioner is about to end. The Cooks have been living at 36 Queen’s Gate in Kensington, near the Royal Albert Hall, and mightily enjoying themselves by all accounts. Joe’s biographers have judged his performance in the diplomatic aspects of the role competent rather than distinguished, but he did work hard and successfully at promoting immigration and investment in Australia, and he and Mary relished the social side.

Dame Mary Cook, 1927. National Archives of Australia M3606, 16

Joe had developed a taste for high society during sixteen months he spent with prime minister Billy Hughes representing Australia at the Imperial War Conference in London in 1918, and in Paris for the peace conference in 1919. He was appointed Knight Grand Cross in the Order of St Michael and St George in 1918 and became Sir Joseph Cook. Mary and the family stayed home during that trip, but now, as Lady Mary Cook, she and various of their children went with him.

Joe’s new position meant hosting and attending numerous luncheons, receptions and dinners. He and Mary attended royal garden parties, launches of ships and planes, lunch with Mrs Winston Churchill, “At Homes” with Mrs Neville Chamberlain, Mrs Stanley Baldwin and the Archbishop of Canterbury, and society weddings, notably that of the Duke of York (the future King George VI) to the Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon.

The absolute pinnacle of social prestige was an invitation (“command”) to attend court, where young, unmarried women from the upper crust would make their social debut by being “presented” to the monarch. Married women such as Mary could also be presented.

It was a highly ritualised event but fortunately for outsiders like Mary and Joe, the Lord Chamberlain’s Office issued a guidebook on court dress. Included were advertisements from specialist tailors and outfitters who could supply all the clobber one needed and advice on how to wear it. The 1921 edition instructed that for ladies, feathers, veils and trains had been abolished, but in Mary’s 1927 photograph she is certainly wearing “Court Dress with feathers and train,” as stipulated on her invitation card. The previous instruction has obviously been reversed.

Unmarried women had to wear white, and their headdress was to consist of two ostrich feathers only. Married women could wear colour, as Mary seems to have done, but their headdress had to be a “Prince of Wales” plume consisting of three feathers, the central feather being higher than the rest. The length of the dress’s train was also prescribed. Mary wears the decorations of a Dame Commander of the British Empire, an honour she’d been awarded the previous year. To celebrate their attendance at court women often had their photographs taken at one of London’s prestigious studios, and Mary chose Hay Wrightson in New Bond Street. Lafayette was another popular choice.

For me there are two striking features of this portrait. First, Mary again wears that favourite necklace with the suspended pearls that was obviously so meaningful for her, surely a gift from Joe from way back although not as far back as Staffordshire, I think. This was not a trinket bought at a country fair by a poor young man. (That I would like to see.)

Second, Mary wears glasses for her court photograph. How many women would do that? For an occasion as important as this most would surely leave their glasses in their handbag, and indeed I’ve studied many court photographs and in none of them are the women wearing glasses. One’s character and personality (and weaknesses) were not to be on show. It was all subsumed into the ritual.

And yet here is Mary Cook, just being herself, a real person. She attended at least two other courts during her London years and wore glasses in all her photographs. (Joe, on the other hand, needed glasses for reading but rarely wore them in public, and certainly not for photographs.) It’s possible that Mary was shortsighted and needed her glasses during the formal proceedings to help her manage her train and to perform the tricky act of walking backwards when required. (It was a terrible breach of etiquette to turn one’s back on the monarch.) The glasses also suggest that here was someone who had not forgotten that she had begun married life scrubbing her own floors and stirring the family’s washing in a copper with a stick.

Mary’s DBE recognised “her services in connection with visitors to London from the Commonwealth of Australia” and was not solely for her work with the Red Cross, as John Murdoch believed. (It was mistake repeated by Frank Crowley; Zachary Gorman doesn’t mention Mary’s DBE at all.) Dame Mary, as she was known thereafter, supported a variety of causes and was as active as Joe in promoting immigration to Australia (he and she being perfect exemplars, of course). Most of the biographers fall short of mentioning that Joe’s social prominence could not have been achieved without her.

Or indeed his career success in general. Joe was able enough and certainly hard working, but although he acted the part of a statesman, he lacked a statesman’s vision and capacity to inspire others. Perhaps it was Mary who had the greater talent and ambition? She who plotted and planned, dreamed of and schemed? Biographer Graham Bebbington concedes (where the other biographers do not) that she was a formidable person who did dominate her husband in some things. Shrewdly, Mary could have assessed the marriageable men in her community and thrown in her lot with Joe Cook because he offered the best prospects and seemed the most biddable.

Without Mary, Joe’s highest achievement might have been a job as an accountant to some firm in Stoke-on-Trent, and the closest he would get to Buckingham Palace a day trip to watch the changing of the guard.

Mary was unable to attend Joe’s funeral in 1947 because she was suffering from dementia. She died in September 1950 and her ashes placed next to Joe’s at the Northern Suburbs Crematorium in Sydney.

On balance, the evidence does suggest that Mary and Joe shared the same aspirations. My point is that, as so often happens, women’s compliance is assumed, not interrogated. If, for the sake of the exercise, we flip the power in the relationship from him to her, we notice niggling, ragged little ends: questions unasked, facts unchecked, assumptions untested, alternative perspectives unexplored.

In 1992 Diane Langmore published a study of ten Australian prime ministerial wives (ending with Hazel Hawke) and was struck by how little had typically been said about them. Her book is a fascinating and successful attempt at filling that gap. However, of the six pre-first world war wives — Jane (Jeanie) Barton, Pattie Deakin, Ada Watson, Florence Reid, Margaret Fisher and Mary Cook — Langmore selected only Pattie Deakin for her book.

The lives of the rest are largely unknown beyond glimpses in their husbands’ biographies. There has been little exploration of these six women as individuals, and no consideration of them as a cohort. No one has wondered how well acquainted they were with each other, and what advice and encouragement might have been shared among them, across political boundaries, as they attempted to fulfill a role they may never have sought or expected. Their support for their husbands constitutes an entirely unrecognised contribution to the making of the Australian Commonwealth. •

The post Three portraits of a lady appeared first on Inside Story.

Julia Cooke’s newly released Starry and Restless brings us another group of three women writers, all of whom came into prominence in the middle of the twentieth century. Rebecca West and Martha Gellhorn would be known to most readers; Emily Hahn is the outlier, and possibly the most interesting.

All three were fearsome as they were fearless, and each of them belies Becker’s assumption that female war correspondents only came into their own in Vietnam. Not only were women covering the Spanish civil war and the second world war, they also were prone to breaking other rules. According to Cooke, the onslaught against “objectivity,” for instance, occurred much earlier than 1970s New Journalism, and from the start women were a critical factor:

Cracks in the firmament of American journalism had widened enough to make space for a new approach to reporting. Two decades earlier, closer to the turn of the century, an emphasis on “objectivity” had attempted to establish guardrails around sensationalist, openly partisan journalism… But objectivity slipped and skated when it hit certain subjects, like the suffrage movement or racial violence or global conflicts.

As for reporting on wars, it took perseverance and ingenuity for women to get into war zones, let alone deal with unbelievable hardships in covering them, hardships often far more difficult and dangerous than those their male colleagues experienced.

The eldest of Cooke’s trio was Rebecca West (born Cicely Isabel Fairfield, a name she discarded for the one we know her by). She began her career writing for suffragist papers but by her forties, Cooke writes, “she had aged into stature as one of Britain’s best-known literary celebrities.” Her son was fathered by H.G. Wells, twenty years older, but she broke off altogether with him once she was making enough to support the child herself. By the time she married the bankrupt Henry Andrews she was earning enough to support him too. Then Andrews came into an inheritance that further enhanced their lifestyle. The couple stayed together until Andrews died, with West surviving him by another fifteen years.

Most readers would know of Martha Gellhorn, if sadly more for her liaison with Ernest Hemingway — just as West is too often remembered for hers with Wells — than for her own remarkable career. But Emily “Mickey” Hahn is another matter. The first female to get a degree in mining engineering, she gave it up for writing. Despite producing more than fifty books, she is relatively unknown today.

In 1930, on the first of her many adventures, Hahn took a third-class berth on a steamer to the Belgian Congo. It was 1930, America had sunk into the Depression and, unemployed and freelancing, she was seeking a place cheap enough to live, think and write in. Five years later she was in Shanghai, feted as “one of the cleverest of America’s youngest writers.” There, a nightclub regular, she acquired a reputation, a pet gibbon, and eventually an aristocratic Chinese poet, who, among much else, married her and introduced her to opium.

Shanghai’s bombing by the Japanese was Hahn’s segue into war reporting. Her male colleagues, considering Europe more important, had left to cover the war threatening there. Her pieces in the New Yorker focused on the lives of civilians, depicting “the subtleties of people of different cultures and national allegiances.” When things got too grim she fled to Hong Kong, interviewing Chiang Kai-Shek’s wife and her two sisters in Chongqing on the way. It was in Hong Kong that the war would finally catch up with her.

It caught up with Martha Gellhorn too, who was in Europe making good money for her bulletins to Colliers magazine. Before Czechoslovakia, she had been writing from France and England, but unlike the English, which she found in denial, the Czechs were hiding anti-aircraft guns in haystacks in preparation for a German invasion. As the war gathered pace she went with Hemingway to his beloved Cuba, where she sought a stabler home than his rough Havana headquarters. It’s hard to dismiss the feeling that Finca Vigia, the rundown farm they rented and restored, represented Gellhorn’s hopes for a permanent relationship with a man already noted for his serial monogamy.

Settling in a country property in England, Rebecca West might also have been hankering for permanence. In 1939, she and Andrews bought Ibstone House, halfway between London and Oxford. Like Finca Vigia, it was in disrepair, but they did what they could to restore it. They were safe from the Blitz there, but West could hear “the thrum of German bombers worrying their way past her home” as she worked on Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, her magisterial study of Yugoslavia. The couple ended up sheltering a retinue of Yugoslav refugees from the war.

For some, permanence would prove an illusion. Gellhorn and Hemingway married in 1940 but that didn’t quell Gellhorn’s need to write and travel. When Colliers asked her to cover events in Asia she couldn’t subdue her wanderlust, nor Hemingway his machismo. He insisted on accompanying her but, true to form, propositioned other women along the way. It turned out “a horror journey,” a defining step towards their marriage’s eventual dissolution.

Gellhorn sought her own agency for the rest of her life, yet the price was a restless impermanency. On France’s Omaha Beach for D-Day in June 1944, and later in Italy “sleeping in fields and foraging for food,” she was the war correspondent once more. At war’s end she bought a small bombed house, co-authored a play with Virginia Cowles — another correspondent — and then wrote a book about the Dachau concentration camp. She continued moving, adopting an Italian orphan whom she took with her to Cuernavaca.

Yet the lure of reporting still called, despite the contradictions in chronicling the pain of others and the prizes that time and again went to the men. In 1954 she married Tom Andrews, a former Time editor. On the cusp of cold war conservatism consigning women to the home, the marriage ended with her discovery of his five-year affair with another woman.

Like West before her, Hahn bore a child out of wedlock in occupied Hong Kong. A woman full of surprises, she was a remarkably tenacious mother, and the little girl, the daughter of British prisoner of war Charles Boxer, survived. Boxer also survived, and was released when Japan surrendered. The couple married, Hahn continued to write, and they had another daughter. Of the three woman, hers seemed to be the happiest marriage; their difficulties eased when Boxer was offered an academic position at Kings College London, though eventually she lived separately from him.

Friends and rivals as writers go, the three women moved in and out of each other’s lives. West was a mentor to Hahn; Gellhorn and Hemingway turned up in Hahn’s Hong Kong apartment. Their knowing each other is the glue that holds together the stories, not to mention the reader’s attention. They wrote to each other, and some kept diaries or extensive notes in which the others were mentioned. That said, Starry and Restless is so full of incident it’s sometimes hard to keep up. Fortunately there’s an excellent index and pages and pages of endnotes. It is indeed a scholarly achievement, a historical treatment of the changes in women’s journalism and how women in turn have changed the profession.

Cooke has already made her own name as a writer with The Other Side of Paradise: Life in the New Cuba, a young woman’s travel book published when she was in her twenties. She first visited Cuba in 2003, fell in love with the place and in 2008 went to live there, studying at the University of Havana and interviewing Cubans from various parts of the island.

Then came her Come Fly the World: The Jet-Age Story of the Women of Pan Am, a book about nine women stewardesses (the word was still in use then) who crewed the Pan America flights to and from Vietnam during that American war. Neither it nor The Other Side of Paradise was concerned with the politics per se; Cooke’s interest, as she’s described it, lay in how the geopolitics affected each of her interviewees’ lives. The same can be said about this latest book.

But why a multiple biography? Previous biographies of Cooke’s subjects tend to be out of print; surprisingly, Hahn published the only memoir. All good biographies embed their subjects in their times, but it’s possible that the attraction of dealing with a group has it the other way around, with their subjects turned historical characters, acting out the chance and flux experienced by differing generations, dismantling the stereotypes that have grown around them. •

Starry and Restless: Three Women Who Changed Work, Writing and the World
By Julia Cooke | Farrer, Strauss & Giroux | $49.99 | 448 pages

The post Cracks in the firmament appeared first on Inside Story.

Treasury data shows how radically disproportionately the capital gains tax discount, negative gearing and trust arrangements have benefited the top 1 per cent of income earners compared to the median income earner since 2000: about 123 times more. Perhaps nothing better explains the force of the campaign to thwart the government’s objective to claw back this scandalous gift to the wealthiest.

Ever since Albanese won the prime ministership a drumbeat has sounded: “What do we want? Reform. When do we want it? Now!” Yet when Labor does reach for the higher-hanging reform fruit and its opponents ferociously bare their ideological teeth, at least some of those who had been advocates of change have responded fickly or tepidly to the budget measures.

While Labor’s tax plan monopolises attention, another frontier of change conscientiously advanced under Albanese’s leadership risks being overlooked. With ramifications that may prove highly significant, it shows there is more than one way to bring about a new order of things.

This is the Labor government’s deliberate and concerted strategy of appointing women to leadership positions in the public service and other key institutions and agencies. The championing of women under Albanese was something I first wrote about in the days after Labor’s resounding May 2025 election win — a result that underlined the trend of women’s votes skewing to the left-of-centre that had been evident since at least 2010, when the support of women effectively saved Julia Gillard’s prime ministership.

Suggesting that the “feminisation of Labor” was one reason for the Albanese government’s handsome return to office, I pointed to not just the record number of women in cabinet and caucus but also how the government was prioritising the interests of women in key policy areas: by moving towards universal childcare support, extending paid parental leave and supporting wage increases in care industries dominated by women workers.

I am conscious of the risks of characterising childcare as an issue of primary concern to women. But the reality is that mothers continue to shoulder the lion’s share of the responsibility for rearing the young and expanded childcare provision thus chiefly enhances their choice.

I also alluded to the operating style of the Albanese government, suggesting that its premium on collaboration and internal solidarity was consistent with a “feminalist” approach. A recent article by the Saturday Paper’s chief political correspondent Karen Barlow about how the prime minister manages the government’s record-sized caucus was striking in that context. The tight discipline of Labor’s party room can be attributed to several things. On the less flattering side, it is consistent with a longer-term marginalisation of caucus and centralisation of authority in the hands of the prime minister and senior ministers. On the positive side, it reflects a lesson learnt: a determination not to repeat the destructive and indulgent disunity of the Rudd–Gillard years.

In Barlow’s piece, an unnamed Labor MP — the absurd braggadocio of the quote all but gives away that it is a male speaking — ascribes the Albanese government’s internal discipline to the dictatorial control exercised by the Prime Minister’s Office. “PMO is like North Korea, right? They’re like Pyongyang.” No one can doubt that Albanese’s PMO, like the offices of all prime ministers at least since John Howard’s time, maintains strict oversight of the government. But Pyongyang, really?

More instructive was a reflection by an unidentified female Labor MP who contended that the government’s solidarity could also be explained by a caucus that comprises 56 per cent women: “There’s a lot of women and there is a much greater sense of working in a collaborative way… outcomes-focused, not ego-driven.”

Julia Gillard’s leadership illustrates the point. Unlike many of her male predecessors and successors, Gillard did not preen or chest-beat as prime minister. Her method was to put her head down and concentrate on managing her team and the nitty-gritty of the government’s legislative program. She let her deeds speak for her without much in the way of fanfare or flamboyance. A behaviour characteristic of women, Gillard’s disdain for the performative side of the job was ironically debilitating for her prime ministership.

The Albanese government’s feminine bearing is also undoubtedly a reflection of its prime minister. As with all holders of the office, Albanese, the son of a single mother, exhibits a belief system and leadership style powerfully stamped by his early life. His was an upbringing in which women — his adored and adoring mother and to lesser extent his grandmother — were the dominant adult influences. This has manifest in what the political psychologist Graham Little categorised as a “group” leadership style: one orientated towards collaboration and cooperation. It is also revealed in the prime minister daring to speak of kindness and compassion as positive leadership traits — at a time when the norm worldwide is uber-aggressive — and by his frequent displays of emotion. Only a little over a week ago, at the Victorian state Labor conference, he barely suppressed tears while defending his government’s budget measures.

Let’s not be doe-eyed about Albanese. He is also the product of the bare-knuckled school of NSW Labor politics. While there is ample testimony to his close and nurturing relationships with female Labor colleagues — Penny Wong and Katy Gallagher in the current government, Linda Burney and Jenny Macklin in the past — his never fully explained lack of generosity towards his neighbouring inner-Sydney Labor MP and one-time potential leadership rival, Tanya Plibersek, has been less becoming. And on occasions his empathy has gone conspicuously missing. His gratuitously callous declaration earlier this year that he had “nothing but contempt” for the “ISIS brides” is an example.

Even so, the advancement of women on Albanese’s watch is unmistakeable. Another dimension of that agenda, perhaps at least equally significant, is the appointment of women to posts that have previously been exclusively male domains. This trend began in the government’s first term with, among things, the appointment of Michelle Bullock as governor of the Reserve Bank and Danielle Wood as chair of the Productivity Commission, followed by Albanese’s handpicking of Sam Mostyn as governor-general.

Australia’s twenty-eighth governor-general, Mostyn is the second woman to occupy the office — the first having been Quentin Bryce, who filled the post between 2008 and 2014. When she was invited by Albanese to become governor-general, a surprised Mostyn asked him, “Why me?” to which he responded: “I want to modernise the office.” That modernising process, as the Australian’s Troy Bramston revealed in his record of an interview with Mostyn in January this year, is based on the guiding principles of “care, kindness and respect.” It suggests a close alignment of (feminine-style) values between prime minister and governor-general.

The announcement of Mostyn’s appointment provoked a sour response from the Australian’s Janet Albrechtsen. Under the headline “Cushy Job for the Wokest of Women,” Albrechtsen bemoaned the “utter predictability” of Albanese’s selection and sneered that if Mostyn’s “chromosomes were XY she wouldn’t have been considered for the role.” That seems a peculiar complaint given the XY chromosomal profile has been a foremost consideration in the choice of the vast majority of governors general since 1901.

Still more bizarre was Albrechtsen’s assertion that Mostyn’s appointment was symptomatic of a “new group of oppressors putting the squeeze on a new group of oppressed.” Presumably men made up that rising class of downtrodden.

The Albanese government’s strategy of placing women in high offices has proceeded apace in its second term, many of them pioneering gender appointments. Among the key examples are:

• Jenny Wilkinson as secretary of treasury
• Sarah Court as chair of the Australian Securities and Investments Commission
• Meghan Quinn as secretary of defence
• Krissy Barrett as commissioner of the Australian Federal Police
• Susan Coyle as chief of army.

Announcing Court’s appointment in February 2026, treasurer Jim Chalmers observed that the Albanese government had “ushered in a wave of female leadership across Australia’s top economic institutions”: the Reserve Bank, the Productivity Commission, Treasury and now ASIC.

The storming of the upper echelons of the public service by women — who now head eight of the sixteen Commonwealth departments — and their appointment to other institutions and agencies partly reflects a longer-term evolution. But the Albanese government’s role has been to accelerate that trend purposely and assiduously.

Does this campaign to promote women matter? We ought, of course, be careful about surrendering to essentialist assumptions about the kind of leadership women provide and the cultures they nurture around them. Each woman will steer in her own distinctive way — and not all will lead well. Nevertheless, research indicates that women, generally speaking, tend to be collaborative, team-orientated leaders who privilege “soft” values. Measuring the impact on the fabric of the nation of the rush of appointments of females to senior positions will be difficult, if not impossible. Its effects will take time to mature and mainly materialise osmosis-like.

Make no mistake, though. We are witnessing a quiet revolution. It suggests there is more than one way to skin the cat of societal change. •

The post Quiet revolution appeared first on Inside Story.

Pelicot consequently spent close to a decade plagued by unexplained memory lapses and gynaecological problems, and having “endless medical examinations.” She feared a brain tumour. No doctor took her, a woman in her sixties, especially seriously. Throughout, Dominique was “always there,” by her side. “He knew.”

Pelicot’s “health concerns” had begun around the time she and her husband retired to the rural village of Mazan in southern France in 2013. They rented a lovely house with a pool, and their three grown children and their offspring were frequent visitors. Then, in late September 2020, Dominique was arrested for filming under three women’s skirts — “upskirting” — at the local supermarket. When he confessed to his wife, she insisted that he apologise to the women and see a therapist. Wanting their life to “go back to normal,” she decided not to tell the children. Yet “what he had done” was “a warning sign — but of what?”

Later, after police seized Dominque’s phone and computer, his wife learned from the magistrate that her husband had drugged her the same night of his tearful arrest confession. She “realised in the magistrate’s office that the rapes had become more frequent in October. He must have known they would be his last.” On 2 November 2020, her husband entered the police station knowing “he would not leave it a free man.”

By the time he and fifty other accused men came to stand trial in September 2024, the couple had divorced, and Dominique had confessed to the attempted rape of a woman back in 1999 and been linked to the unsolved rape and murder of twenty-three-year-old Sophie Narme in 1991. Pelicot, meanwhile, had decided “the door to the courtroom had to be opened.” The words she had first heard more than a decade earlier as a slogan supporting women who had survived rape and domestic violence — “shame has to change sides” — inspired her decision.

“Everyone needs to see the faces of the fifty-one rapists,” she writes. “They should be the ones to hang their heads in shame, not me.” On reflection, it’s a decision she “wouldn’t have dared request” had she been “twenty years younger.”

The catastrophic impact of Dominique’s crimes on the Pelicot family has been told previously from the perspective of his daughter Caroline Darian in her memoir I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again, published in English early last year. For Darian, the horrors were amplified by the knowledge that among the photographs in her father’s files were two taken of her, partially clothed, asleep and possibly drugged.

Darian praised her mother as the “strongest, most admirable woman I know,” but for a time they were estranged. While she remains convinced her father raped her too, Pelicot — acknowledging the photographs as “abject, showing her father’s unbearable incestuous gaze” — sought to “reassure her that it was implausible that he had raped her.”

Each woman is frank about their starkly contrasting responses and personalities. Of her three children, it was Caroline, “the least predictable,” that Pelicot was most concerned about when it came to sharing the shocking news about their father’s abuses. Mother and daughter were each victims, but a gulf grew between them. While the elder woman “embraced silence,” the younger “demanded noise.” Pelicot’s assessment here is less a judgement about Caroline than a claim for her own process, the need she had to “be alone. To close the bedroom door.” By herself, she “breathed more easily, moved ahead at my own pace.” She shifted to a small cottage on an island, took long walks, and rediscovered the “importance of friendship.”

A Hymn to Life is a record of Pelicot finding “my words, the thread in my history, an old story, deeply anchored in me.” Shaped by her beloved mother’s death from cancer when she was a child (“the little nine-year-old girl is still here, restless within me”), Pelicot’s clear-eyed memoir also offers the wisdom of a survivor who long ago accepted that “both love and adversity” were “my inheritance.” Chapters alternate between the unfolding present and a past that began in 1952 when she was born in Villengen, a small German town where her soldier father Yves was stationed during the postwar French occupation.

The man Pelicot married when they were both barely adults, each escaping childhoods of deprivation and neglect, is indelibly part of her story, for if “I erased everything I would be dead.” She narrates their shared life in all its shades — from love story to early parenthood, and through the infidelities and financial stresses of middle age — and via their sex lives, dictated largely by his desires. Focused on building her family, she witnessed feminism only from the sidelines.

Pelicot expresses no regrets about this, but at the same time A Hymn to Life is a profound reclamation of self.  Hers is a life story which in any other circumstances would not have been told. She did not seek attention, and nor did she seek to be defined by serial violations or reduced to an inert body on video submitted as evidence.

Written with the assistance of award-winning writer Judith Perrignon and expertly translated from the French by Natasha Lehrer and Ruth Diver, A Hymn To Life is striking for its intimacy of voice. In the face of unfathomable betrayal and the flattening effects of public labels such as “victim” and “icon,” Gisèle Pelicot — who has since reverted to her father’s surname, Guillou — stands her ground, neither disavowing her past nor turning away from her newfound mission, in her seventies, as “the symbol of a new feminist wave that I know nothing about.” If she had never imagined she would write speeches about her “deep urge and determination to change our patriarchal, sexist society,” nor has she given up on men, or on love.

But what of the men, the ones her ex-husband invited to rape her? Their seeming ordinariness has been much commented on, including now by Pelicot: “Many had wives and children. Men of all ages and occupations, the kinds of men you come across all the time… most of them insisting they had done nothing wrong.” Fifty were charged and ultimately convicted; a further thirty could not be identified.

As the case built for a trial, Pelicot “couldn’t stop thinking about those filthy bastards walking free. What further crimes were they committing, who were they going to rape?” During breaks in court proceedings, she heard the men standing trial “talking, not even bothering to lower their voices, naturally buoyed by male camaraderie.” However diverse in appearance and manner — “there were old men, bald men, men with paunches, men who were young and athletic” — what they shared, observed Pelicot, was a “sense of entitlement.”

Also observing the men in court was French feminist philosopher Manon Garcia, whose book Living with Men: Reflections on the Pelicot Trial was published last year in an English translation by Maya B. Kronic. A worthy companion to Pelicot’s memoir, Garcia’s intervention is also wider and ongoing. Since the Pelicot trial ended in December 2025 with all men convicted — among them a man in his forties who appealed his sentence only to have it extended when he returned to court — more networks have been revealed of “ordinary men” facilitating sexual violence in various online platforms, most recently by CNN following a months-long investigation.

Among the many questions the Pelicot trial prompted for Garcia — and in this she was hardly alone — was “Can we live with men? And if so, at what cost?” Well aware of the provocative nature of this question, Garcia brings together her visceral experience of attending the trial, her own experience of being a woman in the world, and her academic expertise. In fewer than 150 pages, she captures the particulars of the trial itself (including the experience of watching the videos of Pelicot’s rapes, which left her “trembling and weeping”), perceptively examines a range of related themes, and advances a nuanced feminist critique of the limits of the law.

Garcia is a recognised authority on “consent,” and her book on the topic, published in 2023 in English as The Joy of Consent: A Philosophy of Good Sex was cited at the trial. For Garcia,  what the Pelicot trial revealed was that “it was not the courts or the law” that “failed to take consent into account” — the videos were damning evidence, and all men were found guilty — but “rather that the men examined in the trial had not understood what consent is.”

If the Pelicot trial is to be understood as a turning point, as it clearly is, then what it ultimately marks for Garcia is “the end of the idea that we can place our hopes exclusively in the legal system.” Nor is she convinced that the oft-used feminist term “rape culture” is sufficient to capture “the scale of the problem.” Like Pelicot, she refers instead to “patriarchy” to make sense of how a “single man in a small town like Mazan can manage to find at least seventy others” willing and eager to rape his wife — and to not fathom it as such.

Under the umbrella of “patriarchy,” Garcia turns readers’ attention to other aspects of the trial and wider society. To give one example, she writes that “[i]n this trial as elsewhere, incest is all around us, its ubiquity equalled by the silence that surrounds it.” (She dedicates her book to both Gisèle Pelicot and Caroline Darian.) Elsewhere, she homes in on the explanations some of the men provided for why they went to the Pelicots’ house, such as “they no longer had a sex life with their wives, or not enough of one,” suggesting that “for many men, sleeping with their partner and the mother of their children and sleeping with a woman twice their age who is so sedated that she looks dead, basically amounts to the same thing.”

Garcia’s book is infused with anger, but like Pelicot’s it is not without hope. She brings fresh force to longstanding feminist arguments that patriarchy hurts men too, and that social change — and not just legislative reform — is needed. Eschewing polemic at every turn, she writes in an elegant no-nonsense style shared by other French women writers on similar themes, among them Neige Sinno, author of the incest memoir Sad Tiger (which Garcia approvingly cites).

While a conversation with a male journalist who claimed that attending the trial was a job like any other leaves her gobsmacked at his lack of introspection, Garcia is buoyed by the social movement that swelled throughout the trial. She is inspired too by “Gisèle’s calm, her hope in the face of everything,” and ends her book with an invitation. Rather than women asking themselves whether “we should really love men the way we do,” Garcia instead encourages men to love women “so that we can go on loving them.” •

A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides
By Gisèle Pelicot, with Judith Perrignon | Translated by Natasha Lehrer and Ruth Diver | Bodley Head | $36.99 | 256 pages

Living with Men: Reflections on the Pelicot Trial
By Manon Garcia | Translated by Maya B. Kronic | Polity | $41.95 | 208 pages

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Kelly is deeply concerned that Labor has lost sight of its key aims and values in a timid, risk-averse pursuit of the broadest possible range of voters. Consequently, he argues, the Albanese government’s policies often favour powerful vested interests while not doing enough for the vulnerable.

Nonetheless, Kelly’s is a nuanced, sympathetic account from a former Labor staffer. He understands the many factors spooking Labor, ranging from the painful experience of the Rudd–Gillard years and the 2019 election loss to the defeat of the Voice referendum. He has a more than grudging respect for Anthony Albanese, but wonders whether Albo has abandoned his earlier socialist beliefs or is just afraid to express them when a neoliberal ascendancy has silenced more leftist views. He worries that Labor is limiting its policy options to reflect what it thinks people want rather than trying to change their minds, as more visionary Labor leaders have sought to do. He argues that, perversely, Labor’s timidity could end up reinforcing voter disillusionment and even lead to the election of an authoritarian leader.

Yet Kelly sees some signs for hope, citing the government’s rejection of its predecessor’s regressive tax cuts (albeit while partly appeasing higher-income earners), its advocacy for the Voice, and its social media ban for children. In a later piece, published in the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald, he seems further encouraged by Albanese’s support for reserving gas supplies for the domestic market.

Nonetheless, he argues that Labor has all too often “cast itself as a version of what the conservatives once were: the defender of the way things are. This may well appeal to large numbers of Australians, as it did in this last election.” Yet “Labor’s task, historically, has been to change things on behalf of those who desperately need them to change.”

Even Albanese’s leitmotif slogan, “no one held back, no one left behind,” comes in for criticism. “Not holding anyone back and not leaving anyone behind are worthy sentiments,” says Kelly. “But leaving society largely as it is means the second of those sentiments is treated as less important than the first.” Similarly: “Every time an ‘aspirational’ policy is supported with taxpayer money… those dollars cannot go elsewhere.” In short, trying to become the “natural party of government” has come at too high a cost.

Kelly is not alone in believing the government needs to do more to seize its opportunities for change. It is a view held by many Labor supporters as well as commentators. Nonetheless, while his analysis is a sophisticated one that deserves to be widely read, it would have benefited by being even more nuanced at times.

Albanese responded to Kelly’s previous critique of the government for being risk-averse and low-key, arguing that it was “wrong” and “romanticises a mythical land that he lived in once,” and there is some truth in what he said.

While Kelly is correct to note that more radical left-wing views have been constrained by decades of neoliberalism, Albanese’s government still shares many characteristics with previous Labor ones. For example, Albanese has indeed argued that his government wished to achieve “consensus” with business (not least because he believes Bill Shorten’s targeting of the “top end” of town helped cost Labor the 2019 election), but the party has a long history of seeking good relations with at least some sections of business, particularly the manufacturing industry that traditionally employed key Labor voters. Labor governments are always constrained by the need to manage a capitalist economy in which the private sector plays a major role.

Furthermore, the Albanese government’s consensus is very different from the Hawke and Keating governments’ rapprochement with business, which was based on providing a so-called “social wage” of government benefits that allowed business to pay less in wage rises. Indeed, the Hawke–Keating period eventually saw real wage cuts whereas, as Kelly acknowledges, the current government prides itself on its real increases. Indeed, business organisations have often been highly critical of Labor’s industrial relations agenda, including its reforms to the gig economy, enterprise bargaining, pattern bargaining and paid domestic violence leave.

Similarly, Kelly criticises Albanese for now describing himself as a “progressive” rather than (as he did in his first speech to parliament) a “democratic socialist.” But Albanese also described Labor policy as “progressive” three times in that long-ago speech. Kelly critiques the “dreadful blandness” of Albanese’s statement that he is “a social democrat who believes in markets, but believes that the state… can make a difference in peoples’ lives.” Yet, while Albanese made a robust case for greater state action in his first speech, he also acknowledged that “a substantial… social security system” helped maintain “the legitimacy of market economies”.

In other words, while Albanese was undoubtedly more left-wing in his youth, even then he seems to have seen a role for markets. While Kelly cites the dangers of Labor’s incrementalism, it has always been the social democratic strategy to slowly but steadily reform the existing society and economy in order to make capitalism more humane and equitable.

Arguably, as its efforts to end years of wage stagnation demonstrates, the Albanese government still stands for that basic belief in incrementally reducing inequality. Furthermore, while Kelly acknowledges Labor has raised wages, including those of many workers in female-dominated care industries, he says little otherwise about Labor’s gender equality policies. Looked at through a gender-equality lens, though, the government has introduced more reforms than it is often given credit for.

On gaining office, Labor pledged to make Australia once again a world leader in gender equality. Fifty-six percent of Labor parliamentarians, and the majority of cabinet, are now women. The government has appointed feminists to key positions, introduced gendered reforms to skills training, implemented paid parental leave, improved childcare access, introduced paid family and domestic violence leave, implemented additional Respect at Work recommendations, improved gender-responsive budgeting, established a women’s equality taskforce, publicised gender pay gaps in larger businesses, increased gender equity in overseas development goals, tackled women’s health and medical misogyny, and cemented gender equality in the Fair Work Act.

The government has also addressed some neoliberal-influenced features of previous Labor governments’ industrial relations policy — including enterprise bargaining provisions and the outlawing of pattern bargaining — that had contributed to reduced pay in female-dominated industries.

Women’s minister Katy Gallagher has reported that “Australia’s gender pay gap is at the lowest ever level since records began, at 11.5 per cent.” She has also declared that:

The World Economic Forum’s 2025 Global Gender Gap Report has seen Australia rise eleven places in the global rankings to thirteenth out of 148 countries for gender equality, the highest-ever ranking since the Index began in 2006… Australia’s ranking had fallen to an all-time low of fiftieth place under the former Liberal National government.

If the Voice referendum had passed, Labor would have introduced major reforms not just in terms of class (workers’ pay and conditions) and gender equality but also in the area of race relations.

Of course, there are also ongoing deficiencies or areas where the government could do much better, including in relation to gender equality. Australia still lags behind many other countries in providing childcare and paid parental leave, for example. Spending on domestic violence is still insufficient. Policy areas ranging from economic policy and productivity to technology and climate change don’t always measure up though a gender-equality lens.

As Kelly notes, welfare payments are still woefully inadequate, LGBTIQ people can still be discriminated against by religious organisations; the Morrison government’s university fee structures remain in place; environmental regulation, while updated, is still inadequate. Moreover, major problems exist in childcare, aged care, and disability and unemployment services. Private providers are still under-regulated and consultants over-used. Workers are still being exploited. Progress in Indigenous issues has slowed significantly since the Voice defeat. Asylum seekers are still treated appallingly. The list of areas where the government could bring in further reforms is long, with some reflecting the inherited legacies of decades of neoliberalism.

Kelly notes that Labor’s emphasis on reducing budget deficits while not increasing tax revenue poses major constraints. Labor not only fears the Coalition’s neoliberal-influenced critiques but the risk the Reserve Bank will use increased government spending as a justification for raising interest rates. Despite its criticisms, Labor has not yet fully rejected neoliberalism. It is still searching for a coherent alternative economic strategy, with the treasurer embracing wellbeing agendas, Mariana Mazzucato’s work and now the Abundance agenda.

Kelly has legitimate concerns regarding the latter, which claims to show a new pathway for the left but often ends up reinforcing what looks suspiciously like a neoliberal-influenced focus on deregulation. Meanwhile, the economy is not nearly as healthy as it seemed during the election, inflation is undermining workers’ living standards despite wage rises, and AI is threatening jobs. Highly uncertain times are ahead internationally.

Labor’s caution reflects the knowledge that its massive election victory was aided by Dutton’s unpopularity and the Trump factor, among other dynamics. Kelly is therefore correct to worry that this government may not do enough to satisfy Labor’s true believers. His fear of an authoritarian alternative if voters also become disillusioned more broadly may have some foundation too.

Overall, Kelly makes some valid criticisms of this government. But he sometimes underestimates the extent to which it has stood for the fairer and more equitable society championed in Albanese’s 2025 victory speech. •

The Good Fight: What Does Labor Stand For?
By Sean Kelly | Quarterly Essay | $29.99 | 128 pages

The post What does the Albanese government believe in? appeared first on Inside Story.

The repetition by Modjeska of “firstness” strikes a rare, slightly false note in a book that otherwise sets out to challenge many assumptions of art history, not least in the “great man” version. Rather than attempting to sort and rank, Modjeska situates this young German artist, and all the other artist-women she discusses, within her own time and place, paying especially close attention to her female friendships, her wider artistic circles, and her marriage and its strains.

Modjeska’s focus is as much on social as on inner worlds — or at least she keeps both always in view. Her chapters on Modersohn-Becker are revelatory and deeply moving, illuminating in intimate and affecting ways the artist’s struggle and courage. By doing so, Modjeska contributes to the broader effort to accord Modersohn-Becker, known for her arresting self-portraits, belated recognition as a major artist of the twentieth century.

Indeed, it was an unexpected instance of delayed public acknowledge that impelled Modjeska to write this book. In February 2018, Google celebrated Modersohn-Becker’s birth by showing on its search page a doodle from a self-portrait she had created in 1906. Although Modjeska had “long known I’d write of her one day,” it was on that day that “I went home, cleared my desk and began this book.”

Google’s virtual, ephemeral and bowdlerised version of Modersohn-Becker was part of a conjunction of forces — a “synchronicity” is how Modjeska puts it — that coalesced into a determination to make for herself the space required to commence a new creative project. “Let it be. There is no other way,” she might have repeated as she cleared away whatever obstacles, literal and metaphorical, standing in her way. It’s a fabulously evocative image of a writer at a foundational moment in a project, taking a seemingly simple but deeply symbolic step that signals the commitment and courage to create. Go home. Clear the desk. Begin the book. Let it be. There is no other way.

And it is with perennial questions about how women create within patriarchal structures — with which Modjeska has long been concerned, that A Woman’s Eye, Her Art returns. Throughout her writing life she has explored how and why women live a creative life, the female friendships and wider networks that sustain them, the personal and political contexts in which they work, and the gendered social structures that shape — and limit — their public recognition.

This sustained enquiry commenced with her doctoral thesis, a feminist literary history published in 1981 as Exiles at Home: Australian Women Writers 1925–45, which traced Australian writer-women of the 1930s. Her next foray was the genre-bending The Orchard, part essay, part fiction, published in 1994. Like A Woman’s Eye, Her Art, it pursued in different ways and contexts how the unrelenting proliferation and dominance of stories of (and by) men eclipse — even deny — histories of women’s creativity. In Stravinsky’s Lunch, which followed in 1999, Modjeska brought the lives and histories of Australian artists Stella Bowen and Grace Cossington-Smith into view and into dialogue with each other. A clever dual biography, it is in many ways the closest, in form and focus, to A Woman’s Eye, Her Art.

This time, the canvas is bigger: more artists, more decades, more social, political and artistic movements. Added to Modersohn-Becker are the lives and work of Dora Maar, Lee Miller and the lesser-known Claude Cahun (Lucy Schwob), as well as their circles. Particularly in the second part of the book, which focuses on surrealism, the struggle to keep the stories of men at bay proves difficult; for all her effort to critique a masculinist European art history, the likes of Picasso keep muscling in.

And that might be the point: the binary gendered framing to which Modjeska is committed is not always quite up to the analytical task. This is, to my mind, most apparent in the treatment and discussion of the non-binary, non-conforming Claude Cahun. While Modjeska’s book does a great service in introducing readers to Schwob/Cahun — and indeed to the work of the Jersey historical society that led the preservation of the artist’s archive — Cahun deserves more than the book’s overarching framing of the struggle of artist-women to transcend the “male gaze” can provide.

Modjeska appears aware of this. Returning to Google’s commemoration, she repeats the question that her friend and interlocutor Julie Rrap asked that day: “How would we have reacted if it’d been Claude Cahun on Google doodle?” Their combined, amused reply: “If it had, we said, laughing as we waved goodbye, we’d have been celebrating. For then the world might have really changed.”

Across her books, Modjeska has honed a distinctive way of writing about artist-women, here using “prosopography” as a method. This is well suited to her exploration of the entanglements between the personal and the political, the inner and the social. The result is a peopled, biographically intense, account. We learn about these artists through snippets detailing their friendships and fallings out, their wifedom (adopting Anna Funder’s term), their loyalties, infidelities and separations, as well as through the author’s succinct interpretations of their artistic works.

Indeed, the book is richly illustrated, both in the sheer number of images and in Modjeska’s writerly skills, which show her readers how to look and how to see. All this is presented against the backdrop of a world falling apart as Europe is wracked by two world wars. As a result, the book has the quality both of erudite art history, social commentary, and delicious gossip.

Suitably, then, it is presented like a written equivalent of a visual montage — or an artist’s book — with diamond icons used to signal a shift in focus. Less a sustained historical narrative or a fully resolved theoretical argument, the text reflects Modjeska’s questing and reflexive response to its central question of what it meant to live as a woman and an artist by accumulating details and observations. It is full of snippets, digressions and anecdotes into which are added thoughts and reflections derived from conversations with friends and interlocutors, mainly curators and artists, and well-chosen quotes from scholars. This correspondence between subject and approach invites readers to grapple with the contradictions, challenges and vicissitudes of women’s creative life.

The story Modjeska tells about artist-women in twentieth-century Europe shines a light on courageous individual pursuit as much as the female friendships that nourish it. Modjeska is the author, but throughout she makes clear how much it has been a collective enterprise accompanied by many friends along the way. I’ve already mentioned Julie Rrap as a significant voice in the book. Helen Mueller’s contribution is also significant: she and Modjeska worked side by side translating Modersohn-Becker’s writings not only from German to English but also from English to German to see how earlier translations had skewed their meanings. In this, the book makes a significant contribution to Modersohn-Becker scholarship.

For some of the other artist-women included, their stories are now quite familiar and the project to rehabilitate their reputations as artists “in their own right” already somewhat advanced. This is true, for instance, of Lee Miller and Dora Maar, who have recently been the subject of memoirs, films and exhibitions. Indeed, when reading the sections on Miller’s war photography it was difficult not to conjure an image of her as played by Kate Winslet in Lee (2023). Exhibitions devoted to Dora Maar have sought to release her from the prison of her reputation only as muse to Picasso.

Closer to home, the period of the book’s development and publication has coincided with major revisionist projects dealing with the place of Australian women in histories of modern art, namely the National Gallery of Australia’s Know Her Name exhibition and more recently Dangerously Modern: Australian Women Artists in Europe 1890–1940, currently at the Art Gallery of NSW. Such exhibitions have brought artist-women back into view, along with the question of how they have for so long been overlooked.

A Woman’s Art, Her Eye is a timely complement to this broader field of work. In ways different from the representational and analytical work films and exhibitions can do, Modjeska’s luscious text affords a more expansive view of the intricacies of the lives and struggles of a cohort of artist-women working in Europe across the twentieth century. Driven as it is by her curiosity about women’s creative lives, Modjeska draws us into their work and lives with unstinting generosity. •

A Woman’s Eye, Her Art: Reframing the Narrative through Art and Life
By Drusilla Modjeska | Penguin | $55 | 512 pages

The post A studio of one’s own appeared first on Inside Story.

Her second and latest book, Unfinished Revolution: The Feminist Fightback, begins with shared anger, the anger that brought more than 12,000 women to protest outside Parliament House in March 2021. “Anger, frustration, indignation — women across the nation were awash with it… a hot, caustic, female furore” galvanised by “violence and sexual assault.”

When I read Wonder Woman I doubted whether her anger was justified. Reading Unfinished Revolution I have no doubt the anger that fuels it is totally appropriate to the situation in which we women find ourselves today, in what Hausseger calls our “New Now.” I share the despair she feels when she watches TV news bulletins cataloguing the loss of hard-won women’s rights internationally and, locally, “gut-wrenching stories of violence against women.” In fact I can’t bear to watch the news. And according to Haussegger that makes me part of the problem.

The problem is entrenched misogyny, global and local. The solution she urges is revolution — political and social revolution — and, as an essential condition for these, personal revolution. In telling “the story of women’s revolution and feminist fightback in Australia” Haussegger is trying to open her readers’ hearts and minds to the rush of feeling the feminists of the 1970s described as liberation: the understanding that comes with seeing “the systematic patterns of women’s oppression.” In the words of Julia Ryan: “We had no choice. Once our awareness was heightened and our consciousness raised, we had to change.”

I am part of the problem in another way too: as a feminist I have always been a reformer. I have worked inside and out of universities to change laws and regulations to give women equality with men. Haussegger insists on good authority that reform is not the solution; equality is not enough. She cites Germaine Greer: “The idea of women’s equality threatened nobody… the question of liberation was far more disturbing.” And Elizabeth Reid, telling the United Nations in 1975: “We can no longer delude ourselves with the hope that formal equality, once achieved, will eradicate sexual oppression — it could well merely legitimate it.”

Haussegger tells her story backwards. Part 1 considers “Our New Now”; part 2 steps back a few years to the March4Justice; part 3 leaps back fifty years to the birth of Women’s Liberation in Australia; and part 4 chronicles the achievements of Elizabeth Reid in Australia and internationally. I found this backward rush through time disorienting, but less historically driven readers may not be bothered. Either way, there are fascinating stories here, celebrating revolutions and revolutionaries small and large.

Haussegger has done her research thoroughly, supplementing documentary archives, memoirs and biographies with her own interviews. Some of her subjects will be well-known to most of her readers, others less so. Her account of the 2021 March4Justice foregrounds Janine Hendry, whose tweet kickstarted the movement:

Ok here’s my thought — is it possible to form a ring of people around the perimeter of Parl Hse? Then all of us extremely disgruntled women could travel to Canberra on March 8 and form a ring linking arms with our banks turned towards the parliament and stand in silent protest.

The rest is history — though the protest that erupted was far from silent.

For me the most moving section of the Unfinished Revolution is the final one, telling the story of Elizabeth Reid. The story has been told before, but this account is immediate and empathetic, drawing on personal encounters and interviews with Reid.

Haussegger follows Reid’s trajectory from her appointment as Gough Whitlam’s “Supergirl” — the press mockery was immediate and constant — through her role in scheduling the 1975 UN International Women’s Year, the massive funding of women’s projects in Australia to celebrate that year, her speech at the Mexico World Conference on Women educating UN delegates on sexism and patriarchy, the brutal press reactions back in Australia to the Women and Politics Conference, and her subsequent removal from her position as adviser to the PM.

Reid responded by retiring, and leaving the country. Trying to change the system from within was, she said, “extraordinarily destructive and extraordinarily harmful. I think the price is too high for many…”

But the Unfinished Revolution is not all anger and despair. There is joy in this book, and hope. The joy is in moments of sisterhood: a bunch of “older feminists” dancing to Helen Reddy’s “I Am Woman” at the March4Justice demonstration; Women’s Liberation Movement members discussing their abortions “in gruesome detail” when they suspected ASIO was listening in; the candidates for the job of PM’s adviser putting out a joint press release to confirm their commitment to working together whoever got the job.

The hope is in the successes Haussegger catalogues: legal and administrative reforms achieved during the Whitlam and Hawke–Keating eras; reforms to workplace practices and a huge influx of women MPs into Parliament in the wake of the March4Justice. She finds that Australian women are well-placed to fight the global anti-women backlash.

But still, she argues, reform is not enough. In her concluding chapter she declares that “until the world has eradicated all forms of sexism and misogyny… until then we will need to fight for liberation.” She cites Elizabeth Reid: “We must adopt a true revolutionary consciousness… moving past policy reform and gender equality… New challenges demand… a revolution in our heads and hearts… It’s time.”

This should be stirring stuff, and I hope this book finds readers ready to be stirred. But I confess I put it down with my heart unmoved. My head needs to know how this revolution will actually work within Australian culture and institutions. •

The post Talking about a revolution appeared first on Inside Story.

Now in her thirties, Griffiths has established herself as a welcome feminist voice who brings perceptive sensitivity to her investigations into reproductive rights, violence against women and children, and abusive relationships and their aftermaths. With her professional and personal background, she is, in vital respects, the ideal author of a book-length contemplation of the thorny topic of men in universities who sleep with their younger, female students. Griffiths purposefully focuses on this most commonplace of student–teacher relationships, fruitfully analysing them as a “gendered phenomenon” that is both “part of the sexual economy of academic institutions” and “symptomatic of a larger cultural mess.”

While she returns to it intermittently, Griffiths doesn’t dwell for long on her own experience. Casting her net on social media for personal stories, she received “hundreds of responses” and settled on “four tangled accounts of power, lust and learning” to which she felt “an immediate, unshakeable pull.” Partly to preserve their anonymity, she assigns these women pseudonyms — Blaine, Elsie, Cara and Rose — and fictionalises elements of their accounts.

Creative non-fiction also allows Griffiths to imbue each of these women and their stories with the kind of interiority, character and specificity more often found in novels than in conventional reportage. This approach helps to centre the women’s own accounts of their lives, and in parts is reminiscent of American writer Lisa Taddeo’s bestselling Three Women (2019). Elsewhere, the narration can clash with the entwined saga of Griffiths writing the book and wrestling with the subject matter.

Of the four women, Rose leaps most vividly off the page — perhaps because, as Griffiths writes, they recognise elements of themselves in each other. Both “wriggled” their way into higher education “out of a small, plodding town on the outskirts of Melbourne.” And each of them sought in their own way to orchestrate the “undoing” of an ex-boyfriend.

In Rose’s case, the ex is Samuel, her “teacher-turned-lover,” a “hardly-as-bad sort of man,” with whom she had a four-year relationship marked by the usual milestones. Rose was the first student Samuel pursued, but certainly not the last. While they were still together, albeit in diminished form, an anonymous complaint was made about his “inappropriate behaviour with female students,” and later Rose filed her own report of a “historical act of sexual misconduct.” The portrait of Rose — seething with anger, but also somehow reborn — is Griffiths at her best.

Blaine, Elsie and Cara take longer to come into proper view, though each of their stories offers new angles and insights. Blaine is now an academic herself, and one of her colleagues is the teacher with whom she had a clandestine affair when she was a PhD student. Back then, Greg “minced her thesis to bits.” Years later, she’s “immediately repulsed” when she receives an “out-of-the-blue” message from him to thank her for introducing him to her own student, Jenna.

While Elsie was in a relationship with her forty-something tutor Harrison during her twenties, “the two had discussed the concept of grooming at length” and “while wrapped in each other’s bodies, decided that this wasn’t that.” Two years later, she’s not so sure. Cara, meanwhile, “the kind of woman men slump at the feet of,” never had sex with her teacher Ivan. But she is still compelled to share her story, not just about “cartoonishly dorky” Ivan, with whom she spent chaste nights in his candle-lit apartment, but also about other men she wasn’t supposed to be drawn to, who took advantage of her attraction to them.

These are important and fascinating stories, deepened by the passing of time. But Griffiths, despite what are clearly very good intentions, sometimes gets in their way. Aside from the four women, she talks to a wider range of people — others with experiences to share, academics, her boyfriend, casual acquaintances — but these conversations can be as distracting as they are enlightening. She makes an especially powerful detour into what good teaching entails, but other lines of inquiry are left dangling or could have more effectively been brought together.

At one point, Griffiths writes that “I don’t want this book to be muddied with question marks.” But Sweet Nothings is saturated in questions. On the one hand, this is understandable — consensual relationships between adults involving power differentials and a duty of care are an ethical minefield — but the ruminations can tip over into self-indulgence. The key arguments, though, are delivered directly: “For a student to feel entitled to justice, they must first feel entitled to care.”

Given the subject matter, and the book’s concern with questions of “sex and power,” Sweet Nothings has inevitably been compared to Helen Garner’s controversial The First Stone (1995), a book Griffiths confesses to finding “at least a little compelling.” But where Garner represented universities from her outsider perspective as sites of feminism-gone-wrong and overreach — places where decent men can easily and swiftly be disproportionately punished for minor transgressions — one of the central achievements of Sweet Nothings is to show a different dynamic.

Thirty years on from The First Stone, whether the issue is sexual harassment or sexual misconduct or worse, the current systems appear to be overwhelmingly inadequate, over-burdened and/or non-existent. Perusing universities’ codes of conduct, Griffiths is rightly “struck by the obscurity of their language, how up-in-the-air they seem.” Both Rose and Elsie lodge complaints with their universities’ Safer Communities offices — a process implemented across the sector in recent years to support student safety — only to end up in months of limbo. For Rose, the support of a senior feminist academic withers to nothing.

In this respect, Sweet Nothings is a worthwhile companion to feminist theorist Sara Ahmed’s blistering Complaint! (2021). Rose comes to learn that “for every man who keeps his job, a woman is burdened with another, more back-breaking job: the job of becoming the complainant.” And, unlike Garner in The First Stone, Griffiths puts the women right up front.

Griffiths asks us to take seriously the question of whether relationships between university teachers and their students should be banned, as some universities have already done. Where some feminist thinkers (or outliers) like Jane Gallop back in the 1990s, and more recently philosopher Agnes Collard, have celebrated the eros of pedagogy, Griffiths follows Amia Srinivasan, the author of The Right to Sex (2021), in asking whether good teaching and real love can co-exist. While mindful that some of these relationships can mature and flourish like any other, Griffiths and her informants show that it is the younger women who most often bear the brunt of the fallout.

If at times Griffiths overburdens the reader with details of her labours — “I will wake in the middle of the night, vexed, feeling like a hyphen between two words” — ultimately it was worth the effort. Sweet Nothings is a thought-provoking and welcome intervention. •

Sweet Nothings: Power, Lust and Learning
By Madison Griffiths | Ultimo Press | $36.99 | 320 pages

The post A curiosity worth sweating over appeared first on Inside Story.

“Comfort women” is a euphemism for women who were prostituted by the Japanese army during the war. Across Asia, hundreds of thousands of them were taken from their homes or workplaces and press-ganged into service in “comfort stations” attached to Japanese garrisons or military supply stations. Dutch-Australian Jan Ruff-O’Herne was among the victims and in later life was prominent among activists pressing the Japanese government to accept legal responsibility for the system.

The plaits on this statue differentiate it from its Korean counterpart, which has bobbed hair. There are two Korean comfort women statues in Australia, one in the Sydney suburb of Ashfield, the other in the grounds of the Korean Society of Victoria building in Oakleigh. Worldwide, more than seventy such statues provide evidence of an unresolved trauma in Korean history and — despite some significant bilateral agreements — an enduring problem in Korean–Japanese relations. The first of them was erected in Seoul, opposite the Japanese embassy.

A girl with plaits or a bob offers a very different image from a soldier with a gun. She doesn’t say “Look what we can do to you” but rather “Look what you did to us.” For Australians, it is as if a statue depicting the skeletal figure of a survivor of a Japanese POW camp were to be erected somewhere — perhaps in front of the Japanese Embassy in Canberra. But Korean- and Chinese-Australians are of course Australians themselves. The comfort woman statues are a reminder that new generations of migrants bring to this country different legacies of war.

This is especially true of migrants from the People’s Republic of China. Unknown but certainly large numbers of Chinese women were pressed into sexual slavery by the Japanese military. The survivors carried a significant legacy of trauma into the postwar years, their health and often their lives altogether ruined. Yet after the creation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, memories of the war years came close to being obliterated by the sound and fury of mass campaigns targeting domestic “enemies of the revolution.” “Remembering the bitter past” was a collective activity focused on Chinese landlords or capitalists. It was only in the 1980s that this sort of memory work began to be reoriented towards Japan.

Once given their heads, historians in China had plenty of material to work with. The Anti-Japanese War was much longer than the Pacific War and entailed Japan’s occupation of a vast swathe of Chinese territory. The Nanjing massacre of 1937 was the largest single atrocity committed by Japanese forces anywhere. Oral histories, the creation of the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Museum, the publication in translation of The Rape of Nanjing by Chinese-American Iris Chang, movies, television series, and now an annual day of mourning — all these have together generated a collective memory of wartime atrocities that feeds into anti-Japanese nationalism in China.

Like the war itself, the comfort women system was deemed a proper subject for historical research in China only decades after the communist takeover in 1949. Ironically, it was exposure to Japanese research on the topic, along with direct action by South Korean victims, that inspired China’s leading historian of the comfort women system, Su Zhiliang. China now has two museums dedicated to the comfort women, one in Nanjing and one at Su Zhiliang’s home institution, Shanghai Normal University.

In South Korea, democratisation meant space for freewheeling social movements, including feminist movements, capable of pursuing human rights issues independently of positions taken by the government. China has no such space. Entry to the museums is restricted, and in recent years the Chinese government has withdrawn support from an international movement to have the Voices of Comfort Women placed on the UNESCO “Memory of the World Register.”

Outside China, this is a free-floating issue that can easily find fertile soil in diasporic communities. But it has been taken up by other interest groups, too. In Berlin, the installation of a Korean comfort woman statue was supported by a coalition of civic groups of mixed ethnic and national origins with shared interests in crimes of sexual violence, particularly but not only in the context of war. As Japanese demands for the statue’s removal show, however, commemorations invariably have a geopolitical context. The transnational, universalist meanings attached to the peace statues do not exclude their particular, nationalist meanings.

Why such a statue in Melbourne? And why now? The formation of the Chinese-Australians for Peace Association, apparently for the purpose of sponsoring the “peace statue” (heping tongxiang), implies the existence or threat of war, possibly the remembered war that ended in 1945 but also, again possibly, the war that may yet happen if China decides to take Taiwan. The threat is not imminent, but since Russia’s assault on Ukraine it has become a constant in Australian discussions about security in the Pacific.

The founder of the Peace Association is Jimmy Li (Li Jianmin). Li is a good citizen: president of the Chinese Community Council of Australia (Victorian chapter) and a member of the Monash Multicultural Advisory Committee. He supported recognition of an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. He promotes Chinese ethnic engagement in local society and politics. His organisation is not like the Australian Council for the Peaceful Reunification, which has been listed by the Australian government as a body exercising foreign influence. It looks more like a community expression of hope that history will not repeat itself and that a war in Europe will not again have a parallel in Asia.

Yet, corresponding as it does with this week’s huge military parade in Beijing marking the eightieth anniversary of the end of the war, the unveiling of the Oakleigh statue can also read as aligning Chinese-Australian interests with China’s. Koreans in Victoria understand the optics. Their representative society, the Korean Society of Victoria, has given permission for the use of their premises for the ceremony on Saturday so that the Chinese and the Korean statues can sit side by side for the day. But they have refused permission for the Chinese statue to be installed there permanently. In this, says KSV president Chang Suk Lee, they are “influenced in part by the prevailing political landscape.”

To the extent that he means the geopolitical landscape, this statement reflects awareness of the difficult relations between South Korea and China in recent years and also of the realities of a regional order in which South Korea is aligned not only with Australia but also with Japan. In anti-Japanese sentiment, South Korea has long outranked China, but in his Liberation Day speech this year South Korean president Lee Jae Myung made reference to Japan as “our neighbour” and our “partner in our economic development.”

Is it possible to disentangle awareness of this difficult history from nationalist sentiments? Searching for a space separate from the spheres controlled by the state in China, ANU researcher Yujie Zhu has emphasised the relative independence of the research and historical memory work undertaken by Su Zhiliang. But the fact that Su’s research wasn’t conducted at the behest of the Chinese Communist Party doesn’t rule out nationalist readings.

Among Su’s findings are that Chinese victims of the comfort women system numbered no less than 200,000, accounting for half of all comfort women across Asia. These huge numbers, varying greatly from all other scholarly estimates, are characteristic of patriotic history in China. Comparably, in a statement redacted in the English-language version of the ABC report, Chinese-American documentary film-maker Leo Shi Young states: “Comfort women were not just Koreans; there were even more Chinese.

Unsurprisingly, comments by local visitors to the comfort women museum in Shanghai show that the exhibits reinforce the Chinese nationalist narrative and anti-Japanese feeling. There is a risk that the Chinese Australian for Peace Association’s statue will stir up tensions within Australian communities with links to the region.

There is one other noteworthy thing about Chinese comfort women: the consistency with which men figure in reports about documentation, exhibitions and commemorations.

This is not the case elsewhere. In South Korea, the first name to come to mind (apart from any of the many victim activists) is probably Yun Chung-ok, an English literature professor at Ewha Women’s University, who in 1990 did much to educate the public about the comfort women system through a series of newspaper articles on the subject. In Japan, it is Yayori Matsui, daughter of a Christian pacifist, inspiration for the Women’s Active Museum of War and Peace in Tokyo, and an early adviser to Yun Chung-ok.

In China, however, the obvious name is that of male historian Su Zhiliang. Close on his heels is the filmmaker redacted from the ABC report, Leo Shi Young, who is in the forefront of efforts to create Chinese statues to accompany Korean ones. In Australia, Jimmy Li is following in Young’s footsteps.

A movement for recognition of war crimes perpetrated against women, driven by women, necessarily changes character when it’s led by men. With the best will in the world, male activists cannot avoid lending a different aura to the movement. After Fadime Şahindal, a Swedish national of Kurdish origin, died at the hands of her father in a so-called “honour killing” in 2002, she was carried to her grave by women. As Swedish MP Nalin Pekgul, herself of Kurih origin, remarked, “The most important thing was that it was not her male relatives who laid her to rest.”

Pekgul’s point was that the male relatives unavoidably personified the system that resulted in Şahindal’s death. It would overstate the case to claim that the men who have taken the lead in propagating knowledge of China’s comfort women in themselves embody the state-based system of national rivalry that underpins war and war crimes. Nonetheless, once it was felt necessary — by Young — to create a Chinese statue as well as a Korean one, the Korean statue lost something of its universal symbolism as a monument to the sufferings of women through rape in war. Once Young emphatically stated that there were more Chinese victims than Korean, the comfort women issue seemed in danger of being hijacked by competitive narratives of victimhood. It might now be difficult for the Chinese Australians for Peace Association to avoid their no doubt heartfelt gesture of commemoration becoming hostage to these narratives.

The tensions over the installation of peace statues are sometimes represented as a case of right-wing Japanese nationalists versus transnational feminist and human rights activists. But Japan has a strong tradition of activism around the comfort women system, which had its Japanese victims too. The Women’s Active Museum of War and Peace in Tokyo is a fine example of commemorative activity, asking visitors to reflect on the past and on Japan’s responsibility for the system. It’s the sort of internal critique that is hardly possible in today’s China. •

The post Commemorating the peace or remembering the war? appeared first on Inside Story.

I confess that I may have a greater orientation towards friendship than many. But I am not alone in drawing on friendship bonds, in all their multitudinous incarnations, for spiritual nourishment, the sharing of resources, mutual psychological interrogation and political solidarity. As philosophers have argued since the classical period, friendship is essential to human flourishing. In Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle declared it to be “an indispensable component of the good life.” Nobody, he said, “would choose to live without friends, even if he had all the other goods.”

Novelists have also long exalted its virtues — from Charlotte’s Web (“It’s not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both”) to E.M. Forster (“If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country”). More recently, academics have urged its importance in the context of a growing loneliness epidemic. As one sociologist remarked in 2009: “In truth, friendship has a bigger impact on our psychological wellbeing than family relationships.”

Compared to family or professional relationships, though, friendship exists almost entirely in the absence of institutional support and largely bereft of research. Where the status of a spouse is significant in tax law, and where family members or colleagues have various duties and privileges in criminal law, the friend sits shivering and alone, holding a status rarely seen by law as significant — and in many instances, such as wills and donations or employment law, treated as suspect.

Carer’s leave for a family member is an obvious right, as are visitation privileges, but for a friend they require negotiation. At no point was this bias more blatant than during Covid, when people were initially permitted to form bubbles with romantic partners but not friends. And while there are whole sections of the library devoted to studies of marriage and the family, friendship is largely neglected. What’s more, those studies that do exist tend to focus on representations of friendship in literary or philosophical records, which means the scholarship is overwhelmingly slanted towards elite pale males.

Prescriptive literature from across the centuries — from etiquette and conduct manuals to philosophy and glossy magazines — tells us a lot about what friendship should look like but very little about how it’s experienced in all its improvised messiness. Very few poor or marginalised people left behind diaries or letters revealing how they conducted their friendships, and those who did now have them hidden inside family papers: a form of archival cataloguing that speaks volumes about the cultural priority we afford the nuclear family unit. (One of my fantasy research projects is to develop an archive and library of friendship.)

It is for these reasons, and so many more, that Tiffany Watt Smith’s dazzlingly brilliant, wise and joyous book Bad Friend: A Century of Revolutionary Friendships is so welcome, in scholarly, feminist and wider societal senses. Watt Smith is a rare kind of scholar — someone able to move seamlessly between pop culture, television series, films, her own friendships, psychology, philosophy, sociology, anthropology and her expertise in the history of the emotions since medieval times. This book has the kind of erudition and voluptuous prose of Peter Gay, the personal honesty and irreverence of Vivian Gornick, the methodological experimentation and political acuity of Saidiya Hartman and the sage and witty life advice of a good friend.

Bad Friend tells the history of modern female friendship in Britain and the United States from the early 1900s through to the present day, focusing on its most morally ambiguous and emotionally vexed dimensions. If women today are sold friendship in brightly lit, saccharine and uncomplicated forms, Watt Smith reveals a more nuanced and culturally contingent reality.

Moving chronologically across the twentieth century, she begin with the passionate entanglements of youth and efforts to control female friendships from the early 1900s to the 1940s. Then, spanning the 1940s to the 1980s, she explores the friendship negotiations of midlife, when children and marriage might, for some, demand priority. She concludes in the period from the 1980s to today by examining how we call on friends as we age together, exploring friendship pacts and cooperative living among women.

Drawing on archives from “boarding schools, prisons, factories and film sets, suburban streets and urban ghettoes, protests and… hospital wards… communities of women ageing together and… internet chat rooms,” Bad Friend is a more inclusive, expansive and multilayered history of friendship than any other written to date. If the archives are patchy and incomplete, or written from the perspective of authorities, as they tend to be for racial minorities, Watt Smith turns to ethnography or speculative biography to ensure that all her characters have equally rich stories.

This is also a remarkably tender history, partly because of Watt Smith’s brave decision to structure the book around the friendships that have defined the key stages of her life. Challenging the objective, omniscient narrator of traditional history, this method creates an exquisite intimacy with the reader and avoids naturalising her own conventional life trajectory: intense female friendships in her twenties; babies, marriage and a career in her thirties and forties; the reinvigoration of friendship in her fifties and beyond. It also adds a therapeutic dimension to the book.

Watt Smith was prompted to research friendship because of her own history of broken friendships: her feeling that, as a “bad friend,” she had failed in “an essential element of feminine and feminist life.” In the course of the book we come to see how most women can’t help but fail at friendship, given the very exacting standards to which female friendship is held and the fantasy of a complete merger with one’s friend that results in feelings of betrayal when one or the other decides to change. Readers will leave this book with an understanding both of how friendship was modernised in the twentieth century and of how to be a kinder and more generous friend.

So how did female friendship become subject to such suffocatingly high standards? This is a question best answered by an historian of the emotions like Watt Smith, someone who can show how feelings we imagine to be spontaneous, voluntary and private are shaped by changing political and social forces. As these public structures shift so too do the rules that govern our private relationships.

For at least two thousand years, as Watt Smith explains, Western philosophers considered women to be incapable of true friendships. At most, they might form attachments based on utility or pleasure rather than deep loyalties and intersubjective knowledge. From the mid-eighteenth century onwards, as the separation between home and work and public and private hardened with the beginning of the industrial revolution, bourgeois women were increasingly sequestered into the private realm of domesticity, family, emotion, spirituality and femininity, and a corresponding revolution occurred in women’s friendships. Once derided as being incapable of true friendship, women were now celebrated as having the most tender, selfless, elevated and heartfelt bonds.

In dominant discourses, these intense, romantic relationships between women could train them for their future roles as wives and mothers, though an emerging countervailing feminist literature saw them as a superior substitute. Unmarried women, according to Anglo-Irish writer Frances Power Cobbe, did not need to fear a “solitary age as the bachelor must… [as] she will find a woman ready to share it.” As Watt Smith puts it, “romantic female friendship was no longer only a symbol of female domesticity, it was also the key to female liberation.”

How elite white women in the early twentieth century — more educated, more autonomous and more enfranchised than their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century predecessors — inherited these ideas is wonderfully explored in a chapter on romantic friendships focusing on girls’ boarding schools and sentimental stories. Popular literature in the late nineteenth century was filled with stories of romantic friendships between girls: Beatrice and Alice, for example, who in one story “loved each other dearly and with their arms about each other would sit under the deep shadow of the trees listening for the cuckoos’ notes.” Moving from public narratives to private experiences, Watt Smith mines the archives of boarding schools to find school records tallying which of the girls were “gone” on other girls. Female students, she notes, would be seen “performing earnest acts of service for their beloved, filling her hot water bottle, turning down her bed, preparing gifts of dried flowers, saving biscuits from tea to press, soggily, into her hand.”

Teachers were also often targets for young girls’ affections: “I have caught the contagion: I have fallen in love,” wrote one student at Mount Holyoke college in New England to her sister in 1893. “With Dr Lowell [a female professor] of course… [T]he girls tease me unmercifully about it…I am not exactly crushed only I like her very much… [H]alf the girls are in love with her and the other half almost hate her.”

By the second decade of the twentieth century these same relationships were seen as pathological and in need of regulation. Women’s magazines like Harper’s Bazaar asked parents if their daughters were  likely to fall victim to “crushitis.” Love letters between girls published in student magazines were replaced by warnings to not “get a crush” on other women, as the 1913 Smith College Handbook cautioned, while principals told girls that romantic friendships were a form of “mental instability” that “catches hold of you and is a roaring fire all in a minute.”

As Watt Smith notes, it would give you whiplash to see how quickly the norms changed — a panic she ascribes primarily to the homophobia that accompanied the rise of psychology and sexology in the early twentieth century. And at around the same time that romantic friendships were being designated a sign of sexual inversion by Havelock Ellis and Freud, eugenicist discourses warned about “race suicide.” If white women opted for female friendships over being wives and mothers then whites, it was feared, would be swamped by black people.

Watt Smith’s ability, seen in this chapter, to bring prescriptive literature, popular culture and everyday practice into dialogue continues throughout the book, providing the empirical scaffolding through which she identifies the peculiarly modern aspects of twentieth century female friendship: “the promise of liberation, self-invention, freedom and choice” as well as the invention of the “bad friend” to police new norms. Her prose is so lucid and engaging that it’s easy to lose sight of the significant scholarly interventions she makes into feminist history, social history and the history of the emotions.

She is certainly not the first to note the existence of romantic friendships in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for example, but she is the first for some years now to insist on them as friendships. In the wake of queer theory in the 90s and 2000s, scholars rushed in to read romantic friendships as evidence of secret queer or lesbian intimacies — a thesis Watt Smith doesn’t deny, though she refuses to relinquish their importance as forms of friendship. It is not that these intimacies had no obvious erotic elements but that the division between the sexual and the “purely” amicable is ultimately unhelpful.

Similar important scholarly interventions are seen in her chapters on the various utilitarian dimensions of female friendships. Most historians, following sociologist Allan Silver’s groundbreaking research, accept that the mid-eighteenth century witnessed a separation of friendship from calculation, or intimacy from instrumentalism. Prior to the nineteenth century, in a world that ran on patronage, anyone from your accountant, your trading partner, your kin or your marital partner could be referred to as a friend. In the absence of banks and transparent state bureaucracy, friendship networks stretching across the British empire were used to fill employment posts, borrow money, invest in capital, woo partners and divulge secrets. As state and financial infrastructure developed, commerce became separated from friendship and friendship, Silver argues, returning to its original Aristotelian meaning as a private, authentic, virtuous bond separate from economic concerns.

Although she doesn’t explicitly make the case, Watt Smith’s book does a brilliant job of showing just how male-centric and class-based this argument is. In fact, the poor or those burdened by a sick dependent had no choice but to rely on reciprocal exchanges of food, childcare and neighbourly services. That friendship has always had an instrumentalist element is illuminated by case studies of cooperative childcare arrangements in working-class British suburbs and in poor African American areas such as The Flats. In these places, says Watt Smith, friendship was built up “not only because of their history or because they loved one another, but because each was able to trust the other would offer a fair exchange” — a notion Aristotle would sniff at and that we supposedly outgrew in our freer, modern world.

My only cause for consternation in this otherwise marvellous book came from a tendency to overstate the case, which was probably encouraged by a publisher keen for a wide, popular audience. Having examined friendship in the eighteenth century, I’m unconvinced by Watt Smith’s claim that at no point in history has friendship mattered so much as now. While it’s true that the rise in singledom means that more people will rely on friends than possibly ever before, there is also an argument to be made for the extraordinary importance of friendship in societies that run on trust and promise-keeping, such as we see in the eighteenth century. Definitive universalising claims tend to provoke searches for counter-examples: is it not more interesting to simply chart the shifting forms and rules governing friendship as society changes?

The notion that the “bad friend” was invented in the twentieth century also left me cold. What about the reams of advice literature or epistolary novels on the problem of “false friends” in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? Writers spilled vast amount of ink, just as they do today, explaining how to distinguish a flatterer from a friend or how to keep “Pecksniffian interlopers,” in Dickens’s terms, out of your home. Indeed, in the early Australian colony the term seduction was used to excoriate and even incriminate the female “bad influences” who lured other servant girls away from domesticity and work towards the devilish delights of autonomy.

But these are the kinds of criticisms that only another historian of friendship is likely to offer. For anybody else, this book will likely be one of the best things you’ve read all year. •

Bad Friend: A Century of Revolutionary Friendships
By Tiffany Watt Smith | Faber & Faber | $34.99 | 336 pages

The post Friends like these appeared first on Inside Story.

Conversations on these fraught topics often point accusingly at the so-called “manosphere,” a group of online communities of men who advocate for a variety of masculinist views, many of them openly misogynistic. Concern over its effects on boys rose to a crescendo earlier this year with the success of the Netflix series Adolescence, whose thirteen-year-old protagonist murders a girl while under its influence.

The British journalist James Bloodworth has written a timely exploration of the manosphere that is both measured and passionate. Lost Boys dials down the outrage and panic without losing its power as critique. It succeeds in humanising the movement — or at least its fringe-dwellers — through a series of personal encounters with the men who inhabit it. Although it doesn’t always avoid the temptations of ridicule, the book provides a three-dimensional understanding of many of them, as well as a clear-eyed recognition that one-dimensional monsters do exist.

Bloodworth’s first experience of the emerging manosphere occurs in 2006. He is a timid twenty-three-year-old taking part in a “pickup artistry” bootcamp to overcome his shyness around women. By his telling, pickup artistry is the primordial globule from which the manosphere grew: a relatively benign community (at least compared to what followed) that had emerged in the days before social media changed and accelerated everything.

Pickup artists were predatory, treating seduction as a game of overcoming resistance. They held demeaning and objectifying views of women, seeing them as interchangeable simpletons unable to resist a formulaic sales pitch. But most of them were not deeply hateful, merely scheming and manipulative. Pickup artistry was more about cultivating skills to be competitive in the romantic marketplace than developing an anti-feminist ideology.

The version of the manosphere that followed was nastier, elevating gender to supreme social importance and promoting a grim view of the sexual economy. Most men are uncompetitive losers, it argued, fooled by conventional ideas of romance, feminine goodness and being the proverbial nice guy. Women, in turn, are status-obsessed and duplicitous, and throw themselves at a small minority of high resource-value winners.

For the enlightened or “red-pilled” man, the task was now not just to perfect a pick-up routine but to see through the façade and embrace a view of the sexual marketplace as a battle zone in which the enemy was also, paradoxically, the object of desire. To that end, he must embody authentic masculinity and come to realise that men, not women, are the truly oppressed class in society.

The much-discussed incel phenomenon reflects a further evolution, Bloodworth shows. Whereas men who swallowed the red pill took up arms in the war of the sexes, “involuntary celibates” left the battle zone altogether. Believing themselves to be forever uncompetitive in the sexual marketplace they withdrew to form “black-pilled” online communities of resentment. In several cases, examined in Lost Boys, their members vented their rage in murderous attacks on women.

Bloodworth is a knowledgeable and self-aware guide through the history of the manosphere, although he largely overlooks the more separatist “men going their own way” wing. He is particularly adept at revealing the ordinary aspirations of the boys and young men who are drawn into it, and how cynical operators and social media algorithms pull them further and further in. Although the manosphere is unquestionably a dark place, Lost Boys shows it is not merely a cesspool of misogyny.

For one thing, although much of the imagery in incel forums is appallingly hateful towards women and girls, bile is spat in all directions. Other men are targets too, reviled for being successful with women, for being contemptibly unsuccessful, or for being excessively obliging to women in the hope of receiving crumbs of favour. The manosphere’s lexicon is rich with terms of abuse to capture these variants and more: chads and chodes, Stacies and Beckies, alphas and betas, simps, cucks, foids and soyboys.

In addition to its linguistic inventiveness, the manosphere is also surprisingly theory-saturated for a community often caricatured as grunting basement-dwellers. Andrew Tate’s view of reality may be simple-minded materialism, all money, escorts and sports cars, but manosphere thought-leaders purvey a range of views, from myths and mysticism to social Darwinism to evolutionary psychology. The common thread is a fondness for binaries and a paranoiac sense that things are not as they seem.

Bloodworth observes the manosphere’s denizens at close quarters, pungent aftershave and all, but he has more to say about its general awfulness than what could be done to defang it. Some of this is rational pessimism: as the cult of assertive masculinity has become mainstreamed in American politics, the prospect of it withering away seems remote. Lost Boys shows how much ideas from the manosphere have become entangled with white nationalism, MAGA, conspiracy theories, and even health and fitness trends.

Part of the problem in deciding how to respond to the manosphere is that its relationship with gender equality remains obscure. Lost Boys is more a zoomed-in characterisation of the manosphere than a broad explanation for it, but Bloodworth suggests that it is driven by grievance over lost privilege. Men are rising up against women because their taken-for-granted pre-eminence has been undermined by egalitarian social trends led by feminism.

If the manosphere feeds on backlash to rising gender equality, then we can expect it to remain strong or gather force as that rise continues. Only by reversing progress could the wind be taken out of its sails by this account. But Bloodworth also implies that greater gender equality is the solution to the manosphere. He laments the findings of a recent report suggesting that progress towards gender equality stagnated or went backwards in 40 per cent of countries from 2019 to 2022. A closer look shows that whereas 12 per cent of countries had regressed, 62 per cent had moved forward: good news for global egalitarians, but precisely the kind of social change likely to trigger a manospherical reaction.

Making sense of the societal trends that fuel the manosphere is one thing, understanding its effects on individuals is another. Bloodworth is good at putting a human face on the people he meets in his travels, but the Lost Boys is somewhat lacking in empathy for the lost. The greedy influencers, poisonous misogynists and unhinged cranks who lead the movement perhaps deserve none at all, but what of their vast, youthful audience? Boys and young men are being led to develop attitudes, beliefs and habits that are unquestionably harmful to others but also harm and stunt their own growth, cruelling their capacity for emotional depth and rewarding relationships.

We can mock the glittering emptiness of Andrew Tate’s vision of the good life and punish the obnoxious behaviour he encourages boys to display towards women and girls. However, as I am sure the author of this insightful and engaging book would agree, we also need to offer boys and young men a better version of masculinity rather than confirm the manosphere’s axiom that society devalues them precisely because they are male. Combatting the attractions of the manosphere is vitally important. Simply condemning it is unlikely to do much good. •

Lost Boys: A Personal Journey Through the Manosphere
By James Bloodworth | Atlantic Books | $34.99 | 320 pages

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Opposition leader Sussan Ley’s decision to prioritise getting more Liberal women into parliament has set the course for what will be a rugged showdown with her party’s old guard and its more contemporary lieutenants. It already looks like conservatives opposed to moves to “modernise” the Liberal Party might use the issue to undermine their first female leader and foment a split designed to make her fail.

It won’t be a carbon copy of the Julia Gillard days, when Liberal leader Tony Abbott appeared at rallies in front of placards declaring “Ditch the witch.” Treating their own leader that way would be unacceptable and counterproductive. For this, they’d probably prefer to use party processes, the privileges of power and the appearance of cooperation — with the occasional public disagreement on issues such as, say, gender quotas — to seed doubts about their leader’s judgement and erode her support.

This week, the centre-right Ley declared herself a “zealot” when it came to facilitating more women, even if it meant state divisions introducing quotas. “I’m agnostic about how we get more women,” she told the Nine network. “… I stand ready to work with them every step of the way to make sure that we get the outcome that we all seek.”

Within twenty-four hours, Abbott had declared himself firmly against quotas. Shadow defence minister and fellow conservative Angus Taylor, who Ley only just defeated for the leadership, also spoke out. “We should take substantial action,” Taylor told ABC24. “… But I’m saying that subverting democratic processes through quotas is not the way to do it.”

If there was ever a case study in why Liberal women are suspicious of the lip service some colleagues pay to the need for change, it’s the now-infamous NSW Liberal Women’s Council meeting held on 3 June. This was the marathon video conference call during which Victorian party veteran Alan Stockdale mused that women were doing well enough in the NSW division and men might need a hand up.

Seated under a portrait of party founder Robert Menzies, the former Kennett government treasurer was alongside fellow Victorian elder Richard Alston, who served in John Howard’s federal cabinet. Stockdale, Alston and former NSW state MLA Peta Seaton were appointed as temporary administrators of the NSW division last September after the division catastrophically missed the candidate nomination deadline for local government elections and Peter Dutton ordered an intervention.

Having called for submissions and established a clandestine second committee to redraft the state party’s constitution, but not yet having consulted anyone else, the three-member administrative committee was appealing to the Women’s Council to support giving them a second nine months to get the job done.

It was the night before the seat of Bradfield was finally declared lost to independent Nicolette Boele, who beat the Liberals’ Gisele Kapterian by just twenty-six votes. Some of Kapterian’s campaign team were on the call, and by then they knew it was over. Their dejection — and their sense that the administrators had made their job harder — set the tone for the evening.

The women had questions about what they considered an opaque and obstructionist intervention process, not least why this was the first they’d heard from the administrators and what the trio had been doing while a federal election came and went and the Liberal Party — to quote Sussan Ley’s subsequent observation — “got totally smashed.”

Fortunately for anyone fascinated by the inner workings of political parties, at least one of the sixty-plus people on the video conference call recorded it. The transcript of the almost-four-hour grilling makes for compelling reading.

Stockdale’s observation about the relative power of men and women in the NSW Liberals, which found its way into the newspapers, was just a taster. It came about three hours in, after a fair bit of robust dialogue. Before the observation about women’s assertiveness, he had been asked about reports of a second secret committee drafting a new constitution and whether anyone had been consulted. The council — a key formal body within the division — had not.

Because the administrators couldn’t consult everyone before the federal election, said Stockdale, they didn’t consult anyone so as not to “distract” from the campaign. Given the administrators were supposed to remedy problems so the Liberals had a better chance of winning the election, the decision to defer consultation beyond polling day defied logic.

When Stockdale was asked who appointed the drafting committee, he said the federal executive proposed it. Others who’d been present at the meeting authorising the September intervention recalled no such instruction. Stockdale confirmed the drafters included Women’s Council rural vice-president Rhondda Vanzella — whose work he praised effusively — and two others he declined to identify. One had been excused, having been little help. The other anonymous contributor he hailed as crucial.

“But there has been no consultation,” he insisted. Talking to the drafters, he declared, didn’t count.

Stockdale said the drafters’ committee had been kept secret so it wasn’t subjected to public lobbying. Several women asked why the administrators hadn’t just consulted the existing constitutional standing committee, comprised of seven lawyers, whose job is to review the constitution. One of the lawyers, Sarah McMahon, told Stockdale it was “exceptionally inappropriate” to set up a new committee when one already existed. She warned it would be “a breeding ground for resentment,” adding: “You had a resource at your hand of intelligent, educated people.”

Richard Alston responded that he and Stockdale “had a much better understanding of the problems” than the lawyers necessarily would — though both men are former barristers — because they had “been around the party organisation for fifty years or more” and seen things in action.

As the discussion ensued, the two men — and Seaton occasionally chiming in with support — confirmed they had handpicked several other senior NSW party figures to oversee fast-tracked preselections before the election. All men, the group included former Howard government minister Phillip Ruddock and former NSW party treasurer Mark Bailie.

They had also unilaterally reappointed Bailie as honorary  treasurer, having decided he could best raise fast money for the federal campaign. Stockdale insisted he was the right choice but refused to say how much he had raised.

Moderating the meeting, Women’s Council president Berenice Walker observed that she was authorised as a member of state executive to oversee preselections but, like others, had been told she wasn’t needed. The women were increasingly unimpressed by the extent to which the administrators — it was Stockdale and Alston leading — had made executive decisions and sidestepped democratic processes with only electoral disaster to show for it.

Stockdale also earned a personal rebuke for noting he must have suffered “an attack of insanity” in agreeing to take on the administrative role. His joke that he had given up playing golf twice a week to do it also seemed to fall a bit flat.

So the tension had been building for hours when Stockdale made his observation about the relative power of men and women. He had punctured it a few seconds earlier by endorsing the women’s demand to abolish an existing constitutional requirement that branches must send both a male and female delegate to state council, even if they comprised only women. Stockdale said the rule didn’t make sense.

Monitoring the online chat, Walker reported: “Well, you’ve won some brownie points for that.” She then observed that more representative women were needed further afield.

“Mind you,” Stockdale quipped, “I think that women are sufficiently assertive now that we should be giving some thought to whether there’s a need to protect men’s involvement.”

His brownie points evaporated. Walker responded: “I welcome the day.”

A few minutes later, one of the council’s urban vice-presidents, Adelaide Cuneo, posed two questions. Under the proposed redrafted constitution, would the Women’s Council president retain her position as a vice-president with automatic state executive membership? And what did the admin committee think of quotas?

On quotas, Stockdale said there was “a very strong division of opinion.” He didn’t have a firm view and encouraged their feedback. “I suppose as a Liberal,” he went on, “my basic inclination is that preselections, for example, should be on merit and the gender shouldn’t enter into it either way. But I’m open to persuasion.”

Adelaide Cuneo responded bluntly. After speaking to women across the party, she had concluded most were resigned that a quota system “might not be the best solution but it is the only solution” for reaching Liberal gender balance in state and federal parliaments. Merit, she said, was an unhelpful term weaponised against women. “When we’re talking about preselections, you never hear a man have to defend his merit.”

The third administrator — and only woman of the trio — Peta Seaton ventured that she had occasionally felt “token.” She reflected that she had sometimes concluded “I’m not here because I’m the right one. They needed a woman, so I was the one.” Nevertheless, she’d eased her long opposition to quotas and now had an open mind.

The meeting did find some common ground when the discussion turned to the election defeat. Several women eviscerated the federal party’s policies, labelling both the proposed petrol subsidy and the abandoned work-from-home policy “ridiculous,” the latter with an expletive attached.

Stockdale agreed Labor had comprehensively out-campaigned the Liberals. He referred to Labor national secretary Paul Erickson’s post-election address to the National Press Club — a venue Peter Dutton eschewed — and said he hadn’t yet seen it. “My wife says ‘you’ve got to make time,’” he added.

But the ceasefire was shortlived. Cuneo had to make several attempts to have her question about the future status of the Women’s Council president answered. Eventually it transpired that there was, indeed, a proposal to reduce the size of the state executive. Stockdale insisted he wasn’t proposing specifically that the council president be dropped. “But we’re not ruling in or ruling out anything.”

Walker reminded him that the federal Liberal Party was founded on a handshake agreement between Robert Menzies and Elizabeth Couchman of the Australian Women’s League that the Women’s Council’s president would be constitutionally enshrined as a vice-president of the Liberal Party. “You’d be reversing Menzies’ work — Menzies’ decision himself — if that were to end,” she warned.

“That was a very long time ago, Berenice,” Stockdale replied.

When he eventually confirmed one option was not having all NSW vice-presidents automatically on the state executive, Walker was furious.

“How do you think it would look on the front page of a newspaper that a Women’s Council president was no longer a vice-president of the party after eighty-one years?” Walker demanded. “What do you think that would do to our vote?”

Stockdale waved away her concern. “I think it would be very unlikely that even with your best efforts, the newspapers would focus on that,” he replied.

Stockdale’s remark about being “sufficiently assertive” hit the media less than twenty-four hours later.

In the days that followed, Walker convened an urgent meeting of the NSW Women’s Council executive that drafted a protest letter to federal executive on the handling of the intervention and its impact on the election result, and opposed any extension of the administrators’ term.

By the time federal executive met on 17 June to consider an extension, it had received a second letter — from conservative Rhondda Vanzella — opposing the first letter and insisting it was unrepresentative of all council views.

Stockdale asked for the extension. Sussan Ley said it would only be granted if he and Alston were replaced by a seven-person committee of NSW members — including a reappointed Peta Seaton joined by Berenice Walker, Mark Bailie and three others. The conservatives were in uproar. Walker was labelled “a terrorist” for her letter. Ley stared the opponents down and won.

Sussan Ley is determined to prevail over those who practice pat-on-the-head politics with women in the Liberal Party. In her home state of New South Wales and beyond, she has a hell of a fight ahead. •

POSTSCRIPT, MARCH 2026

So much for eradicating pat-on-the-head politics in the Liberal Party.

Less than a year after leader Sussan Ley left open the prospect of quotas for women and declared herself a “zealot” for female progression, everything has changed and nothing has.

Ley is gone, not just from the leadership but from the whole political landscape. The NSW Liberal Party’s state council has backtracked on a decision to discuss quotas for women and shelved the whole idea. And after those twin developments, one of the Liberals’ key quota advocates, Charlotte Mortlock, founder of the Hilma’s Network female-candidate recruitment incubator, is so disillusioned that she’s quit both her own organisation and the party itself.

Ley made mistakes but she was also undermined from within, mostly covertly just as predicted, including through a lack of active support from her conservative rivals. The one who’s since replaced her, Angus Taylor, was a reluctant assassin only in terms of the timing.

Taylor’s response to those who are discomforted by his ousting the first female Liberal leader after just nine months is to point to all the women he’s promoted. They include Tasmanian conservative Claire Chandler, catapulted from the backbench into the shadow finance portfolio, and Victorians Sarah Henderson and Jane Hume, who are respectively from the conservative and moderate factions, returned to the shadow ministry after Ley demoted them. Backing Taylor against Ley also earned Hume the conservatives’ support to become his deputy. The fact that she’s one of their better media performers helped her in that quest, as did hailing from a different faction. Oh, and being a woman, of course.

But while the faces have changed in the Liberals’ senior ranks, signs are that the culture has not.

That leaked transcript of the now notorious NSW Women’s Council meeting confirmed party veteran Alan Stockdale had opposed quotas by observing that Liberal women were already “sufficiently assertive.” It also revealed that Stockdale, in his role as federally appointed administrator of the NSW division, had set up an all-male committee to fast-track preselections in NSW before the federal election.

In late January this year, a fortnight before the conservatives moved against Ley, news of a different meeting leaked to the media, this one involving Taylor and his key lieutenants. Complete with arrival and departure shots, the Australian revealed the group had gathered in Melbourne to talk about how best to remove Ley. Again, it was all blokes. Even worse, they met just before heading to the funeral of a former colleague, Katie Allen. To take the most crass interpretation, they met before burying one colleague to plot how to bury another.

Several weeks on, with the political deed now done, Taylor and his backers claimed vindication in the form of the first post-coup Newspoll showing voters significantly more satisfied with the Liberals’ leadership since he took over. The poll also recorded a jump of seven percentage points in the better prime minister rating for Taylor compared with Ley. Prime minister Anthony Albanese remains voters’ choice as better prime minister but his rating fell four percentage points.

Perhaps more concerning for Taylor, though, is that the same poll showed their primary vote only improving by two percentage points in the fortnight that spanned the leadership change. The poll’s margin of error is 3 per cent.

If part of the reason for the Ley–Taylor switch was to try to stem the outflow to Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, there was no sign of that result. The poll showed One Nation steady on a primary vote of 27 per cent compared to the Taylor-led Liberals on 20 per cent. The Liberals’ two-point increase came at the expense of Labor and the Greens, losing one apiece. Again, the margin of error is three.

Sussan Ley chose not to return to parliament, robbing colleagues of any chance to salve their consciences with valedictory speeches.

She couldn’t even win against her own side. Now, Angus Taylor has to prove he can do a lot more than that. If he doesn’t, and quickly, he won’t be afforded any pat-on-the-head period. It’ll go straight to a punch in the guts. •

Funding from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund is gratefully acknowledged.

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As Gorman showcases, without giving Freud explicit attention — after all, feminists have already been there, done that — women want all sorts of things, from casual sex through to none. Some want relationships, others have done their dash or want to experiment with new ways of relating.

Gorman talks to women who buy sex toys, watch porn, enjoy sex parties, pay for sex and who get off reading romance books and fan fiction. On the other side of #MeToo, hers is a book “about pleasure, not trauma,” a task she approaches with nuance, sensitivity and a healthy dose of scepticism about how sex is so easily, and ever-increasingly, commodified.

Gorman’s starting point too is a sobering one: the sexual landscape for heterosexual women remains grim, evident in an enduring “orgasm gap” whereby “straight women orgasm less with their partners than any other group of people.” And while this may be old news, there are recent related trends to ponder. Choking, for instance, has become an increasing sexual expectation, particularly among younger people.

At first glance, All Women Want is the latest addition to a well-worn genre focused on female sexuality post-feminist and sexual revolutions, beginning with Shere Hite’s 1975 international bestseller The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality. A more recent iteration, Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life (2015) by sex educator Emily Nagoski, is cited approvingly.

Like those authors, Gorman makes women’s desires and bodies central, but she is no orgasm evangelist and nor she is a sex researcher. And while she does (rather awkwardly and endearingly) dress up to attend a fancy “play” party in London, she hardly makes herself the main story. Currently lifestyle editor of Guardian Australia, Gorman is unapologetically a journalist, and readers are rightly encouraged to consider her book “consumer affairs journalism, a way of navigating the business of pleasure without going broke.”

The largely unregulated “sexual wellness industry” — selling everything from vibrators to group sex to “somatic sexology” — is booming, and about half of the sixty of so “experts” Gorman interviews are part of it. She visits sex shops in Australia and overseas, and takes seriously the knowledge of those working on the floor. Online shopping might be less intimidating and more convenient, Gorman argues, but it’s also subject to Big Tech’s “basket case” attitudes to sex, and the industry as a whole “attracts unsophisticated operators with limited concern for customer safety or satisfaction.” As well as sex toys, Gorman scrutinises lingerie, lipstick and lubricants, assessing them for quality and sustainability.

Gorman’s access to big names, legendary figures and leading researchers is impressive. They range from members of the Boston Women’s Health Collective who developed the feminist health manual Our Bodies Ourselves back in the late 1960s through to Jen Gunter, author of the bestselling The Vagina Bible (2019). Among the Australian “pioneers” are urologist and anatomist Helen O’Connell, who with her team published the field-defining 2005 article “The Anatomy of the Clitoris,” based on MRI imaging, which overturned centuries of scientific neglect of this most “exquisite” sexual organ. Some twenty years on and with labiaplasties on the rise, Gorman posits that “we’re in the early stages of clitoral enlightenment.”

The importance of the clitoris to women’s sexual pleasure is a lesson that still has to be taught. Meanwhile, the “vaginal orgasm” that Freud invented lives on as the G-spot, a reportedly erogenous zone of the vagina, that “sexual grifters” have monetised with the “G-shot,” a blood injection that can cost up to $10,000.

Just as compelling, if not more so, are Gorman’s conversations with non-experts. Most are “cisgender women who have sex with men and live in wealthy, English-speaking countries,” but within this ostensibly homogenous demographic she finds a variety of perspectives across the age range, from those who identify as asexual or celibate through to kinky and non-monogamous.

Nor are straight men excluded, as individuals or as a group. Here, Gorman treads carefully but surely. Without discounting the “danger men pose,” Gorman creates space for more complex views, including that of “former escort, cam girl and OnlyFans superstar” Aella, who declares society “hates male sexuality.” She cites research that shows the “most common star of straight men’s fantasies is their current partner,” presents findings suggesting men suffer from more shame about their desires than women, and interviews three men known in her wider networks for being “great in bed.”

On the perennially divisive topics of pornography and sex work, Gorman is refreshingly balanced. While not excusing mainstream porn from all the social ills routinely laid at its feet, she also indicts “far less stigmatised players such as cosmetic surgeons, policymakers, curriculum writers, mainstream movie studios and parents unwilling to talk about sex.” Women and men she talks to make the same complaints about the porn most common on tube sites like Pornhub, including in relation to choking. On some indicators — including the annual Pornhub wrap of user data — women are more likely to search for “rough sex” or “bondage.” Meanwhile, a new predatory industry, aimed at men, has emerged promising to cure so-called porn addiction.

If Gorman has an agenda to push, it’s multi-pronged. The orgasm gap is a problem, yes, but so is “orgasm coercion.” Nor will the gap close without taking men’s sexuality seriously too. Most sex education, as it currently exists, is not fit for purpose. And, lastly, “sexual liberation is not just theoretical, it’s material.” The women most likely to be satisfied, sexually and otherwise, are financially independent. This may seem an obvious point, but as the climax (excuse the pun) of Gorman’s wide-ranging and illuminating investigations, it’s a strong one. •

All Women Want
By Alyx Gorman | HarperCollins | $35.99 | 352 pages

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Beatrice began by quoting from a Glen Tomasetti song, “Don’t be too polite girls… show a little fight,” and then applauded two feminists who had faced “gross hostility, vilification, harassment and misrepresentation” by the media. The first was Irene Bolger, who had led an unprecedented strike of nurses and midwives in Melbourne. The second was Alison Thorne, a socialist feminist and spokesperson for the Gay Legal Rights Coalition, who had caused controversy a few years earlier when she had condemned a police raid on a Melbourne-based paedophile discussion group.

Thorne, a school teacher, had excoriated the raid as a homophobic denial of free speech, noting that homosexuals had higher age of consent laws than heterosexuals. At the end of one radio interview about the raid a school bell could be heard ringing. Derryn Hinch replayed excerpts of the interview on his own program, adding: “Well there, you heard the recess bell. The woman expressing those views about the rights of kids to have sex with adults… is a teacher.” Thorne became front-page news around the country, condemned by editorial writers and radio hosts and was soon moved to an administrative position.

Beatrice’s speech was celebrating the Equal Opportunity Board’s ruling that Thorne had been discriminated against and must be reinstated. Like Bolger, she said in her address, Thorne had sustained a “worse battering than any modern feminist I know of. Both stood up to this magnificently. They showed that women can have True Grit and show a little fight.”

Beatrice agreed that the raid was an infringement on civil liberties, saturated in homophobia and driven by “wowsers, puritans, Catholics and cowardly governments.” She had written about her own romantic affair with an older man at the age of sixteen: “He is my secret. He is bliss. He is a paedophile. I remember him with tenderness and affection.”

In her excellent new biography, Fearless Beatrice Faust, Judith Brett paints an evocative picture of the response to Faust’s speech: “People shifted uncomfortably in their seats, eyes lowered, lips tight, barely listening… Few of the assembled feminists saw things quite as Bea did.”

I confess I equivocated about beginning this review with that unsettling scene. Beatrice Faust, I thought, is someone few people now remember, yet she should be a household name. Her attitude towards paedophilia was discomforting, to say the least.

But if politicians today seek to woo women’s votes around election time or backflip on anti-women policies (like Peter Dutton’s shortlived pledge to end working from home for public servants) then it’s because WEL, the organisation she founded, taught them to think about women’s concerns and to place them high on any political agenda. If states around Australia have decriminalised abortion, it is because campaigners like Faust shattered taboos, spoke about their own abortions and protested at the legal regulation of women’s bodies. And if contraception has become easily available and sex education is on school curriculums it is because Beatrice Faust and other women of her generation fought hard and tirelessly for these reforms. They deserve books, films and statues in their honour.

The wonderful thing about a biography of Faust written by an historian as interested in her private motivations as her public deeds is that the temptation of political hagiography gives way to humanistic complexity. The past is a foreign country whose strangeness or “otherness” can strike even when we are reading about the 1980s. At that dinner, Beatrice seems to be speaking a different language — yet, as Brett explains, her stance on paedophilia is not anomalous with her campaigns around abortion, sex education, homosexual rights or contraception.

Entering adulthood in the late 1950s, Beatrice was part of a generation of feminists whose activism began in the movement for civil liberties and who saw the police and the law being used to suppress sexual lives. The raid on the paedophile group, Brett explains, reminded her of how police had busted abortion clinics during the struggle for abortion law reform. The movement to introduce compulsory sex education in schools had unleashed a moral panic in the late 1970s, and in the frenzy around paedophilia Beatrice thought she found herself in combat with the same enemies of her youth, battling wowserish governments and sexual puritans for the right to speak freely about difficult sexual and moral issues.

There were also more personal reasons for Bea’s stance, more visceral, intimate and bodily. Throughout her life she believed she had a genius for sex: a preternatural ability to orgasm even in early childhood. Sex, she argued, was healthy, natural and diverse, whether it was gay, lesbian or, debatably, expressed by children. Brett deftly translates Beatrice’s speech in a manner she adopts throughout her book: by shuttling between Beatrice’s fertile inner terrain and her wider social context, suspending easy judgement and offering careful psychological speculation.

She also offers a riposte: why did Bea care more about the suffering of paedophiles than children? Shocking as it is, this scene shows why Faust makes such a rich subject and Brett such a clever, companionable and careful guide to her world.

Beatrice Faust came into the world on 19 February 1939 in a birth marred by tragedy. Her mother, who had never wanted a child but refused on religious grounds to take contraceptives or have an abortion, died twelve hours after her baby was born. Her death, says Brett, “was the defining fact of Beatrice’s life,” leaving her with a “visceral hunger for love” and providing the rationale for her abortion activism: every woman should have the right to choose, and every child should be loved and wanted.

Raised by an emotionally reticent, poorly educated, working-class father and a disengaged stepmother, Beatrice described her childhood in Melbourne’s suburbs as a “suppurating wound.” It was a world of “suburban viciousness” she later wrote, “of boiled mutton, greasy carrots and weevilly soup where…. on race days, the wireless had to be left on at full volume even when there was no one in the room.”

Alongside her intellectual malaise, Beatrice’s childhood was plagued by illnesses: chronic asthma, scoliosis and hearing impairments. Later in life she suffered from panic attacks, anxiety and depression which she treated with a range of therapeutic and medical remedies, from yoga and meditation to dangerously addictive anti-anxiety drugs. Where second-wave feminists sought consciousness-raising groups in place of psychology, blaming psychic suffering on political and structural problems, Beatrice turned to existentialism — with its exhortations to personal choice and responsibility — and transactional psychology. Circumstances which today we would describe through a language of “trauma” she saw as mere obstacles to an ever-achievable goal of self and social transformation. As Brett reminds us on a few occasions, she was never a victim.

Young Beatrice was “saved” by a teacher who saw her early brilliance and shepherded her into Melbourne’s Mac.Robertson’s selective school — a refuge for clever girls from poor families, many of whom went on to assume significant public roles. She excelled at high school and won a commonwealth scholarship to Melbourne University. When her ambitions to become an English literature academic were thwarted by a masculinist intellectual culture, she instead became a public intellectual.

Alongside her activism — around state censorship, abortion law reform, gay and lesbian rights and electoral lobbying — she also wrote books and pamphlets on sex and gender, was an art critic for the Melbourne Age and became a go-to commentator on sex. As Brett puts it, Beatrice “never swam with the tide.” As her controversial views on paedophilia show, she was a fearless and radical free-thinker, arguing for the marshalling of empirical evidence and open, rational debate, no matter what the topic. Her politics were guided by her research and by her body, though not in that order. As Brett surmises: Bea’s body would alert her to “social problems that demanded a political solution.” Whether it was the circumstances of her birth, her non-normative sexuality, her discerning eye or her sedative addiction, “Beatrice Faust’s politics,” in Brett’s inimitable opening words, “were driven by her body, its needs and pleasures, and by the body of her mother who died…”

One of this biography’s many strengths is its articulation of the plurality of philosophical positions that have comprised the feminist movement since the 1960s, and particularly the importance of generational differences. Easy generalisations, like the notion that feminists of the sixties and seventies were committed to making the personal political, appear more complicated when examined at the level of an individual’s life.

Like other women of her generation, Beatrice was often closer to liberalism than women’s liberation. She first campaigned for abortion reform in the late fifties not through the feminist movement, which was yet to begin, but through the Council for Civil Liberties, where it was argued that the police, the church and the law should not interfere in personal lives. As with the decriminalisation of homosexuality, the viewpoint was more aligned to that of John Stuart Mill: the personal was not political, and the choice to abort a foetus was a private matter rather than one to be determined by lawmakers.

Yet in making these arguments Beatrice and other feminists used their personal lives as a prompt for activism and broke from their predecessors by placing sexuality at the centre of politics. To this extent, they forged a unique form of feminism grounded in liberalism that campaigned for reform through the state while also being deeply suspicious of state interference in private lives.

This is not to suggest that the abortion campaign was homogenous; groups like the Women’s Abortion Action Committee, for instance, drew on a more radical language of sexual citizenship. In Beatrice’s life, we see the sharpness of these ideological, generational and class differences, as her politics — which are largely liberal and reformist — jostle alongside other more utopian and revolutionary demands. This was partly because she was schooled in different philosophical and political ideas but also because, unlike middle class university students, she didn’t have the luxury to experiment with downward social mobility, signified in the radical dress or indecorous behaviour of women’s libbers. Beatrice had fought hard to leave behind her working-class origins, where swearing was more a routine than an act of revolt. Without a middle-class mother or father policing her speech and comportment, she felt few of the behavioural strictures experienced by middle-class women in the sixties and seventies.

Brett describes her biography as a Melburnian story: feminist activism was local and regional, she argues, because laws governing abortion were state-based and air travel and long-distance telephone calls were much more expensive than today. Yet glimpses of transnational exchanges between feminists abound in the book, for instance when we learn of Beatrice hosting Tunisian-French defence lawyer Gisele Halimi (who worked on the Bobigny abortion trial that led to legislative change in France) for the UN International Women’s Year in 1975, or when we read that WEL had an antecedent in the United States.

Brett could perhaps have said more about the internationalism of the women’s movement at this time. As Rosa Campbell has argued, the Abortion Law Reform Association, of which Faust was president, explicitly drew on British legal precedent to pressure for abortion reform and launch test cases that expanded abortion rights, and abortion activists shepherded women from New Zealand to Australian abortion clinics, often meeting them at airports dressed in red coats.

As with her award-winning biography of Australia’s second prime minister, The Enigmatic Mr Deakin, Brett has access to a tantalising trove of personal papers that help make her book both a feminist biography and a history of how Beatrice gave meaning to her own experiences through philosophy, literature and technology specific to the mid-to-late twentieth century.

“All biographers are voyeurs on the life of another, but few would have such open access as I did to their subject’s sexual desires and disappointments, nor to their deep fears and insecurities,” writes Brett of the extensive diaries, family papers, notebooks and correspondence she was able to use to reconstruct Beatrice’s life. It is in this wealth of private papers that Brett encounters a woman who is at once typical of her generation — whose sexuality as a site of pleasure rather than mere reproduction was shaped by the introduction of the Pill; who wanted more from life than marriage and motherhood; whose friendships formed the basis of her activism; who placed sexuality at the forefront of her politics — yet also saw herself as radically unique.

Beatrice felt different from other women because of her assertive sexual style, which she evidenced in her capacity to separate sexual pleasure from emotion, her response to visual stimuli and her early sexual development. “I am one of a group of women, which Kinsey numbers at three per thousand of his sample, who can remember masturbating to orgasm before the age of three,” she wrote in a published memoir. She made sense of her body’s feelings not through feminist thought but in the writings of sexologists — Havelock Ellis, the Kinsey reports, Masters and Johnson — all of which led to what might appear to us as a rather essentialist, binarised, biologically deterministic view of sexuality.

Men and women simply had different sexualities and sexual styles, she argued, and as she herself didn’t fit into the feminine model she concluded she must be masculine. The writers she drew on could not easily imagine a powerful female sexual style, except that it looked masculine, and by the 1980s Beatrice identified as androgynous. In the eighties and nineties, from this concoction of self-defined masculine sexuality, existentialism and civil libertarianism, Beatrice formulated fervent defences of pornography and railed against “victim feminism’s” focus on rape.

The chapters on Beatrice’s writings — both public and private — about sexuality make for fascinating reading, particularly in light of our current conversations about the proliferation of pornography and its links to increased violence against women. Like her views on paedophilia, the argument that pornography contributes neither to women’s subordinate status nor to higher rates of violence now appear woefully dated.

I agreed to review this biography, I confess, because it felt like a duty I should perform. I first came across Beatrice — as the founder of the Women’s Electoral Lobby — in high school, and I went on to loathe her when, as a university activist, I saw her as a conservative, liberal, twinset-and-pearls-wearing commentator who seemed to hate radical feminists. Finally, as an academic, I came to a grudging appreciation of what she achieved through pragmatic reform.

Brett’s book introduced me to a wildly different person. Fearless Beatrice Faust is an apt title, but it could also have been called the fretful, riotously funny, exquisitely fashionable and utterly fascinating Beatrice Faust. •

Fearless Beatrice Faust: Sex, Feminism and Body Politics
By Judith Brett | Text Publishing | $36.99 | 304 pages

The post Body politics appeared first on Inside Story.

Hill began work on this form of violence in 2015. As a journalist she took a deep dive into women’s and children’s stories and how our politicians, courts and policy makers respond to them. She was determined to change how she and her colleagues reported on domestic abuse.

Nine months into the first year she told Guardian readers that she had started out thinking domestic violence was an extension of the worst behaviour any of us might show when we take out our distress on those who are closest to us. This notion was demolished within weeks of asking questions of victim-survivors and sector workers and listening carefully to the answers. At the heart of domestic violence, she learnt, is power and control. Those driven by this need, and by a sense of entitlement to power and control, frequently hide it from everyone but their victims.

The idea that the good bloke you work with might be going home and abusing those closest to him seemed counter-intuitive. “Domestic violence doesn’t make sense,” she wrote, but “for the thousands suffering in silence at this very moment — we need to make sense of it.”

In the intervening decade Hill has done much to illuminate the dynamics between perpetrators, victim-survivors and the systems that hold and reject them. During a time when the issue has become highly politicised, her accounts of domestic and family violence have reached a wider audience than most researchers, policy-makers or service providers ever reach. Her work has been both lauded and sharply criticised, but she remains fearless, determined and committed.

Watching policy shifts and frustrating continuities over those years has inevitably changed Hill’s views. Losing It is evidence of a broadening of perspective and a willingness, for the sake of getting it right, to challenge some of the people most deeply involved in efforts to prevent domestic and family violence — those whose work has been crucial in earlier stages of her passage towards the positions she outlines in this essay.

For those of us who might have hoped that the increasing visibility of domestic, family and sexual violence was primarily an effect of higher rates of awareness and reporting, the most alarming message of Losing it is that numbers are climbing. The “one a week” statistic that shocked the nation in 2015 no longer captures the extent of the violence.

Hill was writing in November 2024, when Donald Trump, a known sex offender, had just been elected president for the second time. Despite record levels of public funding and awareness, sixty-nine Australian women had already been killed during the calendar year by their current or former intimate partners. Those working in the sector were feeling “bone-tired,” Hill writes, in the face of this increase in violence. She pays homage to the thousands who are working to end gendered violence and positions herself as an “insider–outsider” of their communities.

Hill writes with a sense of urgency. While gendered violence is a problem that is often described as intractable, she reports on a fast-changing cultural and political landscape that, she argues, policy-makers have failed to keep up with. Hill zeros in on the nation’s primary prevention strategy Change the Story: A Shared Framework for the Primary Prevention of Violence Against Women and Their Children in Australia, a suite of educational resources for schools, workplaces and elsewhere launched in 2015 with great optimism and fanfare to tackle the drivers of gendered violence. For Hill, the government overinvested funding and faith in this intensely resourced project, which was the centrepiece of the federal response. Despite unchanged attitudes and increased violence, Change the Story remains at the centre of national violence-prevention policy.

Part of the problem is what Hill calls The Backlash Factory. At the top of this system are governments run by figures like Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin that have pushed back against international rights and recognition for marginalised people. The next level down are the wealthy right-wing Christian organisations, Russian oligarchs and think tanks fuelling disinformation and targeting LGBTQI and reproductive rights, anti-racism advocates and those working for other progressive movements. The Andrew Tates of the world — who are “really just the guys on the factory floor” — occupy the third level down, facilitating tech-based violence and seeking to render the public sphere uninhabitable for women, girls and LGBTQI folks and their advocates. “Broadcasting prevention messages into this febrile and dangerous atmosphere is not just difficult,” Hill writes, “but fraught with risk.”

This is all context for considering the results of Australia’s Gender Compass survey, carried out by Plan International, which leave a confusing picture of understandings and attitudes to gender inequality among men and women across a range of age groups. What the survey results don’t reveal is any attitudinal transformation as a result of Change the Story.

Probing further, Hill investigates political divisions in Canberra over the theory of change that underlies the prevention strategy. Here she explains the “Nordic Paradox”: the Nordic countries’ above-average rates of both gender equality and gendered violence. That anomaly has been a cause for pause among some within the federal Department of Social Services, who argue that focusing on gender equality and changed gender norms draws attention and material resources away from other key causes of violence, namely alcohol, gambling and childhood trauma.

Those factors are the elephants in the room that some claim have been buried in government responses — despite the overwhelming evidence of their significance gathered by royal commissions and in academic research. Much of the rest of Losing It is devoted to these issues.

As usual, Hill’s account features many compelling case studies. One family introduced early and revisited throughout is Theresa and her three children. When they eventually escaped an abuser who had subjected them to physical, sexual and psychological violence, Theresa tried to find help for her children. There was nothing; their case was considered too complex. Theresa’s two sons and daughter soon began exhibiting their own range of challenging and violent behaviours. “She had become their full-time caseworker,” writes Hill, “even as she was forced to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars fighting for the right to be their full-time parent.”

Mothers like Theresa, says Hill, “are Australia’s unofficial reserve army of prevention agents.” The point resonates: just last week I attended the South Australian premier of Unanswered Calls, a documentary produced by Safe Steps, a provider of immediate crisis support for people experiencing domestic and family violence in Victoria. Building on research into systems outside of Australia by Churchill fellow Chelsea Tobin, the film reflects on how that state’s post–royal commission systems respond to the needs of children and young people. A number of young people tell their story of feeling invisible in the system, not knowing how to seek help, and trying and failing to take care of their own wounds without becoming a further burden on their mothers.

Hill describes trajectories like these as the two stages of violence that young people face: the violence caused by the perpetrator and that caused by the failure of the system to make a receptive space for their needs. Seeing Unanswered Calls and reading Losing It gave me a sense that there is a groundswell of commitment to tackling this crucial part of the domestic and family violence picture. Hill argues that adequate specialist services for children whose mothers are victims, who have been directly targeted themselves, or who are victims by dint of their proximity to violence would create a future strikingly different from the present.

Without help, young people are at risk of being re-victimised or becoming perpetrators in their intimate relationships. Hill discusses a rare study of young people’s experiences of intimate partner violence undertaken by Anglicare in Tasmania that interviewed youth workers and their clients. It found that the rate of gendered violence for teenagers was high and featured high rates of serious assault. “Just anecdotally,” one youth worker said, “young women are in more physically violent relationships than older women.”

This chimes with a statistic cited by Hill earlier in the essay. While the sexual abuse of young people by adults has declined, the sexual abuse of young people by their peers is on the rise. The worst parts of the online world, inhabited by young men especially, can’t be ignored in this picture. But neither can the histories of abuse that are carried by young victims. Losing It argues that attending to their inner worlds as close to the point of victimisation as possible, and regulating alcohol consumption and gambling, are the best chances we have at preventing intergenerational cycles of violence.

In other words, Change the Story can’t do the prevention work alone. Its effects, arguably nebulous, are too far removed from the acute settings that are shaping young victim-survivors’ lives. This is Hill’s pivotal message. After establishing the centrality of power and control in See What You Made Me Do, she has followed her own advice to remain curious, and in Losing It she attempts to answer the question “where does this need for power and control come from?”

“We’ve long agreed on a narrative about abusive men: that they do it for power and control…,” she writes. “But a two-dimensional framing of abusive men as powerful and privileged fails to recognise that they too have a complex inner world.” Hill argues persuasively that no matter how unappetising it may seem to explore the vulnerabilities of those inflicting abuses on women and children, understanding perpetrator pathways is crucial if we want to have a chance at stopping the violence at the start.

For those of us immersed in analysing the vagaries of hegemonic masculinity and its dividends for men, past and present, this is the element in prevention that feels like more emotional labour that will fall disproportionately to women who are already doing the heavy lifting. But Hill makes a compelling case that preventing violence involves not just transforming the big picture but training our lens on the source. •

Losing It: Can We Stop Violence Against Women And Children?
By Jess Hill | Quarterly Essay/Black Inc. | $29.99 | 128 pages

The post Inner worlds appeared first on Inside Story.

Niall adeptly distils her own biographical quest into a hook for the reader. In her 2005 Seymour Biography Lecture, published last year in Chris Wallace’s collection Telling Lives, she recalls the lack of interest in biography-writing among her fellow literature academics in the first decades of her university career. In the 1950s and 60s, the literary text was everything: “If we had thought [biography] belonged anywhere in a university, we would have consigned it to history.”

As attitudes began to change in the 1980s, Niall had an opportunity to write the biography of Australian novelist Martin Boyd. Gaining access to his diaries, she wasn’t immediately drawn to the “humdrum record” of his later life. But his final entries, as he faced death in a diminished financial and physical state, moved her. She was drawn to the disconnect between the melancholy of the diaries and the joviality of his public persona. “It was from that point,” she writes, “—contemplating the way Boyd faced his death — that I felt I wanted to know the beginnings… I knew there was a story to tell.”

Beyond the initial quest, Niall’s biographies are shaped by the obstacles she encounters. In Boyd’s case, it was the delicate matters of his sexuality and convict ancestry. The latter had caused Boyd’s family to put a stop to an earlier biography by the impeccably credentialled literary journalist Geoffrey Dutton.

Niall puts her relative success with Boyd’s literary executor down to timing, and it’s true that the intervening twelve years had softened attitudes to both homosexuality and convict origins. But, reading Niall’s biographies, it’s easy to see how her sensitive navigation of controversies and uncertainties has made it hard for descendants to reject the lives she has recreated.

After Boyd, Niall went on to write nine more biographies, of which a few are group biographies and the remainder single subjects. Two of them were written in the last decade of her working life and the other eight — including 2020’s group biography Friends and Rivals, on the fresh connections she uncovered between Australian writers Ethel Turner, Barbara Baynton, Nettie Palmer and Henry Handel Richardson, and now Joan Lindsay — in her “retirement.”

Niall’s challenge in writing Lindsay’s biography was neither possessive nephews nor secret lovers. In setting out to solve the mystery of what in the writer’s inner and outer lives led her to produce her “one remarkable novel” at such an age, the clearest problem was a lack of archival material and definitive information about her subject’s motivations. Lindsay was one of those letter burners whose long life gave her plenty of time to curate her archive. And her 1962 memoir Time Without Clocks was more a slice-of-life than a tell-all, which was typical, says Niall, among women of her generation and class who were “schooled in decorum” and shirked from writing or talking about themselves.

Faced with a similar, or even more extreme, dearth of material, some biographers have turned to what’s called speculative biography. An advocate for this approach, and co-editor of the textbook Speculative Biography, Kiera Lindsey pieced together the story of her forebear Mary Ann Gill from scant evidence to write her 2016 biography The Convict’s Daughter. Her more recent Wild Love, about the Sydney-born nineteenth century artist Adelaide Ironside, saw her fill the gaps in a slightly larger, but sometimes untrustworthy, archive by imagining Ironside’s response to documented events.

Other biographies — including Kerrie Davies’s Miles Franklin Undercover, published this month — use wide-ranging archival and printed sources to reconstruct their subject’s world, but Brenda Niall’s Joan Lindsay isn’t one of them.

In writing about Joan Lindsay nee à Beckett Weigell, a cousin of Martin Boyd, Niall uses her knowledge of Melbourne’s wealthy and artistic early-twentieth-century milieu, and builds on it with imagination. But instead of using novelistic techniques, she speculates in a more transparent way.

Niall becomes a character in the narrative, whispering in the reader’s ear: “It may be…,” “It is likely…,” “Perhaps…” Each insight becomes “a trail of breadcrumbs” that helps answer that question of how Joan accrued the qualities and experiences that enabled her to write her most powerful work. Exploring Joan’s privileged background, for example, Niall considers the personal slights that may explain the heightened emotional register of certain characters in Picnic at Hanging Rock.

Born in 1896 in the Melbourne suburb of St Kilda, with a barrister father and a maternal grandfather who was once the governor of Tasmania, Lindsay had grown up in a twenty-four-room house with two Steinway grand pianos. Young women’s freedoms were so severely restricted that many were brought to a point of crisis. Ignored by her parents as the unwanted third daughter rather than the hoped-for son, Joan saw herself as an outsider when she was sent to a local girls’ school at thirteen and tried, “perhaps too hard,” to catch up.

Seeing in Joan’s early history the bullied-to-death character Sara of her novel “may be a stretch too far,” Niall writes. But in Joan’s memoirs she finds traces of the “shame and humiliation” the author amplified in fictional form.

Structural sexism, continually surfacing in the biography as an inhibition on Joan’s capacity to write, eventually forms a theme of her major work. In early adulthood, she didn’t want the usual middle-class girl’s life of meaningless social events while she waited for someone to marry her. But she also felt educationally ill-equipped for an early hope of a career in architecture. Instead, because she “wanted to do something,” she enrolled at the National Gallery of Victoria’s art school.

At art school Joan built the visual sense that would enable her to create the environment of her novel. She was taught by the artist Fred McCubbin, who depicted the ill-ease of settler colonists in a beautiful but hostile landscape. Niall beautifully evokes the ambivalence in the artist’s rendering of the Australian bush in his painting The Lost Child to show how it influenced Lindsay: “The softness of the light, and the touches of pale blue and golden-brown undergrowth, claim and enclose the child. There is no way out; the barrier of saplings makes its final statement in a way that is almost comforting.”

Niall echoes this ambivalence in her portrayal of Joan’s marriage to artist and National Gallery of Victoria director Daryl Lindsay. Perhaps, she ventures, Joan gave up art in favour of writing because Daryl was struggling to prove himself under the shadow of his talented artist brothers Norman and Lionel. He lacked the sure standing to compete with a talented artist wife.

Without any clear evidence about Joan’s feelings about the marriage, Niall breathes life into the silences. She has enough clues to strongly indicate Joan’s unease at her husband’s obsession with ballerinas and his close friendship, and possible romance, with gallery colleague Ursula Hoff. On Hoff, Niall puts it succinctly after comparing the two women’s status in the gallery as employee and wife: “The two women didn’t become friends.”

Niall makes clear that the marriage was a major obstacle in Joan’s creative career, but she doesn’t emphasise victimhood in this case of wifedom. Joan won the battle over where to live — Australia rather than Daryl’s preference for England — and had more opportunity to write than most women of her generation. The decades she spent supporting Daryl’s career rather than fulfilling hers saw her writing art criticism — though barely credited — as well as “playlets” to be performed for Vivien Leigh and Lawrence Olivier, Keith and Elisabeth Murdoch, and other guests at the couple’s rural property. Daryl’s reference to his wife’s “minor talent” as a visual artist in his 1965 memoir may have been a significant catalyst for the anger and determination she needed to write her novel, but he did praise her writing ability.

Even if I wasn’t always convinced by Niall’s suppositions, they are offered with an openness to alternatives. When Joan is seen visiting the set of the Picnic at Hanging Rock film and embracing the actor Anne Lambert, I’m not sure her “tearful reaction” really was a sign that the character in her novel represented the child she was unable to have. But Niall allows space for another interpretation — that perhaps she was overwhelmed at the physical manifestation of her imagination.

Niall is assured in judging her subjects according to the behaviours and ideologies of their time. While she stresses that Lindsay wouldn’t have been aware of the First Nations history of her novel’s setting, she shows that the novelist was at least asking the question, “to whom did the earth belong?” Clearly not to the girls in long white muslin dresses who emerged into the landscape of Lindsay’s tale from their Anglophile institution and were swallowed whole.

Niall’s fellow nonagenarian writer David Malouf told Susan Johnson last year that he has little interest in biography “because what the writer herself or himself has to say in letters and diaries is always more interesting than anything a biographer says about them.” I’d challenge him to read Niall’s Joan Lindsay. As Brenda Niall stresses in Telling Lives, the art of biography involves creating something with “a life of its own.” •

Joan Lindsay: The Hidden Life of the Woman Who Wrote Picnic at Hanging Rock
By Brenda Niall | Text Publishing | $36.99 | 288 pages

The post Whispering in the reader’s ear appeared first on Inside Story.

Darian is the daughter of seventy-two-year-old Gisèle Pélicot, who in 2024 became the world’s most high-profile rape survivor, as well as a hero to feminists in France and beyond. Darian lovingly describes her as the “strongest, most admirable woman I know.” Her mother “is like a medieval queen — chin up, head high, never the slightest complaint.”

It’s a portrait that fits with what the public has come to know of Gisèle Pélicot. During a sixteen-week trial more than fifty men stood accused of raping her, many times over, while she was unconscious, across more than a decade, led by the man who had been her husband for fifty years. Determined that “shame must change sides,” the trail was, at Gisèle’s request, a public one, held in the provincial French city of Avignon. Waiving the right to anonymity, she displayed extraordinary courage, dignity and generosity throughout, in the face of a seemingly bottomless pit of alleged and documented abuses against her.

With media coverage ranging from the predictably sensationalist to long-form essays about the trial’s wider implications, the facts as they were laid out remained shocking in every iteration. From the bracing purview of Darian, they are even more so: “My father not only drugged and raped his wife for almost ten years without her knowledge, but he also served her up — for sheer voyeuristic pleasure, with no money changing hands — to more than eighty random strangers, most of whom he recruited via the hookup site Coco.gg.”

These words, their affecting precision, have come with time. At first exposure, the “facts” delivered by police to Darian and her family were an “alien presence, a crushing weight we will have to carry for the rest of our lives.”

Darian’s is not a book about the trial, which ended in December with Dominique Pélicot convicted of aggravated rape, among other charges, and sentenced to twenty years in prison. A further forty-seven men were convicted of rape, two of attempted rape and two of sexual assault. Seventeen of them have since appealed their convictions and sentences, setting the stage for another trial in late 2025.

The book opens on the eve of what Darian knows will be an unprecedented trial. First published in France in 2022, while investigations were still ongoing, I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again has now been updated and translated into English. We learn that between the first edition and this one, Darian helped launch a French movement called “Stop Chemical Submission (#Mendorspas): Don’t Put Me Under” to “create awareness of the problem and help prevent it.” Like sexual violence more broadly, chemical submission is more likely to be perpetrated by someone already known to the victim than not. “Date rape” drugs like GHB (often known as GBH) may grab the headlines, but as her mother’s case shows, perpetrators are more likely to use the tranquilisers and sleeping pills found in the typical medicine cabinet.

With a job in communications, Darian conveys the key points about chemical submission effectively. There’s no doubt her advocacy has been useful to the cause, and will continue to be. But despite her book’s new subtitle, Turning our Family Trauma of Chemical Submission into a Collective Flight, there is no escaping that hers is primarily an account of family trauma, or what she describes late in the book as her “chronicle of horror and survival.”

Without tipping over into melodrama or clichés — easy to do, given the circumstances and the challenge of putting them into words — Darian evocatively captures the “cataclysmic” impact of her father’s crimes on those closest to him. Theirs was a close family, taking in her parents, her two brothers and their wives and children, and Darian’s husband Paul and young son Tom. With her father expelled, it remains so, albeit radically altered, and not without temporary divisions as Dominique makes pleas for help from prison.

Mother and daughter have different “ways to cope with extraordinary circumstances.” At first, Gisèle disassociates, retreating into cleaning; Darian has a panic attack and is temporarily admitted to a psychiatric ward. As the investigation unfolds, Darian wants to know the details; for Gisèle, the primary victim, they can be too much to bear. While her mother expresses the thought that she “must have failed” her husband “in some way over the years,” Darian stays firm in her resolution never to speak to him again. Instead, she reappraises their relationship and his character, his weaknesses and duplicities freshly and starkly apparent.

As indicated by the book’s title and the surname she has chosen for publication — an amalgamation of the names of her elder and younger brothers, David and Florian — Caroline Darian no longer wishes to identify as the daughter of Dominique Pélicot. She is tormented by two photographs the police found in her father’s digital files. They show Darian in bed, partly clothed, deep in sleep (she’s usually a light sleeper), possibly drugged. Now, “everywhere I look,” writes Darian, “I see shadows of my father’s dark side.” (Since the trial, where evidence also included photographs Dominique had taken of his daughters-in-law without their knowledge, Darian has been firm in her conviction that her father drugged and assault her too — an accusation he has continued to deny.)

Still, in the first year, Darian confesses that she misses the father, the one “who looked after me for forty-two years,” the one from before, the man she loved “so much.” She directly addresses passages to him throughout the book until they no longer serve a purpose.

Marked by dates, some chapters are as brief as her original notebook entries while others are more recognisably in memoir form as Darian revisits earlier episodes in her life for signs and clues. Her ignorance of her father’s actions — which now explain her mother’s health problems and odd behaviour over the years — makes her feel “almost culpable.”

Darian’s tone veers from no-nonsense to piercing, the pages flooded with both emotional turmoil and hard-won clarity. Whenever her burden is somehow eased, whether by her staunch husband, caring friends or access to proper psychiatric care, she wishes the same for other victims not so privileged. As more men are arrested she thinks of what awaits their young children “as they grow up — the same abyss; the same ruptured, tainted bonds; the same need to cut themselves free, whatever it costs.”

There will be other books about the Pélicot case — or rather the Mazan case, to name the village where Dominque had no trouble recruiting local men to rape his unconscious wife. Some will be as lurid and voyeuristic as the worst press coverage. It’s to be hoped that others will shift some of the media glare from Gisèle towards “ordinary” men like Dominique Pélicot and the other convicted defendants — some of whom continue to insist that what they did was not rape — and the wider culture, technologies and pharmaceuticals that enabled them. But there will be no other books like Darian’s arresting account of the aftermath of her father’s “destruction,” alerting readers to the ripple effects of sexual violence on its direct and indirect victims.

At the conclusion of the trial, Gisèle Pélicot delivered a short statement. While the hearings were a “very difficult ordeal,” she has “never regretted the decision” to “open the doors” for “all of society to be a witness to the debates which took place here.”  Thanking all who supported her, she made special mention of “all the other families affected by this tragedy” and of the “unrecognised victims whose stories often remain in the shadows. I want you to know we share the same fight.” Darian’s memoir is offered in the same spirit: mother and daughter turn out to be not so different after all. •

I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again: Turning our Family Trauma of Chemical Submission into a Collective Flight
By Caroline Darian | Bonnier | $32.99 | 224 pages

The post Before and after appeared first on Inside Story.

The stories Yuan Yang tells in her new book, Private Revolutions, concern women from a more recent time. She meets them during the Xi Jinping era, when the Cultural Revolution is a distant memory. China has long since become the world’s largest factory, its economy now second only to that of the United States. It is emerging as a leader in AI, a technology used to monitor its citizens more closely than was possible even under Mao. “Since the mid-2010s,” Yang writes, “deepening political repression and censorship has made it ever more difficult to gain intimate access to Chinese interviewees.”

The book’s narrative is structured around the lives of just four women, although more again make an appearance in its pages. Like Yang herself, they belong to the post-Mao generation. Three of the four — along with the mother of Sam, the fourth — were born in the countryside. Two, Leiya and Siyue, were “left-behind” children, cared for by their grandparents while their parents worked far away. For them, migration meant moving from the countryside to the city. Participants in the greatest wave of population movement in history, they have been bit-players in the transformation of China.

Their migration routes varied. June crams her way through to a local university somewhere in south China (precise home locations are never mentioned) and finally makes it to a job and a two-bedroomed flat in Beijing. Siyue climbs a step-ladder of central-Chinese places, from village through town to provincial city before finally, like June, making it to Beijing. Leiya simply follows in the footsteps of her parents and goes to Shenzhen, the booming heart of trade and industry in the Reform Era. Sam was born and grew up in Shenzhen, her parents belonging to an earlier cohort of rural migrants.

To the extent that these women journey from countryside to city, overcome obstacles to secure employment, work long hours for a pittance, seize the main chance, learn from experience and make courageous decisions about how to turn their lives around, their stories are similar to those told by journalist Leslie Chang in her 2008 book Factory Girls. Private Revolutions is not the page-turner Factory Girls is, but the thematic overlap between the two books is pronounced, and it is worth asking what Yuan Yang brings to the page that is new.

There is in fact much, beginning with her vantage point. Chang is consciously American. Chinese is her second language. Yuan Yang is British — indeed, was recently elected Labour MP for the new seat of Earley and Woodley. But she was born in China, her old home is still standing, and her grandparents, whom she visited every summer while growing up in far-away England, are still alive. Chang is a participant observer. Yang is at once more of a reporter and more of an insider. She left China when she was four. Yearning brought her back. It is difficult to avoid the impression that in tracing the lives of her four subjects she is exploring roads not taken.

Her cast of characters, too, is different. Chang’s factory girls didn’t yet have children, didn’t advance through the education system and didn’t become involved in politics. Readers of Private Revolutions, by contrast, get an up-close view of the education system: the exhausting struggle of migrant workers to get their children into a good school; the additional problem of doing so for children born out of wedlock; the capacity of ordinary people to take advantage of self-help education advancement; the fixation on university education; and finally some remarkable success stories. For some of these women, education was a way of bypassing the factory.

For two of Yang’s subjects, the national preoccupation with education also provides careers: June finds a position with an edutech company promoting online learning; the enterprising Siyue sets up an education company that delivers English-language tuition to simultaneously anxious and ambitious parents. The remarkable Leiya works her way up through the gruelling factory system, so powerfully described in Chang’s book, but finally steps outside it to become a community worker supporting migrant workers and their families. Among her undertakings is a project to encourage women to read at home to their children.

To some degree, Yang’s four women seem to live under the radar, propelled in different directions in accordance with their own decisions and ability to exploit available resources. But the state inevitably makes an appearance. The problem of hukou or residential registration, which bedevils the lives of all rural migrants, early emerges as a constraint on the women’s lives. Yang remarks at one stage that it was easier for her parents to acquire UK citizenship than it is for a rural migrant in China to gain urban registration and the privileges it offers in education and healthcare. Sam’s mother had achieved the near impossible, allowing Sam, of all these women, the greatest level of security and social advantage. A PhD helps smooth the way to a change of registration: June, a university graduate with a rural hukou, ponders in her twenties whether five more years of university is worth it.

The state features most obviously in the story of Sam, a born-again socialist and labour activist who rails against the travesty of socialism pursued by the contemporary Communist Party and finds herself marched off for interrogation by a posse of no less than ten (male) police. But it appears elsewhere, too. The government’s announcement of a new three-child family policy, a reminder of its intrusion into private life over many decades, meets with groans from women in the migrant village where Leiya works. They dread the pressure to have another child to help stem the country’s falling birth rate.

Yang’s focus on women is almost entirely to the exclusion of the men in their lives, who appear on the sidelines as bosses, business partners and occasionally fathers or partners. The free-wheeling personal lives of young women described in Factory Girls are evident again in Private Revolutions.

Siyue becomes pregnant to a boyfriend who subsequently leaves China, and her. She is thirty-one and decides to have the child, recruiting her mother, Sulan, to help. Sulan’s basic model of parenting is her brother-in-law, who would as soon hit his children as look at them; Siyue has to retrain her in modern parenting methods. She is glad to be a single mother: her friends find life with their partners burdensome. In fact, research on domestic violence in China — not a topic specifically mentioned in this book — shows authoritarian family structures intact, underpinning relatively high rates of intimate partner violence.

Leiya, too, has a child with her boyfriend, although later marrying him. She has to alter the date on her wedding certificate to avoid her child falling victim to the many bureaucratic penalties for children born out of wedlock. There are millions of these children in China, and it is only the precipitate decline in the birth rate that has encouraged a reversal of the government policy that punished unlicensed childbirth with fines.

June, meanwhile, displays attitudes towards marriage and children that are common among young, educated, professional women. She will probably marry her long-term boyfriend but doesn’t even want to think about children yet: maybe in her forties?

Written in plain prose, the book is organised chronologically, with the lives of the four women unfolding in alternating segments. This can make for disjointed reading experience, but you can always opt to choose your own adventure — as you well might in the case of Sam’s story — and skip some pages to find out what happened next.  An extended preface, really a prologue, provides general factual information about Chinese politics and society. The writer makes no assumptions about readers’ prior knowledge, perhaps correctly so. One Cambridge professor has recommended the book as providing “a fascinating perspective on a country we will have to learn more about in the years ahead” — this about a country that has been recognised as a superpower since at least the turn of the century.

The perspective Yang offers is not absolutely clear. The women’s stories are presented dispassionately and she largely refrains from critical intervention. She writes in her preface about China’s increasingly difficult political situation, but having found a basis for optimism in the lives of these resilient women she ends on a note of hope. From the Buddhist monks of Emei Mountain she has learnt that the only constant in life is change. Below the mountain flows the Emei River, beside which she lived as a child. It calls her back to the land of her ancestors, for which she wistfully desires better outcomes than seem to her likely under the present regime. •

Private Revolutions: Coming of Age in a New China
By Yuan Yang | Bloomsbury | $34.99 | 320 pages

The post After the factory girls appeared first on Inside Story.

“Oh. Tip Truck Cake,” she says. “Bitch of a cake. Don’t make it. Unless you are really desperate.”

Clark was speaking to the ABC in 2018 about the Weekly’s most famous cookbook, The Australian Women’s Weekly’s Children’s Birthday Cake Book. I’ve not heard the audio but I assume there was laughter inside her comment. A sense of humour is surely an essential ingredient in baking, especially when it’s for children. For the non-bakers out there: the birthday cake book has been reprinted at least twenty-five times since it was first published in 1980 and has cult status online.

Clark’s advice is lost on me because when my kids were little I was about as likely to make a Tip Truck Cake as I was to acquire an actual tip truck and fly it to the moon and back. Instead I settled for that 1970s classic, the chocolate ripple cake, which is a no-bake, no-shame, never-fail gift to the exhausted single parent. I still reprise it occasionally at Christmas for my grown-up kids. Never had a complaint.

Women’s magazines: my mother never bought them. It wasn’t just that money was always tight, it was because of Mum’s silent rejection of the unattainable ideals dangled about in them. I therefore bring some detachment to my reading of Samuelsson’s book and also to Sue Walker’s biography of her grandfather, The Untold Story of William Shum, published earlier this year. Shum was founding editor of New Idea and Australian Home Beautiful.

Samuelsson makes a convincing case for the ubiquity of the Australian Women’s Weekly, its “omnipresence” in Australian households in its heyday from the 1930s to the 1980s. Circulation peaked in the 1970s at a million a week, with an average of 850,000. Between 1933 and 1982 the magazine published thirty-one cookbooks, and Samuelsson quotes with approval its own claim, made in 1982, that “most families would have sat down to a meal prepared from a Women’s Weekly recipe.”

Not my family. When you work full time, as Mum did, and also have to get dinner for a family of five on the table seven days a week (we never ate out or had takeaway), how can cooking be anything but a chore? At some point in the 1980s, though, Mum found in an op-shop a tatty old copy of a book called The I Hate to Cookbook by the American humourist Peg Bracken, first published in 1960, and fell upon it gleefully.

The book was the result of Bracken and some of her friends having “pooled their ignorance” and tossed together the recipes they “swore by instead of at.” I don’t think we ever cooked from it but Mum and I used to giggle together over recipes for “Stayabed Stew,” “Skid Road Stroganoff” and “Hurry Curry.”

In 1960, when home-making was still thought to be the height of any woman’s ambition (although times were about to change), Bracken’s book was transgressive, and its message a magnificent gift from mother to daughter: that it is perfectly okay not to enjoy cooking. As it happens I do, but if not, so what? Naturally it was Mum who taught me that chocolate ripple cake will do just fine.

I am saddened though that she couldn’t relax and enjoy herself a little with what the Weekly had to offer. Women’s participation in the workforce was rising swiftly in the 1960s and, as Samuelsson notes, the Weekly responded with practical advice. In 1972 it published The Busy Woman’s Cookbook; I wish we’d had a copy of that.

Foundational to the Weekly’s success with food was its famous test kitchen, established in 1934 and enlarged in 1962. The aim was to inspire readers’ trust by triple-testing its recipes before publication. Little knowledge was assumed, so home cooks knew the recipes would work. Samuelsson conducted a survey of 161 Weekly readers and was told by one of them that she “didn’t enjoy cooking” but “wanted to be good at it.”

The magazine’s cookery pages and books were well-produced and illustrated, and the food editors highly trained. I greatly enjoyed reading about these respected professional women, beginning with Margaret Shepherd, appointed in 1933. She was trained in domestic science and nutrition, and her approach, carried on by her successors, was to offer readers practical, nutritious and economical recipes based on the “science” of cooking. From the 1950s the role became more glamourous and there was a shift, as Samuelsson puts it, “away from nutrition towards exhibition” — and to cosmopolitanism and consumerism.

Acknowledging the traditional narrative that the food eaten by Australians before postwar migrants arrived was “boring,” Samuelsson makes a case for the Weekly having promoted “foreign food” to its readers from the 1930s. In reality many of us will remember family food remaining boring until well into the 1970s, but by then interest in many different cuisines, Chinese in particular, was strong. The Weekly’s Chinese Cooking Class Cookbook, published in 1978, has been reprinted fifteen times.

Samuelsson devotes a chapter to the magazine’s obsession with dieting, which began once memories of wartime shortages and rationing had faded in the 1950s. Henceforth, food pages abounded with diet plans, dieting contests, weight charts and real-life weight-loss stories from housewives and celebrities asserting that being slim — attaining the “ideal figure”— would lead to happiness.

Men should consider dieting too, readers were told in 1962. But they were “complete imbeciles” about their health, so it was up to women to keep them at a healthy weight. For men, apparently, weight-loss was about health, but for women it was about appearance.

In her chapter on dinner parties and barbecues, Samuelsson reveals the magazine’s ruminations on male cooking, which amounted to this: Australian men rarely cook. If they do, it’s as a hobby, and they prefer it to involve meat. But when they put their minds to it, they will inevitably be better cooks than women.

Readers might be left seething, but Samuelsson remains calm. She holds her subject in affectionate regard and knows that many of her readers will too. She balances nostalgia with a clear-eyed analysis of the double-standards espoused by the Weekly, and wears her scholarship lightly. The book is beautifully written and illustrated.

Although it is amply referenced, reflecting its origins as a PhD thesis, A Matter of Taste has otherwise been forced on a crash diet and lost much of the contextual discussion I assume it once had concerning other cookery publications in twentieth-century Australia. Margaret Fulton’s bestselling cookbooks, for instance, once jostled for space on the same kitchen benches as the Weekly, but Fulton is mentioned by Samuelsson only in the acknowledgments.

What of the decades-old tradition of community and fund-raising cookbooks that carried on (and still does) despite the Weekly’s “omnipresence” in Australian homes? Samuelsson ignores them. Yet all through this period, stalwarts from countless community organisations, notably the Country Women’s Association, kept churning out their little spiral-bound collections of reader-contributed recipes. If the Weekly can be held responsible for the decline of local culinary traditions, we are not to know.

And then there were rival magazines. Samuelsson mostly avoids them, but New Idea had always been there, established back in 1902 by publisher T. Shaw Fitchett (son of the famous Methodist preacher and writer W.H. Fitchett). New Idea’s first editor, William Shum, spent twenty-three years on the magazine before shifting to another new venture, the Keith Murdoch-owned Australian Home Beautiful, for a further twenty years until his retirement in 1945 (or 1946; two dates are given). Thus, his magazines came into people’s homes every month for forty-three years at a time when, his biographer Sue Walker tells us, “magazines were the most powerful influence on the way people lived.”

Shum was born in Bendigo in 1875, son of a prosperous storekeeper of English and German stock (Schum, originally). Orphaned at fourteen, he and his older sister Ada were taken in by a local family, John and Jennie Harcourt. John was a newspaper proprietor, and after he gave William a job in his business it was clear that the young man had found his métier. He never looked back.

Harcourt sold his business in 1896 and moved with his family, and the young Shums, to Melbourne. Through connections with the Methodist church, William found a job with the Fitchett family publishing business, and in 1905 married Edith Moore, daughter of a prominent Bendigo family. Edith’s brother William Moore became a well-known journalist and art critic, a lifelong friend to William Shum and a regular contributor to Shum’s magazines.

“Home, garden and way of life”: Frank Hedley Sanders’s cover illustration for the September 1927 edition of the Australian Home Beautiful.

Walker devotes about a third of her book to Shum’s antecedents and early years but amid digressions and diversions tends to lose sight of her biographical subject. But she does clearly establish the talents and characteristics that made him a successful editor: his energy, sociability, curiosity and interest in new technologies. He had a wide circle of friends in Melbourne’s literary and artistic circles and was himself a talented amateur photographer.

At home in Brighton Shum would potter about developing his photographs, building furniture and working in his garden. His ideal reader was probably a version of himself, a happy home-maker and family man. He was lucky in his marriage to Edith and was close to his sister Ada, who lived with the Shums all her life. His respect for strong, talented women is reflected in his editorship of New Idea and the staunch support he offered female writers, designers and artists.

By the time we get to Shum’s editorship of Australian Home Beautiful we are well acquainted with the man who would spend twenty glorious years celebrating what Walker describes as “our national spirit and the truly Australian qualities of home, garden and way of life.”

Lovers of interwar architecture and design, like those eager bakers reading Lauren Samuelsson’s book, will likely skip the entrée and mains and go straight to the dessert. Walker (or more precisely, her publisher, The Beagle Press) rewards them with four sumptuously illustrated chapters featuring page after page of reproductions from the magazine, including some heart-meltingly beautiful cover illustrations by artist Frank Hedley Sanders, who contributed to the magazine for fifteen years.

I’m always intrigued, as here, when a publisher spends big on illustrations, design and production but pinches the pennies on copy editing. Hence, Mary “Gilmour” instead of Gilmore, and — even worse — Ruth “Poole Lane” for Ruth Lane Poole.

The book ends abruptly with Shum’s retirement. His life is wrapped up in less than two pages and we learn nothing of his declining years or his death, or anything more about Edith and their children. Nor does Walker deal with the professional struggles and setbacks any editor must face, such as importuning or unreliable authors, tussles with publishers, declining sales, or incursions in the market by rival magazines.

Were magazines the most powerful influence on people’s lives, as Walker claims? What about family, work, healthcare, education, spirituality, politics, the economy? If both authors, Walker and Samuelsson, are inclined to exaggerate the impact of the magazines they write about, there is no denying that magazines did (once) profoundly shape middle-class tastes and aspirations. •

A Matter of Taste: The Australian Women’s Weekly and Its Influence on Australian Food Culture
By Lauren Samuelsson | Monash University Publishing | $39.99 | 240 pages

The Untold Story of William Shum
By Sue Walker | The Beagle Press | $59.95 | 224 pages

The post Let them not eat Tip Truck Cake appeared first on Inside Story.

Although American women had been given the vote nearly two decades later than Australian women, in many respects the United States in the first half of the twentieth century offered white middle-class women more fertile terrain for meaningful professional careers. It’s one reason the country beckoned to adventurers like Lahey. In Travelling to Tomorrow historian Yves Rees tells the stories of ten such Australian women. In addition to Lahey, there’s a decorator, a swimmer, a writer, an artist, a pianist, an economist, a health guru, a dentist and a nurse. All were remarkable for their time. Driven by the usual cocktail of ambition, restlessness and chance, they sought new lives in a new country.

Rees identified them because their exploits were covered by newspapers, and by now most of them have modest Wikipedia pages. But despite often impressive accomplishments, their names are little known. By recovering their stories, Rees revises our picture of Australian relations with the US, suggesting that Australia’s postwar reorientation away from Britain and toward a new northern protector was less abrupt than we often see it. Rees’s ten case studies, taken from the more than 600 women they covered in their PhD dissertation, show currents of intellectual and cultural exchange that have been largely unrecognised. These women fostered new ways of thinking in both countries and gave each side a deeper view of the other.

By 1940, about 12,000 Australians were living in the US, roughly half of them women. The exodus to Britain was much more substantial, but the numbers heading to North America were surprisingly large considering the affective strings lacing Australians to “the mother country” and the US chokehold on immigration. Some of Rees’s women could compare the US and Britain directly, having visited or lived in both. “After America how small, and squat, and grey, this city was,” nurse Cynthia Reed remarked when she ended up in London.

To Rees’s subjects, America epitomised modernity. They felt they had travelled not only across sea and land but through time, to the future. The status of women was pivotal to these perceptions: the country seemed a woman’s paradise because it offered university degrees, professional pathways and consumer goods. Legal and cultural regimes constraining women’s lives were somewhat less onerous. Freedom from the constraining influences of parents along with more permissive social norms — an acceptance of young single women living on their own in big cities, for example — also mattered.

Rees uses terms like “love affair” and “passionate liaison” to describe how these women felt about their adopted country. These generalisations seem slightly too weighty for the intermittent expressions of enthusiasm the book quotes, which were often made for public consumption or to fretful family members back home. And using the language of love too easily slots into longstanding stereotypes that women are ruled by their feelings. But there is no doubt these women found the US more congenial for their career aspirations.

Rees’s subjects spent most of their time in buzzing metropolises. New York was a global hub with a population of seven million in 1930, while Sydney was a provincial outpost that barely topped a million residents. When artist Mary Cecil Allen said that nowhere else was it “possible to live to complete a life” she was talking about New York City, not Youngstown, Ohio.

As we might expect, most of these women struggled to get a foothold in their early days. Isabel Letham, scrabbling to earn a living in Los Angeles, took a miserable job cutting hair for $6 a week, skipping meals on Fridays, before landing a job as a swimming instructor. Persia Campbell’s husband died as she was finishing her PhD in economics at Columbia University, leaving her with two children to support; once she landed a job, her promotion applications were rejected for years because she was a woman. Cynthia Reed was forced to quit nursing school and leave the country when authorities realised she had flouted immigration laws to enrol. (One of Rees’s interesting points is that white Australians were unintended victims of immigration quotas set up in the 1920s to restrict migrants from the un-WASPy countries of southern and eastern Europe. By 1929 the annual quota for Australians was just one hundred per year.)

Though the narrative lingers on struggles more than triumphs, it wasn’t all hard knocks. Rose Cumming, the interior decorator, entertained a parade of aristocrats at her Park Avenue digs. When she threw a party on the Champs Elysée, Hollywood stars showed up.

Over time, these women racked up accomplishments. Campbell, for example, gained a national reputation. She worked for the JFK and LBJ White Houses on consumer affairs advisory committees; wrote and hosted a television series; and served as UN representative for an international consumers union. Against prevailing views that production was the key indicator of national health, she pioneered a consumer-centred approach to economics, arguing that human wellbeing had to count, too.

What themes emerge from the experiences of these very different women? Looks opened doors for women. Cumming’s success as a decorator, for example, was propelled in part by her beauty. Whiteness — all these women were white — offered considerable privileges. (It was also the age of hats: author Dorothy Cottrell had twenty-four in her luggage.)

One thread is that women with the strength of character to leave their native countries in search of professional careers — and to do it in the days before working outside the home was common — often had the courage to buck other trends; stepping outside one box made them better able to step outside others. Campbell did it in economics. Health guru Alice Caporn challenged the dairy industry’s campaign to turn cow’s milk into a health food. Almond milk was healthier, she presciently argued. Letham was an early surfer who tried to bring surf lifesaving to California. Allen defended modern art in the face of sneers and jeers back home.

Rees’s women arrived before Henry Luce declared “the American century” in 1941, but they were among millions of foreigners who saw the US as a beacon. Were white Australians better suited to American life than natives of other lands? What exactly were their preconceptions of the US — shaped, surely, by Hollywood films in the golden age of cinema? For centuries migrants have descended on the US, filling libraries with scholarly books and novels about their experiences. Fleshing out this broader context would have helped us understand what made Australian women different.

Rees’s priority is recovering the stories of their ten subjects, and the book does this brilliantly. These accounts are underpinned by years of painstaking research leavened with imaginative reconstruction. The author often steps in with informed speculation derived from hard-won, intimate knowledge of these women, fleshing out scenes the patchy sources don’t fully illuminate.

Along the way Rees interweaves thoughtful observations about their own experiences in the United States and reflections on changing norms around gender identities. Their narrative voice is chatty, empathetic, wise. The reader feels like a charming guide is leading a tour of interwar America. All of this makes the book an engrossing read.

Though Rees has travelled to archives across the US and Australia and sifted through tens of thousands of pages, including diaries, letters and memoirs, disappointingly few of the documents that would reveal the inner lives of these women have survived. With much of the narrative relying on newspaper reporting, we watch the women as distanced observers more often than we look out at the world through their own eyes. The sources leave the reader longing for a deeper view of the inner lives of these women. We often miss out, for example, on the grainy texture of the sexism they encountered. Lahey’s entering class at the University of Southern California’s Law School had twenty women. By the time she graduated, all but five had found the going too hard — surely deterred by social challenges rather than academic rigor.

The stories in Travelling to Tomorrow are important and compelling, and Rees has done everything possible to reconstruct the lives of these women. Even so, the book will leave readers wishing for a fuller accounting of what Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie describes as “the layers of losses and gains” immigrants experience. It is a testament to Rees’s storytelling that their book awakens curiosity only a novelist could sate. •

Travelling to Tomorrow: The Modern Women Who Sparked Australia’s Romance with America
By Yves Rees | NewSouth | $34.99 | 240 pages

The post Tomorrow’s women appeared first on Inside Story.

Feminist theorists also developed a critique of the traditional liberal divide between public and private spheres that underpinned and shaped our understanding of the domains of politics and history. Traditionally understood, politics referred to prime ministers, premiers, parliaments, parties and public policy. History was the record of men’s deeds in public life, in parliaments and parties, in empire and nation-building, in exploring the wilderness and fighting wars. Feminists argued that the conceptual divide between public and private was a disingenuous fiction that served to render women, their lives and work and the oppression they suffered invisible in the past and present.

A new wave of “women’s history” was launched. Archives once assumed to contain only the records of men’s past exploits were found to be rich repositories for exploring women’s experience. Women in Australia: An Annotated Guide to Records, edited by Kay Daniels and funded by International Women’s Year, demonstrated the wide range of historical records, personal and political, held in Australian archives and libraries. In new histories the public and private were intertwined. The personal not only became political, the political was shown to be highly personal, shaped by gendered subjectivities. New work began to explore how nationalism, socialism, liberalism and other political movements were animated by masculine anxieties and desires.

When women’s liberationists declared that the personal was political they were at one level reiterating what feminist activists had long argued: that home and family life, intimate relations and the domestic economy, and sexual coercion and violence rested on and reinforced men’s power and women’s subordination. Since the nineteenth century women had mobilised politically to change gender relations, to empower womanhood, to win the economic independence of women and end the control men exercised over them. “Woman has been a slave too long,” declared Rose Scott. She needed to be freed from the “House of Bondage,” said Louisa Lawson.

When a male royal commissioner in the 1920s expressed incredulity at a feminist’s demand for state payments to mothers, as citizens, to enable them to raise their children while living apart from their husbands, she agreed that “yes,” it was “revolutionary” and “that is what we wish.” From the late nineteenth century personal experience had shaped a radical new gendered politics in the public domain. Women demanded to be autonomous, self-determining, independent and free. Self-sovereignty was the early promise of citizenship.

The 1960s and 1970s saw new critiques of “patriarchy,” “the family,” “male chauvinism,” “sex roles” and “sexism” and new demands for sexual freedom — for sexual liberation, gay liberation and lesbian rights and recognition — sometimes in the context of the women’s liberation movement and sometimes not. Women’s liberation was both an extension of, and protest against, sexual freedom. Critiques of pornography, sexual objectification and rape flourished in the 1970s. Eva Figes’s Patriarchal Attitudes and Germaine Greer’s Female Eunuch came out in the same year as Sexual Politics. Andrea Dworkin published Woman Hating in 1974 while Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape appeared in 1975. Male power was the focus of these writers; men were conceptualised as the oppressors of women.

There was a yearning for a new order. Women’s liberationists declared Sisterhood is Powerful, longed for revolution, and called for the overthrow of the patriarchal order. But soon there also came more modest claims for an expansion of citizenship rights, such as those advanced by the Women’s Electoral Lobby. As Leigh Boucher, Michelle Arrow, Barbara Baird and Robert Reynolds write in their important new political history, Personal Politics: Sexuality, Gender and the Remaking of Citizenship in Australia, citizenship provided a “powerful master language through which to claim and remake rights.”

From the 1970s these claims were increasingly made in the “languages of gender and sexual identity,” with “identity” offering a new basis on which to demand and define political rights. Identities forged by exclusion and repression began to be deployed by activists who again foregrounded “painful or once-private experiences” to substantiate public demands. In their account of the safe schools movement, the authors suggest that young people’s interactions with the practice of social science were central in “growing the visibility and intelligibility of young transgender people as a new identity in political life.”

Activists campaigning in the name of non-reproductive sex — gay and lesbian — and the refusal of maternity generated, the authors suggest, a new conception of “sexual citizenship.” This notion repudiated earlier conceptions of “maternal citizenship” advanced by feminists from the 1890s through the 1940s in support of women’s economic rights and remuneration. It was the “refusal of reproduction,” the authors suggest, that tied together “the interventions of second-wave feminism and gay and lesbian activism,” a claim that might seem to ignore the central importance of childcare and supporting mothers’ pensions (introduced by the Whitlam government) to the women’s movement in the 1970s and 1980s.

The authors’ argument in Personal Politics is advanced through a number of focused case studies, some more compelling than others, some more concerned with traditional gendered grievance than advancing new sexual rights. The most persuasive case studies of sexual citizenship are elaborated in the first chapter, “Liberalising the Law” — which details campaigns for abortion rights and the decriminalisation of homosexual acts, fought on a state by state basis — and in the last chapter on the federal postal vote on marriage equality, when 61 per cent voted to allow same sex-couples to marry. Other chapters examine gendered contests over the Family Law Act, the struggle for funding by women’s refuges and Mardi Gras, health policy activism in relation to HIV/AIDS and abortion, and campaigns for safe schools and men’s sheds.

Funding by the state has long been seen as a validation and right of citizenship in Australia, a legacy of earlier popular ideals of “state socialism.” From the last decades of the twentieth century into the twenty-first a range of different men’s groups have sought state funding. Personal Politics documents the diversity of men’s activism — out and proud gay men seeking to decriminalise homosexual acts, claiming entitlements as “communities” and working productively with the state to ameliorate the effects of HIV/AIDS — alongside disgruntled, aggrieved, heterosexual men railing against the Family Law Act and demanding and winning state support for the dynamic men’s shed movement. As of 2022, we are told, more than 1250 community men’s sheds in Australia were funded within a framework of men’s health policy to ameliorate mental distress and social isolation. Increasingly, citizenship rights and associated state funding have been framed by a discourse on health and wellbeing, encouraged by a neoliberal emphasis on individual responsibility for personal “wellness” (and eternal life) as poignantly critiqued by Barbara Ehrenreich in her last book, Natural Causes.

Personal Politics celebrates the achievement of activists forging a new sexual citizenship in Australia. The response to the AIDS epidemic was a “story of activist success with partnership between the gay community and health departments at the centre of government response.” The National Women’s Health Policy was a story of “success, indeed victory… and [along with] the National HIV/AIDS Strategy… deserves to be celebrated.” But the authors caution against simple (and simple-minded) success stories. In constructing their argument they are keen to stress that theirs is a clear-eyed corrective to naive “narratives of progress.”

In remaking citizenship there were setbacks, detours, exclusions and defeats. Some campaigns were more successful than others. Compared to the success of Mardi Gras, so vivid that the festival has succumbed to corporatisation, women’s refuges have done little to stem domestic violence and the terror that men continue to inflict on women and children. Neoliberal reforms have restricted state funding for the refuges. Market logics of competitiveness and efficiency have had adverse effects. Numerous women’s refuges and shelters have closed; others are run by charities.

In attending to the limits of activists’ achievements, Personal Politics draws attention to the simultaneous impact of the neoliberal revolution in shaping modes of fund-raising and governance on the one hand, and creating a more individualistic sense of self attuned to identity, self-responsibility and “wellness” on the other.

As sexual citizenship mobilised identities and communities, class mobilisations became less significant. The authors note the uncanny resonances between neoliberalism and the post-1970s activist project of making the personal political. It was not just the former acting upon the latter. The remaking of citizenship had unintended consequences and Personal Politics points to the ways in which activists themselves became neoliberal subjects as they sought to remake citizenship into a vehicle for claiming individual rather than social or economic rights. Their collective achievements nevertheless had a “transformative impact on Australian political history and the rights and entitlements of citizens.”

Transformative, but still contested. As I write my conclusion, the Albanese government is embroiled in controversy over how to deal with the LGBTQI+ community in the forthcoming census, our key method for counting citizens. To what extent has citizenship been remade? Having initially decided to omit any reference to sexual orientation or transgender identity in the census questions (to avoid divisiveness), the government quickly bowed to fierce protest, including from its own parliamentarians, to announce that there would indeed be questions relating to sexuality and sexual preference.

Sexual citizenship had, it seems, secured proper state recognition. But not yet, apparently, for trans and intersex Australians. While sexual citizenship might have triumphed, gender diversity and fluidity seem to pose too great a political challenge to the calibration of true Australian citizenship. •

Personal Politics: Sexuality, Gender and the Remaking of Citizenship in Australia
By Leigh Boucher, Barbara Baird, Michelle Arrow and Robert Reynolds | Monash University Publishing | $36.99 | 314 pages

The post Remaking citizenship appeared first on Inside Story.

Within a roughly chronological structure, Jähner takes the reader on a thematic tour of Weimar German culture and experience. After chapters on the revolution that transformed military defeat into the country’s first democracy following the first world war, and after the obligatory chapter on German hyperinflation in the early 1920s, he introduces us to topics including the Bauhaus and its innovations in building and design; the social and cultural phenomenon of the female office worker; the expansion of automobile ownership; the Charleston and Berlin’s dance halls; Weimar culture’s veritable cult of the human body; and new gender norms. Chronology sets in again with the advent of the Great Depression, mass unemployment and the fall of democracy.

Jähner is a particularly well-read tour guide, and he has an eye for the telling illustration (figuratively as well as literally — the book is illustrated with a wealth of photographs, many of them relatively unfamiliar). Even readers well-versed in the history of the period will discover striking new examples of the culture of the time. I had not previously seen the photograph of female dancers in a stage revue arranged behind discs representing the keys of a typewriter — an example of the eroticisation of the secretary in the 1920s. And we learn that Germany’s confrontation with American culture in this period included not only Mickey Mouse, a creature abhorred by German cultural conservatives, but a now-forgotten yo-yo craze that provided transient distraction during the Depression.

Jähner also displays an intimate knowledge of Weimar literature, including once-popular novels that have fallen into obscurity, and he has delved deeply into the periodical literature of the period, from highbrow journals to the popular illustrated magazines that celebrated a new consumer culture even when most Germans had precious little cash to spend on it.

It is interesting to compare Jähner’s book with older portrayals such as Peter Gay’s highly influential Weimar Culture. First published in 1968, Gay’s book was closer in time to the period it described than it is to our own era. (Gay himself was born in Weimar Berlin.) Its portraits of heroic modernists and their enemies, and its depiction of contests between the “insiders” and “outsiders” who changed places after the democratic revolution of 1918–19, can seem overly schematic now.

Vertigo incorporates a broader spectrum of cultural history than Gay’s focus on high culture, and Jähner has more room for the contradictions and messiness of the cultural and emotional life of the period. (The comparison is a little unfair: Gay’s book was essentially a long essay, while Jähner has some 400 pages to spread out in.) Jähner introduces his readers to right-wing modernists like the decorated war veteran Ernst Jünger, who celebrated the destructive power of modern military technology and idealised the warrior elite who could master it, although another right-wing modernist author, the medical doctor and poet Gottfried Benn, is left out of his account. It is hard, of course, to give a comprehensive account of Weimar culture without either omitting some names or reading like a library catalogue.

Jähner’s book is particularly rich in its coverage of the shifting gender landscape of interwar Germany. From the new genre of novels about the modern secretary to women’s efforts to carve out new professional roles as well as make their own mark in cultural life, he is particularly attentive to questions of gender. He provides a lengthy discussion of celebrity female motorists, for example, who included Erika Mann, daughter of the Nobel Prize–winning novelist Thomas Mann, and Clärenore Stinnes, daughter of the industrialist (and inflation-profiteer) Hugo Stinnes. In fact, Clärenore gets as much space as her more notorious father. Her feats as a driver — including a journey around the world in a fifty horse-power car accompanied by a male Swedish photographer — were certainly remarkable.

While these women may seem to have represented a democratisation of motoring and touring, the possession of a car remained a mark of the social elite. With car ownership featuring on a “prosperity index” used to help determine Germany’s capacity to meet its reparation payments to the Allied powers, German governments used high taxes to discourage purchasers.

Jähner pays more attention than some earlier works to women authors of the Weimar period, including Irmgard Keun, whose novels have recently undergone a revival in English translation. Keun’s portrayal of a young secretary in The Artificial Silk Girl became an emblematic representation of the Weimar “New Woman.”

Given Jähner’s attention to questions of gender, sexuality and the body, it is slightly surprising that he doesn’t mention the campaign to reform Germany’s abortion law, which gained considerable support from feminists and the German left. One by-product of the campaign was the communist playwright Friedrich Wolf’s play Cyankali (Cyanide). Popular mass-market writer Vicki Baum’s novel, Stud. Chem. Helene Willfüer (Student of Chemistry Helene Willfüer), also dealt with abortion, in this case through the story of a pregnant university student. The novel’s subject matter was considered so scandalous that Baum’s publisher sat on the manuscript for some time, though it eventually became a bestseller and was even turned into a film in 1930.

Jähner shines in his interpretations of other cultural artefacts of the Weimar years, although his is a slightly selective account. We learn more about Bertolt Brecht’s enthusiasm for boxing and fast cars, for example, than we do about his plays, and his remarkable 1932 film about communist youth in Depression-stricken Berlin, Kuhle Wampe, made in collaboration with director Slatan Dudow, goes unmentioned.

Jähner also says surprisingly little about the cultural life of the Weimar left. The experimental theatre of the leftist director Erwin Piscator is only barely touched on. Older works on Weimar by the late Brecht scholar John Willett, for example, are more informative about this dimension of Weimar culture. Willett demonstrates the influence of early Soviet avant-garde culture, a dimension absent in this book.

A reader wanting to use Vertigo to understand the rise and fall of Germany’s first democracy will find significant lacunae in its treatment of the history of Weimar politics. We learn little about one of the crucial trends in German politics after the hyperinflation and currency revaluation of the early 1920s: the phenomenon characterised by Larry E. Jones as the “shrinking middle,” an apparently inexorable decline in voter support for the mainstream middle-class liberal parties. (The Protestant middle classes would largely swing behind the Nazi Party during the Depression.)

The intervention by national government troops to depose the left-wing coalition government of Saxony in 1923 gets just one sentence. Jähner rightly points out that the communist candidate Ernst Thälmann split the working-class vote in the 1925 presidential election, helping to elect the anti-republican field marshal Paul von Hindenburg, but fails to mention that the right-wing Bavarian People’s Party also split the Catholic vote, favouring Hindenburg over the Catholic candidate Wilhelm Marx.

Nor does Jähner discuss the Stalinisation of the German Communist Party during the 1920s. On the right of politics, he says little about the radicalisation of the mainstream conservative-nationalist party, the DNVP, which came under the control of the media magnate Alfred Hugenberg in 1928. Hugenberg’s media empire included tabloid newspapers and the Ufa film conglomerate; his tactical alliances with Hitler helped to make the Nazi leader acceptable to the conservative right.

Fritz Thyssen, the Ruhr steel magnate who was one of the Nazi Party’s early backers in big business circles, goes unmentioned, as does the sponsorship of anti-democratic intellectuals and publications by other industrialists. The chemical combine IG Farben’s vast headquarters in Frankfurt is described, but its buyout of the Frankfurter Zeitung, which signalled the end of that paper’s decades-long existence as the voice of democratic liberalism, is not. The abolition of the eight-hour day at the end of 1923 and the massive lockouts in the metal-working industry of 1928 — when heavy industry sought to break with the social compromise on which the republic had been based in 1918–19 — are also missing from this account.

In another, perhaps more surprising, omission, Jähner jumps from the Reichstag fire and the elections on 5 March 1933 to the Enabling Act that bestowed dictatorial power on Hitler without mentioning the stage-managed inauguration of the new Nazi government. That ceremony in Potsdam symbolically celebrated the alliance between the new nationalist forces of the Nazi movement and the conservative Prussian-German elites.

In short, anyone who wishes to learn about the vital socioeconomic conflicts and political dynamics that determined the political fate of the Weimar Republic will need to turn to other histories of the period.

An edited collection of academic essays on the Weimar Republic from 2012 was titled Beyond Glitter and Doom, and “Glitter and Doom” was also used as the title of an exhibition of German portraits from the 1920s at the New York Metropolitan Art Museum in 2006. Subsequent major exhibitions of Weimar art (including in Australia) have played variations on that theme.

The “glitter and doom” paradigm — the dancing on the edge of the volcano, the intellectuals debating high theory in the “Grand Hotel Abyss” — has become a cliché. Jähner brings to light many lesser-known aspects of Weimar culture, and seems aware of the dangerously seductive pull of its popular image, but he is unable to resist it entirely. He also knows that there is more to the history of the Weimar Republic than the urban culture of Berlin, but Vertigo’s perspective remains very Berlin-centric. Perhaps the magnetic pull of 1920s Berlin is indeed irresistible.

In the historical drama of the death of the Weimar Republic, the zeitgeist, that slippery and always elusive abstraction, figures in Jähner’s book as victim and culprit alike. He is an always readable and entertaining analyst of the cultural manifestations of that zeitgeist. But when historians arrive at the crime scene to try to discover who killed Weimar democracy, they will be looking for more tangible evidence than this book ultimately offers. •

Vertigo: The Rise and Fall of Weimar Germany 1918–1933
By Harald Jähner | Translated by Shaun Whiteside | W.H. Allen | $36.99 | 480 pages

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Judith Allen was one such historian whose sudden and untimely death in London on 4 July has shocked and saddened many historians. Productive to the end, her death left unfinished a number of books that promised to have her signature game-changing effect on how we think about the history of gender and sexuality.

Judith Allen was Distinguished Professor and Walter Professor of History at Indiana University (Bloomington), where she had worked for almost three decades. She was researching in London, her cultural-historian husband Peter Bailey’s home city, when she died.

I first met Judith in 2006 when I was working at the Menzies Centre at King’s College London. Thrilled to have struck up a friendship with a scholar whose work had been indispensable to my History PhD, I was invited to their London flat for brunch. I was a little surprised (disappointed, even) to discover on arrival that this would not be an intimate occasion, but the crowd made sense when our hosts announced that this was not an ordinary brunch gathering but their wedding. It was a warm and hospitable celebration and there was a lot of laughter.

Some months later Judith was keynote speaker at a conference on feminism and the body I convened. Her lecture packed the venue, a testament to the interest in her topic, “Cultural Genealogies of Anovulation: Revisiting Abortion, the Pill and Feminist Sexual Politics,” and her reputation in Britain. Ours was a fleeting friendship in Judith’s richly connected and intellectually vibrant life, but her generosity and insights have lingered with me.

When I returned to Australia, her ongoing companionship took the form of books, chapters and articles that have always been close to hand. When I had started my PhD in 1999, Allen’s writings were models of feminist history, both empirically and theoretically, that made it seem possible to write my own history of the pregnant body. Her feminist agenda and her embrace of poststructuralist approaches to historical research offered a language and conceptual toolkit for charting the changing nature of the pregnant body in Australian medicine, law and feminism. As I resumed this line of inquiry post-PhD, her historical interventions continued to inform and guide me.

I am hardly alone in finding Judith’s work a continued inspiration. Allen’s chapter “Evidence and Silence: Feminism and the Limits of History” in Feminist Challenges (1986) has long been a classic text on feminist methodologies. For me and many of my peers that essay sits alongside its contemporary, Joan Scott’s “Gender as a Useful Category of Analysis,” as key to our emergence as feminist historians.

Scott argued that all historical research was impoverished without due consideration of gender in all its expressions, material and metaphorical, “as a category of analysis.” Throwing caution aside, Allen went further and proposed jettisoning a discipline, history, that she saw as a moribund site of enquiry for those keen to understand the situation of women.

No doubt she believed the respect she had garnered from historians in Australia — men and women alike — meant she could afford to make such claims, and perhaps they anticipated her move from history at Macquarie University to Griffith University, where she became the inaugural professor of women’s studies in 1990.

In 2017 Kathryn M. Hunter’s article “Silence in the Noisy Archives” called for renewed attention to Allen’s feminist caution against conventional historical methods in the context of transformations in archival research brought about by digitisation. This revisiting of Allen’s essay almost twenty years after its publication was testament to what Mary Spongberg recently described as her “paradigm shifting” on evidence and silence that “changed the way in which women’s private lives were studied in Australia and beyond,” including in women’s studies. But Allen’s ties to history remained.

In the same year she moved to Griffith, Allen published Sex and Secrets: Crimes Involving Australian Women Since 1880, which applied the philosophical and methodological lessons imparted in “Evidence and Silence.” This was the major work on the history of abortion in Australia and remains the most comprehensive account of the subject in the period up to the mid-twentieth century. Like its forerunner, “Octavius Beale Reconsidered” (1982), Sex and Secrets introduced many students of Australian history in the 1980s and 1990s to the politics of gender and reproduction in the Australian colonies and the new nation. This is true also of the book’s discussions of infanticide and domestic violence.

In recent years Australian historians have revisited the theme of domestic and family violence, reflecting a growing awareness and sense of urgency about this phenomenon in the present. This field of feminist history had been almost dormant since Sex and Secrets, which was the culmination of a decade of Allen’s research and publishing on this topic alongside her peer Kay Saunders.

Allen’s compelling work on the history of domestic violence in Australia was undertaken in the early stages of her career. When her book chapters were published in the 1980s and 90s, they attracted scholarly engagement as well as contributing to policy conversations within the federal government. To begin with, Allen and Saunders found the domestic violence sector more receptive to this work than Australian historians. Both empirically and conceptually, Allen’s work was both ground-breaking and extraordinarily mature and influential for someone so early in their career. It continues to inform the direction of this field.

Scholars since have opened up histories of domestic violence to questions of race and a fuller range of expressions of masculine status, areas that Allen was criticised for not having adequately attended to. Yet, as I work with Ann Curthoys and Zora Simic on a major history of domestic violence since 1850, Allen’s publications remain foundational and illuminating. They were also a touchstone for Elizabeth Nelson’s 2014 book Homefront Hostilities: The First World War and Domestic Violence.

With her next major book after Sex and Secrets, Allen knew she had a challenge on her hands — how to write an exciting history of first-wave feminist Rose Scott, best known perhaps as a wowser who fiercely opposed mixed-sex surf bathing and railed against the “animal in man.” Not only was she up for it, having first studied Scott for her honours thesis, but Allen produced one of the most enduring works of Australian feminist history.

Rose Scott: Vision and Revision in Feminism 1880–1925 illuminated the general character of Australian feminism in this period, introducing other key figures and describing their cultural milieu and strands of political thought. Allen’s interest in feminism’s changing political critiques of heterosexuality and strategies for combatting its role in determining women’s identities and statuses saw her trace Rose Scott’s growing awareness of the differences between women.

Rather than reject the likes of Scott as second-wave women’s liberationists had done, Allen approached her and other feminists of the time on their own terms. I learned from her close friend, Stephen Garton, that in Bloomington Allen cultivated an impressive rose garden in honour of this significant Australian.

While Allen began her career in Australia, her biography of Scott was the last of her Australian studies. In our conversations in London, Allen critiqued Australian historians for their false sense of exceptionalism, a critique that she was well placed to make given the direction her research had taken since the mid 1990s. Her subsequent publications established her reputation as an expert in British and US histories of feminism and sexuality; they included a 2009 biography of American feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman that picked up some of the themes in her account of Scott’s later feminist thought.

In 2019 I was delighted to have the opportunity to preview a section of the manuscript Black Market in Misery: Criminal Abortion and British Sexual Cultures, 1780–1980, which promised to be the first major history of abortion in Britain. It showcased Allen’s outstanding empirical research, evocative storytelling and compelling analysis. If this book is published it will surely be compulsory reading for anyone interested in the cultural, medical and legal histories of sexuality and reproduction in Britain and elsewhere.

For example, Allen analyses in unprecedented detail the introduction and early implementation of the far-reaching Ellenborough Act, so crucial to an understanding of the status of abortion in British colonies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including Australia, placing it in the context of changing British sexual cultures that looked to post-Revolution France for inspiration and with trepidation. As ever, she sets her analysis within a wider international frame.

Allen also had a number of book projects underway dealing with the legacy of US sexologist Alfred Kinsey and signalling her emerging status as our foremost expert on this key figure in the history of sexuality. Her contribution to this field was facilitated by the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University, where she served as the senior research fellow for the final decade of her life. Her work towards Kinsey and the Feminine is a robust challenge to the standard narrative of Kinsey’s second report, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female — the view that it was of less interest to him than the first, and thus a further indicator of strands of misogyny in his character and work. It prompts a thorough rethinking of standard perceptions of Kinsey, tracing how he assembled his evidence and exploring the wider context of relationships that influenced his interpretations. Allen’s longstanding interest in the implications of this history for sexual politics strengthen its contemporary relevance for scholars and the wider public.

An abiding theme of Allen’s work is the history of heterosexuality and marriage. As well presenting her paper “Desperately Seeking Solutions: Battered Women’s Options since 1880” at the 1985 National Conference on Domestic Violence, she made a provocative closing speech imagining a culture with “woman-centred values” that would identify and regulate marriage “as a dangerous trade, just like coal mining or working in a nuclear plant.” Its health hazards for women would be advertised in the same way as those associated with smoking. Where these hazards manifested as domestic violence, perpetrators would be “disenfranchised and lose citizenship rights.”

This brilliant utopian vision was presented in the spirit of feminist solidarity. Its rhetorical purpose was to place in sharp relief the masculinist world inhabited by women. It remains salient in 2024 as some of us arm ourselves with Allen’s insights to advance histories of domestic and family violence, a problem that can seem intractable, in ways that speak to present concerns.

Allen sought to shift the nature of inquiry and to unearth and spotlight assumptions that have dulled the quality of historical understanding. She often gave overdue recognition to the intellectual and political work of important historical figures. Scholars with the power to persuade their colleagues to reflect on closely held truths, reconceptualise research problems and take new approaches to their craft are rare and invaluable.

She maintained a handful of significant friendships with historians in Australia, but for the most part the profession here adjusted to life without her embodied presence. Elsewhere the loss of Judith Allen is registering daily. Amrita Chakrabarti Myers, her colleague at Indiana, wrote to me recently of her grief and the extraordinary impact of the friendship and mentoring Allen offered her when she arrived in Bloomington in 2005:

She quickly became not only a dear friend, neighbor, and colleague, but a savvy mentor who dispensed humor, insights, and advice in equal measure while always having my back. She openly acknowledged the misogynoir I faced… I will always picture Judith sitting at one of our favorite tables at a local restaurant called C3, listening to Peter play piano on the patio with various jazz trios. Wearing one of her trademark, jewel-toned dresses with matching lipstick and holding a glass of “Troublemaker” red wine, she would regularly break into one of her big, buoyant, show-stopping laughs while slapping the table and yelling “Oy!” My God, how I miss her. She was one of a kind.

The post The best kind of troublemaker appeared first on Inside Story.

Now that Democrats have nominated a woman of colour, the question looms large and can’t be definitively answered until the votes are counted.

Still, early polling is promising for vice-president Kamala Harris. As I noted in the Washington Monthly earlier this week, if November results matched August’s two-way trial heat polling, Harris would narrowly win the national popular vote by about one or two points. She would win Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by equal or slightly higher margins — enough for an electoral college majority. (Soon after, a series of swing state polls from The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter found a one-point edge for Harris in North Carolina.)

The polls have spiked despite sexist and racist attacks from Donald Trump and other Republicans. The vice-president has been demeaned as a “DEI hire.” Some, calling attention to her mid-1990s relationship with former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown, have suggested California’s former attorney-general and US senator slept her way to the top. Trump routinely diminishes her intelligence, calling her “low IQ,” “dumb,” “barely competent” and “not smart enough.” He claims, “She can’t do an interview.”

These attacks have yet to work. But why? Is it because men have matured and aren’t falling for it? Or is it because women are repulsed and flocking to Harris?

Early data is conflicting. But before we look at recent polls, we should understand the history of the gender gap in presidential elections.

Looking at exit poll data from 1972 to 2008 and post-election data analysis using voter files by the political data firm Catalist for the last three presidential elections, we can see the gender gap emerged in 1980.

For the 1972 and 1976 elections, the margin between the Democratic and Republican candidates is about the same among women and men. In 1980, the difference mushroomed to seventeen points. In nearly every presidential election since, except for 1992, the gap has been in double digits.

Since 1992, women have consistently favoured the Democratic candidate. Since 1996, except for 2004, the Democrat has won the female vote by a double-digit margin, typically between eleven and thirteen points.

The Republican edge with men has been less consistent than the Democratic edge with women. Bill Clinton won with men in 1992 and lost them by a point in 1996. Similarly, Barack Obama won them by a point in 2008 and lost them by four in 2012. Al Gore, John Kerry, and Hillary Clinton each lost men by eleven points. Joe Biden kept the male deficit down to six points.

You will not be surprised to learn that two of the three widest gender gaps involve elections with Donald Trump — twenty-four points in 2016 and nineteen points in 2020. (The 2000 election between Gore and George W. Bush featured a twenty-two-point gender gap.)

Because the 2016 exit poll showed Trump winning white women by nine points, Hillary Clinton’s defeat is sometimes attributed to an abandonment by those women. (Catalist pegged the 2016 white women margin at eight points.) But that conclusion was drawn without historical context. White women have firmly sided with the Republican nominee since 2004 (not counting George W. Bush’s one-point edge in 2000).

Compared to 2012, in fact, Hillary Clinton narrowed the white women gap by five points in the exit poll data and by one point in Catalist data. And one group of white women did rally around Hillary Clinton — college graduates. According to Catalist, Obama tied Mitt Romney with college-educated white women while Clinton won them by nine. Unfortunately for her, she also shed support from non-college white women, losing them by eighteen points, four points more than the prior election.

In 2020, Biden’s white women gap was held down to a manageable five points, boosted by a huge sixteen-point win among the college-educated. Compared to Hillary Clinton, his margin was a point worse among non-college women.

Women didn’t abandon Hillary Clinton. Men did. Obama in 2012 won 47 per cent of the male vote, and Biden 46 per cent. In between, Clinton took just 41 per cent, losing men to Trump by eleven points. Non-college men drove the decline. Obama and Clinton each won 41 per cent of male college grads but Obama won 36 per cent of working-class males and Clinton only 28 per cent.

No Democratic presidential candidate had done so poorly with men since Michael Dukakis in 1988. (Bill Clinton also won 41 per cent of the male vote in 1992, but in what was effectively a three-candidate contest that was a plurality.)

Is Kamala Harris’s support among women and men closer to that of Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton? Different polls are telling us different stories.

Harris leads by one point in the most recent CBS News/YouGov poll, for example, and in NPR/PBS News/Marist by three. In both, she pulls 45 per cent of the male vote while hitting the mid-50s among women. That’s roughly similar to Biden in 2020.

(Marist is a rare poll that offers subsample data for white college-educated women, with whom Harris obliterates Trump by thirty-two points. But we should treat subsample data with extreme caution since it comes with high margins of error.)

Polls by Civiqs and SurveyUSA, however, show Harris running up the score with women to offset a weak performance among men. Civiqs has Harris up by four, fueled by 58 per cent support among women and just 39 per cent among men. SurveyUSA’s gender gap is a bit less extreme, with Harris winning 56 per cent of women and 40 per cent of men en route to an overall three-point lead. In these polls, Harris’s support from men is less than what Hillary Clinton received. (Polling levels typically lag final results, however, since undecideds either decide or stay home, and many flirting with third parties eventually vote for a major party candidate.)

We don’t have a clear enough picture from initial poll data to be able to say confidently that Harris’s confident, energetic, and — to quote her wingman Minnesota Governor Tim Walz — “joyful” campaign style is inoculating her from Trump’s boorish misogyny, but it’s a plausible conclusion. With assistance from his running mate J.D. “Childless Cat Ladies” Vance, Trump may be driving more women than usual into the Harris camp. Or men are not as attracted to rank sexism as they were. Or both.

The converse may also be true. Maybe, as in 2016, today’s polling is illusory. Maybe Trump’s divisive rhetoric needs more time to do its dark work.

But Kamala Harris is not Hillary Clinton, who brought to the 2016 campaign three decades of political scars inflicted by sexist attacks and who suffered considerable damage to her reputation — quantifiable by the steep decline in her favourable ratings — throughout a contentious primary campaign. Harris began her hundred-day sprint to the White House backed by a unified and euphoric Democratic base, propelling a sharp rise in her favourable ratings. The nomination came to Harris without her having to display the ambition that so many voters seemed to find distasteful in Clinton, even though the former secretary of state was simply aspiring to what so many male politicians have.

Barack Obama didn’t end racism in America. But in his historic 2008 campaign he provided a road map for overcoming it in the presidential arena, with unifying rhetoric that showed how common struggles transcended race. Maybe, just maybe, Harris has figured out how to overcome misogyny. •

The post Are American men ready for Kamala Harris? appeared first on Inside Story.

The great writer has spent the morning making jam, and the flat is still heavy with the scent. A little jar is set aside for me to take home. Dame Mary likes making jam, but as she escorts me in she’s quick to notice that any talk about the ratio of fruit to sugar is wasted on me. I’ve never had time to make jam.

My hostess sets about making yerba maté tea for me, chatting about how she grew to like it during her years in South America. She had travelled to Paraguay in 1896 to join the utopian socialist settlement known as Cosme, where she met and married her Australian husband Will Gilmore, and after the failure of the settlement in 1900 had moved to Argentina with Will and their baby son Billy while Will worked to pay for their passage home.

Forty years later the Australian magazine Pix published a feature on Mary Gilmore, who was famous by then as a journalist, poet and social reformer, and photographed her at home drinking yerba maté the traditional way from a gourd, using a straw known as a bombilla. Today, though, she presents it to me from a teapot. I was expecting a bitter, grassy concoction but it turned out to be quite mild and pleasant. The critical thing, Dame Mary tells me as we settle down in her cluttered living room, is to brew it gently in water that is hot but not boiling.

When journalist Leslie Rees visited Mary Gilmore at home in 1936 his impression of her was of “living eyes, richly, deeply brown as the eyes of William Butler Yeats, in a face that shows the scars of a life faced with dignity and intelligence.” Her brain was “as active and unsentimental as an electrical coil.” Bright and lively conversation was said to be the essence of life to Mary Gilmore, and that’s partly why I’m nervous; I’m not a sparkling conversationalist myself. So it’s a relief when the heavily underlined copies of Soviet Weekly are set aside and she waits with a kindly look for me to broach the subject I’d come to talk about.

I ask her about the years she spent editing the women’s page of the Australian Workers’ Union paper, the Worker. I tell her I’m especially interested in the first pages she edited, published in January 1908, in which she put a call out to women to write to her on any subject that interested them and to share their knowledge, even just little labour-saving procedures in the kitchen, with other readers. Her hope was to get at the “needs, the hopes and fears and desires” of all women, in a “bond of unity” from one end of the country to another.

Ah yes, she muses. She had wondered how to educate women about how politics and current events could affect their lives. But how do you reach the tired woman rocking the baby’s cradle with her foot while she peels potatoes or darns stockings in her lap? Such a woman, Dame Mary chuckles, has no time to read the prime minister on tariff reform.

“So, women did write to you?”

“Oh my word yes! About all sorts of things, very personal sometimes. Distressing. And the questions I got! From men as well. People seemed to think I was a one-person encyclopedia. Has the price of calico gone down? How do you make soap? How do you get rid of fleas? Once I even published a poem about my weekly mailbag.”

“Yes, I’ve read that.”

“Have you indeed!” She pauses. “So why are you here?”

“Do you still have the letters women wrote to you?”

Dame Mary stares.

“No. Why should I keep them? I dealt with them and threw them in the wastepaper basket.”

I think of all that history consigned to oblivion.

“Look around you. I don’t have space to keep that kind of thing. Do you know how many times I had to move house in those years?”

“No.”

“Actually, nor do I any more. But it was a lot.”

“I wanted to see the originals of the letters.”

“Why? They weren’t written to you.”

She leans forward.

“What exactly you are searching for?”

What indeed? What was it that brought me in my imagination as a suppliant to Mary Gilmore’s door?

I had become interested in Gilmore’s editorship of the Worker women’s page because out of it emerged one of Australia’s most successful community cookbooks. The recipes and household hints section had been so popular that she compiled the contributions into a book, The Worker Cookbook, published by the paper in 1914. It went through ten editions between then and 1919.

A trail through secondary sources led me to Gilmore’s papers at the National Library of Australia in Canberra, where apparently there were letters from women who had written to her in response to the cookbook. They survived because the frugally minded poet had used the backs of them as scrap paper to draft her poems.

With archives you never know what will get, I know that perfectly well, but still I dreamed of a feast of untapped primary source material. The cookbook would provide the necessary narrative focus for a kitchen-window glimpse into the domestic lives of working-class women more than a hundred years ago. The archival material would be exactly as I imagined it would be, and the result would be awesome.

Not. The trail turned out to be false, at least as far as the cookbook was concerned. There are letters from readers within files of Gilmore’s drafts of published and unpublished poems. I found about eighty, in MS 727 series one, two, three and nine, and in MS 8766 box two. Unfortunately, they can’t be identified from the library’s finding aids because the archivist who described the records didn’t think them important enough to note.

Only a handful of the letters refer to the cookbook, and then just in passing. The handwritten drafts of poems were often illegible (although as Gilmore might say, they weren’t written for me) and the reverses were usually blank. My project on The Worker Cook Book collapsed before my eyes.

I wasn’t going to give up; I’d stay for whatever I could find. I must have turned over thousands of handwritten and typed sheets. On and on, turning, turning, rocking myself mentally to sleep in the peaceful hush of the library reading room.

Suddenly, this: “… a worm will turn. When we think of all the suffering that is all over the world and for what purpose, it seems for one class only and it is time the working class woke up and got their rights.”

I was wide awake now too. Who was this? Mrs E. Birch, whoever she was. I only had the second page of her letter, no address and no date. She has been reading the Worker for two years, she says, and finds it appeals to her “way of thinking.” She and her husband were on an “estate” as a married couple, but to live and save from a man’s weekly wage was “impossible.”

More turning. Maud Woodbury from Cessnock wrote in 1918 to ask Gilmore to send a word of friendship and cheer to some “lonely sister” of the “never-never country.” She enclosed a second letter for Gilmore to forward to anyone she knew who might appreciate it. “Those brave, quiet women of the glorious proletariat always fill me with deepest admiration and sympathy.”

A mother wrote a frantic account of her baby’s illness, but I only had the second page of her letter. A doctor had advised her to stop breastfeeding and give the baby whey, but she refused. “I gave her castor oil and looked to my own health.” The baby was weaned eventually on to Glaxo (a baby formula) but “one tin nearly killed her.” She tried barley water and Nestlé’s Milk Food. The baby developed a fever and gastritis. There was a hospital visit. Nearly at the bottom of the page now. Barley water again, and white of egg, and brandy. “I gave her…” — and there it ends.

Mary Gilmore photographed by May Moore in 1916, during Gilmore’s time at the Worker. State Library of New South Wales

A mother of six wrote in 1920 from Woolbrook, south of Armidale, to ask how to find a book on midwifery because she was anxious to help pregnant women in her town with their births, there being no doctor or nurse for sixteen miles. She had written to the state government and been told that such a book would not be suitable for “inexperienced women.”

May Kent from East Moree wrote in 1920 about an elderly woman living alone next door who, because of a horror of being buried a “pauper,” had “done without many a little thing to put a couple of shillings away.” This woman had been told that if it was discovered that she had money in the bank it would interfere with her pension. Could Mrs Gilmore advise on this point?

I found many of those much smaller questions that obviously caused Gilmore so much amused exasperation. J.M. Mann from Wyalong wanted information on how to rear young parrots — blue bonnets and “bullan bullans” (ringnecks) — because oatmeal failed and his birds died. Jessie English from South Gippsland wanted to know if the Australian School of Sketching in Sydney was a genuine establishment or a “swindle.” George Ritter from Narabri had “scurf” in his hair and sickness in his fowls.

Then there were the letters from children. Every week Gilmore published a selection of these and, perhaps recalling her own childhood, tended to favour those from children in remote places. Joyce Jones from Pine Ridge in northern New South Wales wrote in 1918: “I am nearly twelve years old and would like some girls to write to me we have three cats and three cows and I am very fond of reading my Uncle takes the worker we live almost on the bank of the Marra Creek.”

I was charmed to discover letters from two sisters, written on successive days in October 1917, asking to be put in touch with pen-friends. Lilly and Annie Hasted wrote from Listowel Downs via Blackall, south of Barcaldine in Queensland. Both remarked on their faraway home. “It is very lonely out here,” wrote Annie, aged twelve.

Sometimes all I found was a torn fragment. “Well Mrs Gilmore,” wrote someone from Burrandong via Mumbil in 1919, “after reading those pitiful letters in the Worker about tired Mothers I think it is something terriable my mother is only a poor woman and we have to battle through the world as good as we can there are…” — and the rest of the sheet is torn off.

Most perplexing of all was a sheet torn vertically rather than horizontally, leaving only the right-hand side of the page. The letter was from a child, apparently a regular correspondent, along with her sister, to the Worker. Since her last letter there had been a flood at their place, she says, and she is knitting a sock. Here I did study what Gilmore had written on the other side, a lullaby. I wondered if the narrow width of the sheet had helped Gilmore to keep the lines short as she drafted the poem. Here are the first two verses.

Here we go
Sleepy slow
Rockabye baby
Bye O

Still little foot
Still little hand
Hushabye baby
Bye O

Gilmore’s women’s page was much more than an advice column. Typically each page carried several leading articles written by Gilmore herself in which she explored her many cherished causes. These could include the need to introduce an aged pension; the plight of rural women living in poverty; poor treatment of female servants and prisoners; the introduction of maternity allowances, child endowment, and pre- and post-natal care for mothers; and women’s rights to living wages and equal opportunities, and indeed to the same rights as men to freedom, independence and happiness.

Readers’ letters were nevertheless critical in informing Gilmore’s advocacy on these and other issues. In her twenty-three years editing the page, Gilmore must have read thousands of letters from readers, especially women. They might be published in full, or their content arranged into copy that Gilmore would write, often with added commentary of her own.

Now that the Worker (known from 1913 onwards as the Australian Worker) is fully digitised and available via the National Library’s Trove website, this vast corpus of Gilmore’s work is fully searchable. This makes it possible for me to discover if the readers’ letters I saw in Gilmore’s papers were published or mentioned, but of the selection noted above I could only trace the letters from Joyce Jones, the Hasted sisters, and the man rearing parrots. Of the rest, nothing. So I can’t say whether the sick baby survived or the woman from Woolbrook received her midwifery book or the caring woman received advice for her pensioner neighbour.

But the correspondent who mentioned tired mothers was responding to a regular theme on the Worker’s page. In 1914 Gilmore published some poems (not her own) titled “Tired Mothers,” which initiated a stream of letters well into the 1920s. Women wrote that they were exhausted with childrearing and housework and the strain of feeding their children on their husbands’ small wages. Of how sad it made them that their children could rarely eat fruit and vegetables except potatoes or receive a new toy at Christmas. That they would rather die themselves than bring any more children into the world.

Reflecting in 1919, Gilmore wrote that she was proud to have published as many of these letters as she could because, she claimed, no women’s column in any other paper was bothering. “They come to me by every mail. The saddest things can never be published; they are too individual and too private — and sometimes too terrible.”

Gilmore had always been unusually sensitive to the suffering of other people and had known loneliness herself. Life as a bush wife on the Gilmore family farm in Victoria was unbearable for her and in 1911 she and Will decided to live apart. Their adored son Billy went with Mary to Sydney, but as soon as he was old enough he joined his father working properties in Queensland. Mary and Will still regarded themselves as a couple but the family was seldom together.

So although she relished her independent existence in Sydney as a celebrated poet and journalist, Gilmore missed the intimacy of a small family circle. Torn as she was between love, duty, work and family, the struggles of other people never failed to move her, and her own warm and compassionate manner was very evident to readers.

Relations between Gilmore and the management of the Worker deteriorated throughout the 1920s and in February 1931 she resigned. In a long, angry letter to the president of the Australian Workers’ Union, John Barnes, she declared that in addition to her published work for the paper, there had been considerable extra labour — unpaid and unthanked — privately answering letters from thousands of “poor souls” who had had no one else to turn to.

Drunken husbands, persecuting policemen, unwanted babies, family maintenance, workers’ compensation, pensions: she dealt with them all. “From New Zealand to Tasmania, from Sydney to Port Darwin, you will find letters of mine in every direction.” And they had not cost the union even the postage stamp that carried them.

A diagonal line across each of the readers’ letters I saw in her papers suggests that Gilmore had dealt with them, if not by publication then by private reply. This gets me imagining the arrival into thousands of homes of a letter from that much-loved author, Mary Gilmore. Many a woman must have quietly slipped one into her apron pocket to study later, anxiously, by the fire, when the family was asleep.

I don’t consider Gilmore an “agony aunt” in the modern sense because, in print at least, she mainly focused on responses to practical problems. In those less explicit times, her readers’ emotional and sexual difficulties were probably among the things she believed “too terrible” to publish.

They are gone, most of them, those readers’ letters to Mary Gilmore, and her private replies are also scattered and lost. Yes, her journalism for the Worker does incorporate many of them in one form or another, and yes, digitisation opens up research pathways undreamed of in an analogue age. Why chase what is not there to be found?

Sometimes I think of a line from Tennyson’s Ulysses (one of my father’s favourite poems): “Tho’ much is taken, much abides.” It offers a helpful path towards acceptance, at least in some circumstances. But in archives the reverse can apply: much abides but much has been taken. That absence is not nothing; it leaves a trace. The letters and letter fragments I found at the National Library pointed so powerfully to what was not there that for a while all I could do was sit there, rigid with disappointment.

Still, within that absence there was also an encounter with aspects of myself, my desire to gather up what is lost, mend what is broken, and bear witness to the uniqueness of every human experience.

“There is something I can show you though.”

“Oh yes?”

“On the table over there, that little card. Bring it here.”

She turns it over in her old fingers. On the front is an illustration of a kitten with a blue bow around its neck holding a bunch of flowers.

“I was on television, you know.”

“Yes, I saw it. I can’t believe they brought all their cameras and things in here.”

“So tiring.” But she is smiling.

She hands me the card. It’s from a ten-year-old girl, Christine Higgs of East Maitland. Christine had carefully dated it 12 June 1959. She wrote to say that she had seen the telecast from Dame Mary’s flat.

“I enjoyed it. I heard your poems, and I also saw your kettle boiling.”

On the back of the card she had written out a poem of Dame Mary’s she had learned at school.

“Read it for me.”

The Fairy Man

It was, it was a fairy man
Who came to town today.
‘I’ll make a cake for sixpence,
If you will pay, will pay.’

He iced it with a moonbeam
And found a penny, too;
He made a cake of rainbows,
And baked it in the dew.

“I read that one at school too. But I think Christine has muddled the lines a bit…”

I look up. Dame Mary is asleep. •

The post Afternoon tea with Mary Gilmore appeared first on Inside Story.

But what if the book is about women who lived through one of the most war-filled centuries in British history? What about the proposition that war shaped every aspect of eighteenth-century British life, even if this is little remembered in the popular rush to curate the Georgian period as a time of big hair, dashing cads and masquerade balls?

You can see that I went back to the beginning of Gibson’s book with some scepticism about the distinction. True enough, Gibson does focus far more on “the feelings of women” than on war, but gradually her chapters turned me around to Woolf’s position. What is lost in the lack of detail about “masculine values” is made up for by carefully drawn portraits of ten or so bluestocking women, each struggling, soaring and surviving in a world designed for another gender. Gibson returns a keen sense of complex female humanity to at least one corner of over-storied eighteenth-century Britain.

The book’s two pillars are Elizabeth Montagu, critic and powerful patron of the arts, and Hester Thrale, writer and general literary busybody in late eighteenth-century London. Also included are discussions of the poet Ann Yearsley, the didact Hester Mulso, the moralist Hannah More, the playwright Elizabeth Griffith, the novelist Sarah Scott, the classicist Elizabeth Carter and the historian Catharine Macaulay. (Yes, those descriptors are inadequate — most worked in other genres too — and, yes, everyone should have tried harder to come up with a greater variety of first names and, also yes, most of these women bore multiple surnames as they moved in and out of marriages: by the end of Hester Thrale’s life, for example, she was more accurately Hester Lynch Salusbury Thrale Piozzi.)

Gibson’s initial chapters set up the two main poles for the bluestocking crowd: Montagu’s glittering and rather controlled Mayfair salon and Thrale’s more relaxed but equally exclusive country house at Streatham, south of London. Both places served as a way for women and men to meet, converse, swap literary news and generally engage in that eighteenth-century pursuit, the “refinement of manners.”

Men could also find this opportunity through other means at the time — in clubs, societies and lecture halls. But for women the chances were scarcer. More than these physical establishments, though, Montagu and Thrale — themselves friends though not coordinated patronesses — helped to create connections between like-minded people that could then be maintained through letter-writing and smaller meetings elsewhere.

It was Montagu who coined the term “bluestocking.” She first applied it in 1757 to a man, a botanist friend of hers who was so obsessed with his studies in his garden that on entering the house he forgot to change from his blue worsted stockings into his white silk stockings. The term became a byword for those who privileged intellectual inquiry over fickle fashion, and it initially attached equally to men and women. By the 1780s, though, it was increasingly being applied only to women; and after 1800, with the death of Montagu and most of her acquaintances and the coincidental tightening of Britain’s gender norms, the term took on a pejorative sense.

More than a hundred years later, Woolf was one of the first to try to revive respect for the bluestockings. Into the twentieth century, some — though not all — feminists took a similar interest, choosing to focus on their mere existence in the face of concerted patriarchal forces (and ignoring their well-known elitism and general conservatism). In her twenty-first-century book Gibson aims likewise.

Carving out a collective existence as intellectual women was no mean feat. And the bluestockings did have a lot of feelings about their efforts to do so, as Woolf would say. Those feelings, though, were not what you might expect — confidence, resolution or pluck. Rather, they were mostly doubt, exasperation and fear.

Griffith, for one, always doubted her writing abilities: “I have none of that charming, flattering Enthusiasm about me, that should support one’s Spirits when their Words are sent to the Mercy of the Public.” On the contrary, she insisted, “I shrink into nothing on such occasions.” Similar feelings might be discerned in the decision of many bluestockings to publish anonymously or with a male pseudonym.

Exasperation was a dominant emotion. It was directed at those things thought to stand most starkly between the bluestockings and the time they needed to write: namely, husbands and children. Montagu once baldly confessed that “I weep more at a wedding than a funeral.” Her own marriage turned out to provide untold wealth and connections, but at the price of having to forever placate a man perpetually jealous of her friends.

Elizabeth Carter refused to get married at all, freeing up space for her classical translations that her correspondents could only envy. She didn’t escape drudgery entirely, though: her respectability depended on living with family. She once explained that her slowness in replying to a letter was due to “working my eyes out in making shirts for my brother… ’Tis a most vexatious thing to be perplexed for want of time.”

Thrale took the cake, however, for vexing domesticity. Gibson’s extraordinary chapter on “Motherhood” details with captivating horror Thrale’s seventeen pregnancies in fifteen years, and the burial of no fewer than seven of the children who were born. Although she was a devoted mother, Thrale often felt trapped, especially when her care ended so often with death: “The Thing is,” she once admitted, “I have listened to Babies learning till I am half stupefied — & all my pains have answered so poorly… The instructions I labor’d to give them — what did they end in? The Grave.”

Her husband was also, hands down, the worst of all the men associated with the bluestockings. A poor businessman who needed his wife to rescue his brewery, he cheated on her endlessly, once adding to Hester’s duties an hourly scrub of his balls with a poultice to cure him of venereal disease.

Finally, there was fear — fear of ridicule, fear of scandal, and most of all fear of being ostracised from polite society. Thrale found out all about bluestocking fear when her awful husband finally died in 1781 and she could marry her great love, a lowly, Catholic Italian called Gabriel Piozzi. Her friends were scandalised by the class and religious incompatibilities, as well as by the gross implication that older women felt lust. Montagu dropped her like a stone. Mulso outright declared her insane: “Passions are not natural in a Matron’s bones,” she fumed; “It has given great occasion to the Enemy to blaspheme… the Bas Bleu [bluestocking] Ladies.”

The historian Catharine Macaulay suffered even harsher treatment when she married a younger man. She had been part of the bluestocking crowd for more than a decade, but with her misstep came total disavowal. Hannah More claimed she had always regarded Macaulay as “absurd, vain, and affected.” For Sarah Scott, she was “a dishonour to the sex” who ought to be drowned in the Avon.

Fair play to Woolf, then, that an account of women’s feelings is not without drama or intrigue. But what of the larger world around these particular women? What of their feelings about the constant warfare that raged alongside their lives? What of their views about the revolutions and colonies that were forged by Britain’s wars? What, in other words, of their politics?

Although we know many bluestockings had strong political feelings, these are not tackled in Gibson’s book. The only person to emerge as “political” is Macaulay, the republican historian who apparently believed that her writings should have “a clear ideological slant.” In fact, all the bluestockings wrote ideologically; it’s just that their ideology was chiefly of the status quo — conservative, royalist, classist, xenophobic and anti-reform — and thus appeared invisible.

Gibson misses several opportunities to explore the bluestockings’ politics. Griffith, for instance, once forgave her fiancé for a misdemeanour because of his ideas about John Locke’s political theory. But what are these? Thrale once helped her cad of a husband to stand for a parliamentary seat against a radical, pro-American opponent. Did this mean she also opposed the American rebellion and reform of the franchise? Mulso once wrote that girls should be encouraged to have “an interest in… politics.” Yet how? Why? To which end?

This silence doesn’t detract from Gibson’s achievement. It probably does mean, though, that her book’s subtitle — “the first women’s movement” — strains too hard for credibility. On page 3 she goes further, calling her subjects “the first women’s liberation movement.” From the evidence she gives, the majority of bluestockings were never cohesive enough to form a movement, and certainly never reformist enough to seek the freedom of any women other than themselves — and sometimes, when a bluestocking transgressed, not even all of their number.

Montagu, Thrale and their associates certainly argued for new ways of thinking about women’s intellectual capacity. But without an adequate account of their opinions about what was happening beyond their own spaces it is hard to make a full assessment of their success. Future works on remarkable women might need to include feelings and politics — not only drawing-rooms but also theatres of war. •

Bluestockings: The First Women’s Movement
By Susannah Gibson |  John Murray | $55 | 337 pages.

The post “I weep more at a wedding than a funeral.” appeared first on Inside Story.

The truth of the matter is more nuanced. The National Study of Mental Health and Wellbeing, carried out between 2020 and 2022 by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, tells us that 22 per cent of Australians had a mental disorder in the previous twelve months and 43 per cent within their lifetime. Large numbers, no doubt, but no larger than the 20 per cent and 45 per cent figures obtained when the study was conducted in 2007.

But hidden in these aggregated figures is a worrying trend. Among young people aged sixteen to twenty-four, the twelve-month prevalence of mental disorder rose from 26 per cent to 39 per cent, and that increase was especially steep for young women, up from 30 per cent to 46 per cent. When half of this group has a diagnosable mental illness — an underestimate, because the study only counts a subset of the most prevalent conditions — something is clearly very wrong.

A similar story of age- and gender-biased deterioration is told by the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey. When an index of mental health is tracked across iterations of the survey from 2001 to 2021, older and middle-aged adults hold relatively steady but people aged fifteen to thirty-four, and especially young women, show a relentless decline beginning around 2014. The pandemic, the usual all-purpose explanation for recent social trends, can’t be held responsible for a rise in psychiatric misery that preceded it by several years, so what can?

Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation offers a provocative but compelling answer to this question. Haidt, an American social psychologist known for influential books on well-being (The Happiness Hypothesis), moral psychology and political polarisation (The Righteous Mind) and upheavals on US college campuses (The Coddling of the American Mind, written with Greg Lukianoff), argues that some of the usual explanatory suspects are innocent. They don’t account for why declining mental health disproportionately affects young women, why it is occurring now or why the trendline started to dive in the early 2010s after a period of stability.

The prospect of ecological catastrophe, for example, weighs most heavily on younger people but every generation has experienced existential threats. Wars, natural disasters, and economic crises are conspicuous reasons for distress and despair, but world events have always been terrible. It is not obvious why they should disproportionately make young women anxious and depressed while leaving older and maler people unaffected. The stigma of mental illness may have declined so that people have become more willing to acknowledge it, but increases in the prevalence of mental ill-health among young people are not confined to subjective reports but also found in rates of hospitalisation and suicide.

The chief culprit, Haidt proposes, is technological. Smartphones and social media have rewired young minds to an unprecedented degree, replacing “play-based childhood” with “phone-based childhood.” Portable devices with addictive apps and algorithms engineered to harvest attention and expose children to damaging content have wrought havoc on young people’s mental health. They have done so in ways that are gendered and most severely affect generation Z. Born after 1995, these young people are the first to have gone through puberty in the virtual world.

Haidt marshals high-quality evidence for the decline in young people’s wellbeing over the past decade. Graph upon graph show inflection points in the early 2010s when mental health and related phenomena such as feelings of social connection or meaning in life start to trend downward. These trends are not limited to the United States but occur more or less in lockstep around the Western world. Their timing indicates that it is not the internet or social networking sites themselves that are damaging, but the transformation that resulted from the advent of smartphones, increased interactivity, image posting, likes chasing, algorithmic feeds, front-facing cameras and the proliferation of apps engaged in a race to the bottom to ensnare new users.

Haidt argues that the near-universal use of smartphones in children and especially pre-teens is driving the increase in mental health problems among young people. Coupled with over-protective parenting around physical risks in the real world has been an under-protection around virtual risks that leaves children with near-unfettered access to age-inappropriate sites. Like Big Tobacco, the developers of social media platforms have designed them to be maximally addictive, have known about the harms likely to result, have made bad faith denials of that knowledge, and have dragged their heels when it comes to mitigating known risks that would have commercial consequences.

There are many reasons why phone-based childhood has damaging effects. It facilitates social comparisons around appearance and popularity, enables bullying and exclusion, exposes young children to adult-focused material, and serves individualized content that exploits their vulnerabilities. It fragments attention and disrupts sleep, with implications for schooling as much as for mental health. Smartphones also function as “experience blockers,” reducing unstructured time with friends and the opportunities for developing skills in synchronous social interaction, conflict resolution and everyday independence.

Haidt is emphatic that the problem of phone-based childhood is not just the direct harms it brings but also the opportunity costs: the time not spent acquiring real-world capabilities and connections. Added to a prevailing culture of safetyism that attempts to eradicate risk and prescribes structured activity at the expense of free play and exploration, the outcome is a generation increasingly on the back foot, worried about what could go wrong and feeling ill-equipped to deal with it. Well-documented developmental delays in a range of independent and risky behaviours are one consequence, and the rise of anxiety is another.

When many children and adolescents report that they are almost constantly on their phones we should therefore not be surprised that they feel disconnected, lonely, exhausted, inattentive and overwhelmed. Haidt argues that many of these emotional and social effects are common to young people as a group, but some are gendered. Girls are more likely to be entrapped by image-focused networking sites that promote perfectionist norms, decrease their satisfaction with their bodies, and expose them to bullying, trolling and unwanted attention from older men. Boys are more often drawn into videogames and pornography, which foster social detachment, pessimism and a sense of meaninglessness, sometimes combined with bitter misogyny.

Haidt reminds us not to think of children as miniature adults, but as works in progress whose brains are malleable and developmentally primed for cultural learning. “Rewiring” may be an overstatement — brains never set like plaster and cultural learning continues through life — but the preteen years are a sensitive period for figuring out who and what to look up to, a bias easily hijacked by influencers and algorithm-driven video feeds. Older adults can be moralistic about adolescents who won’t disengage from their phones, but when those phones are where life happens, and when the brain’s executive functions are only half-formed, we should understand why shiny rectangles of metal and glass become prosthetic.

What to do? Haidt has a range of prescriptions for parents, schools, tech firms and governments. Parents should band together to encourage free play, promote real-world and nature-based activities that build a sense of competence and community, limit screen time for younger children, use parental controls, and delay the opening of social media accounts until age sixteen. Schools should ban phones for the entirety of the school day, lengthen recess, encourage unstructured play, renormalise childhood independence and push back against helicopter parenting. There is a social justice imperative here, Haidt observes, as smartphone use seems to disproportionately affect the academic performance of low-income students.

Responsibility for intervening can’t be left to individuals and local institutions alone. Governments and tech firms must recognise their duty of care and come to see the current state of affairs as a public health issue, much like tobacco, seat belts, sun exposure or leaded petrol. Tech firms must get serious about age verification and increasing the age of “internet adulthood” at which young people can make contracts with corporations hell-bent on extracting their time and attention. Governments can legislate these requirements, design more child-friendly public spaces, and remove penalties for healthy forms of child autonomy such as going to a playground without a parent, currently criminalised in the United States as “neglect.”

The Anxious Generation is a passionate book, coming from a place of deep concern, but most of it is written with the cool intonation of social science. The work is accessible and clearly intended for a wide readership, each chapter ending with a bulleted summary of key points. There is a refreshing humility about the empirical claims, which Haidt accepts can be challenged and may sometimes turn out to be wrong, referring the reader on to a website where updates on the state of the evidence will appear.

The part social media plays in mental ill-health is in dispute, for example, although the evidence of a correlation with heavy use is not. Haidt offers up studies supporting the causal interpretation but acknowledges that nothing is straightforward where human behaviour is concerned. Nevertheless, he is justified is arguing that his “Great Rewiring” hypothesis is now the leading account of the origins of the youth mental health crisis. No other contender appears capable of explaining why things seemed to start going wrong around the globe somewhere between 2010 and 2015.

Critics of The Anxious Generation are likely to argue that Haidt’s hypothesis is simplistic or that it amounts to a moral panic. Both charges would be unfair. A single explanatory factor rarely accounts for something as complex as a major social trend, of course, but identifying a dominant cause has the pragmatic benefit of prioritising interventions. If phone-based childhood is the problem then we have a clear target for possible solutions.

As explanations go, Haidt’s isn’t quite as simple as it might seem in any case. The advent of smartphones and all-consuming social media may take centre stage, but earlier cultural shifts that amplified the sense of risk and promote over-protection set the scene and compounded young people’s vulnerability. Haidt’s account of the elements of smartphone use that are most damaging is also highly specified rather than a wholesale rejection of the virtual world.

The mental health field often extols the complexity of its subject matter, which sits at the jumbled intersection of mind, brain and culture, but that recognition can hamper the search for agreed interventions. The usual calls to boost clinical services are understandable, but solutions that address individual distress in the present fail to tackle the collective, institutional and developmental sources of the problem.

Some proposed solutions, such as efforts to build online social connections, may be ineffective because they fail to foster the embodied, real-world connections that matter. Other supposedly compassionate responses, such as accommodating student anxiety with diluted academic requirements and on-demand extensions, may make anxiety worse by enabling and rewarding avoidance. Haidt arguably overlooks how much mental ill-health among young people is being inadvertently made worse by well-meaning attempts to accommodate it and by backfiring efforts to boost awareness and illness-based identities.

The charge of moral panic is equally problematic and doesn’t stick for three reasons. First, evidence for the harmful consequences of phone-based childhood is now documented in a way that past worries about new technologies were not. Second, Haidt’s proposal focuses on the welfare of young people rather than social decay. Although he argues that phone-based life can cause a form of spiritual degradation, his critique is primarily expressed in the register of health rather than morality. Third, although Haidt articulates a significant threat, with the partial exception of social media companies he is not in the business of lashing villains so much as promoting positive, collective responses and a sense of urgency.

The youth mental health crisis is real, and it shows no signs of abating. The human cost is enormous. If rates of mental illness among Australians aged sixteen to twenty-four had remained steady since 2007, around 350,000 fewer young Australians would be experiencing one this year. The Anxious Generation is vital reading for anyone who wants a sense of the scale of the problem and a clear-eyed vision of what it will take to tackle it. •

The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness
By Jonathan Haidt | Penguin | $36.99| 400 pages

The post Virtual anxiety appeared first on Inside Story.

Her causes are many and diverse, but linked by a unifying thread: always, Sylvie sides with the oppressed. For nearly sixty years she has fought for women’s rights, refugee causes, and for anyone whose treatment she deems unfair. Perhaps the best measure of her conviction is that she holds fast to causes, even at risk of personal cost.

Sylvie traces her radical roots to her Jewish paternal grandparents, David Leber and Rivka Szaladajewska, whose motivating creed was social and political change. Rivka was born on 26 September 1896 to an observant Jewish family in the Polish city of Łódź. She would later reject religion, and her family her, but she maintained a cultural and social connection to Judaism, working at the Grosser orphanage for Jewish children in the central Polish city of Piotrków Trybunalski. Her fierce commitment to the politics of the left, at a time when Jews were among the most prominent advocates for social democratic causes in eastern Europe and Russia, was another point of connection to her Jewish heritage.

David Leber was born in Piotrków Trybunalski, Poland, on 10 January 1887. While the details of his early life are sketchy, he was motivated from a young age by the tenets of social democracy. He was schooled first at a yeshiva, but left religious education to embrace Bundism, the influential secular Jewish movement that agitated for social and labour reform.

Bundism led David to Russia, and trouble. The February revolution of 1917 saw Bundists and Mensheviks align in a union of social democratic parties. When the February, or Menshevik, revolution was supplanted in October by the more radical Bolsheviks, the Bundists who supported Menshevism became pariahs, dismissed by the new regime as ineffectual gradualists and enemies of the communist state.

Though not a Menshevik himself, David was damned by association. His link to the Menshevik cause appears to have led to his arrest and deportation to Siberia. An accusation that he had sought to assassinate a public official may have been the pretext for his arrest. Whether or not he escaped from Siberia or was released, he is thought to have been rescued from the Soviet Union on a British ship.

Now back in Poland, David found work as a waiter, and met Rivka. Worsening anti-Semitism prompted them to leave their homeland for France in 1922. Rivka was pregnant when they made their way west, and a son, Samuel, was born in Paris on 3 December 1922. Against Jewish custom he was not circumcised, and David and Rivka didn’t marry until twelve years after his birth, with Rivka keeping her maiden name. Her choice to be known as Rivka Szaladajewska was both a stab at patriarchal custom and an affirmation of identity. Others might have seen the Polish suffix “jewska” as a millstone, but not her.

David and Rivka became part of a Parisian left-wing milieu that included other Jewish émigrés, among them the Russian-born artist Marc Chagall, with whom they became good friends. John-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were part of the same circle. David and Rivka brought their passions with them to Paris: they were united in their dislike of conventions for which they saw no purpose and in their commitment to social democratic principles and secularism. David continued to see these beliefs as inherent in Bundism: his experiences in Russia didn’t dim his enthusiasm for the Bundist approach to social change. A manifestation of his commitment to community and history was his involvement in founding the Medem Library in 1929, which is still the most important site of Yiddish learning in Europe.

David and Rivka were two of the thousands of Jews ensnared in 1942 by Operation Spring Wind, in which officials of the Vichy French state cooperated with the Nazi regime to arrest foreign and stateless Jews living in France. The operation was the first step in a plan to send Jews east to Auschwitz and their deaths. The two of them were arrested on 16 July in the infamous Vél d’Hiv round-up, interned at the Drancy transit camp in Paris, and then deported to Auschwitz on 24 July as part of convoy number 10. They were killed at Auschwitz, probably later in 1942, though when exactly isn’t certain. Rivka is thought to have taken her own life, throwing herself on an electric fence after she learnt that she was to be a victim of one of Josef Mengele’s depraved experiments.

Two years earlier, when the Germans marched on Paris, Rivka and David’s son Sam was a seventeen-year-old school student living with his parents in the 20th arrondissement. His response to the German advance was to cycle to the port of Royan on the Atlantic coast in the hope of finding passage to England. This plan failed and he returned to Paris, where he remained until November 1941, when David and Rivka compelled him to leave the city for Lyon in the zone libre, where he lived with friends.

German occupation of the zone in November 1942 prompted Sam to move to Grenoble, where he worked as a lathe turner before being corralled into the Chantiers de la Jeunesse Française, a national service scheme imposed on French youth by the Vichy state. Released from this obligation in mid 1943, he managed to avoid another, more insidious labour scheme — the Service du Travail Obligatoire, which sent young French men to Germany as indentured labour — by joining the Resistance in late 1943 or early 1944.

For life as a maquisard, Sam chose the stirring alias Serge Rebel, his new surname a testament to his task and heritage: Rebel is the anadrome of Leber. From David and Rivka he had inherited a commitment to the ideals of Bundism and socialism. He had joined the SKIF, the youth wing of the Bundist movement, in 1931, the year he turned nine. A strong anti-communist streak may have been another inheritance, though his opposition was fed also by his own experiences.

During the Spanish civil war of 1936–39, he had travelled to Spain to fight with the Republicans against Franco’s Nationalist forces. He was turned away on account of his youth, but took from the war an understanding that communists had undermined the Republican cause by concerning themselves more with anarchists than fascists.

His dislike of communism hardened when the French Communist Party, echoing Moscow’s line, adopted a neutral position at the start of the second world war, a stance he thought amoral and hopelessly naive. Later, in the Resistance, he objected to the division of the organisation along communist and anti-communist lines as a needless distraction. In his thinking, communists too often missed the point of the fight. And the point of any battle was to act, not to posture.

In the Resistance Sam worked in intelligence and sabotage. He and his fellow maquisards couldn’t spare explosives to destroy railway tracks so prised them out of position, ensuring that carriages travelling the tracks at Grenoble, an important railway junction connecting different parts of France, would tip over. Precious explosives were reserved for attacking factories that sustained the German war effort. In one instance, Sam recalled, bombs were used to kill German soldiers, but more often their targets were objects rather than people, collaborators aside. For traitors, direct violence always seemed justified.

Sam served with the Resistance until the liberation of France. His rewards were the Croix de Guerre, citations for brave conduct and good service, and a bullet wound, sustained during a firefight with German soldiers in March 1944, which led to three months in hospital, a shortened leg and a permanent and painful limp. Several decades on, Sam was diagnosed with motor neurone disease, which doctors linked to spinal damage caused by his limp.

In later years Sam mentioned his war rarely, and usually only when pressed. School students and Holocaust historians sought him out for interviews, seemingly surprised to find a decorated maquisard living in McKinnon in suburban Melbourne. Sam obliged these requests, with humility and a trace of bemusement. He had fought the war against fascism as a solemn and obvious duty, a position that precluded the shaping of recollections as personal achievement. The fact he was speaking in his third language, after Yiddish and French, may also have shaped his responses, which could seem blunt.

“Sometimes an action went wrong and people got killed and things like that,” he told two interviewers in the 1980s. Nazi collaborators, he added, were “interdicted” on their way to or from work. These answers, on first reading dispassionate and perhaps even callous, did not reflect the man. Rather, they hint at Sam’s lifelong and noble belief in the primacy of the collective cause over the claims of the individual.

After the war Sam returned to Paris, a city that had visited both kindness and cruelty on the Lebers. His parents had found blessed sanctuary there in the 1920s; twenty years later, it was the place of their betrayal. He met Madeleine Benczkowski, and they married in 1948. His new wife, also French-born of Polish Jewish heritage, had been born in Paris on 20 January 1926. Her parents, Herschel and Chaya Benczkowski, had emigrated west from Poland in the years after the first world war.

Herschel was murdered at Drancy in 1942. Madeleine, her brother Sam and their mother Chaya survived the war thanks to the people smugglers who spirited them from Paris to Lyon, where they lived under false names and Madeleine was able to earn money as a furrier’s apprentice. In Madeleine’s vocabulary, “people smuggler” could be a term of endearment and a pejorative. She knew three types of people smuggler — humanitarians, money-makers and “bastards” who betrayed Jews to Nazis. The Benczkowskis’ saviour was a humanitarian and a money-maker, having taken payment in jewellery.

Sam and Madeleine began their married life in Paris as tailors, making men’s trousers from home. Their daughter Sylvie was born on 30 May 1950. The next year they resolved to emigrate to Australia, their decision to leave France prompted by the Korean war and the threat of another world war. They considered Canada, but chose Australia on the advice of Rose and Leon Goldblum, Sam’s cousin and her husband, who were living in Melbourne and recommended the city as a good, safe place to raise children. Rose and Leon were Auschwitz survivors. A preference for a warmer climate may also have influenced Sam and Madeleine’s choice. The Lebers sailed on the Italian ship Sydney, arriving at Station Pier, Port Melbourne, in February 1952.

The family settled into Australian life in Grey Street, St Kilda, within a milieu that offered comfort and connections to the world from which they had come. Melbourne in the 1950s, and St Kilda in particular, was home to a community of French-speaking Jews from France and Belgium. In their company Sam and Madeleine found friends with whom they shared a common language and aspects of a common heritage. As for so many other migrants across time and place, such connections to the familiar were a sustaining tonic in difficult years.

Before the war, Madeleine had hoped to be an accountant, Sam an engineer. After the war, steady work and a safe home were aspiration enough. Madeleine sought work as a jewellery shop assistant but was rejected on account of her French accent, so she returned to what she knew, working from home as a seamstress. Sam worked as a toolmaker, and fitter and turner. He joined the Australian Metal Workers’ Union: the union movement, and the postwar Australian Labor Party, reflected some of his Bundist ideals.

For Sylvie, the initial contrast between life in Paris and life in Melbourne was less abrupt than it was for her parents. She spoke French at home and Yiddish at her kindergarten at the Bialystoker Centre at 19 Robe Street, St Kilda, which served also as a hostel for Jewish migrants and refugees from Europe. The Alliance Française, where Sam and Madeleine borrowed French-language books, was on the same street. Such was Sylvie’s immersion in this European milieu that she knew little English when she started at St Kilda Park Primary School. Daniel, her brother, was born in 1959.

***

If Sam, who died in 2011 aged eighty-eight, was an “activist,” he probably didn’t recognise it. His engagement with the political was not a conscious choice but the manifestation of a commitment to social democratic ideals; in his conception, actions gave honour and worth to thoughts. To be political, if that’s what others called it, was simply his way of being.

Sylvie has followed the same path, her activism inseparable from her work and passions. In this regard she is her father’s daughter. Madeleine, who died in 2015, was a quieter social democrat than her husband: she voted Labor and hoped for a society ordered on fairness and merit rather than money and privilege, but was not overtly political.

In 1979 Sylvie and her friend Eve Glenn formed Girl’s Garage Band, a seven-woman punk rock band with Sylvie on bass guitar, Eve on lead guitar, and Fran Kelly, not yet an ABC journalist, on vocals. The band became better known as Toxic Shock, the name a pointed reference to the bacterial syndrome associated with tampon use that at the time was harming and killing many women. The band’s 1981 single “Intoxication,” written by Sylvie, protested at the complicity of tampon manufacturers in the prevalence of the syndrome.

Through Toxic Shock, Sylvie could voice specific protest, rail against the patriarchal nature of the punk and post-punk scenes and the music industry generally, and express her passion for music. Give-Men-a-Pause, a women’s music show she hosted on 3RRR in the early 1980s, offered another stage to voice thoughts on life and music. In a 2015 article about the contemporary Australian popular music scene, she wrote of her enduring love for playing and listening to music, and her dismay at the persistence of the boys’ club that Toxic Shock strove to disrupt.

For Sylvie, music has been a passion, a motivation and, on occasion, a refuge from horror. In Queensland in 1972, some years before forming Toxic Shock, she was raped and very nearly murdered. She has written with compelling honesty of these crimes, the toll they have taken on her mind and body over half a century, and her determination always to fight back lest “the bastards win.”

Her response to the assault might be described as Leberian, for its hallmarks are concern for others and a remarkable and enduring capacity to resist. Initially she sought to shield her parents from the attack, worried that they, as European Jews who had lived through the war, had experienced enough anguish. Later, her understanding of the Lebers’ commitment to social justice motivated her to speak publicly about what she had suffered. A year after she was assaulted, she and a group of friends founded Women Against Rape, Victoria’s first rape crisis centre, housed within the Women’s Health Centre on Johnston Street, Collingwood. Women Against Rape supported victims in every way possible, while advocating simultaneously for legal change and community education.

Sylvie is a passionate advocate for the rights of refugees and asylum seekers, the experiences of her parents and grandparents having taught her something of the pain and indignity of being denied a home. When Arne Rinnan, captain of the infamous MV Tampa, made his last voyage into Australian waters before retirement, Sylvie and other Melbourne members of the Refugee Action Collective took to a small boat so that they might approach his cargo ship and salute him for his role in rescuing imperilled refugees during the Tampa affair of 2001. Rinnan’s moral example elicited an idiosyncratic touch: to signal her admiration, Sylvie fashioned a placard decorated with a love heart. Love, Sylvie believes, “is a revolutionary emotion.”

Sylvie named her daughter Colette Anna — Colette for the pioneering French author and feminist, and Anna for a great aunt who survived Auschwitz. Colette is a social worker, committed to many of the same causes as her mother. She works to prevent violence against women, and argues for the rights of refugees, including protesting their abysmal treatment by Australian governments, Liberal and Labor. Colette is another Leber ratbag, which makes her mother proud. It’s in the blood. •

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Her sources are “the papery remains of blighted affection,” the records of the 1000 or so cases involving alleged breaches of promises to marry that were brought before Australian courts between 1788 and 1976. These papery remains are brought to vivid life by her broader research — in archives, museum collections, newspapers, memoirs and genealogies — into the lives of the women and men who were at the centre of these cases. As she promises, she writes “a peopled history, one in which the reader gets an insight into the inner lives of women and men in the past, a feel for the textures, sounds and smells of the world which they inhabited.”

Courting is organised around eleven case studies, in the full sense of the term: eleven breach-of-promise cases divided into four time slots, each focused on a period of change. Her choice of cases is shaped by the themes she wishes to investigate: the use of marriage to civilise the convict colony, when law and love were entangled; the geography of mid-Victorian courting, when bourgeois scripts were not always followed; the social turmoil of turn-of-the-century Australia, most strikingly in terms of racial politics; and the commodification of love in a psychologised, therapeutic society, when law and love went their separate ways.

Along the way the reader meets some fascinating people. Outstanding for me was Sarah Cox, “young, feisty, and possessed of ‘killing beauties,’” a seamstress who in 1825 successfully sued a lover for breach of promise but was then disgraced by bearing an illegitimate daughter fathered by her lawyer. That she later married the lawyer and became Mrs William Charles Wentworth did nothing to restore her to Sydney society.

Though her daughter Timmie married well, Sarah was banned from any contact with her other than by letter. When William died in 1872 she wrote to Timmie: “The light of our dwelling has left us so desolate for he was the one that made our house so very cheerful.”

Then there was James Lucas/Jamesetjee Sorabjee, a South Indian merchant from Hong Kong who won his breach-of-promise case in Sydney in 1892. Simmonds’s research makes Lucas an understandable, sympathetic figure: he was a Parsi, and therefore “raised among people who delighted in going to court.”

In 1916 there was schoolteacher and “flighty flapper” Verona Rodriguez, who claimed £5000 for breach of promise, including £180 for her trousseau, and lost the case. Simmonds take us into the warehouse of the Powerhouse Museum to finger with her “the buttery softness” of silk nightdresses from trousseaux of the period so we can imagine the salacious scene in the courthouse when Miss Rodriguez’s nighties were produced as evidence. This is intimate history indeed.

Together with this close reading of the past, Simmonds offers some broad-reaching readings of historical change. She delights in challenging established truths — those established by historians and those assumed by experts and activists in the past and the present. Lawyers and psychologists, feminists and defenders of human rights — all will find their preconceptions under challenge in this ambitious volume.

Simmonds teaches law at the University of Technology, Sydney, and law students and professionals are one of her intended audiences. The backstory to her trail of breach-of-promise cases tells of an evolving legal practice and profession that became more abstracted over time from ordinary reality. In the earliest years “ordinary people” used the common law as “a set of ancient rights and inherited privileges” and “as successful stories became binding precedents, common people, as much as judges and legislators, made law.” By the end of the nineteenth century civil law was turning away from torts to contract law, privileging material evidence (like nightdresses) and bureaucratic logic. And today, says Simmonds, we live with a “divided legal system” in which the poor “are channelled into the criminal law while the wealthy have the comfort of the civil courts.”

Simmonds’s litigants are not wealthy, and mostly not very respectable, for “working-class people… were the people who went to court.” As a corrective to bourgeois scholarship, she draws on their voices to argue that the rules of nineteenth-century working-class courtship were different from those of middle-class courtship. Women in paid employment were never limited to the private sphere like their middle-class employers, and “they also had more sex.” Sex before marriage was perfectly acceptable so long as marriage followed. Simmonds writes with cheerful bias that the “countervailing working-class romantic culture… was delightfully resistant to respectable mores.”

But Simmonds’s corrective goes further. American and British histories of love mark the 1890s as the period of greatest change, the time when women moved into the public sphere and capitalism moved courtship out of the home. But “Australia tells a different story,” says Simmonds. Capitalist prosperity came early to Australia, and by 1880 Australian city environments were “based more on pleasure than prohibition,” offering cost-free romantic opportunities to lovers of all classes:

Far from being a classic tale of embourgeoisement — of the working classes becoming respectable — what we see by the 1880s is the middle classes gradually taking up more expansive working-class romantic geographies.

Perhaps this reading would apply to all industrialising, city-building societies at the time.

Simmonds’s reading of the decline and eventual abolition of the breach-of-promise action denies — or at least sharply modifies — the understandings of the feminists and equal rights advocates who consigned it to legal oblivion in 1976. Second-wave feminism’s focus on making women economically independent made them understand breach of promise as reactionary, forcing women “back into dependency on men and marriage.” Simmonds recognises that its abolition marked an advance in women’s status, but she is more concerned with what was lost.

Her revision is based on an understanding of common law as privileging a public language of “moral norms and economic responsibility.” Within this frame the action of breach of promise “produced feminist political subjects.” This seems a large claim, and it is based here on the evidence of a single case study.

But Simmonds’s structural analysis is compelling. Breach of promise required women to take a public stage, to stand in judgement of men, to take their own feelings seriously. The action “elevated private pain to a question of public justice,” and “put a price on the unremunerated feminine labours of love.” Its abolition marked the loss of “compensation for psychic and economic injury” and “the individualism of emotional harm.” It was not “the triumph of love over sexist tradition” but “the final chapter in a story of how love… lost many of its ethical and material foundations.”

This is a radical rewriting of legal and emotional history. It will be fascinating to see how historians currently researching these fields choose to engage with it. •

Courting: An Intimate History of Love and the Law
By Alecia Simmonds | La Trobe University Press/Black Inc. | $45 | 448 pages

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I’ve always found this class fascinating for the intergenerational transfer of ideas it affords, and as a means of tracking changes in students’ approaches to sex and gender. When I began teaching it more than ten years ago, everybody thought that MacKinnon “denied women agency” and nobody identified as a radical feminist, or a feminist at all for that matter, except for the clever girl in Birkenstocks, cargo pants and a women’s collective T-shirt down the front.

By around 2017, after Beyoncé declared herself a feminist and #MeToo swept across the globe, all my students became feminists. Men wrote essays on sexual assault that began with an asterisk next to their name linking to an admission that, yes, they were cis, white, straight, bourgeois men but they had attempted to amplify the voices of the marginalised to compensate for their privileges. MacKinnon was still on the out because this cohort thought women could be empowered by sex work, pornography or kink, and because nobody liked being a victim.

But this year, like last year, I have noticed a distinct change. My students appear to have returned to 1970s radical feminism. It’s not the postmodernist celebration of agency that speaks to this generation but the anger and the structural critiques of patriarchy found in Catharine MacKinnon, Susan Brownmiller and Andrea Dworkin.

Chanel Contos is part of this apparent radical feminist revival, and she has written a book that is erudite, powerful and urgent. I confess I was surprised to enjoy Consent Laid Bare as much as I did: the type is overly large (a friend called it idiot font), it’s aimed at teenagers, and twenty-five-year-old Chanel looks more like a student than a feminist critic.

I was expecting the kind of book we’ve become accustomed to from mainstream feminism: homespun wisdom gleaned from a few popular Netflix series, a few zingers and a rousing call to arms. Instead, Contos’s book is well researched and superbly argued, drawing on radical and postcolonial feminism to widen our understanding of what constitutes sexual violence and to contribute new solutions to a global problem with epidemic proportions.

Contos also extends radical feminism in clever ways. Where MacKinnon and Dworkin in the 1980s called on the state to prohibit pornography (and soon found queer erotica banned) and where #MeToo activists often have a carceral logic to their campaigns (the ideal end point is a lawsuit, then prison), Contos’s solutions are pedagogical and therapeutic. Thinking only in terms of law, she argues, ignores the fact that many survivors don’t want their attackers to go to prison; many simply want validation and an apology.

Where radical feminists critiqued the contractual origins of consent, Contos expands its meaning into the realm of emotion. The etymology of consent, she reminds us, is con, a bringing together, and sentio, to perceive with the senses. Sexual violence occurs when a man’s sense of entitlement overrides his empathy. To this extent, legal consent is a bare minimum. What we need is sex as a form of empathic communication: don’t treat someone how you want to be treated, treat someone how they want to be treated.

Contos’s journey as a consent activist began with her shock as a high school student when a sex-ed speaker came to her school and described a series of commonplace sexual scenarios but labelled them as sexual assault. It wasn’t just that Contos and most of her female friends could identify with these scenarios; their male friends were often the ones responsible.

In 2021, troubled by the pervasiveness of the problem, Contos decided to obtain solid empirical data by asking people online to share their stories of sexual assault during their school years. Seven thousand people sent in testimonies describing behaviour that would fit legal definitions of rape, also mentioning the good jobs their attackers held in order to show both a lack of accountability and the fact that “normal and functioning” people were typical rapists, not strangers in the park.

Contos then built a website called Teach Us Consent that included a web petition signed by nearly 50,000 Australians demanding mandatory consent education in schools. A year later, state education ministers met and agreed to her demands.

These nationwide changes to our education system have happened around the same time as shifts in consent’s legal definition towards active and ongoing consent. The question is no longer whether the person said no, but whether they said yes. Intoxication now completely vitiates consent.

Consent Laid Bare is divided into ten chapters, each of which is aimed at expanding our narratives of sexual assault, whether they concern what a rapist looks like; what causes rape (specifically how rape culture normalises sexual violence); how women respond to rape; how digital technologies and pornography have created new forms of violence; and how we need to go beyond legal solutions when trying to hold men accountable, and to end sexual violence.

Contos’s arguments about the causes of sexual violence will be familiar to anyone versed in radical feminist literature. Because rape is construed as an expression of masculine power and domination — an act that keeps all women in a state of fear and hypervigilance — education about consent is necessary but not sufficient. The problem is wider and deeper.

Girls are raised to accommodate the desires of others, to evacuate the self, to feel shame around their own sexuality and to feel like they don’t have a right to demand pleasure. Boys, on the other hand, are taught to not take no for an answer, particularly if they’re the entitled private school boys that Contos grew up with. They’ve absorbed the view that their sexuality is biologically irrepressible, hydraulic and ungovernable, and that they can offend without consequence. Where girls receive social rewards for their passivity and self-abnegation, boys are rewarded for acts of physical intimidation or ability, wealth and sexual conquests.

This socialisation is part of what Contos, and the radical feminists before her, term “rape culture.” This is a world where sexual assault is normalised by gendered expectations of men and women, where girls are told that wearing a short skirt is distracting for the boys in the class (who simply won’t be able to contain their sexual urges) or where a victim of sexual assault is immediately disbelieved and socially shamed, while the boy walks off scot-free. This wider context helps us to understand not simply why some men feel entitled to rape, but also why women often put up with sex that is uncomfortable, unwelcome or coercive.

Any person over the age of twenty will likely read sections of Contos’s book in a state of fascinated horror: the chapters on sex and the online world and pornography make for particularly grim reading. I was quite unaware that strangulation had become a normal part of sex, which boys assumed girls enjoyed so much that consent was unnecessary. Given that 84 per cent of men aged between fifteen and twenty-nine watch porn at least once a week, there’s no prizes for guessing where these new sexual scripts might be coming from. I was also shocked to find that a girl might now be sitting on a bus or train and a man could send an unsolicited dick pic by airdrop on to her phone.

In Contos’s experience, girls begin being asked to send nudes to boys around the age of twelve (yes, twelve!) while a 2022 Australian study found that 86 per cent of students aged fourteen to eighteen had received sexual messages or images, and 71 per cent had sent them. By the time Contos, as a consent educator, speaks to high school students aged fourteen and older, she says that many say that they’re “over” the sexting stage. In a digital extension of the centuries-old tradition of slut-shaming, a girl whose nudes get “leaked” faces embarrassment and shame, while the boy doing the leaking usually rises up the social hierarchy, congratulated by his male friends on a new conquest.

In this context, it is entirely understandable that generation Z might be rejecting what Contos calls “modern feminism” and returning to the clear, unambiguous critiques of sexual violence offered by radical feminists. Why are all the things  popular feminists celebrate women “choosing” to do — from watching porn, to shaving legs, to wearing high heels, to engaging in sex work — exactly what patriarchy and capitalism want them to do?

“Modern feminism has framed sex work as sexually liberating and put pornography and sex work in the category of strictly Do Not Debate,” Contos argues. Far from being a “righteous reversal of the gender hierarchy,” sex work is not only the most dangerous job in the world, but it also goes hand in hand with capitalism. Unlike radical feminists before her, however, Contos doesn’t argue for state regulation, simply for a more open debate and for an end to the popular, uncritical equation of sex with empowerment.

I suspect that the predominance of psychological discourse among gen-Zers — their tendency to describe their identities through languages of trauma, fragility or pathology — also makes them less concerned about the elements of radical feminism that see women as victims. This is a generation who accept their vulnerability and woundedness, and for whom the most important question is not how they have agency but how to end sexual violence and gender oppression.

In short, this is a book that you should thrust into the hands of the teenage boys and girls in your life. But you should also read it yourself first, both as a fascinating document that signals what might be a historic shift in discourse away from poststructuralism towards radical feminism, and also because Chanel Contos, with her well-researched, well-reasoned and well-written arguments, is smart and inspirational. •

Consent Laid Bare: Sex, Entitlement & the Distortion of Desire
By Chanel Contos | Macmillan Australia | $36.99 | 368 pages

The post Active and ongoing appeared first on Inside Story.

Walter, a British feminist writer and activist, has written an evocative book, Before the Light Fades, that begins as an exploration of the emotional aftermath and turns into an examination of the lives of Ruth and her refugee parents. At first her grief is raw, turning her into “a little scuttling mollusc without armour.” It is compounded by the lingering stigma of suicide, which somehow coexists with a new cultural openness to talking about it.

Walter struggles against the view that her mother had the worst kind of death and that her suicide could only be attributed to mental illness. She bristles at the modern tendency to see all dark emotions through a psychiatric lens, but also worries that towards the end Ruth was in a state of despair rather than Socratic composure.

Friends who use the well-meaning but “off the shelf” language of self-care to comfort her provoke the same irritation. She tries out a range of healing distractions — yoga, swimming, running, gardening — but the idea that we should soothe and coddle ourselves in times of loss seems to her self-absorbed and alien to the generation that is being lost.

The book’s account of the changing seasons of grief is intense and unsparing. Walter has tears, self-reproach and regret, as our current bereavement script leads us to expect, but also times of anger, bitterness and misanthropy. Mourning does not always deepen or ennoble. At times it leads her to resent the living and become hardened, cauterising her empathy to stem the flow of pain. “I am becoming less human, the more I grieve.”

Walter captures the experience of having an ageing parent beautifully. Her relationship with Ruth is about as solid and unambivalent as two strong personalities can have, but she confesses to having experienced a growing annoyance with her mother’s growing vulnerability. Ruth’s preoccupation with dementia, amplified by experiencing her own father’s illness and her work in aged care, seemed out of proportion. Walter is saddened by the loss of Ruth’s independence, fearlessness and rebellious spirit, but her sadness is mingled with an implied criticism of her slide into weakness, as if Ruth should have tried harder to embody the maternal ideal she represented as a younger woman.

Walter reclaims that younger self in a compelling retelling of Ruth’s past, from the horror of her parents’ early life as Jews in Nazi Germany, to their circuitous escape into an unwelcoming England that sent them to internment camps, their shrinking into postwar suburban anonymity, and their upset when the young Ruth resurrects her father’s abandoned radicalism in the fight for nuclear disarmament in the 1960s. Georg knew where dissent could lead.

Ruth’s involvement in Bertrand Russell’s Committee of 100 is a mix of clerical tedium — so much typing, copying and mailing — and daring escapades, peaking when she helps uncover evidence that the British government had built bunkers to house the great and good in the event of nuclear apocalypse.

Ruth’s politics extended beyond the nuclear issue, leading her into a brand of feminism that would later conflict with her daughter’s. Walter recounts how the power feminism she embraced in the 1980s rejected Ruth’s critique of femininity. She believed she could remain glamorous while the last few glass ceilings were quickly shattered. That former self was naive, Walter writes, failing to anticipate that “objectification would be sold back to us as an empty mirage of empowerment.”

This realisation becomes part of a broader and more sympathetic re-evaluation of Ruth’s unorthodox and sometimes puzzling life choices. Even the suicide becomes intelligible, “like leaving a party when you’ve had enough.”

Before the Light Fades reveals not only the courage and creativity of Ruth’s generation of protesters, but also how the disarmament movement’s mission to avert global disaster is echoed in the climate emergency movement of today. Ruth herself comes across as a free spirit who retained her own parents’ sense of displacement and never became entirely settled. Marriage to a fellow activist burns brightly for a while but ends badly. She throws herself into study, social work with refugees, and being a mother and grandmother: “the myth maker of the family, the one who told us who we were.”

Walter’s writerly voice is distinctive without being showy: she is humane, curious and allergic to cliché, but also sceptical, half in the world and half on the sidelines looking askance. She is a deep thinker but not a wallower or a theorist. As her grief starts to lift, she recommits to political action as if carrying forward a family tradition. Her book is a moving meditation on ageing and loss, the persistence of the past, and the necessity of hope in spite of it all.

It’s a funny kind of hope, peeking through a cloud of pessimism, but it seems a fitting tribute to Walter’s lineage of brave and beleaguered radicals. •

Before the Light Fades: A Memoir of Grief and Resistance
By Natasha Walter | Hachette | $32.99 | 256 pages

The post The one who told them who they were appeared first on Inside Story.

Khrushchev’s eyes slid across the appliance, deadpan. “We have such things,” he replied.

Nixon tried again: “This is our newest model. This is the kind which is built in thousands of units for direct installations in the houses. In America, we like to make life easier for women.” Khrushchev bristled, perhaps at the assumptions about gendered work. “Your capitalistic attitude to women does not exist under communism,” he said.

Apparently missing why his praise of a dishwasher might have drawn such a reaction, Nixon barrelled on: “I think that this attitude towards women is universal. What we want to do, is make life more easy for our housewives.” The “American system” gave consumers “new inventions and new techniques” so rapidly, he said, that this very kitchen — currently so up to date — would itself be obsolete in twenty years.

“In Russia,” said Khrushchev, “all you have to do to get a house is to be born in the Soviet Union. You are entitled to housing… In America, if you don’t have a dollar you have a right to choose… sleeping… on the pavement. Yet you say we are the slave to communism.”

It was the mention of this exchange in Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek’s new book, After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time, that prompted me to watch Nixon and Khrushchev talking past each other. It is good viewing, if only for the unintentional cringecore. Squirm as Nixon digs himself deeper; behold two different views of the world butting up against one another. It’s obvious that the US president didn’t understand Khrushchev, but did he also feel that he was being laughed at, outsmarted or outwitted by one to whom he felt a natural superiority?

I happened to watch the video in Laos, just one of the countries Nixon ordered to be bombed in the name of crushing communism, but one particularly devastated by that crusade. I wondered if humiliations like this kitchen debate partly motivated his inhuman insistence on bombing this country “back to the Stone Age” (in the words used during the Indochinese war by General Curtis LeMay) a decade later.

Sitting on the banks of the Mekong River, I could see traces of the poverty, grief and physical devastation left by the war. Amid all this, it seemed indecent to be ruminating on the difficulties of the life I lead at home in Australia. My life, and presumably Hester’s and Srnicek’s, is the kind common across what they call the “rich world”: chronic overwork, real or imagined precarity, a constant feeling of being harried, kids I adore but can’t be with enough, and endless domestic chores at the end of a long week.

This crisis of work in and out of the home has been building for some time, but, as writer Angela Garbes says, “Over the course of the pandemic, many people came to understand — for the first time, deeply, or with renewed agency — that American life is not working for families.” It is easy to dismiss these as “First World problems.” But they are real all the same.

After Work fuses visions for a post-work world with calls to recognise and tackle the crisis in care. Reading it in Laos forced me to see the history of coercion behind the crisis Hester and Srnicek describe. It is not that we “find ourselves” in isolated nuclear families and impossible work–life imbalances. And not everyone lives that way today. But everyone is affected by the struggle over how to live. The fight for free time might not have drawn bombs and bloodshed in Australia and the rest of the rich world, but in other theatres it was violent and prolonged.

Understanding how we got into this mess is surely an important step towards finding a way out. That said, After Work is not really a history book. Perhaps a librarian would place it in the critical sociology section. I read it as myth.

It reminds me of a myth told by the ethnic Katu I work with in Laos. Before the flood, they say, everything was different. The stars were people and the people were stars. Animals were people and people were animals. With the flood, everything swapped places. Those who were rats turned into people, which is why today some people have a lot of hair and others are bald — the bald ones were rats that had been captured and plucked for eating when the flood came. And so on: every element of the current world is explained by how different things were before the flood, and how everything changed and bore the stamp of that change.

Hester and Srnicek describe the Industrial Revolution as an “unprecedented change” that “utterly transformed” domestic life: “Prior to this transformation, housework was exhaustingly laborious.” Heating was apparently a large part of this labour, but not cooling: so by implication they are describing life in a cold climate. We are also in a dystopian world: the authors tell us that children were usually put to work and demands for elder care were few because “working to death was standard.”

We are in a city, probably somewhere in Europe or America, because running water, electricity and gas appeared “as the twentieth century dawned” in this everywhere–nowhere home. The authors briefly mention “the Western household” but this is not a frequent phrase: most of the first half of the book describes an unspecified location.

Then came the flood. The “industrialisation of the home,” a “radical” change, “significantly reduced the burdens of domestic labour” and ushered in “peak family.” Labour was split between a male breadwinner and a female homemaker, producing the image of the nuclear family.

The “second key phase” in this history is the neoliberal stagnation of the 1970s through to the 1990s. The floodwaters receded, leaving a detritus of expectations about the home (for instance, as the key site of almost all unpaid care work); at the same time, anyone who could work for money was expected to do so. These demands bred “a universal sense of growing time pressures.” Today, say the authors, “We remain enmeshed in a world of domestic technologies whose potential to reduce work has gone largely unfulfilled.”

Hester and Srnicek take issue with Joel Salatin, the advocate of whole foods and farming, for evoking a mythical past. But here they offer another myth: that “most” of our great-grandparents “were more likely to be eating stale and monotonous food, plagued by scarcity.” If Salatin’s myth is a classic Garden of Eden story of paradise lost, Hester and Srnicek’s is of the Katu flood variety: everything swapped places, one dystopia replaced another.

The book’s discussion of bathing shows the limits such a view places on imagination. They write that “when bathing meant lugging water into the home, warming it up, and removing waste afterwards, the sheer amount of work required limited how often baths could be taken.” It is as if the only alternative the authors can imagine to a hot bath in a nuclear family’s bathroom is one where hapless family members create the conditions for such a bath using sheer manual labour.

Looking at bathing across cultures and times shows that we (and I use this word in its most inclusive sense) can and do bathe in many ways. We have bathed daily in the Mekong River as the sun set red over the rushing current. We have bathed in water captured from a mountain stream in bamboo pipes and fed across the village fence. We have bathed in Japanese sentō. We have bathed in Minoan palatial throne-room “lustration basins” under paintings depicting menstruation.

Following anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow, we can see that “we” have a capacity for imagining new ways of living and bringing those imaginations into being. Innumerable experiments in living are evident across the anthropological, archaeological and historical record. There is not just one “before” and one “after” in the human story. This diversity is key to the thinking the way out that Hester and Srnicek so rightly seek.

Hester and Srnicek envision a post-scarcity world. By this they mean not an overabundance of consumer goods but a world in which selling one’s labour is not a prerequisite for remaining alive. They propose reducing necessary labour (“work”) as much as possible by improving domestic technologies, accepting lower standards (messier homes, wilder childhoods), and making care work more efficient by removing it where possible from private homes (think: kitchen-less apartments, laundry services). The goal is to expand freedom — defined as time spent in autonomously chosen activities — as much as possible.

The second part of After Work introduces historically grounded alternatives as inspiration: the Russian commune in the early twentieth century; social housing in Vienna; the hippie movement in North America. It is a relief to be grounded after the nowhere–everywhere of the previous chapters.

Hester and Srnicek dutifully mention the well-known shortcomings of each of these “missed futures.” They do include among their inspirations Cuba’s recent family code, which defines a family as “a union of people linked by an affective, psychological and sentimental bond, who commit themselves to sharing life such that they support each other.” But Cuba is not treated as an extended example and nor are criticisms identified. Uncomfortably, all the significant inspirations described in After Work are decidedly white.

“Even in the most gender-equal countries, such as Norway and Denmark, women continue to do nearly 1.5 times as much” unpaid domestic labour as men, Hester and Srnicek write. This is considerably less than the world average, in which women do 3.2 times more unpaid work than men. Here in Laos, though, women do only 1.4 times more such work than men. On this count, Laos outshines Norway and Denmark: by a tiny margin, true, but I still wonder why Laos was left out of the praise granted the Nordic countries.

Of course, I don’t expect all authors to write from a Laos-centric perspective. But living here and being part of a Lao extended family means I read from that perspective. I share Hester and Srnicek’s frustrations with work in the rich world: reading After Work felt like having a sociologist explain a typical week in my Australian life. But I also know that my typical is very strange from the perspective of my Lao family.

Khrushchev and Nixon’s kitchen debate shows how wild the misunderstandings can be when one way of life is perceived from the perspective of another. The mistake Nixon made was assuming that his vision of domestic labour and technology represented progress, and thus assuming that the Soviets were behind. Khrushchev, too, indulged in teleological visions.

Students of conflict in the twentieth century know the violence of such one-track stories. Hester and Srnicek speak truly when they say that typical lives in “the rich world” are now untenable. I agree. Better lives are possible. In building these, let’s not narrow our vision needlessly. The sparks of yet-to-be-realised futures may be hiding in plain sight. •

After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time
By Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek | Verso | $29.99 | 208 pages

The post How should we live? appeared first on Inside Story.

Since the US-supported president Ashraf Ghani fled the capital, the economy has shrunk by 20 per cent or more. Around twenty million people are short of food, and an estimated 3.2 million children are malnourished. Some rural people are reportedly selling organs or even children for cash to survive. Others have streamed into relief camps near provincial capitals for meagre rations.

For its part, the Taliban leadership seems less focused on dealing with this crisis than applying its interpretation of sharia law to social behaviour. It bears down chiefly on women and girls, restricting or even stopping their access to work and education or movement outside the home.

Behaviour like this is the reason the world hangs back from helping the country recover from war. Pakistan, China, Russia, Iran and Qatar have kept their embassies running in Kabul, and India rejoined them in August last year. But none of those countries has formally recognised the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate, and nor has any other Muslim-majority country. Australia and other Western countries maintain cautious communication with the Taliban through diplomatic posts in Qatar, and in the United States’ case through occasional fly-ins or third-country meetings.

Around US$9 billion of the former regime’s foreign funds have been frozen by the United States, several European countries and the United Arab Emirates. After seventy top economists, including Nobel prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, urged president Joe Biden last August to let the Afghan central bank tap the reserves — and stop the “collective punishment” of the Afghan people — the United States set up a foundation in Switzerland to allocate half of the reserves in American banks (US$3.5 billion) to pay for humanitarian supplies and electricity from Central Asian neighbours.

But what more can and should the outside world do to alleviate the suffering and starvation of the Afghan people — and beyond that, influence the Taliban towards the more inclusive interpretations of Islam, especially in the treatment of women and religious minorities, that apply in so many other Muslim nations?

In The Return of the Taliban: Afghanistan after the Americans Left Pakistani-American scholar Hassan Abbas suggests that the immediate prospects for reform in Afghanistan are not great, but that the West must try anyway.

He opens his book by describing how contact between the Taliban and the United States in Qatar from 2012 first acquainted Western officials with some of the figures who were destined to emerge in top positions in the new emirate. After Donald Trump became president in early 2017, this contact developed into negotiations for a US withdrawal.

Zalmay Khalilzad, a seasoned diplomat of Afghan origin, was appointed leader of the American team, and in January 2019 he was cleared by secretary of state Mike Pompeo to offer a drawdown of US forces to zero. In July that year, Trump imposed a nine-month deadline for an agreement. With no gains to show from pulling out of the Iran nuclear pact and talking to North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, Trump needed a deal before the 2020 election.

The Taliban persuaded the Americans to agree on a complete pull-out, including from the huge Bagram air base near Kabul. In return they promised that Afghanistan would not become a base for terrorist attacks on the United States or its allies, and that US forces and their local helpers could withdraw without harassment. Rather less firmly, they also pledged to enter power-sharing dialogue with Ashraf Ghani, and to look after Shia and Hazara minorities and allow female education.

Trump got his peace deal in February 2020, though it was signed in Doha rather than, as he’d hoped, at Camp David near Washington. He overruled Ghani’s objection to the release of 5000 Taliban prisoners as part of the deal. With withdrawal by May 2021 pledged, the Taliban suspended action against American forces and concentrated instead on attacking Kabul’s army. By the time Biden formed his administration, Taliban fighters controlled most of the provinces and were closing in on Kabul. Ghani dithered and postured, losing any opportunity to bargain.

Biden decided not to abandon Trump’s agreement, though he shifted the final departure date to 11 September 2021, exactly two decades after the 9/11 attacks by Afghanistan-based al Qaeda. After a trillion dollars, 2448 Americans killed, 20,722 wounded and many more traumatised, Biden said, a changed outcome was highly unlikely even if America stayed another hundred years.

The reality, says Abbas, is that “the Taliban outlasted the Americans.” Afghans were disabused of any faith that the West and their favoured Kabul politicians would save them. “The glorious myth of the ability of foreign intervention to install a democratic order” was comprehensively debunked.

Parallel with the negotiations in Doha, the Taliban were undergoing successive leadership changes. In tracking these shifts, Abbas give us important insight into the make-up and views of the men now in charge of Afghanistan.

Mullah Mohammed Omar, the secretive but charismatic Ameer ul-Momineen (Leader of the Faithful) during the Taliban’s first spell of government in the 1990s, resurrected the movement after it was ousted by the Americans and the Northern Alliance in late 2001. Around 1995, he had boldly entered a museum in Kandahar, the country’s second city, taken out a rarely seen cloak said to have been worn by the Prophet Muhammad, and put it on before an amazed and adoring crowd.

In 2013, a little over a decade into the new insurgency, Omar became ill and died in a Karachi hospital. His death was kept secret by the Taliban and their mentors in Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency, the ISI, while succession plans proceeded. The natural successor might have been Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, Omar’s young brother-in-law, but he was viewed with suspicion by the ISI because he’d opened contact with a brother of Mohammed Karzai, the then US-backed president in Kabul. He was also out of the picture: the ISI had arrested and jailed him in 2010.

In his absence, Mullah Akhtar Mansour was proclaimed the new emir in 2015. A mullah though he was, he was known for his worldly appetites, heading frequently to the Gulf to “buy perfume” — in other words, enjoy Russian sex workers — and hosting Gulf sheikhs for falcon-hunting. It was under his leadership that the Taliban made their first breakthrough in Afghanistan’s north, seizing the city of Kunduz.

Mansour’s term as emir ended when an American drone strike killed him on the road back to Quetta, his Pakistani hideout, after a stay in Iran. The ISI helped target him, Abbas says, so that US forces struck him on the road, rather than at a tea-stand halt, to avoid civilian casualties. With this “help” from the ISI the United States may have lost an emir more inclined to deal with Kabul.

Succession came down to one of Mansour’s two appointed deputies. The victor, Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada, then fifty-five, was one of the few mullahs who actually knew the Qur’an and hadiths (sayings of the Prophet), though his interpretations diverged from those of most Muslims elsewhere. Apparently strict and calm, Abbas reports, even now he doesn’t know how to use a mobile phone.

Hibatullah retained Mansour’s other deputy, Sirajuddin (or Siraj) Haqqani, a military commander regarded by US intelligence as an ISI asset, who to this day has a US$10 million bounty on his head. One of Omar’s sons, twenty-six-year-old Mullah Yaqoob, was added as second deputy. Baradar, added as a third deputy in 2018 after his release by the Pakistanis at Washington’s request, was soon assigned to the Doha negotiations.

Two years after its return to Kabul, the new Taliban emirate has two centres of power. Hibatullah resides in Kandahar, surrounded by equally conservative mullahs in a council known as the Rahbari Shura. This is the ultimate power centre, akin to the supreme theocratic figure in Iran.

The other centre is the government in Kabul. Unlike its counterpart in Tehran, it isn’t the product of any form of popular election. Its most powerful figures are Siraj Haqqani and Yaqoob, who seized the interior and defence ministries respectively in August 2021 and remain entrenched there.

The prime ministership went to a seventy-year-old mullah, Mohammad Hassan Akhund, regarded as safe hands by Hibatullah. The important qualifications for the job, according to Abbas, were being in Pakistan’s good books, having been in the Taliban councils in Peshawar or Quetta shura and, having studied at the Darul Uloom Haqqania seminary, being of like mind with Hibatullah.

Akhund heads a cabinet of mostly Pushtun conservatives, nearly half of whom are on a UN terrorism blacklist. His government did become a little more diverse when deputy ministers were added, notably deputy economics minister Abdul Latif Nazari, a member of the Hazara ethnic minority who holds a PhD in political science, and deputy health minister Hassan Ghyasi, a medical doctor who is also Hazara.

From the time of the Doha peace agreement until their first weeks after entering Kabul, the Taliban purported to have changed since the 1990s, when women were forced into the all-enveloping burqa, and executions and amputations conducted in public were substituted for sport. Siraj Haqqani even told readers of the New York Times in February 2020 that “killing and maiming must stop,” that the Taliban would work for a new inclusive political system, and that women would have the “right to work” and the “right to education.”

There have been glimmers of progress since the takeover. Taliban fighters guard the Shia minority’s mosques and festivals. Women in the cities wear headscarves, as they would anyway, rather than the burqa, and women have been appointed heads of maternity hospitals and gynaecological schools. A contest to head the Afghan Cricket Board became a “fistfight,” suggesting that attitudes towards sport had changed from when the first Taliban regime expelled the Pakistan soccer team with shaven heads for wearing shorts on the field. Hibatullah has also issued a fatwa against forced marriage and the disinheritance of widows.

Mobile phones and social media are allowed. Indeed, Taliban spokesmen have hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers. With seven million Afghans using the internet — “a necessity of the people,” one minister has said — the regime accepts that this particular tide of modernity can’t be ordered back. A new 100,000-strong regular army and a 140,000-strong police force, many with shaven faces, have been formed. Foreign correspondents are allowed to stay in Kabul, and often get interviews with government figures.

Yet if the promises on taking Kabul seemed too good to be true, that’s because they were, according to Abbas. In December 2021 women were told they must be accompanied by a male relative when travelling medium to long distances. Girls’ schools for grade six (age eleven) and above were subsequently closed.

In June last year, a book by chief justice Mullah Abdul Hakim (with a foreword by ) emphasised the absolute authority of the emir, and entertains no notion of a representative mechanism. Modern (non-religious) education was causing all the country’s problems, he wrote, so education had to be inherently religious. Women could only be wives and mothers, and their intellectual inferiority meant they could never be the emir. They had to be taught at home by family members, and must never study alongside men; if they had to leave the house, the teacher must be a woman.

In October, a government guidance said girls shouldn’t take college entrance exams for subjects like economics, engineering, agriculture, geology and journalism, which were deemed “too difficult.”

Abbas sees two minds at war here, with the conservative clerics advising so far prevailing, to the dismay of more progressive elements. It doesn’t help that some Western media call this “a return to traditional Islam” — it isn’t, he says. The Taliban “routinely mix up their tribal norms with Islam” instead of following sayings of the Prophet such as “Education is incumbent on every boy and girl.” Once again, women are the victims of war, Abbas writes. “They have become the bargaining chip, their liberties the sacrifice.”

And what of the Taliban’s other promises?

On security, the main terror threat comes from the regional branch of ISIS, known as the Islamic State in Khorasan. Its suicide bombing amid the crowds outside Kabul’s airport on 26 August 2021 killed 170 Afghans and thirteen American soldiers, and it has also targeted the Shia and Hazara minorities where it can. The Taliban are said to be seeking aid from the Americans, including signals intelligence, to fight the ISK; outflanked in extremism, it worries that its now-idle fighters might gravitate to the radical group.

But old Taliban friendships persist. In July last year, a CIA drone strike killed the visiting al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in a Kabul residence where he was apparently a guest of interior minister Siraj Haqqani. The muted response of the government showed its embarrassment.

While the ISK, with its many foreign members, might struggle in Afghanistan, a worsening security problem is blowing back on the Taliban’s old puppet-masters in Pakistan. A wave of terror bombings by the Taliban’s counterpart, Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, is aiming to establish an even purer (to its mind) form of Islamic rule in the country whose name means “Land of the Pure.”

As for inclusion, the Taliban resisted bringing figures from the former US-backed government into even symbolic roles. But Hamid Karzai, the former president, and Abdullah Abdullah, a former chief minister, continue to live in Kabul. The Hazara ethnic minority fares better than during the first Taliban period, when they were victims of a genocide that saw desperate journeys to foreign asylum — some to Australia by boat — but Abbas notes Hazara lands reportedly being taken by Pashtuns and Hazara being excluded from relief supplies.

Economic stringency is affecting the Taliban as well, and helping moderate figures. Baradar has come back into the picture as head of economic policy with oversight of the finance ministry. Though not an economist, his Doha background makes him best suited to approach foreign partners and donors.

Another frontman is a foreign ministry spokesman, Abdul Qahar Balkhi, who grew up in New Zealand, speaks fluent English and may be a son-in-law of the late emir Mansour. As part of this effort to improve their image abroad, the Taliban have invited foreign correspondents to witness the drive against opium cultivation.

Overall, Abbas says it’s too early to declare that anything resembling a “New Taliban” has arrived. The regime is a toxic mix of “religion gone sour,” patriarchy, tribalism, nationalism and ethnic rivalry — all surrounded by baleful geopolitical rivalries: Saudi Arabia vs Turkey vs Iran; India vs Pakistan; the United Arab Emirates vs Qatar. But change might happen over the next five years as the Omar-era old guard retires.

This is very much an interim book, breezily written, more journalistic than academic, with necessarily vague attributions to the Taliban, diplomatic, intelligence and army figures whom Abbas quotes. It is strong on the who, how and where, less so on the “why.” The explanation of the Taliban’s theology derived from the Deoband school in Northern India could be a lot clearer: Abbas assumes a knowledge of the Salafi and Wahhabi purist schools originating in the Arab world in making a distinction about the Taliban.

But Abbas does buttress his contention that holding back doesn’t help anyone. The Taliban are the de facto government, and the West recognises regimes with equally atrocious human rights records elsewhere. Distinguishing between engagement and endorsement, Abbas argues that only through “creative engagement” can the Taliban be influenced effectively. He concludes: “Not engaging is going to support the view of hardliners that the world is against them — and consequently they will rise further within the organisation.” •

The Return of the Taliban: Afghanistan after the Americans Left
By Hassan Abbas | Yale University Press | $34.95 | 305 pages

The post Enigmatic pariah appeared first on Inside Story.

The interesting addendum to this parade of facts is the covert nature of abortion procedures. The number performed in Australia is nearly impossible to accurately calculate because no specific Medicare item number exists (the rebate is shared with that for miscarriage curettage) and only South Australia collects data on pregnancy outcomes. Medical abortions are even more difficult to numerically assay.

Think about those facts for a minute: it’s the third most commonly performed surgical procedure in Australia but nobody, anywhere, is analysing or even supplying accurate statistical information as to numbers, types or reasons.

I am a women’s health services provider, and we professionals are all in agreement: the most fundamental right of those with uteri is to have agency over their bodies, their lives, and the means and methods of personal choice in reproductive health. And yet a procedure that is swift and accessible has been legalised in Australia on a piecemeal, state-by-state basis, influenced by differing standards of acceptability based on geography and local attitudes.

Abortion is the secret obverse of motherhood, a choice rather than a sacrifice, and that makes people, especially right-wing male Christian politicians, uncomfortable. You could say that Australia’s abortion policy comes down to this: you’re welcome to have one as long as you promise not to talk about it.

Madison Griffiths’s memoir Tissue positions her squarely in the eye of the abortion discourse storm. She is a feminist, a vegan, a cis-queer artist and published essayist, a podcaster and a domestic violence campaigner. In the middle of the Covid lockdowns in 2021 she was confronted with a pink line on a test strip, undeniable evidence of her own pregnancy. What action she chose to take is, of course, at the centre of this narrative. Griffiths decided to have a medical abortion.

There are things we never find out about Griffiths’s choice. We do find out about her problematic relationship with her own mother and her mother’s anorexia, about the love between the pair, and about Griffiths’s considered intention to become the opposite daughter to the child her mother asked for and expected.

Griffiths puzzles her conservative mother, with her unshaven underarms and legs, her non-conforming clothing, her same-sex relationships and her drug use. “[W]hen I consider my own connection to my mother,” she writes, “there has always been, injected into every goodnight kiss, every tense phone call, a complex thread of guilt; the feeling of having failed, having committed a grievous wrong against her, having let her down.”

Griffiths accepts her mother’s anorexia without qualification, and there is a moment in Tissue that made me catch my breath in wonder: the comparison between the fat-melting cling wrap encasing her mother’s abdomen and the condom Griffiths’s lover refused to wear. Her lover “felt suffocated once fitted in a clear casing, their body robbed of glee. They too, were hungry. But unlike my mother or myself, their hunger mattered.”

Griffiths’s central and complicated relationship with her mother is never completely resolved, although ultimately she implies that the choice to pursue termination, to opt out of parenthood, has given their dyad a degree of resolution. She describes her mother’s love after the abortion as “urgent and keen to shelter me from scorn, determined that I not become her parody, for she is my mother, and I am hers to protect.”

Abortion is, at the core of it, about choosing or denying motherhood, a choice formed from past experiences that will echo into the future: the branch in the path, one course taken and the other unseen, unknown, unknowable. Implicit in Griffiths’s decision-making is the knowledge that she may well experience premature menopause, an inherited condition that heightens the chance this will be her only pregnancy.

But we learn more about her thoughts after the abortion than before, once the termination has been given personhood in its own right and discussed like a breathing individual, both in the abstract and the concrete. Ironically, though, by discussing the effacement of her body by the unwilling nourishment of a being whose existence she considers complete and separate, Griffiths avoids a journey to the latest frontier in the war against women’s bodies.

The battlefield is shifting from women’s reproductive rights to the joyless self-effacement of modern motherhood, misogyny’s newest and most sinister gift. It is no longer considered acceptable to mother in any other way than by the most arduous of labour. Griffiths mentions the Instagram moments of parenthood, a newborn suckling its mother’s breast, a proud father in the background. But modern motherhood is now a matter of continuous soul-obliterating attention to each child, broken sleep for years at a time, an insistence that a crying baby or toddler risks severe psychological harm.

Where Griffiths’s mother’s abdomen was “ripped open” by childbirth, Griffiths spared herself the agonies of parenthood, describing her abortion as “a celebration of my vibrant, colourful, beautiful life. A homage to my joy.” And yet, and yet… Abortion is seldom chosen lightly. Of the aftermath of my own abortion, I once wrote, “I was unbalanced I knew, filled to the brim and over with rage — pure, white, volcanic anger. What tiny chinks remaining were stuffed with grief.”

We never really get to see any great ambivalence in Griffiths’s account of her feelings and motives. It is possible that she genuinely saw her abortion as an unmixed blessing, but she describes an episode of short-lived sobriety afterwards, the creation of a Spotify playlist that reflected her decision, a playlist in which the word “baby” featured in the titles of a third of the songs, which seems to suggest that the impact was greater than she had expected, perhaps more than she was easily able to accept.

Griffiths’s words can seem like they were carefully selected to obscure rather than clarify, as though within the 200-odd pages of her narrative we are given Griffiths only in glimpses, a minnow in a deep, still pool seen in flashes and fragments rather than as a discrete and integrated whole.

This left me musing on the obligations intrinsic to publishing a deeply personal narrative. What portion of the author’s life and experiences do we have a right to expect? Can we find a way of listening without considering ourselves entitled to the whole gory story?

But there are moments that invite elucidation in this book: the incident, for example, in which Griffiths smeared the blood of her abortion over the toilet in her boyfriend’s share house then motioned to him: that’s your problem, clean it up. We never learn what was going through her mind, what her boyfriend’s response was. Her actions are left hanging, without expansion, without analysis. It seems a strange place to exercise coyness.

In rebuttal, one could argue that memoir is selective by its very nature. The author weaves a story from a series of small but significant incidents, moments that, taken together, illustrate and unpack a greater whole. But Griffiths has opened up only part of her tale, and this causes her book’s straddling of the divide between the personal and the polemic — both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness — to be uneasy.

Truly, in its looping, discursive, sometimes unfocused and repetitive recitations, Tissue parallels the conflicting thoughts and emotions Griffiths must have felt when attempting to make sense of the event during three months of late-night sessions in front of the screen: the real-time processing necessary to place a life, unlived by choice, into the past. As a reader, however, it made me wish that Griffiths had spent more time with an editor.

There were also prolonged discussions of the impact of Roe v. Wade in America, but conspicuous in its absence was any reference to Griffiths’s home in Australia, a country in which abortion is legal and the tablets Griffiths took to procure her abortion easily obtained. Again, I wondered where this discussion would fit into the range of Australian experiences, and whether her narrative could be considered as representative. Australia is filled to the brim with stories, other women, other men, other lives.

Perhaps the strongest of Griffiths’s themes comes in her chapter on queerness and unplanned pregnancy. While it is a fact that very few trans men or lesbians will ever require an abortion, perhaps the marginalisation of that tiny minority means a genuinely queer-centred discussion is long overdue, and Griffiths is ideally placed to begin that process. I found myself impressed by the chapter and, later, thinking hard about the issues it raises.

I have provided abortions; I have had an abortion. My daily working life is a study in abortion and its consequences, in foetal abnormalities, terminations after the most bitter and agonising of discussions, sleepless nights and tears blotted by tissues drawn from the box that sits always on my desk.

I have needed to face my anger and grief honestly, head on, and acknowledge that my choice to prioritise myself — the right decision then and afterwards — came at a significant cost. I have subsumed my pain, transformed it into a crucible, a map to something new, something better. The consequences of my loss have made me a more feeling person, tougher and more aware. Perhaps because of that, I am strongly inclined to respect abortion narratives, and I found much to respect in this flawed but energetic book.

Griffiths recites her feelings over and over, each iteration varying only in its minutiae, creating a strange and tangled web of deliberation, her body a citadel invaded by a barbarian horde, the cells of her unplanned pregnancy. She reads widely; she quotes impressively; and many of those quotes made my heart sing.

Though her story ultimately feels to me like a delta — more breadth than depth — Tissue contains moments of great beauty and clarity, sentences that had me gasping, hand over mouth, in which I felt seen. This book has a tremendous heft, a combination of muscularity and verve, and I came away from it with benefits that are likely to increase with time. •

Tissue
By Madison Griffiths | Ultimo Press | $34.99 | 320 pages

The post Eye of the storm appeared first on Inside Story.

There is no dearth of biographies of George Eliot. From markedly unpromising beginnings, the woman who was born Mary Anne Evans became one of the nineteenth century’s most successful authors. Carlisle lists more than half a dozen full-length lives in her endnotes, in addition to the published journals and letters — much of them digitised in the enormous George Eliot Archive — and the books about George Henry Lewes, her spouse of twenty-five years, and by their many associates, all of whom took part in the century’s intellectual ferment.

But although scholarly interest keeps growing, as far as I can tell no other philosopher has been moved to write a book about Eliot. Here, in her preface, Carlisle tells us why:

When I studied philosophy at university, most of the authors I read were unmarried men: Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein. Did they regard marriage as a hindrance to the serious work of philosophy, rather than a spur to thought? My friends and I were constantly analysing relationships — our own and other people’s…

Beneath its conventional surface, marriage simmers with tensions between self and other, body and soul, passion and restraint, the poetry of romantic love and the prose of domestic routine… For better or worse, the answers we find to our marriage questions — whether to marry, how to live in a marriage, whether to remain married — are often close to the heart of our life’s meaning. Over centuries these questions have shaped religious, political and social histories.

We could ask why Carlisle chose to embed her discourse in a study of the life and works of the author we have come to know as George Eliot, and not, say, Jane Austen, whose specialty was dissecting unhappy unions with wit and style and guiding her heroines towards happier ones. Eliot read Austen and couldn’t have failed to have been influenced by her. Yet when she did turn her hand to fiction her approach was darker and broader.

Like Charlotte Brontë, whose work impressed her deeply, Eliot was less concerned with finding the right husbands for her protagonists than with what came after the nuptial knots were tied. And it was the complexity and contradictions in Eliot’s own life and work that Carlisle found particularly useful for exploring the enigma of marriage itself.

George Eliot — variously, Mary Anne Evans, Mary Ann Evans, Marianne Evans, Marian Evans, Marian Lewes, Mary Ann Evans Lewes and finally Mary Ann Cross — was born on 22 November 1819 in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, the third child of Robert Evans, an estate manager. Her father saw that she was formally educated until she was sixteen, when he lost his wife and the children their mother.

At that point, as Mary Ann, she became her father’s housekeeper. She still had access to the library at Albury Hall, where he worked, and quickly plunged into a course of self-education, principally in the classics. After the family moved to Coventry she was introduced by a wealthy couple, Charles and Cara Bray, to England’s radical intelligentsia. Then, after her father’s death, she went to Geneva, boarding with an artist and his wife, and after that to London, where her talents expanded and her circle of connections grew.

It’s hard to imagine a better instance of landing in the right place at the right time. It was as though fate had taken her by the hand and led her to milieus where her intellect could thrive. It also, admittedly, reflected her own determination, her lifelong need to define her identity and, not the least of it, her longing for intimacy. Carlisle, like other biographers, traces her failed relationships (the philosopher Herbert Spencer was one) before she found love and the stability she needed with the journalist-cum-philosopher George Henry Lewes.

The Marriage Question opens with the couple eloping in July 1854. She was thirty-four and had established herself in literary circles by her editorial work, now signing herself Marian Evans, at the prestigious Westminster Review and by her own essays, criticism and translation. But she was not a marriage prospect; her age and prodigious intelligence put off duller men than Lewes, and throughout her life people felt free to comment on what were perceived to be her physical deficits. An overlarge chin was the chief problem, if compensated by a surprisingly beautiful voice.

Nor was Lewes — “slight, short,” his face scarred by smallpox — an oil painting; one contemporary uncharitably remarked on his “immense ugliness,” though photographs show him in a better light. Whatever his physical drawbacks, though, they were more than overcome by a lively, gregarious personality combined with the seriousness of his pursuits.

A perfect match? Not entirely, and more on that later. For now it’s important to note that Lewes also came with baggage — namely, a wife and four children, so Marian Evans was taking a huge risk running off with him. But by the time they boarded the train to Weimar, they were passing themselves off as man and wife, and from that moment she discarded the Evans for Lewes. Throughout their twenty-five years together her husband who was not her husband referred to her affectionately as Polly.

The dash to Weimar was a momentary escape from the scandal that would dog her in Victorian England, but also served to widen her horizons further. Lewes and she were following the path “trodden by other intellectual pilgrims — Romantic radicals who worshipped… the miracle of Genius.” The genius in question was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the Frankfurt-born polymath poet, novelist and scientist who had settled in Weimar as a young man and remained there until his death in 1832. The couple had learned of him by reading Madame de Staël, who had taken the pilgrimage when Goethe was still alive.

With a letter of introduction from Thomas Carlyle, they attended the salon of Goethe’s daughter-in-law, befriending the composer Franz Liszt and other members of Weimar’s creative society. Lewes was halfway through his Life of Goethe, but Marian, Carlisle writes, was particularly ripe for inspiration. Moving among free-thinking artists and intellectuals in Weimar led her to wonder if she could match them.

Into the biography Carlisle weaves many influences of the time. Chief among these was the seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza, whose writings were gaining serious attention some hundred and fifty years after his death. Marian began translating his Ethics into English in 1855. The translation languished for a publisher as Spinoza’s works had, and like his only appeared well after its creator’s death. (Carlisle has edited the 2020 edition.) But the undertaking was a clear indication of the strength of Marian’s ambition and the depth of her intellectual capacity.

It was also a measure of Lewes’s support. Knowing what we do of many couples in which the woman’s aspirations take a back seat, the extent of his interest was rare. Aside from the demands of his own work, he was both her critic and agent, assuming control of her business transactions, eventually  leaving her free to concentrate on her writing. It turned out to be a wise investment. With the success of her first novel, Adam Bede, she was making more than he did, and she turned it all over to him in accordance with the rules of marriage at the time.

More importantly perhaps, she found that, more than poetry or essays, fiction was her true metier. Here she would combine her prodigious capacity for thought with the heightened emotional sensitivity that was equally part of her nature. Like the Brontës before her, and for the same reasons, she adopted a male pseudonym (George being Lewes’s given name, Eliot the most English surname she could think of) for her collection of stories, Scenes of Clerical Life, but with Adam Bede the author’s identity became an open secret.

Then, in 1859, while researching for what would become The Mill on the Floss, she produced “The Lifted Veil,” a short story along the lines of Edgar Allan Poe’s science fictions. The clairvoyant protagonist describes his gift as a form of “double consciousness” — a term, Carlisle tells us, that Eliot used to describe “her own self-doubting, self-critical inner voice.”

It’s telling how often the phrases “lifted veil” or “lifting a veil” recur in this biography, acting as a key to other kinds of double consciousness, and how suited the words are for interrogating the questions about marriage that Carlisle has chosen as her theme. Almost to a woman, Eliot’s heroines, unlike Austen’s, make poor choices and suffer terribly for them before they find happiness, if they ever do. Domestic violence, sometimes in the extreme, is a constant in Eliot’s fiction, and Carlisle’s examination of her partnership with Lewes does raise questions about what today we might call coercive control.

Yet that didn’t seem to put Eliot off marrying. Fifteen months after Lewes died Eliot wed John Cross, a man twenty years younger than she was, as devoted to her as Lewes had been, and who authored the first of her posthumous biographies. She also changed her name to Mary Ann Cross, which appears on the headstone of the grave where she was buried, near Lewes, in Hampstead. It’s not too farfetched to take this as yet more evidence of her deep need for the stability and companionship marriage can offer and how much she must have missed the one she had with Lewes, however irregular and scandalous for the times it was.

I make no claim to Eliot scholarship. Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda are the only two works of hers I remember having read. But if one of the aims of literary biography is to rekindle interest in an author’s work, Carlisle has certainly succeeded with me. Everything Eliot wrote is examined in the round as the life and thought that nurtured them unfold — an approach I found as illuminating as it is thorough.

As for myself, I’ll be reading whatever of George Eliot’s I can lay my hands on, and rereading what I have read with renewed understanding and attention — how the gambling scene that opens Daniel Deronda, for example, is not just a clue to Gwendolen Harleth’s character but can also be read as a metaphor for marriage itself and the risks it inevitably entails.

Did I pick that up on my first reading? Possibly unconsciously, but probably not, because my interest in the book began with Eliot’s philosemitism and that’s largely where it stayed. But The Marriage Question chronicles Eliot’s wide, encompassing vision, her impeccable research, the complexity of her fiction and, as a sidelight, her exasperation that the reviews of her books were generally restricted to commenting on the development of character and plot.

Carlisle, a philosopher, has shown literature to be much more than that. A lot has changed in the world and in the world of letters since Marian Lewes starting writing fiction, but how surprising it is to learn that on the whole reviewing hasn’t changed much at all. That said, I hope I’ve given you in the space I’ve had some idea of the level of Carlisle’s achievement. •

The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life
By Clare Carlisle | Allen Lane | $45 | 367 pages

The post Sense and sensibility appeared first on Inside Story.

In Wifedom, Anna Funder — award-winning writer of the non-fiction Stasiland (2003) and novel All That I Am (2011) — strips everything from the edifice on which George Orwell’s reputation has stood and finds beneath it his first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy: unthanked, unloved, neglected and certainly exhausted. She was also, as Funder relates, an intelligent and discerning woman whose energy and promise were fed upon and ultimately drained by her husband.

A graduate of Oxford who started her own typing agency while studying for a master’s degree in psychology at University College London, Eileen married a moth-eaten and prematurely aged Orwell in 1936 after they met at a party at a friend’s house. For the next nine turbulent years, she worked to financially support his writing while keeping house for him and directly aiding his work by editing, typing and advising.

While doing so, she bore an enormous number of indignities. Almost without exception, Orwell gave his needs and desires higher priority than hers. He rarely lifted a finger around the house and his work kept them on the edge of penury. He was repeatedly, callously, unfaithful. He also persistently erased her contributions.

Much of this was evident from the earliest days of their marriage when they settled in a damp, cramped cottage in rural Hertfordshire. In the seclusion of a room upstairs, Orwell wrote and wrote and wrote, and Eileen — despite having a thesis to finish — was kept on her feet from dawn to dusk, cooking, cleaning, attending to the shop they purported to run, and editing her husband’s work at night — by candlelight — while he, upstairs, made use of the only paraffin lamp.

Then Orwell decided to go to Spain to join the socialists in their bitter civil war against the fascists. His experience as a soldier provided a hideous scar for his neck and the material for Homage to Catalonia, and also became another conspicuous occasion on which Orwell wrote Eileen out of history. Bored by the prospect and dreading the back-breaking labour required to keep the Hertfordshire home running, Eileen followed him to Spain.

Formally she was a lowly typist in the offices of the Independent Labour Party; in reality, her duties required her to lift her eyes much higher than the keys of her Olivetti. She worked variously as an organiser, banker, logistics manager, newspaper and radio editor, writer, producer and more besides. It was work every bit as dangerous — if not more — as Orwell’s, particularly as the tide of the civil war changed; quite likely it was more important work than his, too. Nonetheless, despite her saving Orwell’s life and enabling their escape from Spain, Eileen’s presence and contribution were all but expunged in Homage.

Back in England, Eileen worked at all manner of jobs to make ends meet, including a lengthy stint at the information ministry during the second world war. She continued to keep the house, and she continued to carry the load of her husband’s whims and sometimes callous wishes, including his affairs with her friends and the couple’s adoption of a child, Richard, in 1944. She provided invaluable advice on her husband’s writing during the period when he produced Animal Farm and a succession of essays that became classics, while suffering from tumours that caused her to bleed and faint at disturbingly frequent intervals. During an operation to remove those tumours, she died, aged thirty-nine.

Orwell, who was in Europe reporting on the war, quickly cast about for a new wife — or, really, a replacement live-in servant. He proposed to at least four women and began writing Nineteen Eighty-Four in the Jura house that Eileen, in one of her last acts, had arranged to rent for them. That book was the death of him but the birth of his enormous reputation: seven months after it was published, he died, aged forty-six.

Most of the facts of Eileen’s life make for grim reading, and they are of a kind with the lives of other women with famous writer spouses. The question Funder poses about Eileen is one that could apply just as easily to Jane Welsh (wife of Thomas Carlyle), Catherine Hogarth (wife of Charles Dickens) and Elizabeth Howard (second wife of Kingsley Amis), among others: why did an intelligent, brave and insightful woman become so ground down? In crude terms, how did Eileen not tell Orwell to take his aspidistra and fuck off to Wigan Pier?

Funder’s answer, in short, is patriarchy. It is her awareness of its insidious influence in her own marriage — in how the equal share of the work of life and love has become unbalanced, with the result that her sense of self was being crushed — that prompts her to turn to Orwell’s writing in the first place. She admires his work, the way he illuminates power and its dynamics, servants and masters. “I would read Orwell on the tyrannies, the ‘smelly little orthodoxies’ of his time,” she writes, “and I would use him to liberate myself from mine.”

But that reading of Orwell is not so freeing. She is disconcerted by a stray passage on the dirtiness of women and their “terrible, devouring sexuality.” That it appears to have been written about Eileen troubles her. That the six biographies of Orwell produced between 1972 and 2003 neither explain it nor even really explain Eileen causes Funder’s concern to harden into something approaching suspicion. She begins to wonder why this woman has been pushed to the periphery. “In the end,” she writes, “the biographies started to seem like fictions of omission.” To what extent, she asks, are they influenced by patriarchy?

With this question in mind, Funder uses these works, Eileen’s letters, and Sylvia Topp’s 2020 biography of Eileen to guide a new reading of her life and her marriage to Orwell. Funder studies how the weft of the facts — as they have been established, and can be established — combine with the warp of those Orwell biographies: what is left in, what is taken out, what the biographies disguise and downplay. Funder reads to see the gaps where Eileen might be apparent: “The way the text buckles and strains to avoid her is the way I can see the shape she left.”

The buckles and strains she notices are striking. Funder spotlights passages and techniques by which Orwell’s biographers portray a great man doing everything alone and women as little more than nursemaids or helpless victims, if they are acknowledged at all. Omission is one method; another is the manipulation of chronology, so that cause and effect are separated and the credit for action is denied to the women who act. The most pervasive — ironically, considering Orwell’s famous injunction on it — is the use of the passive voice. In Orwell’s biographies, this is frequently wielded to erase Eileen’s financial and domestic labour, which created the conditions in which Orwell could write, as well as her courageous actions. As Funder writes, “Manuscripts are typed without typists, idyllic circumstances exist without their creators, an escape from Stalinist pursuers is achieved.”

The outrageousness of Eileen’s erasure is compounded by the biographers’ apparent over-reliance on Orwell’s versions of events, most notably in his claim to have had an open marriage. Funder espies a convenient fiction that Orwell told and his biographers swallowed because it preserved an untroubled decency that they projected onto his character. The claim that Eileen also had extramarital affairs is another convenient story, Funder argues: “One revolutionary tryst would transform the Orwells’ marriage to an ‘open’ one in which infidelity was the deal. It wasn’t.”

For these reasons (and more), readers with only a casual acquaintance with Orwell’s life will find in Wifedom a brutal dispelling of any image of a virtuous and decent Orwell, a wizened Saint George whose “wintry voice of conscience” is still heard in debates over totalitarianism, bureaucratic obfuscation, social oppression and colonialism. It will, for those readers, be a harrowing account — yet another, to go up there with Carmela Ciuraru’s Lives of the Wives or Phyllis Rose’s Parallel Lives — of how a monstrous and entitled man took from a woman everything that he should not have. Deepening this tragedy will be the apparent complicity of Orwell’s biographers, and their willingness to consign Eileen to the periphery, if not the shadow, of the biographical spotlight.

Wifedom is a forceful and powerful book, relentless in its advocacy for Eileen and the horrifying injustices done to her. It is also salutary for biographers — a thumping reminder to broaden the spotlight of their inquiry, to peer more closely at the forces at work on their subjects and themselves, and to be ever more careful about the implications of their prose and the benefits they grant their subjects.

Yet for all its close reading, Wifedom is also curiously uninterested in what makes biography a uniquely charged genre to work in. While a biography is concerned with a single subject there is a tension in the simultaneous need to take in the people, institutions and forces that shape the life. A biographer’s sources are much less than everything and they can only work with what they can get, yet they must at some point decide they have enough source material to make a judgement.

Biography, for all its empiricism and evidential rigour, is subjective in nature. While there is a narrative tug to assume a god-like omniscience, there is also an ethical tug to admit to gaps, ambiguities and possibilities. It is axiomatic that no biography is ever definitive, yet it is less well understood that biographies have a shelf life which, if not quite as short as a carton of milk’s, certainly gives the same sour smell when it is exceeded.

Wifedom ignores much of this in its treatment of the Orwell biographies. After their first mention, Funder never again identifies the books or their authors by name except in her endnotes. In anonymising the biographies in the text of her book, she plasters them with a homogeneity that erases how their authors contended with the inevitable tensions and imperatives. One effect is to suggest that the biographers were entirely of the same mind and view and all had the same evidence to hand.

While the biographies are all written by men, and may treat Eileen with less than her due, they are also profoundly different in focus, depth and outlook, and deal with very different ranges of sources. They make for conflicting accounts, and indeed the writers have conflicted with one another. When Peter Stansky, the co-author of the first Orwell biography (1972 and 1979), was once approached at a conference by Bernard Crick, author of a 1980 biography of Orwell, he briefly wondered whether they would come to blows. Crick, however, pointed out that another Orwell biographer was soon scheduled to speak. “Shall we bury our hatchets,” he began, and paused, “… in Jeffrey Meyers’s skull?”

All these men had hatchets. None had an interest in upholding the Saint George figure canonised in Christopher Hollis’s enormously influential Study of George Orwell: The Man and His Works (which goes uncited by Funder). That figure took root and went without an advocatus diaboli for a considerable period because of the unwillingness of anyone to challenge Orwell’s deathbed opposition to any biography at all and his second wife Sonia’s determination to uphold that wish.

Yet palpable across the six biographies published between 1972 and 2023 is a willingness to assail the saintly halo and draw attention to Orwell’s myriad flaws. None of the six biographers is reticent about Orwell’s infidelity, his potential repressed homosexuality, his chauvinism and his racism, among other matters, yet the strength of the criticism for him on these and other fronts increases noticeably in volumes closer to the present day. This reflects, I think, both the increasing size of the Orwell archive — which has just resulted in a new, expanded edition of D.J. Taylor’s biography (reviewed by Peter Marks for Inside Story) — and the new questions biographers have been spurred to ask by societal changes. If these biographies have not wholly dispelled the popular image of Orwell, it has not been for lack of trying.

They certainly have their blind spots, but they are not wholly blind to Eileen’s significance and Orwell’s treatment of her; nor are they uniform in what they do perceive. Funder admits this in a comment she consigns to her endnotes: “[Jeffrey] Meyers is the only biographer to address directly who did the work.” She quotes him, too: “Orwell enjoyed this hairshirt existence [in Hertfordshire], but Eileen, who did most of the work, suffered terribly.” Crick points to how friends and acquaintances understood Eileen:

Her friends are vehement that she understood people far better than George, and that her range of interests was almost as wide. They were not to be perfect together, but always a good match. She fought his fights and looked after him as well as he would allow — although she was a woman careless of creature comforts herself. She indulged, even enjoyed, his eccentricities. Brenda Salkeld thought well of her, believed her to be the kind of woman George needed. Some of Eileen’s friends, however, were not so sure that George was the right man for her, and were puzzled that such an emancipated and forceful woman was so willing to play second fiddle to what appeared to be a rather self-absorbed and gawky minor novelist.

In his 2003 biography, meanwhile, D.J. Taylor points out that Orwell obscured Eileen’s presence in their life: “One could read Orwell’s account of the time they spent together in Morocco — sedulous nature notes and climatic observation — without ever realising that another person was there.” Taylor was also aware enough to write that, in the retrospective glare of Orwell’s reputation, Eileen “never quite exists in her own right.”

One way that Funder has Eileen exist again is by extensively quoting a batch of letters, discovered in 2005, that Eileen posted to a friend during her nine years of marriage. Those letters formed the core of Sylvia Topp’s 2020 biography of Eileen (which reaches very different conclusions from Funder’s) and were also critical to Funder’s decision to eschew a novel about Eileen. “A novel was impossible now, because it would devour the letters as ‘material’ and privilege my voice over hers,” she writes. The solution was to have it both ways: to “make her [Eileen] live and at the same time reveal the wicked magic trick that had erased her.”

The latter half of this sentence accounts for the close readings of Orwell’s biographies and for the sections of first-person memoir-cum-travelogue-cum-polemic; the first half accounts for what Funder calls “a fiction that tries not to lie.” These are scenes, or vignettes, for the most part centred on the letters Eileen sent, quoting the letters and surrounding them with novelistic texture and evocation. Funder suggests that the imagination informing this — the flesh she adds to fact’s bones — is modest, built on factual knowledge of what was happening. “Mostly,” she explains, “I supply only what a film director would, directing an actor on set — the wiping of spectacles, the ash on the carpet, a cat pouring itself off her lap.”

One such scene has Eileen and Orwell sitting in an inn in the Atlas Mountains in 1938, eating stew and drinking tea. Orwell eyes some young Moroccan women outside, and then tells Eileen that he has been working so hard:

“I deserve a treat,” he says, blowing a thin stream of smoke away from her.

A small thing inside her turns to stone. He doesn’t mean her. She forgets to breathe, then does. Closes her mouth. He says he wants one of these Berber girls, “just one.”

“And from me you want?” she says.

“I just thought I should tell you.”

At this, I had a shudder of disgust so strong I had to close the book. The scene is excruciating — in the torment it evokes in Eileen, in the gross and dehumanised entitlement Orwell claims, and in the leaden weight it settles on Eileen while she waits for Orwell’s return afterward. It is an apt example of Funder’s power and formidable talent as a writer.

But this scene is also troubling for precisely that reason. It includes more than just some modest filmic details. The dialogue and Eileen’s reaction are all made up. Its power, especially in that dialogue and imagined reaction, is so enormous that it easily withstands the disclaimer that Funder immediately follows it with: “I am imagining these details, but because this is what happened, there must have been some kind of scene.”

Is it what happened, though?

Funder cites two sources. First are the 1982 memoirs of Tosco Fyvel, who wrote of Orwell telling his wife during the second world war of his attraction for “young Arab girls” and Eileen’s permission for him to “have one of these girls on just one occasion.” Second are the 1970 memoirs of Harold Acton, which recounted, in paraphrased terms, a conversation with Orwell in 1945 in which Orwell had spoken about the beauty of Burmese and Moroccan women and then “admitted that he had seldom tasted such bliss as with certain Moroccan girls.”

This is the sum of it: two recollections independently made twenty-five years after the event of paraphrased conversations about events taking place a minimum of five years before that. Only Fyvel’s makes a specific mention of the incident; the other alludes to something like it only. Fyvel’s also suggests some ambiguity: “True or imagined? It hardly mattered.”

Funder is scathing of that (“I bet it mattered to her,” she writes of Eileen’s reaction), yet there is a very real question to be asked: are these recollections strong enough to support the scene Funder writes? Are these strong enough to declare, as Funder does, that “this is what happened,” that this is “fact”?

Certainly they are strong enough, and of sufficiently grave import, to warrant inclusion and discussion in a biography, with evaluation from the biographer about how the reader can understand them one way or the other. And this is indeed the approach largely adopted by Orwell biographers Stansky and Abrahams (1972 and 1979) and Crick (1980), who had only Acton’s recollection to work with. All are sceptical, but don’t cast the matter wholly aside. Nor is Stansky and Abrahams’s “8-pt footnote,” as Funder calls it, quite as far banished and hidden as she implies: it is printed in the body text of the book.

What is also not noted by Funder is that the biographers after 1980, working with the benefit of Fyvel’s memoir, give the claim more credence. Meyers (2000) implicitly accepts that it happened, offers a rejoinder to Stansky and Abrahams’s caution, and grants an expansive ambiguity about Eileen’s reaction. “Eileen may have allowed Orwell to go with a prostitute,” he writes, “but it must have made her unhappy and hurt their marriage.” Gordon Bowker (2003) and Taylor (2003) implicitly accept it too, though Taylor suggests that Orwell’s disclosure to Fyvel gave “an odd gloss to an otherwise conventional relationship, the thought of shadowy, secret recesses stretching away beneath the surface of their public lives.” Funder is critical of this sentence, seeing it as an unwarranted attribution to Eileen of secret recesses, yet a plainer reading is that Taylor is merely relaying Fyvel’s projection of those recesses.

None of the Orwell biographers declares emphatically that it happened. None of them denies with the same feeling that it did. Nonetheless, Funder finds their treatment wanting, accusing them of trying to “excuse Orwell’s behaviour” and “transmute fact to a rumour.”

“Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent,” Orwell once wrote. Wifedom follows that advice to a tee. In its exploration of Orwell and Eileen it finds considerable evidence for a man undeserving of the pedestal on which he has been placed and a woman who has been unfairly cast aside. It will prompt a better reckoning for Orwell scholars and it will be salutary for writers working with other subjects. But, in time, it too will be seen as an instalment in an arc that ultimately bends towards greater illumination. •

Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life
By Anna Funder | Hamish Hamilton | $36.99 | 464 pages

POSTSCRIPT, MARCH 2026

Every few months, for the past six years, Peter Browne has written to ask if I’d be interested in reviewing a forthcoming biography for Inside Story. Almost all the suggested books — but not this one — have been about men; almost all those men have been involved in politics or literature; and almost all have had titanic egos and stained characters.

There’s been John le Carré, desperate to stop biographer Adam Sisman from making public le Carré’s many affairs. There’s been Norman Mailer, fresh from stabbing his own wife during his campaign to become mayor of New York City. There’s been Peter Ryan, smearing the record to decimate Manning Clark’s reputation. And there’s been Blake Bailey, biographer of Philip Roth, brought undone by claims of infidelity, sexual assault, and affairs with women who were once his middle-school students.

What this suggests about Peter’s regard for my reading interests is probably best left unsaid — as is my willingness to take such assignments. But Peter’s suggestions and proffered books have been instructive. Cumulatively, they have sharpened my sense of how public figures tend to their reputations; how they wheedle and connive to conceal the flaws in their reputations; and how, when found out, they deny, then admit, and then transform themselves into martyrs. That overarching continuity has been guiding my writing about public figures ever since.

Peter’s editing has also been instructive. His eye for the vague thought or woolly platitude is unfailing and his suggestions of clear lines and snappy replacements feel like blessings. His awareness of the judgement that goes too far, or which can be made by the reader from the evidence without the help of some shouting reviewer, is very fine. And his patience with a writer chronically late and prone to writing too much is enormous. He has made my first drafts better, just as he makes the published version better.

In more recent years, many of Peter’s emails have come with an apology for not paying much. The apologies have been unnecessary: each task has come with a lesson that is priceless.

Inside Story is a gem in Australian publishing. Its range and depth, its variety and its contributors, make it unique. Writing for it has been a privilege just as much as reading it has, and I’m very glad that we all will continue to enjoy that privilege. •

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With its focus on domestic politics, Netflix’s new hit series Wave Makers is a reminder that Taiwan is something more than a flashpoint. It’s a lively democracy dealing with a familiar range of modern problems. The series is a mini West Wing, Taiwan-style, with a #MeToo story at its heart — and, in a remarkable case of art informing life, it has made #MeToo an actual domestic political issue. At a moment of high tensions in the Taiwan Strait, this is the issue making news.

Wave Makers is one of several Taiwanese productions from the Netflix stable available in Australia. Internationally, Taiwanese television drama is less popular than Korean, but this series is rating well. Strong performances from a star-studded cast do credit to a script written by two women (Chien Li-ying and Yen Shih-chi) who have real-life experience of party politics.

The series follows media staffers of an out-of-office political party as they deal with political graft, the status of migrants, marriage equality, the death penalty and other politically sensitive issues through ten months of an election campaign. But the political becomes personal when a #MeToo story emerges, slowly becomes the dominant thread, and changes the course of the election.

Reviewers have remarked on the absence from the series of any mention of cross-strait relations, the elephant in the room of East Asian politics. In fact, this elephant is not easily bypassed. Banned in the People’s Republic of China, “harmonised” (censored, that is) on Douban, the main Chinese website for entertainment and culture, the series has inevitably ended up in the cross-strait space.

As an exercise in soft power, Wave Makers functions like Taiwan’s planned porcupine defence, covering “a large number of small things” instead of one big one. Chat on the mainland microblog site Weibo shows that viewers in China, breaching the great firewall to watch the series, are fascinated by the multifaceted portrayal of a thriving Chinese-speaking democracy.

In Taiwan itself, the series has gone to air at a sensitive time in the political cycle. Campaigning is under way for the presidential election on 13 January next year, and so far it’s a men’s race. The redoubtable President Tsai Ing-wen is coming to the end of her second term of office and (unlike her counterpart in China) is stepping down in accordance with the constitution. Her successor may be vice-president Lai Ching-te, whose election would extend the tenure of the Democratic Progressive Party, or DPP, into a third term. With Hou Yu-ih, the candidate for the old establishment KMT party, performing poorly in the polls, Lai’s main competitor looks like being a former mayor of Taipei, Ko Wen-je, who founded the Taiwan People’s Party in 2019.

As if they didn’t have enough to worry about (opinion polls, economic contraction, Chinese fighter jets, Russian frigates), these men are now likely to be reviewing their personal histories.

The #MeToo story in Wave Makers is firmly located in the political world. As early as episode two, rookie staffer Chang Ya-ching is having to deal with the office sleaze. An internal hearing leads nowhere: sexual harassment within the party is too delicate an issue to handle in the course of an election campaign.

As it happens, Ya-ching is also suffering at the hands of her former lover, who is running for election as vice-president on the other party ticket. Handsome, sophisticated and predatory, the aspirational VP has in his possession intimate photos of Ya-ching that he is refusing either to return or to destroy. A sensitive performance by twenty-five-year-old Gingle Wang shows a younger, happier Ya-ching in flashback, falling in love and embarking on a disastrous relationship that blights her job prospects and destroys her peace of mind.

The series reaches its climax with her revelation of the abuse on public television, the inevitable impact on her former lover’s family, and the eventual reverberations for the presidential campaign. Australians who watched Rachelle Miller’s exposé on Four Corners of her treatment at the hands of MP Alan Tudge will be struck by the parallel.

In Taiwan, the series was triggering. Among those who watched it was a former staffer for the DPP. “The first thing that happened,” she later related, was that she had “a good, big cry.” The next was that she went on Facebook to report on her own experience of sexual harassment at work.

Soon afterwards, a second female party worker came forward with an allegation of harassment by a fellow staffer. DPP youth affairs department head Tsai Mu-lin was criticised in both cases; according to the second complainant, he had not only failed to take her accusation seriously but had forced her to apologise.

The DPP moved swiftly to repair its reputation, holding a press conference on the afternoon of 2 June, issuing apologies and forcing resignations, including Tsai Mu-lin’s. But the damage had been done. One website began keeping a running tally of complaints after the style of Covid statistics. In the space of two weeks more than thirty women from various spheres had come forward with complaints. In China, where the DPP is synonymous with abandonment of One China policy, the official media greeted the party’s discomfit with schadenfreude.

What initially looked like a DPP problem quickly turned out to be a general one. A sexual harassment case was already running against a KMT legislator, and incidents involving other party members quickly came to light. Outside the political arena, the entertainment industry has been hit the hardest, with allegations of sexual abuse on the part of actors and television personalities continuing to surface at the time of writing.

Among the accused are Wave Makers star Huang Chien-wei, whose performance as the amiable head of the party’s media department and muddle-headed husband of a long-suffering wife won him hearts all over Taiwan. Prominent political dissidents of the 1989 generation have also been named, including by Wave Makers scriptwriter Chien Li-ying, who alleges that dissident poet Bei Ling groped her during a meeting about a play production.

For political parties, allegations concerning their own party members are hugely embarrassing. On 6 June, President Tsai herself went on Facebook with a strong statement on the duty of society to protect victims. The DPP is currently moving to improve legislation on sexual harassment. In both politics and the entertainment industry, resignations and apologies, and in some cases strong denials, have become frequent.

The impact on the election is hard to predict. On 30 June, at the end of a month’s wall-to-wall coverage of #MeToo, China intensified military exercises in the Taiwan Strait. The following day, Singaporean journalist Woon Wei Jong spoke with seven young Taiwanese about their voting intentions. The conversations were dominated by the cross-strait relationship and the different parties’ stance in relation to the mainland. Is #MeToo at all relevant in this context?

According to mainland emigrant Shangguan Luan, the answer is yes, although the effects are more likely to be seen in an impact on voting patterns than in #MeToo’s becoming an openly debated election issue. Among younger voters, she writes, a sensitivity to gender issues overlaps with the “naturally independent” sensibility characteristic of people born since the 1980s. This generation has grown up in an era when democracy has fostered a sense of self-determination while time has attenuated ancestral links with the mainland. The effect of #MeToo should be to hasten the drift away from the older, more conservative, and essentially more Chinese, attitudes that form the bedrock of the One China policy.

Among mainland viewers, as the same commentator remarks, responses to Wave Makers have varied from sneers about Taiwanese democracy to frank envy. The series’ themes necessarily highlight Taiwan’s political differences from the People’s Republic: the participation of women in political life at the highest levels, a multiparty system, political accountability, freedom of association, freedom of expression, and same-sex marriage (legalised in Taiwan in 2019). The #MeToo movement itself, now surging in Taiwan, has been met in China with arrests of activists instead of perpetrators. A pallid civil rights code introduced in 2022 passes responsibility for infractions ever further down the line of management.

These differences have yielded Taiwan a human rights dividend that is complicating international relations, especially vis-à-vis China. A highly self-conscious Taiwanese series like Wave Makers can hardly avoid being entangled in the resulting complex of issues. The opening scene of the series, a rally on election night, amounts to a call for recognition. The wave makers are warming up the party faithful: “You have voted for hope for Taiwan’s future!” “Let’s change Taiwan’s future together!” The crowd cheers. The name of the candidate flashes up on the screen: “Lin Yueh-chen!” The crowd roars: “Frozen garlic!”

“Frozen garlic” is a pun on the Mandarin word for “elect.” Cheeky and assertive, it captures something about Taiwan at this moment in history. If it joins the lexicon of terms banned by the Chinese government, no one will be surprised. •

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To a man, the officers nod or voice their agreement. It is not until the meeting is about to close that the lone woman in the room musters the courage to speak. Her statement comes in the form of a question, the standard gendered inflection of women in her day. “Isn’t the economy supposed to serve society,” she asks, “rather than the other way around?”

It has been nearly half a century since I drafted a minute, a ministerial or a cabinet submission, but that single interrogative sentence has been forever imprinted on my brain. Since resigning from the service, I have stood outside the arena, taking another direction in my own life as governance in Australia followed the trajectory outlined in that brief senior officers’ meeting.

It may surprise some to be told that the meeting took place while Labor’s Gough Whitlam was still prime minister, and that his government was adopting a tighter approach to fiscal expenditure. This is not the general view of things, but the truth is that the government, under the extreme pressure it was subjected to during that year, accepted it was time to pull up its socks and conform to more stringent fiscal expectations. If the Dismissal had not intervened and the government had been permitted to continue, the received wisdom about its economic capability would be substantially different.

That said, the Whitlam government — and that of its Coalition successor under Malcolm Fraser, whose election later that year was so ignobly prosecuted — was still imbued with a fundamentally Keynesian outlook, the legacy of our postwar reconstruction. The Coalition certainly introduced stringent cost-cutting, but the Country Party’s influence combined with Fraser’s reversion to stimulus measures in the 1982 budget indicated that it hadn’t subscribed to demands for wholesale economic reform.

Indeed, the Fraser government took back responsibility in 1977 for women’s refuges, which had previously devolved to the states, and doubled the allocation for them. It also continued funding childcare and resisted subsidising commercial centres. It was the Hawke Labor government, elected in 1983, that was wholly committed to what was variously called Reaganomics, Rogernomics or economical rationalism, albeit a tempered version. We know it now as neoliberalism, the basic idea of which is that governments should get out of the way and let the market take over.

This change, though focused on economics and couched in its language, has ultimately been a cultural one, and it has been profound. It is perfectly acceptable even today for professionals of all stripes to speak of “the market” in quasi-deistic terms. A spate of articles appearing in the 1980s — in ostensibly progressive media like the National Times as well as in business journals — valorised the pursuit of riches and those who pursued them in gushing terms. I used to keep score of the number of times the word “success” was used, meaning getting ahead in some sort of business.

By the time Howard came along, we were all businesses. Even freelance writers like me were sending out invoices to our editors, and the more fortunate among us were filing quarterly business statements and charging GST. The practice continues to this day, and no one bats an eyelash over the paperwork involved in what was supposed to be a development to rid us of red tape.

And I’m not the first to note that in our dealings with government suddenly we were “clients” and “customers” but never citizens. Gradually, many began to see themselves as lone actors instead of members of communities or collectives. Union membership declined, as did that of political parties. Politics too became a profession rather than a calling.

How have women fared under these developments? Before addressing the question, let me say a few words about myself. I was born in the United States during the Great Depression, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president until I was six. It’s hard to explain how a child that young could absorb the zeitgeist of his New Deal, the relief of knowing that a government was there to help, that people who had been at risk of starvation were given work, even artists and writers and actors like my mother, but I did. And it would be years before I would find myself with a government resembling it.

I left the United States when the scourge of McCarthyism had only just begun to subside. We were now in the grip of a cold war and the repudiation of anything smacking of socialism. Though the Australia I came to in 1958 was also enmeshed in cold war politics, and I was shocked by the blatant racism and what we would come to know as sexism, the attitude towards government I found here was markedly different. To paraphrase the historian Keith Hancock, Australians expected their governments, state and federal, to be at the service of their citizens.

Even for an American scarified by those McCarthy years, the easy Australian attitude towards government took some getting used to. It wasn’t until 1972 that I felt I could let my guard down — that I was once again experiencing a government whose progressive flavour and sweeping reforms for improving society resembled those of the war years of my youth.

Yet less than three years later the seeds of neoliberalism had been planted, the hope and excitement of the Whitlam experiment came crashing down, and though it would take another eight years for the seeds to ripen, the tenor of the previous contract between government and its citizens was transformed.

Is the purpose of an economy to serve a society, or is it indeed the other way around? Most particularly, how have women accommodated this profound change in economic understanding, and its consequent changes in governance?

For an answer I have to go back to those Whitlam years again, during which some groundbreaking reforms were initiated. Women’s reproductive freedoms were enhanced, financial support for single mothers was introduced, and advances in employment were set in train, with the government backing equal pay for equal work and the extension of the minimum wage to women. Discrimination committees were established, part-time work encouraged and, most importantly, a wide-ranging, substantially funded childcare program was introduced.

Free tertiary education, arguably the most significant reform, was not specifically designed for women but did most to expand our horizons. All this required an expansion of the federal public service and the public sector in general. But under the changed zeitgeist, and as time has passed, both have been systematically whittled back, to the point where today we are subjected in every conceivable sphere to the signs of a seriously fractured social order.

Climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic have accentuated these fault lines. The accelerated appearance of extreme weather events predicted by climate scientists decades ago has been met with increasingly woeful federal government policy, the Gillard government’s short-lived emissions trading scheme being the sole exception.

After more than twenty drought years since the turn of the century, whole towns have been left without water and rivers turned dry. The bushfire season has extended, and resources for fighting the growing number of fires and their increased spread and ferocity have been seriously overstretched. What’s more, the very means for fighting them – the planes, the water, the fire retardants – add to the carbon discharged into the atmosphere, itself the cause of the heat enveloping the planet.

As the planet struggles to adapt, the weather volatility grows. Floods ruin homes and vital infrastructure, damage crops and spread disease, and again the tools at our disposal for saving lives and rebuilding the damage escalate their cause. The sad truth is that almost every facet of human existence, as contemporary Australians have known it, contributes to this spiral effect.

One of neoliberalism’s central tenets is that by reducing the size of the public sector the more efficient markets will stimulate trade and a concomitant growth in wealth. Beginning with the Whitlam government’s 25 per cent across-the-board tariff reduction in 1974, the edifice of tariff protection that characterised our postwar years was dismantled, with serious inroads on our manufacturing sector, which had grown substantially out of the import substitution policies adopted after the war.

I’m not arguing that freeing up trade has been wholly bad for this country, but we have seen how the neoliberal approach, being more an ideology than sound economics, has seriously distorted our economy, made all the more evident in a crisis like the Covid pandemic when supply of vital imports is disrupted. Moreover, the globalisation of assets and the ceaseless movement of goods and people around the planet have all contributed, along with the effects of climate change, to the emergence of pandemic viruses like SARS, of which Covid-19 is but the latest manifestation.

And where has this led for women? Childcare has become prohibitively expensive, and the effective marginal tax rate on married women with children has acted as another disincentive to their participating in the workforce. The safety nets that formed part of the social contract when the Hawke–Keating government signed up to Reagan and Thatcher’s economics have either shrunk or are punitively applied; with deregulation, the weakening of unions and galloping casualisation, working life is transformed.

It’s arguable whether these changes were deliberately designed to frustrate women’s advancement; some were, most weren’t. Despite the general increase in female workplace participation over the past forty years, its predominance of part-time and casual work has resulted in an associated reduction in women’s earning power and superannuation, so much so that women in their fifties today have become the fastest-growing group among the homeless.

At the same time, the one lasting legacy of the seventies women’s movement and its involvement in the Whitlam government has been women’s view of ourselves, and the aspirations we have held for our futures. As Whitlam’s first women’s adviser, Elizabeth Reid, once put it, what had been a women’s movement had become a movement of women, as women became a visible presence in all walks of life.

I marvel that for years after my arrival in Australia in 1958 I never saw or heard a woman reading the news or anchoring a current affairs program, let alone driving a bus or piloting a commercial aircraft. Women held a tiny minority of management positions, in the order of 3 per cent, and these were mostly in the public sector or gender-segregated occupations. It is salutary to be reminded, too, that when Whitlam came to office not a single woman held a seat in the House of Representatives. All that has changed, and dramatically so.

Yet somewhere along the way the egalitarian ethos of the earlier movement was abandoned, with class divisions evident in the seventies substantially deepened today. It’s true that we feminists of the second wave were predominantly middle class, with many having benefited from the expanded education and tertiary scholarships initiated under Menzies.

Yet not all the women who participated were products of middle-class privilege, and the socialist bent of women’s liberationists in particular made us acutely aware of the entrenched inequalities in what was all too often touted as Australia’s classless society. So while it can be said that the movement’s composition was largely middle-class, it would be wrong to characterise it as such. That feminists didn’t always succeed in erasing unexamined, often racist assumptions about Aboriginal women, for example, doesn’t mean we didn’t try.

But it is also true that women did advance even as neoliberalism permeated all aspects of society. There’s no denying that many of us did well. Women began to be taken seriously in the media. A fair few became professors, a scarcely imaginable trajectory when the movement began, even if the prospects for young female scholars today are considerably less rosy. Casualisation was well under way with the corporatisation of universities, but the future for current untenured academics, particularly in the humanities, has dimmed altogether with the pandemic.

Women have succeeded in getting themselves elected in increasing numbers, and despite the setbacks, especially on the Coalition side, many more have been ministers. A woman heading a public service department is nothing to marvel at; that there are female chief executive officers in both public and private sectors is barely worthy of comment, yet a whole generation of women in their twenties and thirties are precariously employed, paying high rents and excluded from the ever-escalating housing market. Their day-to-day struggles to keep afloat financially have made it harder for them to organise politically than it was for us back in the 1970s. And although there are signs — with #MeToo and the 2021 March4Justice — that this may be changing, social inequality is deepening and democracy itself is threatened.

It’s been forty-four years since I left the public service determined to become a writer, and thirty-eight years since my first novel, based on my experience in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, appeared. West Block begins two years after the Dismissal, and opens with the teenage daughter of the central character discovering her mother’s diary and reading the last entry, dated 9 December 1977.

“Two years have passed since it happened,” writes Cassie Armstrong, “when with a shock the trunk imploded. Leaves withered and dropped. We were dazed, stunned with it, and I found myself a conservative.” In writing these lines through my alter ego, the wording was not only to convey the sudden, brutally executed change of government, when those in the department found themselves serving conservative masters, but also to express my dismay that basic Australian traditions — traditions that had become precious to me, and that my heroine, likewise, hoped to conserve — were being dismantled.

Although it would take a few more years for the neoliberal revolution to take hold, we were standing on the brink of it in 1975, and looking back, we can see it for the revolution it was. There is no little irony, then, that the truly radical revolutionaries of the Anglosphere have not been those on the left of the spectrum, but those on the right.

As Cassie Armstrong, head of the department’s Women’s Equality Branch, or WEB, went on to say in the novel, not all change is good. It is up to us now to do what we can to restore the democratic traditions of fair play and social equality that have been so comprehensively repudiated. But how?

The radical changes ushered in by the moneyed ascendancy have been so pervasive and become so entrenched that it would be dishonest to suggest they could be undone easily. But it would be equally mistaken not to take heart from some changes for the better since those palmier days. Australians generally are more attuned to feminist aims than they once were, more aware of Indigenous achievement and the appalling racism Indigenous people have endured, and more accepting of differing sexual orientations and gender fluidity.

For all that, it’s next to impossible for any leader today to argue the simple proposition that taxes are not only needed but beneficial if the revenue raised is directed towards restoring good government and a fairer, more productive society. Tax and what its purpose is in a democracy remain so far a no-go area in the dominant political discourse.

Having participated in the 2019 campaign to elect an independent in the federal Sydney seat of Warringah, I was acutely aware that there was no chance of Zali Steggall’s winning it if she didn’t openly reject Labor’s 2019 policies to remove negative gearing and franking credits. And though I’ve been heartened by Steggall’s re-election in 2022 and the striking success of other independent candidates, the vast majority of whom are women, I’ve yet to hear them make taxation an issue, though most would seem in favour of reversing the Morrison government’s highly regressive stage three tax cuts that the Labor government has insisted — at least so far — on keeping. Some have also supported needed changes in superannuation taxes.

At this point it’s worth recalling not only that the 1970s women’s movement involved numbers of tertiary-educated women, but also that many of us, owing to the effects of sexism, were out of work at the time. In this we could be said to have been repeating the part intelligentsias with grievances have historically played in revolutionary movements.

Given the casualisation and precarity of university teaching today, we might also consider organising groups by enlisting redundant or precariously employed academics to study the new economics developed by women like Mariana Mazzucato. This could be influential in gaining greater community understanding of the crucial role governments can and have played, in both directing economic development and providing basic services, and the vital role played by progressive taxation.

Women’s policy developed in the Whitlam government was predicated in large part on the need for women to be more strongly represented in all aspects of political life. The government’s 1975 Women and Politics Conference was excoriated in the media, but its long-term effect is undeniable. No matter the barriers they continue to face, female politicians are no longer the isolated oddities they were when that conference was held. We’ve had a female prime minister, female premiers, and female senators and members of parliament, many of whom have reached the rank of minister. But not all of them, particularly on the Coalition side, have delivered what the community has needed, or indeed what has been expected of them.

The 2019–20 bushfires and the Covid pandemic necessitated growth in government spending, but it was reluctantly and inefficiently delivered, with too many sectors rendered ineligible for the Coalition’s largesse, while the waves of new variants disrupted the economy further just as it was tightening its purse strings. That female politicians were enlisted in its retrograde parsimony is regrettable.

While advocacy groups such as the Women’s Electoral Lobby and the National Foundation of Women continue to foster excellent research in the growth of inequality and other matters important to women, the Morrison government paid next to no attention, and members of their National Women’s Alliance faced being defunded if they proved too critical of government policy and practice. The Women’s Office in its various permutations had been sidelined.

In a sense, then, our success in making women’s concerns mainstream political issues has sown the seeds of our failure. In the old days we called that co-option, and my mission once I’d joined the bureaucracy was trying to explain to hardline radical and social feminists fired by anti-establishment sentiment how necessary working within government was.

Today, the positions seem dramatically reversed, even though the nomenclature has changed. We have no shortage of groups tackling specific issues of concern to women or their echoes within the bureaucracies, academia and parliaments. What’s missing, for the moment anyway, is a widespread, radical, community-based movement engaged in fundamental questions such as what constitutes social value, how it can be measured, and how a more equal society that best serves its citizens should be funded.

Climate change and the pandemic have thrown these questions into high relief, and there are glimmers appearing here and there that such a movement’s time may be near.

What I’ve been suggesting is a conscious effort in developing what was once called a double strategy. Yes, we will always need progressive thinkers in government bureaucracies, on government benches and in local and state governments, but the lesson I took from my experience in government is that without the strong, coordinated pressure from within civil society, such penetration can be redirected to regressive aims (for example, greenwashing) or rendered useless altogether.

The neoliberal revolution of the past half-century measures every public service in terms of cost, thus forcing advocates to couch almost every proposal in terms of its economic benefit or detriment rather than its social value. While enriching some and impoverishing many, this cultural revolution has penetrated our thinking and transformed Australia, with a particular impact on women.

To reverse these developments, along with meaningful action on climate change, is the challenge of our century. To steer us through it, the basic question to ask remains: isn’t the economy meant to support society? And seeing the result of the opposite viewpoint all around us, how were we ever persuaded to switch the two around? •

This is Sara Dowse’s contribution to the new book Women and Whitlam: Revisiting the Revolution, edited by Michelle Arrow and published by NewSouth.

The post Women and Whitlam: then, now, and what might come appeared first on Inside Story.

Stumm, who flew over Hiroshima with a group of correspondents, later wrote of the experience: “The usual journalists’ banter in the aircraft stopped as we neared the city, we were all so silent. I will never forget what it was like. I had expected rubble and the devastation, but nothing prepared me for the piles of bodies, clearly recognisable, and the bitter desolation of a once prosperous community. This [silence] continued even when we touched down. No one said a word.”

But it was Stumm’s interview with Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge as he lay in his hospital bed suffering from radiation poisoning that gave her readers the first real insight into what had taken place.

“Father Kleinsorge described walking barefoot through devastated Hiroshima for hours after the bombing,” Stumm filed. He had been reading at his presbytery, just 500 metres from ground zero, when he saw a flash. “I don’t remember hearing any explosion or how I came from the second floor to the ground floor, but when I did, I found that our house was the only one left standing as far as I could see,” Stumm quoted Kleinsorge as saying:

It was black as night. Six people, four brother priests, one student and one servant collected together, and we dug out the wife and daughter of the caretaker from under the wreckage. Fires had broken out all over Hiroshima. They raged at us from every direction. We had small splinter-like wounds all over our bodies. In the afternoon a whirlwind sprang up which made the sky pitch black and drove many people into the river, where they drowned. People were wandering about with their whole faces one large blister from the searing effect of the bomb. Only forty out of six hundred schoolgirls at the Methodist college survived; three hundred little girls at the government school were killed instantly. Thousands of young soldiers in training at barracks were slaughtered. I walked for two hours and only saw two hundred people alive.

“Two days after the bombing,” Stumm reported, “Japanese military forces entered Hiroshima and collected 200,000 bodies for cremation. In addition to those killed outright, many more died through lack of medical attention as every hospital had been destroyed.”

Ten years earlier, with a bachelor of arts, a diploma of journalism and some casual sports reporting experience at the Brisbane Telegraph under her belt, Stumm had followed her boyfriend, Harley, to London, where he was training to become an airforce pilot and she aimed to be a reporter.

But it was “harder to get into Fleet Street than to rob the bank of England,” as she would later write in her autobiography, I Saw Too Much. So, in 1936, she “crashed” into the night editor’s office at the Daily Mirror and plied him with a judicious mix of charm, truths and falsehoods.

“He asked me, can you do interviews? Never having done such a thing in my life, I promptly replied, yes.” To her amazement, he gave her a month’s trial, which would end up taking her across the world to cover the story of the century:

I was as green as grass for I’d never known what real work was like until I joined the Daily Mirror. However, it didn’t take long to realise that my job was one that demanded the qualifications of a Scotland Yard sleuth, combined with the acumen of an astute lawyer and the bright ideas of a crack advertising agency.

In the beginning I had no technical knowledge of how a newspaper operated. What I did have, I quickly discovered, was an instinctive news sense, something I believe you cannot learn: you either have it, or you don’t. In some instinctual way, I could scent, or feel my way into an important interview or recognise a good angle for a story.

And her angle was firmly tabloid. She covered crime, securing her first scoop by stalking a pathologist, charmed the leading tenor of the day into the bath to sing for a photo, interviewed movie stars like Robert Taylor and authors like George Bernard Shaw, and tailed Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret through the zoo at Regent’s Park.

When war broke out, Stumm followed Harley, now her husband, to Singapore and quickly found a job on the Malaya Tribune as a general reporter, bringing a “dash of Fleet Street” to Southeast Asia — so much so that her first story defamed the governor, almost getting her deported. Then, after the birth of her baby and the Japanese shelling of Singapore, she received a cable. It was her old editor at the Mirror. “Delighted to know you are safe. Can you become our accredited war correspondent and start filing stories immediately?”

Stumm became known as “that war correspondent with a baby.” Tiny Sheridan waited outside press conferences with her amah while her mother covered the refusal of authorities to believe that Singapore was vulnerable to Japanese attack. But Singapore did fall, and Stumm was forced back home to Brisbane, where she received another cable from the Daily Mirror: “All delighted you are safe. Can you represent us at General MacArthur’s HQ in Brisbane?”

The US general was the Supreme Allied Commander South-West Pacific Area, and Brisbane seethed with hundreds of thousands of serving US and Australian men and women. It was a city of sandbags, brown-outs and bomb shelters.

Stumm wore an Australian army officer’s uniform and the flat, broad brimmed Australian women’s army hat, all of which she felt was far from flattering. The American brass, complaining the hat made her look like a squashed tomato, gave her a US officers’ side cap, which she wore with flair. The quality of her reporting brought her to the notice of MacArthur, who included her in an otherwise all-male reporting pack sent to Port Moresby to cover the battle against Japanese forces.

“Here at this forward area, the atmosphere tinges with excitement and grim preparedness,” she filed. “Rugged Australian soldiers load trucks, dig roads, heave fence poles, their mahogany backs bent to the job, their Digger hats stained with the perspiration that pours off them in this humid land. Side by side with them work the Doughboys, more conventional in their fatigue suits with rolled-down sleeves, some even in khakis with ties neatly tucked in at the neck.”

She worked alongside George Johnston, who would cover the war in China and go on to become one of Australia’s most important novelists, and Ian Morrison, the war correspondent son of Australian George Morrison, who had covered the 1900 Boxer Rebellion in China for the London Times. Like most of the men, she operated out of the local command post, covering stories that she couldn’t see first-hand, like the Battle of Kaiapit that saw Australian soldiers defeat a much larger force of Japanese with few losses and establish an airstrip to protect the northern coastal town of Lae.

“The country around Port Moresby was so bad it was a wonder to me that troops could fight in such difficult terrain,” she would write later:

The jeep track leading to the Kokoda Track was so rough it was a misery to ride along. But even here, Australian humour came to the fore. At the start of the Kokoda Track, a huge banner was stretched across the track which read: “Through these portals pass the best damn mosquito bait in the world.” On the other side to welcome the returning troops was written: “We told you so!”

Stumm covered the work of nurses, impressed with their courage and the hardships they faced. “Into Moresby by plane usually come the wounded from land and sea battles. Twenty-four hours a day the girls of Moresby, Australian and American, are on the job, taking care of them,” she filed. She would later interview a group of nurses freed from Japanese captivity, who, fearing pack rape, had kept vials of morphine, ready to kill themselves.

“Even though I’d been through air raids in Singapore, New Guinea was a shock,” she wrote later. “I remember walking down a dusty track, feeling dazed by the heat and the noise, when coming towards me was a war correspondent colleague, George Johnston. He asked me how it was all going. ‘It’s all a bit overwhelming, suddenly finding myself in the theatre of war.’ He nodded sympathetically. ‘I know. It’s a case of I saw too much.’”

As the war was ending, Stumm took a job on the Daily Telegraph in Sydney. But there was one last cable to come from the Daily Mirror, this time asking her to go to Tokyo to cover the Japanese surrender. In a story that would be repeated for women correspondents for decades to come, the editor of the Daily Telegraph only agreed to let her go if she made her own way there. With no civilian flights available, Stumm called on her air force connections, who helped her in memory of her husband, Wing Commander Harley Stumm, who had been killed in action.

After the war, MacArthur awarded Stumm the Asiatic Pacific Service Star for her services as a war correspondent in New Guinea. •

This is an edited extract from Through Her Eyes: Australia’s Women Correspondents from Hiroshima to Ukraine, edited by Melissa Roberts and Trevor Watson, published by Hardie Grant Books.

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There were reasons for this. In those halcyon days we eschewed the very notion of leaders and actively resisted the media pressure to find them. And though in time, and ironically with our success, we lost that battle, at heart we libbers never lost our collectivist fervour. That there was a dark side to that deep-seated egalitarianism for those who went on to achieve their individual ambitions is yet another aspect of the story, one that Rowbotham felt keenly.

Above all else, Daring to Hope is an exercise in what Rowbotham calls “historical memory.” Maybe all memoirs are, but not in quite the same way as this one, for me anyway. From the very first pages it was like popping some memory-enhancing pill, my mind suddenly flooded with the incredible ferment of those years. Anybody who’s seen the film Brazen Hussies will have gained an idea of how exciting and radical it all was. The consciousness-raising, the marching, the conferences, the street theatre, the abuse from right and left (and I’m talking literally here). And painful too, what with the heart-wrenching churn of intimate relationships. How we struggled to put into words and fashion theoretical sense out of what was happening.

Rowbotham was one of the best of us. She wrote out of her experience in Britain, but that didn’t matter — within the Anglosphere, at least, the movement was a global one.

Her Women, Resistance and Revolution came out in 1973 and is still in print. I wouldn’t be the first to call it a classic. Take note of the title. We believed in revolution then. Juliet Mitchell’s contribution was The Longest Revolution, Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex. For if in large part women’s liberation was a child of the left, a good deal of energy was spent hoping to convince leftist males that women’s issues were legitimate ones and then, when we were successful, trying to stop them from arrogating the podiums to themselves (mansplaining being all too rife even then).

And if many of us identified as socialists — or socialist feminists as we came to call ourselves to distinguish us from “liberals” or “radicals” as the movement splintered — our aim was a socialism of an especially humane kind. On the whole we resisted dogma and championed underdogs, whether they were working-class or racial or sexual minorities or, counting us, any combination of the three. Intersectionality is what it’s called today.

But how to come up with a theory out of this? Rowbotham, it could be said, took it as her own life project, with Dorothy and Edward Thompson, doyens of left history in their day, as her mentors.

Yet Rowbotham’s work was always grounded in her activism. As groups sprang up and transmogrified across the London boroughs she managed to keep up with them and keep herself together by teaching at a comprehensive girls’ school, running Workers’ Educational Association courses and at one stage working as a doctor’s receptionist, while writing, writing, seemingly all the while. With Women, Resistance and Revolution published, the invitations to speak also came hard and fast. Where did she get the energy, I gasped, reading about it these many years later.

The fact is, she was young. We all were — I’d almost forgotten that. As she writes in her introduction:

In 1970 I was twenty-six and working on my first book. I was a socialist and part of the emerging British women’s liberation movement, supporting gay liberation, revolt in the trade unions and resistance to racism. Demands for economic and social resources and claims for recognition and respect were being asserted by many groups who had been either sidelined or outcast. The term “liberation” extended democracy beyond voting; it meant opposing all forms of inequality and hierarchy. It carried too a fragile vision of what else might be — a fusion of collective and individual freedom.

Throughout the subsequent decade the hope that gave birth to that vision met challenges at every turn, often from the many contradictory emotions that swirl to this day in our hearts. Rowbotham is appropriately candid about this, as our movement’s central insight was that the personal was indeed political. At the decade’s beginning she was more or less a free spirit, if an uncommonly hardworking one; at the end of it she was a mother of a small boy. If, in the parlance of the time, motherhood did a bit to cramp her style, it wasn’t for long, for that too was a gesture of hope. By then, too, the movement had grown beyond even our wildest imaginings.

Daring to Hope is Rowbotham’s second memoir; the first was Promise of a Dream: Remembering the Sixties, which I confess I haven’t read. Perhaps a third one about the subsequent decade or decades is in the offing, maybe not. As should be obvious now, I haven’t kept abreast of Rowbotham’s writings or indeed her life since the heady days of the 1970s. It’s as though she, like them, had been sequestered in my memory’s scrapbook, at least until now, when feminism has become a political force again. Which naturally raises the question of what went wrong in the years in between.

For one thing Maggie Thatcher happened, and Ronald Reagan. And with them a reversion to the crude laissez-faire capitalism we’ve come to know as neoliberalism — a cultural as well as an economic phenomenon during which second-wave-type feminism was repudiated along with any notion of collectivism. “The new amalgam of right-wing politics Thatcher came to embody,” Rowbotham writes, congealed into “a mindset… undermining the hopes of social equality and of extending democracy into daily life.” And look where it has gotten us.

But I would be the last to suggest that there will never be another time like the seventies. For all I know, as a woman in my eighties and captive to reminiscence, the ferment may be bubbling again right now. Certainly, there are signs. It’s never quite the same — history doesn’t work like that — yet women’s history has been noted for its cyclical nature. There’s #MeToo, and the rising anger over the appalling incidence of domestic abuse, the bullying of women in political life and on social media, the widening gender pay gap, the increasing homelessness of women in their fifties, and much else. Suddenly, feminism is no longer the dirty word it became in the intervening decades. And if by socialism we mean a genuine democracy, in which a nation’s wealth is more equitably distributed and societies are more than their economies, I see shoots growing there too. •

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I opened the piece with Lewis Carroll’s Alice being chased by the jealous Queen of Hearts — “Off with her head,” the queen cried — and observed that Alice was spared “only through the king’s kindness.” But that was Wonderland, and there’s never been much kindness in NSW party politics. Long before Keneally became premier, Labor’s stocks had fallen so low that her predecessors had decamped or been decapitated.

Bob Carr, premier from 1995 to 2005, resigned just as the electorate’s patience was wearing thin. Morris Iemma, his successor, won the 2007 election by promising a halt to the privatisation of the electricity grid, but resigned the following year after losing the support of his colleagues. Then came Nathan Rees, who lasted just fifteen months. Not only had he come from the party’s left faction, but he’d also wasted no time in sacking some of the most unpopular ministers, all of whom hailed from the right.

Then came Keneally, for whom the right’s support had been crucial. She had entered parliament in 2003, taking the seat of Heffron after defeating the incumbent Deirdre Grusovin for preselection. Ministerial portfolios followed: ageing, disability services and then, with the resignation of Frank Sartor, planning. She had been a year in that portfolio when the powerbrokers backed her for the premiership.

Here it is salutary to remember that there are two different ways of looking at what happened. I’ve outlined the first above — the infamous revolving-door leadership, soon to contaminate the federal party. Then there was the poisoned chalice view, whereby a woman was handed the ship of state just as it was sinking fast. As I wrote in 2010, “When the party chose Keneally for premier no one believed that it was anything but a desperate bid to shore up the government’s sinking fortunes. After all, it wasn’t the first time a woman had been given the leadership of a seemingly doomed government.”

The pattern had been set in 1990, when Carmen Lawrence was handed the Western Australian premiership in the wake of the “WA Inc” scandals. Next came Joan Kirner in Victoria, where manufacturing was shrinking, unemployment was high, and the state’s deficit had ballooned. “After a year of Kirner’s leadership,” I wrote, “during which she was subjected to some of the most vitriolic abuse ever dished out to a female politician, voters elected Jeff Kennett.” Yet this would prove nothing next to the hatred churned up for Julia Gillard.

Fast-forward to 10 September 2021. With Covid cases rising despite a seemingly unending series of lockdowns, and with voters increasingly exasperated by the Morrison government’s failures in quarantining, vaccinating the vulnerable and overall vaccine supply, Labor announced that Keneally, deputy opposition leader in the Senate, would be its candidate in the federal seat of Fowler. The decision, though in line with Keneally’s own ambitions, was a neat solution brokered by Labor factions in readiness for the coming federal election, whenever Scott Morrison finds it in his interest to call one.

Coincidentally, that very night I logged onto SBS on Demand to watch Strong Female Lead, a documentary about Julia Gillard’s treatment as prime minister. It’s hard to imagine anyone not being shocked in retrospect at what Gillard endured. The incidents accumulated, one gross misogynistic slur after another. I had written about Julia Gillard too, and as I sat watching I felt more than a twinge of sorrow that, my feminism notwithstanding, I hadn’t been entirely sympathetic with our first and, to date, only female prime minister. Only since she left politics have I come to appreciate just how good a leader she was.

The concentrated display of what Gillard was up against, from the Ditch the Witch/Bitch banners, Larry Pickering’s pornographic cartooning, Alan Jones’s slanderous vituperations to her passionate misogyny speech and more, left me, like many others, reeling. Even at the time, the ABC’s juvenile At Home with Julia left an awful taste in my mouth, and it was far from pleasant to be reminded of it. Nor did any of her attackers, least of all the opposition leader, stop to consider what they were doing to the office of prime minister itself, let alone to the Australian body politic.

Most tellingly, of all those interviewed, it was Cheryl Kernot who got to what I believe was the crux of the matter. For what did Gillard’s choice in taking the leadership from Rudd actually entail? Kernot posed the fundamental question: is it politic, when the moment arrives, for a woman to be “willing to take the risk and step up to the challenge,” as men in politics repeatedly do.

So, to Keneally. My interest in writing about her back in 2010 sprang from the fact that, like me, she was born an American, and yet this didn’t seem to pose a problem as it might have once. That said, my experience was substantially different, as was the Australia of 1958, the year of my migration. By the time Keneally was naturalised in 2000, Australia’s population had nearly doubled and its ethnic composition had changed enormously, with a quarter of Australians having at least one parent born overseas. Australians had also seemed to become — to this Yankee expatriate anyway — more comfortable with ever-increasing American inroads into what was once a largely British-oriented culture.

Moreover, in the forty-two years between my arrival and Keneally’s, the status of women in this country had improved considerably, in no small measure due to two Labor governments. Not without a struggle, the women in the party had succeeded in carving out a significant space for women. Outside the party, though, the gains of previous years had stalled with the Howard government — services were cut back, and the effective marginal tax rate on married women in employment went as high as 90 per cent as the cost of childcare rose. This, combined with the attractive family tax benefit B, acted as a significant disincentive for women’s participation in the workforce.

At the same time, though, increasing numbers of women were tertiary-educated, and expected to have careers. If it still had its difficulties, a woman entering politics when Keneally did in 2003 wasn’t considered extraordinary.

Eighteen years later, times have changed again. The announcement that Keneally has been shoe-horned into Fowler has triggered an avalanche of responses. Those objecting point to the seat’s predominantly multicultural composition and the rejection of talented Vietnamese-Australian candidate Tu Le, who has longstanding links to the community. For many, Keneally’s move into the seat is both a cynical attempt on her part to further her ambition and yet another instance of party officialdom’s high-handed treatment of local branches. At bottom lies the belief that not only should a parliamentarian fight for issues important to her electorate, but that a member who represents an electorate’s particular demography is ipso facto best qualified to do so.

The decision’s defenders argue that a high-flyer like Keneally offers the seat its best chance for due consideration where it counts — in cabinet. Keneally’s supporters include figures like Paul Keating and, unsurprisingly, Anthony Albanese, who are thinking of the unwelcome prospect of losing her talents had she been forced to take the party’s risky third Senate ballot position. They’re looking to the party’s chances of victory, not to mention their government’s pool of talent should they happen to win.

Whatever else you can say about it, another controversy over Labor’s inner workings is a retrograde step for the party, feeding into misgivings about the factional machinations and backroom deals of quasi-mythical “faceless men.” None of which is at all peculiar to one side of politics, though with Labor it somehow sticks, taking oxygen away from the endlessly egregious performances of the Coalition government. It’s certainly put Labor on the defensive; hence Albanese’s laughable contention that white, English-speaking American-born Keneally is just another successful migrant.

As for me, after reading all the commentary, I’ve come to conclude that something important has gone missing from the debate. It has to do with those revolving doors and poisoned chalices mentioned earlier. Both are part of the same package; both bedevilled the reigns of successive female leaders, most spectacularly Keneally’s and Gillard’s. Female premiers are no longer the oddities they once were, nor is the prospect of a female prime minister anywhere near as challenging. What matters most, it seems, is the manner of their ascendancy. To paraphrase Cheryl Kernot’s remark, does one seize the opportunity as it presents itself, or bide one’s time until circumstances are more favourable?

It’s true that men in the past have got away with circumventing the rules in ways that women seem not to be permitted, perhaps because it was men who invented them in the first place. But it’s looking like the practice has gone on too long, like the end result of years of “whatever it takes” is a deep deficit of distrust within the electorate. At the federal level at least, not many have heard the alarm bells. Yet, apart from and above specific considerations of gender or diversity, this diminishing trust poses a genuine threat to democracy, and the more people are alienated from the political process, the greater that threat becomes. We see it happening in the United States, and signs of it here.

If I were Tu Le, I might heed Albanese’s assurance that her time will come, and that one way or another the party will repay her for waiting. It’s the normal progression of a rising star’s political career. But that approach overlooks the profound disillusionment among voters, and the cynicism that has come to shape the electorate’s view of politics and the character of its active participants. It’s not Tu Le’s career I’m worried about, though I’m pretty sure she would make an excellent candidate and contribute to the ethnic diversity sorely needed in our parliament.

What I have been worrying about is what’s been happening in my adopted country, and I’ve been wondering if Keneally could have done something about it, something that would have taken courage, something that might have made a difference. Supposing that, instead of following the script and slotting herself into Fowler, she’d decided to run in a riskier seat. Given her talent and political skills, she would have had a chance of taking an extra seat for the party, and more importantly, made a statement about how democracy should proceed.

It’s true it might have been a risk. She lost when she ran in Bennelong, and she might have lost again. She’d be unlikely, though, to stay in the wilderness forever. Because principles matter, courage matters, and we have to believe that people do respond to them — if they’re given the chance. •

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By committing suicide in their shared office, Xi implicated Tang in her death: in the traditional moral code, suicide was the ultimate reproach, and the unsettled ghost of the dead was said to linger until justice was finally served. But Xi didn’t leave a note, or at least none was ever found. Did she kill herself because Tang had invested — and lost — a significant sum of her money on the stock market? Or because he had suggested she become his concubine, as her family later alleged? The tragedy and the surrounding intrigue, which touched on so many facets of China’s transition to modernity, captured the public imagination and inspired an outpouring of commentary. No fewer than three books about the incident were published within weeks.

Historian Bryna Goodman has delved deep into a story that has since lain forgotten among the greater dramas of the era. More than two thousand years of dynastic rule had ended only ten years earlier, with the republican revolution led by Sun Yat-sen. But the government had already split into warring factions, with further challenges to its authority from regional warlords, who carved off chunks of territory to rule themselves. The patriotic May Fourth movement of 1919 had galvanised students, workers and businesspeople alike to fight for national revival and cultural rejuvenation and helped to inspire the founding of the Communist Party of China in 1921. The semi-colonial exploitation of the country that had begun under the fallen Qing dynasty, meanwhile, continued into the modern era, with European powers and Japan controlling a number of key ports and resources.

Semi-colonial, transnational Shanghai was China’s most modern city, yet old ways and thinking maintained a stubborn hold. In The Suicide of Miss Xi, Goodman draws on a huge range of original sources, including court transcripts (Tang was subsequently convicted of financial fraud) and Xi’s own writings, to show how this incident illuminates the social, political and economic contradictions and tensions of its time.

Both male and female supporters of women’s rights had argued passionately for women’s participation in education, work and nation-building. Yet many also agonised about how women could preserve their “virtue” in male-dominated workplaces. After Xi’s death, even feminists spoke of her according to what Goodman describes as a “formulaic pattern of virtue”; she was, they said, “quiet, diligent and chaste.” That Tang might have proposed concubinage to her — as a way, perhaps, of helping her out of the financial hole he’d helped dig for her — struck them as particularly odious given that Xi had previously vowed that she would never marry.

Feminists of the time tended to view concubines as embarrassing, even morally tainted, leftovers from the old society. New marriage laws forbade a man taking more than one wife, and marriage was henceforth to be an arrangement freely chosen by both sides, in theory at least. Betraying their elite perspective, many feminists failed to consider that concubinage, which persisted as a practice, may have remained the only option for some less-privileged women.

Instead, they assumed that concubines, along with prostitutes, had made their choice out of avarice. Progressive women’s associations in Shanghai at the time of Xi’s suicide typically denied membership to concubines or even former concubines. To their minds, Tang’s alleged proposal was both outrageous coming from a man of supposedly progressive ideals and a profound insult to Xi’s character and identity as a modern woman.

Then there was the question of her shares. It was one thing for a woman to want to achieve economic self-sufficiency — to become, as Xi did, a provider for her family — but quite another to be greedy and profit-seeking. Many commentators, sympathetic and less sympathetic alike, noted that Xi was hardly alone in having risked money in this way. Pretty much everyone in Shanghai with money to spare was investing in the stock market — or rather, markets. By the end of 1921, more than 140 stock exchanges were operating, including some that traded in single commodities. Tang’s Journal of Commerce was one of many outlets founded on progressive ideals that promoted investment in stocks as a social and political good. Progressives had observed how stock markets in the United States, Japan and elsewhere contributed to the strength of these countries by raising capital for their industries as well as helping democratise wealth.

This is one of the details that has been largely lost in the telling of the story of modern China. As Goodman notes, “Historians have not generally placed economics, let alone stock exchanges, among the structuring ideas of the early Republic or as a constituent element of May Fourth ideas of science and democracy.” Her work here is a major contribution to modern historiography.

As Goodman shows, regulation was a lot scarcer than enthusiasm. The markets were rife with speculation, insider trading and other forms of manipulation. When the inevitable crash came, it took with it the precious savings of many, making Xi “a symbol of human vulnerability, an individual swept into the whirlpool of financial temptations, in a city of untrammelled greed.” Some of the fury that Tang copped in the aftermath of Xi’s suicide resulted from his paper’s previously enthusiastic endorsement of stock-buying combined with his own vested interests in the exchanges: he became, as Goodman observes, “a perfect target for public rumination over the immorality of the new order.”

That rumination had a platform in the vibrant and diverse local press that sprang up in the early republican era. In response to Xi’s suicide, the papers published a great stream of cartoons, commentary, reportage and even poetry written by readers; several even featured word-by-word transcripts of Tang’s trial. Women’s groups, chambers of commerce, and hometown or home-province associations — indeed, grassroots public organisations of all sorts — weighed into the controversy as well. With a dysfunctional polity, both public associations and the press stood in as arenas for public life, testing grounds for democracy, and arbiters of social justice.

The semi-colonial nature of Shanghai factors into this complex story as well. The Journal of Commerce had its offices in the city’s International Settlement, which had its own courts separate from China’s legal system. When Chinese judicial officials determined to put Tang on trial for financial fraud, they had to kidnap him in the foreign concession and take him across the street to Chinese sovereign territory. Yet because Xi had clearly killed herself and there was no evidence that Tang had committed any crime, and given that China was still years away from its first civil law, the fact that he was arraigned was a travesty of justice.

When Tang went to trial, the courtroom was packed with members of the public, journalists and even actors from a theatre troupe preparing to perform a play about Xi’s death. Despite the evidence for criminal prosecution being, as Goodman writes, “illogical, unsupported, and unwarranted,” the judge dismissed the brief prepared by Tang’s excellent legal team as “confusingly irrelevant.” Although the charges revolved around financial misdeeds, the judge was more interested in the accusation that Tang had pressured Xi to be his concubine. In the end, he sentenced him to three years’ imprisonment. Moral judgement, including the view that the stock markets were intrinsically malevolent and unethical, trumped the law.

Among those disturbed by the verdict was Sun Yat-sen himself, who asserted, “It is particularly inappropriate for a court of law to ignore the evidence in favour of the popular sentiment.” What’s more, a military man whom Tang had offended over other matters ensured that he served more than twice his sentence, and in a military prison.

The People’s Republic of China today continues to wrestle with many of the issues raised by Xi’s suicide. These include the relationship between private wealth accumulation and national flourishing, the nature of the judiciary and its relationship to the law, and the contradiction between the opportunities available to young women and societal expectations. Even concubines — now called “mistresses” — remain a hot topic that divides Chinese feminists. If, as ancient Chinese historians liked to say, history is a mirror, there are plenty of apposite reflections to be found in this one. •

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With her starkly posed question, Srinivasan pushed the conversation beyond the disturbing subculture of incels to consider more broadly the politics of sex and desire. Can and should sexual preferences be subject to political scrutiny? And what of the sexual desires of people outside the bounds of mainstream sexual appeal? These are tricky questions but Srinivasan, cognisant of the high stakes, navigated them carefully and thoughtfully.

Srinivasan’s LRB essay fittingly takes centre stage in her debut essay collection The Right to Sex, augmented by a fascinating “coda” tracing responses to Srinivasan’s essay and her own evolving thinking about the “politics of desire.” Notably, the title is no longer posed as a question, though as befitting the essay mode and philosophical inquiry, the collection is replete with them.

Srinivasan writes in her preface that her essays “dwell, where necessary, in discomfort and ambivalence,” and are not intended “to convince or persuade anyone of anything, though I would not be unhappy if they did.” As explicitly feminist essays, Srinivasan positions them in the tradition of feminist theory spun from the reality of lived experience and shared struggle, rather than “from on high.” It’s a rousing and enticing lead-in, with an urgent tone. Re-read afterwards, however, the preface also signposts the competing tensions evident throughout, including between an avowed grassroots feminism and an interlocuter who is based at Oxford University.

The American edition of The Right to Sex — not the one I read — has a subtitle: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century. It’s apt insofar as Srinivasan canvasses the current hot topics associated with feminism, or demanding of a feminist response, most of them to do with sex: #MeToo, consent, pornography, sex work, and more tangentially, trans rights.

On most of these topics, Srinivasan’s intervention is as stimulating and welcome as any. In the opening essay, “The Conspiracy against Men,” Srinivasan shifts focus away from the high-profile figures ensnared by #MeToo to those most likely to be accused and/or imprisoned for rape: black and brown men. The #MeToo mantra “Believe women” is similarly challenged for eliding historical and enduring racialised sexual stigma. As for those who defend men on the basis that until #MeToo came along they had no idea what other men were doing, she persuasively dismisses them as “in denial of what men have seen and heard.”

The problems of carceral responses to sexual violence, and of “carceral feminism,” are picked up again in the closing essay “Sex, Carceralism, Capitalism.” Here, Srinivasan is at her most passionate, arguing for an anti-racist, anti-capitalist feminism (and a feminist working-class movement) of which there are both historical and current exemplars.

Yet while she points to “theorists and practitioners of feminist abolitionism” for inspiration, Srinivasan curiously devotes more space to feminists who have campaigned for the abolition of sex work rather than the abolition of the carceral state. This is in keeping with the heterodox historical approach that characterises Srinivasan’s creatively researched and synthesised essays. The historical turn in contemporary feminist writing is to be welcomed — like recent books by Katherine Angel and Lorna Bracewell, to name just two, Srinivasan generatively revisits the Anglophone feminist “sex wars” of the 1970s and 1980s — but sometimes the topic at hand begs for more engagement with contemporary activism and theorising.

Take, for instance, the essays “Talking to My Students about Porn” and “On Not Sleeping with Your Students.” In key respects, these are the strongest in the book and testimony to Srinivasan’s opening gambit that feminist theorising is most effective when extrapolated from life. Of all the essays, they are the most coherent in argument and focus, and the most engaging, if not least because Srinivasan shares more of herself in them.

In the latter, she makes a compelling case for a “sexual ethics of pedagogy,” variously drawing ideas from psychoanalysis, early feminist theorising on workplace sexual harassment, and feminist thinkers like bell hooks who have written about eros and pedagogy. As a counterpoint, the notorious case of Jane Gallop, the feminist philosopher accused of sexual harassment in the 1990s, is productively revisited. Yet we read more about one of Gallop’s male defenders opining in a literary journal than we do about the material conditions of the contemporary neoliberal university. These days, the teacher is more likely to be an exploited casual than a male god professor or feminist superstar, and increasingly teaching is mediated by screens.

I also wonder how representative her classroom is. But still, like Srinivasan, I’ve found students in my classes who are open to, and curious about, the anti-porn feminism exemplified by Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, while simultaneously wary of the sorts of solutions that seemed both possible and plausible in the 1980s.

Here, Srinivasan identifies and starts to fill what she sees as a lacuna: feminist writing about pornography that resists the pull of “anti-porn” or “pro-porn” feminism. She admirably traverses a diverse range of views on both the harms and possibilities of porn, yet ultimately retreats into a vague vision of “more joyful, more equal, freer” sex that recalls Ariel Levy’s 2005 polemic Female Chauvinist Pigs. Feminist writing about sex need not seem so removed from it.

The Right to Sex is, at once, equivocal, didactic, spirited and oddly bloodless in parts — which makes for mostly rewarding but occasionally frustrating reading. For those seeking a primer or refresher on feminist debates primarily emanating from the United States and Britain, Srinivasan is an erudite and well-informed guide, adept at summarising where we are now as well as illuminating some of the paths that led to it. Now that the promise of the LRB essay is fulfilled, and Srinivasan properly launched as a public feminist and intellectual, I look forward to future writing that opens up vistas briefly glimpsed in The Right to Sex. •

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While Davison didn’t identify himself as an incel, his actions echo those of men associated with this movement. In 2014, for example, Elliot Rodger killed six people in a shooting in Isla Vista, California, and in 2018 Alek Minassian drove a rented van through a pedestrian mall in Toronto, killing ten. Each of these men made clear their allegiance to incels.

These killings helped fuel concern about misogynist violence, and particularly violence linked to online forums. As Donna Zuckerberg, who happens to be the sister of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, argued in her 2018 book on the issue, “social media has elevated misogyny to entirely new levels of violence and virulence.”

A newly released report from a global team of researchers led by Manoel Horta Ribeiro backs up some of these concerns, finding that online anti-women groups, including incels and “men going their own way” (men who believe relationships with women are so toxic they are best avoided altogether), appear to be growing. Using data collected from forums like Gab and Reddit, the researchers also found the level of toxicity in the “manosphere” had risen significantly.

Policymakers have also expressed concern. In March this year the director-general of ASIO, Mike Burgess, described how a growing number of extremists no longer fit the left–right spectrum and are instead “motivated by a fear of societal collapse or a specific social or economic grievance or conspiracy.” Incels were among the groups ASIO is taking more seriously, he said.

Despite the new labels, the ideas motivating these groups are not entirely new. They follow on from a longer-standing men’s rights movement that has had significant influence, despite its relatively low profile, in key areas of family policy, particularly during and since the Howard government.

The men’s rights movement originated in the United States, where figures such as Warren Farrell, who was once a prominent male feminist, created a movement to oppose what they describe as “institutional misandry,” or hatred of men. Focusing primarily on political activism, these groups have campaigned on issues including a perceived bias against men when custody battles go to court, a belief that men are as much victims of domestic violence as are women, and the need for a greater focus on suicide rates, education levels and deaths in the workplace among men.

Several men’s rights organisations have been working on these issues for decades in Australia. Groups including Fathers4Equality, the Men’s Rights Agency and the Australian Men’s Rights Association have focused primarily on father’s rights, with the Family Court being a core concern. The Australian Men’s Rights Association, for example, argues that an “epidemic” of fatherlessness is hurting children, and has pushed against laws that separate men from their children. They also, somewhat paradoxically, provide men with advice on DNA paternity testing to overcome what they believe is a trend of “paternity fraud.”

Despite their relatively low profile, these groups have had some influence in conservative politics. In 2006 the Howard government amended the Family Law Act to prioritise a child’s right to have access to both parents in the case of divorce. While the legislation offered an exemption in cases of domestic abuse, there is evidence that the shift has resulted in some abusive men having ongoing access to their children.

One of the key advocates for this change was Bettina Arndt, who advised the Howard government on family law and child support issues. Arndt, who was controversially awarded an Order of Australia in 2020, has followed a similar trajectory to many men’s rights activists. Previously a self-proclaimed feminist, she now believes that radical feminism’s critique of men’s behavour has damaged relations between the sexes.

In recent years Arndt has fashioned herself into one of Australia’s leading men’s rights activists. “Now it is men’s lives we aren’t allowed to speak about — the very real problems confronting men and boys in our male-bashing society,” she wrote in her 2018 book, #MenToo. She has become a staple on conservative TV, and frequently appears on Sky News Australia, where men’s rights issues have become a topic of concern.

But other groups have recently taken a higher profile. The Australian Brotherhood of Fathers, or ABF, which has more than 70,000 likes on Facebook, is one of the most active. Its Facebook page discusses the perceived injustices of the family law system and the plight of men denied access to their children.

Mothers of Sons — launched in 2020 at an online forum hosted by the conservative commentator Prue MacSween and featuring NSW One Nation MP Mark Latham — is run by a “group of ordinary women whose sons have faced extraordinary ordeals in our unfair, anti-male legal systems and workplaces.” Mothers of Sons holds to the belief that some women make “false accusations” of sexual assault and domestic violence against men, and rails against the “excesses” of the #MeToo movement.

Like Arndt in the early 2000s, these groups are also achieving some political success, although through different avenues. In recent years men’s rights groups have found favour within Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party. In 2019, for example, after lobbying by the ABF and members of the “Blokes Advice” Facebook group, Hanson successfully moved for a parliamentary inquiry into the family law system, which is chaired by herself and the former Liberal minister, and high-profile social conservative, Kevin Andrews.

The ABF argues that twenty-one Australian men commit suicide each week following family breakdown, and link this to failures of the family law system. The figure is highly contested, and even former Queensland One Nation leader Steve Dickson, a key men’s rights supporter within One Nation, concedes it is anecdotal. That hasn’t stopped its being taken up more widely by men’s groups.

In pushing for the inquiry, Hanson herself promoted that other, highly contested, belief of the men’s rights movement — that women frequently lie about domestic violence and rape in order to get back at men. “There are people out there who are nothing but liars and who will use that in the court system,” she claimed.

The committee is still at work on its inquiry, but One Nation has already adopted many of the demands of the men’s rights movement as part of its policy platform. The party’s family law policy, for example, takes the view that apprehended violence orders and other court orders shouldn’t necessarily restrict parents’ access to their children, and that allegations of abuse should only be heard during divorce proceedings if they are accompanied by medical records or a criminal conviction.

Although the men’s rights movement has had a growing influence on the conservative side of politics in Australia, Ribeiro and his colleagues found that this older variety of activism is becoming less popular, while groups like the incels and men going their own way are thriving.

Reflecting longstanding assumptions about inherent differences between men and women, men’s and manosphere rights groups often focus on reinforcing traditional ideas of masculinity and femininity. Thus, they believe the gender pay gap reflects women’s inherent desire to spend less time than men in paid work rather than structural problems in the labour force. Using ideas from evolutionary psychology, the manosphere focuses on these supposed differences in sexual and romantic relationships – arguing that women engage in “hypergamy,” a strategy in which they only date men of a higher social, economic or physical status.

The “manosphere” is therefore distinct from the older men’s rights groups in a number of ways. First, its members are less focused on political activism and more on fixing their personal lives. Manosphere discussion primarily focuses on sex and relationships, and features constant complaints about women, sex and love.

The second major difference between the newer groups and their predecessors is their online focus. Men’s rights activists act in the same way as other established political groups, with men getting together in meeting rooms, in conference halls and, occasionally, on the streets. The manosphere meets most often on Reddit, 4Chan, YouTube, Gab and other social media.

While the influence of the internet in fostering extremism is often overstated, it has had a direct influence on how these groups form and operate. My own research has found that men in these communities have relatively weak connections with each other online. They are attached to the idea of the manosphere but don’t find a deep social connection with others. They often remain deeply socially isolated, sitting at home, online, growing angrier about their lives with no one there to support them.

Other researchers have found that the architecture of social media platforms can push participants towards more toxic and extreme discussion. Research by Tiana Gaudette and colleagues, for example, found that Reddit’s voting function normalised radical anti-Muslim and anti-left sentiment in the forum dedicated to support of Donald Trump. Voting was used to mobilise members around these sentiments, creating the sense that participants are part of an in-group opposed to an identified out-group. Reddit’s upvoting feature produced a “one-sided narrative that serves to reinforce members’ extremist views,” wrote Gaudette and her colleagues, “thereby strengthening bonds between members of the in-group.” My research finds that these sorts of trends are viewable in the manosphere as well.

These new features create a noxious combination. Alongside ongoing social isolation, the belief in essential differences between men and women fosters a form of nihilism in which men see no solution for the problems they are facing. Matched with growing extremist content, this can create an environment of hatred and misogyny, which can push some individuals to undertake deadly attacks.

Australia has yet to see any incel-motivated attacks of the kind experienced in the United States, Canada and Britain. But does that mean the threat doesn’t exist?

The influence of these groups is often harder to measure than traditional men’s rights groups. While many of the online communities are very large, it is impossible to know individuals’ locations or level of commitment.

Some signs suggest that the influence of the manosphere is present in Australia. Prior to the pandemic, influential American manosphere activists frequently made Australia a destination. In 2017, for instance, filmmaker Cassie Jaye visited the country promoting her movie The Red Pill. Taken from the movie The Matrix, the Red Pill is a term used by these groups to describe the process of learning the harsh truths about feminism. Local men’s groups organised screenings of the movie, and Jaye made several high-profile media appearances.

Later, in 2019, Canadian conservative and anti-feminist thinker Jordan Peterson sold out theatres across the country promoting his anti-feminist self-help text 12 Rules for Life. While he is unlikely to see himself as a member of the community, Peterson is famous in the manosphere, particularly for his perceived tendency to “destroy” feminists in interviews or forums.

Similarly, the “seduction industry,” made up of companies and individuals that teach men a range of (often coercive) tactics in order to “pick up” women, has had a presence in Australia for well over a decade. Way back in 2014, Julien Blanc, who has publicly advocated for men to coerce women, had his visa revoked while on a trip to Sydney. Despite this controversy these groups have stayed strong. Early last year the Sydney bookstore Kinokuniya announced a ban on such behaviour when it discovered that pick-up artists were operating on its premises.

The views of these groups are unlikely to represent a significant portion of the Australian population, or even of Australian men. Like the men’s rights movement, the manosphere is relatively small, both globally and in Australia. Yet, with its growth online and its influence in politics, it is a force worth watching. If even one of its members decides to take out his anger in the real world, as happened in Britain just weeks ago, the consequences could be very serious.

Of course, some of the complaints made by these men are well founded. Male suicide rates are extremely high, as are deaths in the workplace. It is also true that men are, at times, the victims of domestic abuse and rape, and as victims are sometimes ignored. Boys often fall behind in our schools, and men face high levels of mental ill-health. These are all issues that need serious attention.

But the ire of the manosphere is directed at feminism rather than the real causes of these problems, and too frequently turns misogynistic. While claiming they stand for gender equality, these groups undermine the serious work needed to achieve it. •

The post Australia’s manosphere: a prehistory appeared first on Inside Story.

One evening I glanced at the rug and couldn’t believe my eyes. I asked my son to corroborate. “Tanks, warships and helicopters,” he said, having already seen them, as an eleven-year-old would, but until then reluctant to say. We laughed at how I’d been diddled. Little did I realise that what lay at our feet was an item of genuine value.

I tell this story because my ignorance was emblematic of the Western attitudes towards Afghanistan that are the overall theme of Tim Bonyhady’s Two Afternoons in the Kabul Stadium. Bonyhady, a cultural historian, has fashioned a history through imagery, a refreshing approach to a highly complex and often elusive subject. His exploration of the Western boom in war rugs erupting out of Afghanistan’s conflicts is a prime example of his method.

Afghanistan’s history has been shaped by outsiders’ repeated attempts at conquest, in which their arrogance has combined with the fiercely independent spirit of Afghans to produce failure. First the British, then the Russians and later the Americans foundered there. After twenty years the United States has finally pulled out, dragging us Aussies with them, and the Taliban is poised to take over. The book couldn’t be more timely.

Two Afternoons in the Kabul Stadium spans from the early twentieth century to the September 2001 attack on New York’s twin towers and its aftermath. Apart from its use of various types of imagery as barometers of successive foreign influences and Afghan responses, one other thing distinguishes this book: Bonyhady’s exposure of how that imagery has been greatly misrepresented in foreign media, chiefly because much of it has been shaped by cameras capturing what we foreigners expect to see — a phenomenon that encapsulates for Afghanistan what Edward Said wrote about Orientalism in general.

Take women’s dress. You couldn’t find a more politically loaded symbol of Afghanistan’s vicissitudes, from periods of modernisation to those of fundamentalist backlash, complicated by regional and tribal differences, and all of it responding to foreign influence. Add to that the fact that Western perceptions are largely shaped by developments in Kabul, a city that has both welcomed and discouraged the interest of foreign media.

In the 1920s the country’s Queen Soraya made a show of throwing off traditional dress. A famous photograph has her face bared, her hair fashionably bobbed, and her neck and arms exposed in a sleeveless jewelled gown. As a sign of Afghan women’s new freedoms, it appeared in countless overseas outlets. Many upper- and middle-class Kabul women followed suit, throwing off veils and donning short skirts. Girls in the city were being educated, some were going on to employment, and a few ended up in prestigious careers. In 1929, however, their newfound liberties were cut short. A rebellion against Western influence had women back in chadaris (the Afghan burqa) and it wasn’t until 1959 that Western styles took hold again.

It was in that year that Afghanistan’s prime minister staged an “unveiling” at Kabul’s Ghazi Stadium, signalling the government’s return to women’s advancement. For two decades women enjoyed greater freedom in dress and opportunities, at least in the capital, but this was quashed by a new wave of religious fundamentalism triggered by the onset of mullah rule in neighbouring Iran. Then Soviet-backed communists seized power in Kabul, initiating a swing back to wider horizons for women and another relaxation of the dress code. Some women even became celebrated parachutists.

American and Saudi financial support for the mujahideen meanwhile escalated, “transforming Afghanistan,” Bonyhady writes, “into a prime site of the Cold War and of Islamic fundamentalism.” The Soviets hung on until 1989, then leaving a vacuum that enabled a host of tribal warlords to sweep through the country. Two years later the Soviet Union itself collapsed, and by 1994 the Taliban were in charge. Now, twenty-seven years on, history, in that hackneyed phrase, appears to be repeating itself.

This necessarily brief survey doesn’t begin to do justice to the tremendous detail and nuance Bonyhady brings to his subject. The second “afternoon” of the book’s title, for example, was the 1999 public execution in the Ghazi Stadium of a woman named Zarmeena, in striking contrast to women’s ceremonial “unveiling” on the site forty years before. Convicted of murdering her husband, she was clad in a flowing blue chadari when she was executed by Kalashnikov shots to the back of her head. Members of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan filmed the execution with cameras hidden in their chadaris, and the video went viral after one of the RAWA women appeared on Oprah Winfrey’s program.

Zarmeena was most likely innocent, but in such frenzied times any reasonable doubt counted for little in Afghan courts. And Americans, post 9/11, would prove only too eager for evidence of Taliban rigidity. Yet Bonyhady’s portrayal is of an ever-spiralling chaos in which the Taliban themselves were caught. He notes their frequent retraction of edicts in response to popular resistance, and compares them to the warring mujahideens whose bloodlust was far greater. As for their executions, they were fewer than Iran’s or Saudi Arabia’s at the time, or even those by lethal injection in Texas.

While Bonyhady conclusively shows “the heft of the visual,” he also shows how susceptible images are to misrepresentation, not to mention manipulation. He recognises their importance in societies with high levels of illiteracy, yet points to the dangers they hold even in those with literacy rates like our own. Given their central place in his argument, it’s a pity so few images are reproduced in the book.

Still, for an exploration of Afghanistan and its fateful interaction with the West, you couldn’t do better than this book. The wealth and range of its material, combined with its extensive analyses of the status of Afghan women and the roles of posters, photography, television, cinema and pictorial carpets, can make it dense reading, but its map and timeline help with navigation, and I was grateful for the index. The chronological rather than thematic structure can be challenging: its discussion of a single image or artefact — a carpet, say — is set within the various histories of regional carpet weavers, the Western buyers of their carpets and the places they were sold, all in the context of unfolding political developments. A sign of Bonyhady’s breadth, it also means there’s a lot to digest in each chapter.

Finally, if you’re wondering whatever happened to my war rug, all I can say, as a measure of its worth, dear reader, is that it was stolen. •

The post The heft of the visual appeared first on Inside Story.

What happened next became one of the most high-profile domestic violence homicides in a year when their rising tally was grabbing national headlines. Her father stabbed her mother Salwa to death in front of Haydar’s youngest sister Ola, who was wounded when she tried to intervene. The case went to trial, first for the conviction and then for sentencing; throughout, her father’s side of the family appeared daily in public support of him.

In 2018, after the case had made its way through the criminal justice system, Haydar made her public debut as a visual artist. For the Archibald Prize, she painted herself in gloriously patterned hijab holding a framed press photograph of Salwa. In Salwa’s arms is a photograph of her mother Layla Shaikh Hussain Haidar — the artist’s beloved Teta, who was killed by Israeli drones during the war in Lebanon in 2006. Just as the beautifully layered portrait draws the viewer in, its title “Insert Headline Here” gives them something more to think about. Too easily, and too often, headlines reduce the lives — and deaths — of women like these, women in headscarves, to fit sexist, racist and Islamophobic stereotypes about Muslim women and Islam.

Haydar’s remarkable portrait, with its intricate bundling of generations, kinship and shattering loss, is hidden on the back cover of The Mother Wound, where it both contains and unleashes Haydar’s memoir. With this painting, she found a way to start sharing, as she puts it, “the parts of our stories that Dad’s family, the legal system and the media had not made room for.” Through her art, her advocacy against domestic violence and now in her writing, Haydar continues the loving and painful work of making personal and wider meaning of the deaths of her mother and grandmother, and her place in a matrilineal line wounded by trauma. Her distinct perspective — as the first-born daughter of Muslim Lebanese immigrants who grew up in southwestern Sydney in the shadow of the Cronulla riots — animates this quest and underpins the larger significance of the book.

In her own estimation, Haydar is more confident as an artist than she is as a writer, but as is sometimes the case when a person is driven to write because they must, The Mother Wound grips the reader’s attention and emotions from the first page. It opens with Haydar giving birth to her daughter, just months after her mother’s murder. When the midwife acknowledges her loss, Haydar responds: “I am so happy to have a daughter. I come from a family of strong women.”

Among them are Haydar’s two sisters, whom she depicts with love and affection without ever presuming to tell their stories for them. As the title infers, though, The Mother Wound is not a straightforward triumphalist account of multigenerational maternal strength. Instead, it unfolds resolutely on Haydar’s terms, its non-linear and sometimes repetitive form reflecting how her mother’s brutal murder rearranged everything she knew about her family and the world.

In passages likely to resonate strongly with readers whose own lives and families have been upended by violence, Haydar revisits her memories of her parent’s marriage, including her mother’s account of it. This powerful thread unfolds across the course of the book, made more acute by Haydar’s frank recollections of minimising or not properly comprehending what her mother had confided in her.

During her father’s court case, she reveals, she was still getting used to calling what her mum had gone through abuse. Like many other abusers, her father was not physically violent towards her mother — until he was, fatally. Looking back to what she’d been taught in school, she remembers a whole swathe of useful information about sexual and general health, but “not anyone asking whether we could identify abuse, or whether we had witnessed it.”

In the worst possible circumstances, Haydar began to educate herself and others, aided by public awareness campaigns like Destroy the Joint’s Counting Dead Women project. Her nascent feminism started to “crystallise,” sharpened against a wider culture which correlates Muslims with violence; a criminal justice system stacked against victims; and condemnation from members of her own extended family and community. Movingly, Haydar also discovered how politically engaged her mother was before she died, adding another layer to her nuanced tribute.

The Mother Wound is a major contribution to the discussion of domestic violence, including its impact on surviving family members. Haydar weaves in pertinent research, but what stands out are her own hard-won views and insights. She expresses some ambivalence about carceral responses to gendered violence, while firmly believing there are no excuses for men like her father. In sharing her story, she documents a wider cultural shift, an expanding public space for talking about domestic violence, and one that is crucially becoming more diverse.

Summing up The Mother Wound as an important book about domestic violence would do it a disservice, though, and not only because it potentially condemns the memoir to a worthy obligation read. The wound Haydar carries also includes her grandmother’s death in a war that seemed so distant in 2006 that she didn’t feel it entitled her to special consideration at school. Haydar and her mother both grieved deeply, but apart, separated by differences in age, personality and upbringing.

In the cruellest twist of fate, Haydar is now able to fathom her mother’s pain and public mourning, and to identify that her Teta “has been denied a language and a response. There is no movement and no hashtag for this kind of woman.” There isn’t, but there is now Haydar’s urgent and necessary book. •

The post Beyond the headlines and hashtags appeared first on Inside Story.

This rulebreaker was Constance Stokes. Although she won the coveted two-year National Gallery travelling scholarship in 1929, she never received the same recognition in Australia as her male competitors. Exhibiting in London, she won high praise from Kenneth Clark and other British critics, but at home she was largely ignored. Forgotten for many years, Stokes is only now being rediscovered.

She wasn’t the first woman to show her work in public, of course. Women had been exhibiting their paintings in Melbourne and elsewhere for decades. But they didn’t have the assurance of male artists; and when they exhibited in the company of men, their work was often ignored. Many careers paused because of the demands of marriage and children, as did that of Constance Stokes. Some never developed.

Women’s individual achievements were belittled. When Nora Heysen won the Archibald Prize for portraiture in 1938, she was photographed in her kitchen. The report was headed: “Girl Painter Who Won Art Prize Is Also Good Cook.” Heysen was twenty-eight years old. An unsuccessful entrant, Max Meldrum went public with the thought that it was “sheer lunacy” for women to think they could paint as well as men. Being “differently constituted,” they should concentrate on raising a healthy family.

Meldrum was echoing the long-established view of the proper role of female artists. Samuel Johnson gave his ruling in the mid eighteenth century when he declared that “public practice of any art [was] very indelicate in a female.” When portrait painting involved “staring in men’s faces,” it was a serious breach of decorum.

Such comments were not about a woman’s skill as an artist; they were about her place in the world. If she insisted on devoting her time to painting, she would do best to stick to flowers or small children, and not to offer her work for sale. In some ways, it was easier for female writers. They could make themselves invisible, as Jane Austen did when she published as “A Lady,” or, like the Brontës and George Eliot, they could use a male pseudonym.

Nora Heysen’s Archibald win might have been less offensive to traditionalists because her subject was a woman, the elegant wife of the consul for the Netherlands. In 1960, when Judy Cassab won the award with a portrait of the swaggeringly assertive Stanislav Rapotec, the press wanted to be sure that Cassab could cook and was a devoted mother. By winning the prize for a portrait with a male subject, she made a double breakthrough. Cassab won again in 1967, this time with a female sitter. Other female artists had to wait. Over the hundred years of Archibald contests, only eleven women have taken out the prize.

Questions about a woman’s place in the public world of art are central to Jennifer Higgie’s new book, The Mirror and the Palette: Rebellion, Revolution and Resilience: 500 Years of Women’s Self-Portraits, a captivating study of how female artists have created their images of self. Although the invention of the mirror benefited male as well as female painters, it had special meaning for women. Excluded from the life class, they could become their own models.

In earlier times, the female self-portrait had often come from those whose artist fathers trained them to be studio assistants. The remarkable seventeenth-century artist Artemisia Gentileschi was taught by her painter father, who in turn was a disciple of Caravaggio.

Until the nineteenth century, mirrors were scarce and expensive. But the female self-portrait flourished as soon as any female artist could study her own likeness. She saved money by not employing a model, and she could be alone with her art. It wasn’t just a matter of making up for the life class in a private anatomy lesson; for many, it was a chance for reflection.

Alice Neel in front of her 1980 self-portrait in New York. Sonia Moskowitz/IMAGES/Getty Images

Higgie adroitly places her artists in the context of their times and personal circumstances. Rather than take them in chronological order, she uses a thematic structure that groups them under such headings as “Smile,” “Allegory,” “Hallucination” and “Naked.” The “Smile” chapter is really about not smiling; the Mona Lisa look is as open as it gets. Some of the women depicted are lively and responsive to being seen, but they seldom show more than a glimpse of teeth. This restraint, as the author suggests, may have been partly due to poor or non-existent dentistry, but even in modern times the lips of most sitters remain closed.

The naked self-portraits were created in deliberate defiance of the rules that for centuries excluded women from the life class. In 1980, American portraitist Alice Neel painted herself at eighty, with no soft lighting on her ageing body. Unfazed by showing her sagging breasts, she faces the world with assurance, her expression jaunty. No regrets, no apologies; this is who I am.

In “Allegory,” the author suggests, we find coded messages from the painter. The empathy for the terrified woman in Artemisia Gentileschi’s Susanna and the Elders (1610) must reflect the artist’s own experience as a victim of rape. In 1794, a middle-aged Angelica Kauffmann looked back on her choice of career to paint herself in a moment of hesitation between the competing arts of music and painting. Angelica, an innocent in white, rejects the advances of blowzy Music and begins the uphill climb marked out for her by the stern figure of Painting.

“Hallucination” includes the wayward art of Leonora Carrington and the nightmare visions of Frida Kahlo. Carrington’s self-portrait shows the artist seated on a red cushion in an empty room. Behind her is a white rocking horse; outside the window another white horse gallops freely. Close to the artist’s chair, a hyena turns a malevolent gaze on the viewer. This expression of Carrington’s inner world stretches most notions of self-portraiture. What, after all, is the self and where does it begin and end?

Swedish artist Helene Schjerfbeck painted herself in a series of nightmares. In her eighties, anxious, lonely, dying of cancer, she produced twenty self-portraits. In most of them she is an apparition, “an other-worldly being in swirls of brown and beige.” In the last paintings she stares ahead, barely alive, barely human.

The story of Gwen John, sister of the more famous Augustus John, is a painful example of a life overwhelmed by force of circumstance. Illness, poverty and misplaced love might suggest a victim, but her superb self-portrait, painted in her mid-twenties, shows her as strong and self-contained, demure yet amused.

“I am not a flower”: Margaret Preston’s only self-portrait (1930). Art Gallery of New South Wales

Australia’s Margaret Preston had few doubts; hers is a history of triumphs and blunders. As Higgie says, Preston’s fascination with Indigenous art coexisted with a staggering ignorance and insensitivity to cultural trespass. She appears to have painted herself only once, on request. She wasn’t enthusiastic about the task. “I am not a flower,” she said. “I am a flower painter.” By contrast, Nora Heysen did many self-portraits. Whenever she changed her place of living, she would start by painting the person she knew best, herself.

Heysen’s self-portraits show subtle shifts in mood. Often she is seen at her easel, absorbed. In one painting, she turns away from her work, displeased by an interruption. There is no clutter in her studio. Her clothes are in clear, bright colours, plain and smooth as her neatly braided hair. The mood is one of composure, a quiet certainty without assertiveness. As the daughter of the famous Hans Heysen, she needed to be reassured about her independent self: her self-portraits affirmed her separateness. Heysen’s private space may seem limited, but it was her own.

Jennifer Higgie is an Australian art historian and screenwriter who now lives in London. Because her wide-ranging, generous and perceptive book can give no more than a selection from 500 years of women’s self-portraiture, it seems ungrateful to complain of omissions. Yet, in a study that includes self-portraits by artists from many cultures, some space could have been found for Indigenous Australian women. One example: Julie Dowling’s Self-Portrait: In Our Country (2002) carries the burden of her family history.

Higgie skates rapidly over colonial Australia, where she finds nothing of interest. Georgiana McCrae is an obvious omission. Trained in London, with professional experience in 1830s Edinburgh, McCrae was forbidden by her husband from painting for money. Her career ended after her marriage and settlement in Port Phillip. She did, however, paint portraits of family and friends. The most relevant to Higgie’s study would be McCrae’s early self-portrait, coupled with her much later portrait of “Eliza” of the Bunurong tribe. Eliza’s pose, with one hand at her breast, matches that chosen by McCrae for her own image. The young Georgiana looks confident, even coquettish, while Eliza’s gaze is patient, expecting nothing. Painted at a time when McCrae’s hopes had dwindled, Eliza’s portrait may express the artist’s empathy.

In an art world that didn’t accept women as equals, the self-portrait was an assertion of individuality. “This is who I am,” these artists say. It’s their response to those who questioned their right to a career in art with the putdown of “Who does she think she is?” Jennifer Higgie’s spirited and engaging book shows that there are as many answers to that question as there are individuals. Their versions of self, in many moods and modes, encompass worlds of experience and achievement. •

The Mirror and the Palette: Rebellion, Revolution and Resilience: 500 Years of Women’s Self-Portraits
By Jennifer Higgie | Weidenfeld & Nicolson | $39.99 | 336 pages

The post Who does she think she is? appeared first on Inside Story.

It was, in fact, less an interview than an extended opportunity for Banks to detail the “shocking allegations” she makes against parliamentary colleagues in her new memoir, Power Play. Banks looked nervous as she began to describe a working environment where “Mad Men meets House of Cards.” Tingle prompted rather than challenged.

Allegations like these certainly matter, but in the absence of consequences their continued outpouring risks simply becoming dispiriting. Last week’s Four Corners featured another extended airing of grievances by former Australia Post chief executive Christine Holgate. “I was thrown under the bus and the bus reversed back over me,” Holgate said as she recalled the prime minister’s sudden attack on her in parliament last October.

When such powerful and influential women present themselves as victims, the message is double-edged. On the one hand — and this is Banks’s and Holgate’s point — it shows they are up against an exceptionally hard-grained, intractable culture of abuse wrought by those more powerful than themselves.

On the other hand, it raises questions about how women in positions of power can manage their options. This is the focus of Ms Represented, a four-part ABC series premiering next Tuesday to mark the centenary of the first time Edith Cowan — the first woman elected to an Australian parliament — spoke in Western Australia’s House of Assembly.

Writer and presenter Annabel Crabb, who sometimes risks trivialisation in her determination to show the lighter side of our political culture, is at her best here: crisp, vivid and ironic. She and director Stamatia Maroupas, with deft work from editors Andrew Hope and Karin Steininger, blend historical narrative with observations by twenty groundbreaking female parliamentarians.

One of their strategies is to get the participants to read the historical narrative to camera, cross-edited between speakers. And so we have Anne Aly, Ros Kelly, Julie Bishop, Linda Burney, Natasha Stott Despoja, Amanda Vanstone, Julia Gillard, Bronwyn Bishop and Penny Wong working as an ensemble to tell the story of how the 1902 Franchise Act was passed.

Aside from the novelty of catching all these speakers quite literally reading from the same page, there’s significant entertainment value in the way they present the material. Rivalling trained actors, they use shifts in tone and pace to underline the absurdities of antiquated political attitudes. Except, of course, such presumptions are now proving to be not so antiquated.

These female voices from across the political spectrum are also in chorus, unscripted this time, on the syndrome of “gender deafness.” It goes something like this: put forward an idea in a meeting, and there is no response — until, a few minutes later, it is repeated by a male colleague as if it were his own, and is thereafter cited with general approval.

In the telling, these experiences come across as social satire rather than victim narrative; the speakers share a wry awareness of their own capacity to manipulate the wilful blindness of ego-driven male colleagues. But there are times when it really is no longer funny, as a succession of recent scandals and crises has shown.

In some of the worst instances, the procedures of the parliament itself are at issue. Sarah Hanson-Young’s account of being sabotaged on the floor of the Senate by Cory Bernardi, who crept up behind her and audibly whispered the names of all the male colleagues he implied she had been intimately involved with, is well supported by video documentation from the chamber. Bernardi was called to order, but it was Hanson-Young who was formally ruled against, for suggesting that he be breathalysed.

What is most striking about Ms Represented is how, time and again, these usually discordant voices converge to present identical narratives and perspectives on issues that really matter, not so much for themselves as individuals trying to make their way in an especially difficult professional environment, but for women in general.

They emphasise the opportunities they have as parliamentarians, and the responsibility they feel. Quick-witted, insightful and determined, and with a directness and honesty rarely evident when they are “on message,” they make entertaining company across the four episodes. “What’s not to like?” as Amanda Vanstone asks at one point.

And yet, over the decades, there has been so much outright vilification, from shocking comments in the 1902 Hansard about the prospect of Aboriginal women in parliament, read out by Linda Burney, to Tony Abbott and his supporters congregating under a placard urging “Ditch the Witch.”

The centenary perspective is an appropriate reminder that a difficult road has been travelled, but also that any sense that the journey is complete is premature. What the series lacks is the perspective of independent MPs, with Cathy McGowan, Jacqui Lambie, Kerryn Phelps, Helen Haines and Zali Steggall all unaccountably missing. Surely an additional episode might be devoted to them? They may well hold the key to a real change in the culture of parliament. •

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In reality, though, most domestic abuse involves coercive control: a pattern of physical, sexual, financial and psychological abuse that one person (usually a man) uses to control and dominate another person (usually a woman, and usually an intimate partner).

This week a multi-party parliamentary committee recommended that New South Wales become the first jurisdiction in mainland Australia to criminalise coercive control. (Tasmania introduced related offences sixteen years ago.) After nearly a year of research and consultation, a committee of Liberal, Labor, Greens and One Nation MPs unanimously recommended that coercively controlling a current or former intimate partner should become a crime.

The committee didn’t specify the precise wording or scope of the new offence. But because these laws exist in Britain and elsewhere — as the committee highlights in its report — we can expect two key elements to feature.

First, like stalking laws, a coercive control offence will focus on a pattern of abuse, not on isolated incidents. This means the justice system will be forced to see abuse the way victims experience it, as an ever-present threat. This focus on repeat behaviour will present challenges to investigating police. But it will also deal with a key shortcoming in the main response to family violence: intervention orders. These orders sometimes result in women being mistakenly identified as the primary aggressor, because they limit police’s consideration to the immediate event (disregarding the possibility that her actions, if any, may have been taken in self-defence). By looking at the whole of the relationship, rather than just the most recent incident of violence, the new offence provides a better lens for assessing who is the real abuser.

Second, the new offence will outlaw psychological, emotional and financial abuse. Isolation from family and friends, degrading and humiliating conduct, and deprivation of necessary financial resources will be prohibited. This is behaviour that has traditionally fallen outside the scope of the criminal law. The offence won’t, though, apply to reasonable behaviour, and it will only apply if the offender intended the behaviour to cause harm to the victim or if a reasonable person would have known that harm was likely. Concerns that the new offence will prevent parents from disciplining their children, or spouses from taking the family car without the consent of their partner are wrong and inflammatory.

Other elements of the new offence are less settled. For instance, while overseas jurisdictions limit their coercive control offences to familial relationships, or some more narrowly to intimate partners, the committee left open the possibility of including broader relationships.

It is also important to realise that as groundbreaking as this proposed reform is, in some ways it isn’t new. Most states and territories already indirectly criminalise coercion, psychological abuse, control, emotional abuse and financial abuse when it occurs as a breach of an intervention order. What is novel is that the new offence wouldn’t require victims to first go to court and obtain an intervention order before the abuse became criminal. Instead, they could directly seek the assistance of police, who would now be better able to respond.

So, how might this new law work in practice? The case of Natalie Curtis, who lived with her husband just east of London, is illustrative. By the end of their six-year relationship, he was calling her up to forty times a day, threatening to kill her, throwing her belongings out of the house and smashing their furniture. He blamed Natalie for his behaviour.

As is often the case, the relationship didn’t start out that way. He initially seemed attentive and caring, but over time that attentiveness became surveillance, and care became control. Natalie describes it as “a drip effect, each event gets a bit worse and a bit worse… And then someone has control over you.” She developed severe anxiety and panic attacks, and eventually went to the police. Her husband was charged with controlling or coercive behaviour and ultimately sentenced to two years’ jail.

Of course, some of his behaviour, such as threats and property damage, was already criminal. But the justice system, viewing them in isolation, often doesn’t take these offences seriously enough. In fact, two years before Natalie left him for good, her husband received a suspended prison sentence for threatening to kill her. A few weeks later, after he promised to reform and begged her to take him back, they moved back in together. It got worse after that.

To be clear, criminalising coercive control is not a panacea for the shadow pandemic of family violence that costs our country lives, untold misery and billions of dollars every year. And there are still important tasks ahead. The NSW committee recommended establishing a taskforce to oversee careful drafting of the new offence, to consult about its final form, and to monitor its implementation. That taskforce will need to deal with concerns about the ability of our justice systems to deal with domestic violence and “invisible” harms. The new law must also be drafted and implemented carefully to meet the needs of Indigenous Australians.

The committee made it clear that a new offence was contingent on broader, systemic reforms occurring concurrently: widespread community education campaigns; extensive training for everyone whose work will be affected by the new law; and additional resources for domestic violence services and criminal justice agencies to help them absorb the extra workloads created by the new offence.

With nearly all states and territories now considering whether to criminalise these forms of family violence, New South Wales leads the way. A new law that directly outlaws these forms of abuse will give effect to what victims, frontline workers and researchers have known for decades: that coercion and control, rather than physical violence, are the core of domestic and family violence. •

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Titley would have needed to prove a lack of consent and doing that required physical evidence of a struggle. Not just minor signs, either: the contemporary textbook Medical Jurisprudence, Forensic Medicine and Toxicology advised that “slight traces of a struggle… on the thighs and breasts” should be treated as evidence of the woman having failed to use “all her strength in her defence.” Indeed, it noted, members of a “certain class of woman” were known to “make a point of a show of resistance before yielding.”

The question of consent would also have thrown the burden of proof and the attention of the court onto Titley herself. Being orphaned and poor (she was a house cleaner in the inner-Melbourne suburb of Emerald Hill), and having previously had a boyfriend, she might well have been accused of being unchaste or belonging to that “certain class of woman.” Being seen as promiscuous meant being considered “common property,” and to this extent, outside the reach of rape laws. After all, rape was a crime of trespass against another man’s property, either her husband or father. A similar logic underpins a still-common belief that sex workers or women who enjoy sex with multiple partners can’t be raped: a woman who belongs to no man belongs to every man.

But this is not just another miserable story of women’s oppression in the Victorian era. Frances Titley fought for her rights in the civil courts and won in a way that we might not have anticipated. By proving that Moltine had promised to marry her if she became pregnant, she was able to sue him for breach of promise aggravated by “seduction” (or coerced sex).

This charge shifted the focus on to Moltine’s actions and words. He bore the burden of proving that he had neither promised marriage nor “seduced” her. And, like the vast majority of defendants sued in this way, he lost. If he had been living in the United States, where seduction in the late nineteenth century was a criminal offence, he would have gone to jail. In Australia, he was subject to the unusually large damages of £200 (double the average for the century). As the Australian reported at the time, “lovers of justice would be pleased.”

Titley v Moltine came to mind when the NSW government announced earlier this month that it would adopt changes to the criminal law’s sexual consent provisions recommended by the state Law Reform Commission. Among other things, the law will incorporate an affirmative model of consent and codify a person’s right to withdraw consent at any point.

The announcement sparked the usual tired debate about the balance between the rights of the victim and the presumption of innocence, but nobody has questioned whether consent itself should be reconsidered. While I wouldn’t recommend going back to legal actions based on “seduction,” Titley v Moltine is a reminder that consent is not the only way the law could distinguish sex from rape.

Consent’s problems are evident in the way it increasingly comes with qualifiers — affirmative consent, enthusiastic consent, communicative consent — all of which are attempts to carve out sexual agency for women from a concept that consigns them to passivity. With its origins in contract law, consent is a cumbersome, clod-footed category when applied to the delicate shadowlands of sex, power and desire.

My jurisprudence students are always surprised when I tell them that feminists have been the most trenchant critics of this use of consent. Prompted by the women’s movement of the 1970s, legal theorists like Catharine MacKinnon declared the focus on consent to be a major cause of the injustices experienced by rape survivors in the courts.

Although consent promises to focus the court’s attention on women’s sexual will, MacKinnon argues, it actually enshrines the worst gender stereotypes. By accepting that “man proposes, woman disposes,” it preserves a power imbalance in which men have sexual will and women merely permit, or don’t permit, sex — a very low bar for sexual agency.

The problem goes back to consent’s origins in contract law. Whereas the temporal boundaries of sex are nebulous, contracts govern the delivery of goods within a specified period. This gives rise to the popular idea that men are “owed” sex if consent has been granted. If a man can show that a “free and voluntary agreement” was reached at the beginning of an encounter, then he can easily claim good faith on his part.

What goods was the law imagining would be delivered when it sought to regulate sex through contract law? The woman’s body, of course — in accordance with the common law tradition of treating women as the property of their fathers and then their husbands. By the late nineteenth century, though, a series of legislative reforms had begun to shift ownership of a woman’s body (or at least a white woman’s body) from her husband or father to herself. They were now considered to have “property in their own persons” that allowed them to contract out their own bodies or their labour (unlike slaves, who were the property of others). With the exception of marital rape, which was not prohibited until the late twentieth century, the “trespass” of rape was no longer on the property of an “owning man” but on the woman. This was certainly an improvement, but the law of consent still bore no relation to the act of sex or the harm of rape.

In imagining a woman rationally consenting to the use of her body by another, the law imposed a mind/body split on an act that by its very nature dissolves such distinctions. Far from being a rational exchange between two parties, the language of sex is often an inarticulate language of gestures and sighs — of non-verbal, non-rational, corporeal communication. And this is why rape is so damaging. It is an assault on a woman’s sexual will and body at the same time. In Linda Alcoff’s words: “It is not that ‘my body’ has been taken; I have been taken.”

Contract law’s notion of a “free and voluntary agreement” also suggests that both parties reach an agreement as equals, which obscures how a woman’s consent and decision-making may be constrained by economic dependence, coercion or other subterranean forms of inequality. More fundamentally, it also ignores how women are socialised into sexual passivity and how male dominance is eroticised in almost all forms of popular media. How meaningful are the terms “free and voluntary” in a society where sexual imaginations are still overwhelmingly shaped by male power and fantasy?

The NSW amendments go some way towards recognising these complexities by specifying that consent needs to be active and ongoing, and that consenting to one act does not mean consenting to all acts. But the underlying problem remains.

We’re left with a paradox: consent is both the main problem with the law of sexual assault and the only conceivable solution. Yet no number of qualifiers will fix the fundamental mismatch between the language of contract law and the language of sex. Returning to nineteenth-century notions of seduction may be no answer, but knowing that other means have been used to prosecute sexual violence gives us more room to be imaginative in finding legal solutions. •

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Those women were part of a movement that stretched back to 1965, when a group of Sydney women calling themselves Save Our Sons, or SOS, began protesting against conscription. They were swiftly dismissed as a bunch of eccentric housewives.

Every picture tells a story, but not necessarily the whole story. In the years since then, memories of Australia’s anti–Vietnam war movement have tended to focus on images of the huge moratorium marches, largely ignoring or downplaying the role of women. Coming across photos of the Sydney protesters almost fifty years later, I too thought I had them pegged, albeit more kindly, as a group of concerned middle-class mums.

As a mother of a teenage boy myself, it wasn’t hard to empathise with Joyce Golgerth, who formed the Sydney SOS after learning that her twenty-year-old son had been picked for conscription in the Menzies government’s conscription “lottery,” a crass spectacle involving an actual bingo barrel. And it was easy to understand why, after the organisation issued a “distress call — SOS — to mothers everywhere,” others were inspired to form their own groups in Townsville, Brisbane, Newcastle, Wollongong, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth.

But the more I delved into my research, sifting through archives, ASIO files, newspapers, letters and interviews, the more it became clear that SOS involved much more than maternal outrage. Indeed, as the stories started tumbling out it seemed the entire history of the twentieth century was converging on this one phenomenon.

Black-and-white photographs of women in sensible shoes and matching handbags don’t do SOS justice. In my book, Save Our Sons: Women, Dissent and Conscription during the Vietnam War, I wanted to look at the stories behind the images, to present a more nuanced picture of this grassroots movement and of those who joined it.

As I soon learned, there was no typical SOS supporter; many weren’t even mothers. They were young and old; rich and poor; working and non-working; of all political and religious creeds; and they lived on farms and in cities and country towns. Some were well known in peace circles; others had never joined a cause in their lives.

Individual stories stood out: the television celebrity with the radical past; the ambulance driver (now a mother of ten) who had patrolled London during the Blitz; the German migrant whose husband had been part of the SS and who was determined not to be a “fellow traveller” again. I read heartbreaking letters from women who were still living with the fallout from previous wars. One, who had lost all her close male relatives in the second world war, now had two sons of conscription age.

It became clear that history hadn’t given SOS its due: it was one thing to march with thousands of others in 1970, but a different matter altogether to picket an army barracks in 1966. Indeed, SOS was one of the first groups to protest against conscription, and one of the last to put its banners away.

For almost eight years, supporters worked tirelessly, often behind the scenes, assisting young men and their families, and fighting for civil liberties along the way. As the war dragged on, some became more radical: scandalising Melbourne Cup–goers in scanty anti-war fashions; hijacking an evangelical rally; holding parties to fill in false conscription papers; and setting up a series of safe houses to hide draft resisters.

The year following the Canberra protest, five SOS members were jailed after staging a sit-in at a Commonwealth office in Melbourne. Politician and moratorium leader Jim Cairns would later describe it as a turning point in the anti-war campaign (and apologise for not mentioning SOS in his memoirs).

Protesting came at a personal cost. SOS women were followed by ASIO and faced widespread hostility, sometimes within their own families. One woman’s workmates poured hot tea on her (she resigned at once). When ridicule didn’t work, SOS women were derided as communist dupes, bad mothers and neglectful wives.

More surprising was the bitterness of other women; one declared SOS “a disgrace to womanhood,” and members clashed publicly with “white mouse” Nancy Wake, the Australian war hero.

Pinpointing SOS’s legacy is difficult, but as well as their practical contributions, there can be no doubt that these “respectable” women helped widen the appeal of the anti-war movement and made public dissent more acceptable. After SOS, some adopted new causes, including the women’s movement; a few moved into politics. Others, like ballet teacher Edna Gudgeon, quietly resumed their former lives. Asked why she had joined the Canberra chain gang, she summed up the frustration of the times: “Because I cannot seem to reach this government in any other way.” •

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The case the court has agreed to hear, Jackson Women’s Health Organization v Dobbs, challenges the constitutionality of a 2018 Mississippi law that bans almost all abortions after fifteen weeks of pregnancy, with narrow exceptions for medical emergencies or foetal abnormalities. A federal district judge and a panel of the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit have both upheld an appeal against the law launched by the women’s health organisation that runs the only abortion clinic in Mississippi.

The case effectively reopens both Roe v Wade and the US Supreme Court’s 1992 decision in Planned Parenthood v Casey, which held that “the state’s interests” in relation to a foetus that isn’t yet viable “are not strong enough to support a prohibition of abortion or substantial obstacle to the woman’s effective right to elect the procedure.” In accepting the Mississippi case, the court says it will examine whether “all pre-viability prohibitions on elective abortions are unconstitutional.” The state’s attorney-general will argue that the capacity to survive outside the womb is the wrong place to draw the line.

Among developed nations, the longstanding and increasingly partisan political battle over women’s reproductive rights is uniquely American. Continual challenges to legal guarantees encapsulated in Roe v Wade and elsewhere not only undermine women’s freedoms but are also likely to be contributing to the appalling rates of maternal and infant mortality in the world’s richest nation.

A quick history lesson highlights how precarious the legal right to abortion is for American women. While Roe v Wade is commonly seen as guaranteeing a right to abortion, it secures only the right to privacy when seeking access to an abortion, thus protecting a woman’s autonomy in the decision to have an abortion.

Even this is mitigated by what the distinguished legal journalist Linda Greenhouse calls “a physician-centric framework.” To a remarkable degree, indeed, Roe v Wade is about doctors’ rights. The majority opinion, written by Justice Harry Blackmun, actually says that “the attending physician, in consultation with his [sic] patient, is free to determine, without regulation by the State, that, in his medical judgment, the patient’s pregnancy should be terminated.” This doctor-knows-best rhetoric could well have helped enable the limitations since placed on American women’s reproductive rights.

It is important to note that Roe v Wade is essentially superseded by the 1992 decision. When this case reached the US Supreme Court, only Justice Blackmun remained of Roe’s seven-member majority, and a majority of the justices had been appointed by presidents who openly sought its reversal. Even so, the court surprised everyone by reaffirming Roe’s central tenet of the right to an abortion; but it also instituted an “undue burden” standard that permitted the state to regulate abortion to protect unborn life from the beginning of pregnancy, so long as women’s authority to decide whether to give birth was protected. In taking this approach, the court created opportunities for restrictions on abortion that Roe itself never sanctioned.

In the wake of the Roe v Wade decision, anti- and pro-abortion groups were galvanised. At the same time, Republican strategists were staking out anti-abortion positions as part of a strategy to appeal to Catholic and evangelical voters. This was the beginning of a growing partisan divide on the issue, which has become almost a litmus test for aspiring Republican lawmakers.

Efforts to limit abortion soon turned to focusing on funding for reproductive services. The Hyde amendment, introduced in 1976 and enacted by every Congress since, bans the use of federal Medicaid funds for abortion services, with exceptions for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest and pregnancies that would endanger the mother’s life. It is particularly harmful to women of colour and those with low incomes, who disproportionately rely on Medicaid for their healthcare coverage. (Note that the Hyde amendment does not block states from using their own Medicaid funds; currently fifteen states pay for more abortions than those permitted under the amendment.)

Gallup polls report that around 50 per cent of Americans agree abortion should be legal “under certain circumstances” and another 29 per cent “under all circumstances.” This level of public support makes the federal political fight difficult, leading anti-abortion activists to be more relentless in their use of the courts and to target Republican-dominated state legislatures.

Donald Trump oversaw a major effort to curtail abortion. The “gag rule” was applied to recipients of US global health aid (a hard line that was particularly punitive for female victims of sexual violence during conflicts), access to contraception was restricted, and insurers and healthcare professionals were given more latitude to deny reproductive health services. He also made good on his promise to load up the Supreme Court with justices who would overturn Roe v Wade by appointing Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

Joe Biden has been reticent about speaking out on abortion. His election campaign didn’t highlight the issue, and he hasn’t taken it up since moving into the Oval Office. Perhaps his Catholicism has played a role, but more likely his silence reflects the many other important issues that need to be tackled.

But he has made a good start on rolling back Trump’s undermining of women’s health. He has reversed the restrictions on funding Planned Parenthood and overseas groups that provide abortion referrals; reversed restrictions on the supply of medical abortion drugs; and removed hurdles to medical research that uses foetal tissue derived from abortions. He has appointed vocal advocates of abortion rights to key federal posts, including Xavier Becerra as health and human services secretary.

The mere fact that the Supreme Court agreed to take up this case indicates it is likely to overturn or severely limit the judicial basis of abortion rights. None of the usual criteria for accepting a case were satisfied — there was no split in the circuit decisions and no unsettled question of federal law — and the case had languished on the court’s docket since before the death of Justice Ruth Ginsburg, an ardent support of Roe v Wade. Moreover, the newer, more conservative justices have already shown their willingness to overturn longstanding precedents and expand the scope of decisions.

Biden will be under enormous pressure to do more to protect abortion rights, not just because of fears about the outcome of Jackson Women’s Health Organization v Dobbs but also because of even more draconian state-level anti-abortion provisions. Sixteen states have attempted to ban abortion before viability, mostly with “heartbeat” bills, which seek to ban the procedure from the time a foetal heartbeat can first be heard. (This is six weeks from conception, at which time many women are still unaware they are pregnant.)

The anti-abortion legislation recently passed by the Texas legislature highlights what the future could look like without Roe v Wade (which originated in Texas). It not only bans abortions after six weeks but also allows private citizens the right to sue anyone who aids or abets an abortion — including healthcare workers and facilities, insurance companies, counsellors, families, the person who drives the patient to the clinic, and even those who donate funds to support abortion services. As lawyers opposing the legislation have argued, it enables anti-abortion groups to “weaponise the judicial system” to paralyse women’s healthcare services, isolate women who need abortions, and intimidate these women’s supportive networks.

All of these bills have been blocked by court orders, and await the undoing of constraints imposed by Roe v Wade. Many more bills are coming: since January, 549 abortion restrictions, including 165 abortion bans, have been introduced across forty-seven states; sixty-nine of these, including nine bans, have been enacted.

Biden made an election commitment to codify Roe v Wade into federal law and abolish the long-time ban on federal funding for abortions via the Hyde amendment. Vice-president Kamala Harris campaigned on a proposal to create a “preclearance” system, analogous to that in the Voting Rights Act, whereby states that want to change abortion access must seek approval from the justice department. In a first step, Biden’s fiscal 2022 budget request, just released, omits the Hyde language.

To enact any or all of these provisions, Biden must determine how much pressure he wants to put on the Democrats in Congress to tackle these fraught issues ahead of the 2022 elections. And there is an additional problem: all of these measures can only be passed if the Senate filibuster (a requirement for sixty votes rather than a simple majority) is abolished.

A more contentious way to tackle this issue — one that is already on the table for some Democrats —is to expand the number of justices on the Supreme Court (there is precedent, although not recent). A group of Democrats has introduced a bill to do this in the House of Representatives; and, not surprisingly, Republicans have been scathing in their opposition. But the bill has a doubtful future even without Republican opposition: House speaker Nancy Pelosi has said she has no plans to bring it up for a vote.

Although the court’s composition is clearly on Biden’s mind, he has been in no hurry to make a decision. In April he signed an executive order setting up a bipartisan commission to examine the court’s size, the justices’ lifetime appointments and other court-related matters, thus fulfilling a campaign commitment.

The key issue that may drive Biden and his administration to apply more effort to abortion rights specifically and women’s reproductive health more generally is his strong commitment to improving access to healthcare and creating a more equitable society. “We are deeply committed to making sure everyone has access to care — including reproductive health care — regardless of income, race, zip code, health insurance status, or immigration status,” Biden said in a joint statement with Harris on the forty-eighth anniversary of Roe v Wade in January.

The hard line against abortion rights that is so prevalent in American politics puts women’s lives, livelihoods and health at risk and widens the disparities between rich and poor that are already a feature of US healthcare. More importantly, the current battles ignore the real-life complexity — ethical and financial — of ending a pregnancy. That is not likely to change any time soon. •

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This approach was on full display after former Liberal staffer Brittany Higgins told her story in February. Caught off guard by the outpouring of outrage that followed her devastating claims, the Morrison government ordered no fewer than five reviews.

Not counting the continuing police investigation, there’s the Foster review of how serious incidents are handled at Parliament House, the Gaetjens review of who knew what and when about the alleged rape, the Kunkel inquiry into the behaviour of the prime minister’s media staff, the Hammond review of how Coalition offices operate, and the Jenkins work on parliament’s workplace culture.

Three months later and counting, with parliament back and Senate estimates in session, we have had several (painstaking) opportunities this week to learn where these inquiries are up to.

After estimates yielded little information on Monday morning, Anthony Albanese’s first question to Scott Morrison in question time was why none of the reviews had been concluded. Probably having guessed something like this was coming, the prime minister said he was expecting the Foster review “very, very shortly.”

As it turns out, Stephanie Foster — a deputy secretary in his department — finished her report at 8pm that evening. Later the same night, she also learned Morrison would issue a media statement about her key recommendations the next morning. The two had not yet talked about her final report.

Foster appeared at estimates on Tuesday, alongside finance minister Simon Birmingham, who was representing Morrison and is heavily involved in the government’s Higgins response. Birmingham said he only learned of the announcement that morning and had not read the whole report. Despite a barrage of questions from an unimpressed Penny Wong, he couldn’t say whether it would be released publicly.

Pending the detail, the headline recommendations seem sensible. On top of a previously announced 24/7 support line for current or former parliamentary staff (“1800 APH SPT”), they include face-to-face education for managers and staff, and an independent, confidential complaints mechanism. The report will go to cabinet next week and will indeed — as we later learned from Morrison in question time — be released publicly for more consultation.

But the rush and confusion around the report’s release struck a worrying note. It also came after the officials who run building security (a different part of the bureaucracy from Foster) told estimates there have been “no formal changes” in the policies governing how parliamentary staff handle serious incidents. No changes, that is, during the two years since Higgins’s alleged rape in a ministerial office, after she returned to the building late at night with a senior colleague, obviously intoxicated.

Another review head, prime minister’s department secretary Phil Gaetjens, also appeared before estimates. Gaetjens has the delicate job of examining exactly when the prime minister’s office found out about the alleged rape. This was paused in March so as not to clash with the Federal Police’s investigation, but has since restarted.

Well before this week, the vibes were bumpy. Remember how Morrison declined to mention that Gaetjens’s work had paused when asked about progress back in March? And remember how it emerged that no plans had been made to speak to Higgins?

It was hard to feel more confident following Gaetjens’s appearance. He could only provide a loose time frame for completion, saying he needed “probably weeks… certainly not months.” Nor could he say how many staff members had been interviewed or if the report will be made public. The interviews with staff have been done confidentially, he said, and although he still hasn’t talked to Higgins, a meeting is now “scheduled.”

But while Gaetjens’s release is still to be confirmed, and we don’t have the full detail of Foster’s work, another report landed, complete and public, on Tuesday afternoon. These were the findings of Morrison’s chief-of-staff, John Kunkel, who has been examining claims the PM’s political staff negatively briefed journalists about Higgins’s partner, David Sharaz.

Higgins made a formal complaint a month after the backgrounding claims were first reported by the media, writing to Kunkel that “numerous journalists” had told her about a campaign against Sharaz. On Tuesday morning in estimates, Labor made repeated attempts to unearth details of Kunkel’s work. But come question time, Morrison tabled the report unexpectedly, declaring emphatically that Kunkel had “found in the negative.” On that basis, some media reports suggested his office had been “cleared.”

If you read the four-page report, you’ll find that Kunkel actually wrote that he wasn’t in a position to say for sure because he had found no “first-hand” evidence. (Not surprisingly, most press gallery journalists weren’t forthcoming about what they’d been told in private conversations.) On top of this, Higgins reportedly had no warning Kunkel’s review would be released, and didn’t know that parts of her discussion with him would be quoted in the document.

And the other reviews? In February, Morrison asked Liberal MP Celia Hammond (who took over Julie Bishop’s old seat) to look at the culture of Coalition offices; in March, sex discrimination commissioner Kate Jenkins was appointed to look at parliament’s workplace culture. If Morrison was seeking to shine a special spotlight on his own party, the intention was shortlived. Within weeks, the Hammond review was rolled into Jenkins’s. This certainly avoids double-ups and provides a more arm’s-length way of reviewing Coalition offices (something Hammond was concerned about), but sceptics also point out that Liberal Party practices and culture in Canberra will escape a focused review.

Jenkins is seeking submissions from anyone who has worked at Parliament House. Her independent process — funded by the government but run by the Australian Human Rights Commission — is due to provide an initial response in July and a final report in November. Both will be made public.

Leaving aside Jenkins’s inquiry, the treatment of the four other reviews has created a growing and disturbing pile of niggles. Confusion, obfuscation, a lack of detail, a lack of warning and, in some instances, a lack of respect for Higgins — it doesn’t look like a government sincerely doing everything within its power to deal with a problem and try to get ahead of it. It looks much more like a government going through the motions in the hope that will be enough to make the whole thing go away. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

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The defence naturally had a different story: “Everything that took place at those premises on that night was consensual.” And, consistent with the statistics on sexual assault (only one in ten reported cases results in a conviction), de Belin and Sinclair were found not guilty. On one charge, that is — the jury’s eight men and four women were unable to reach a verdict on the remaining charges.

Does it matter that twice as many men as women were sitting on that jury? It’s not customary when reporting on trials for journalists to discuss the jury’s composition, but in this case the Sydney Morning Herald’s court reporter, Georgina Mitchell, saw it as relevant.

It’s true that jurors are randomly selected from the election roll, but a recent study by the Melbourne Age found that women called up for jury service in Victoria are more than twice as likely as men to be excluded from criminal trials by peremptory challenges (the right of barristers to veto jurors without giving a reason), and even more likely if the case concerns a sexual offence.

It has always been thus. Unlike British women, who gained the right to sit on juries in the early twentieth century, Australian women had to wait until the 1990s to achieve full jury rights in every state. Until then, women were denied their power to engage in the adjudicative process or to be judged by a jury of their own peers. Female victims of sexual violence usually had to narrate the most traumatic moment of their lives to a male judge, male journalists, male barristers and a jury comprised entirely of men. An institution that was meant to be the democratic voice of a sovereign community was instead one of the most unrepresentative institutions in Australia.

While I was reading about the de Belin case my desk was piled high with archival materials detailing the tireless efforts of feminist organisations to get women on juries. Let me correct that: tireless isn’t quite the right word. By the 1940s the women had been campaigning for more than half a century, and they were exhausted. “This meeting is a waste of time,” huffed Miss Cotton in a 1942 deputation to NSW justice minister R.R. Downing. “We are not asking for a privilege; we are asking for a very unpleasant right… We think it is work we should be doing and it is our right to do it.”

Like those of us who have served on a jury, the women knew that in the bundle of rights, duties, privileges and obligations that define citizenship, jury service is most definitely a duty. “It is no privilege that women seek, but the right to take their place as full citizens with the knowledge that civil and social duties should not be determined by sex,” one woman wrote to the Melbourne Argus in the 1940s. Erna Keighley, a feminist activist from the same era, agreed: “Any community which excludes half its citizens from such activities, because of sex alone, is undemocratic.”

By the middle of the twentieth century white Australian women could vote, sit in parliament and practise as barristers and solicitors. As an editorial in the Sun put it, “The bar table, the witness box, the dock and the gaol are all open to them; only the jury box is closed.” Worse than that, women were removed from court in any case involving sex, while men were allowed to stay. As activist Annie Golding complained in 1929, “When a man is charged with a sexual offence against a young child of six, seven, or eight years of age, or against an unfortunate girl that has been seduced or outraged, the court is cleared” of women and the girl in the witness box is left “friendless.”

Queensland was the first state, in 1923, to grant women the right to sit on juries, but it was an opt-in system that required                 women to volunteer to the local sheriff. So few volunteered — and those who did were usually subject to peremptory challenges — that by 1941 only three women had served as jurors. It took until 1995 for Queensland women to gain full jury rights.

A similar story can be told of Tasmania, where women were allowed to volunteer for jury service in 1939 but didn’t have equal jury rights until 1991. South Australia denied women any right at all to sit on juries until 1965; full jury rights came in 1975. Western Australia gave women full jury rights in 1985, New South Wales and Victoria in 1977 and the Australian Capital Territory in 1979. It’s a shocking performance from a nation that likes to celebrate the fact that it granted women the right to vote and stand in parliament relatively early.

What reasons were given for the denial of this basic and not very pleasant right? Put simply: toilets. Or, as one justice minister euphemistically put it in 1942, “The greatest difficulty in the way of anything being done immediately is the provision of accommodation.” Yes, in New South Wales and Victoria the main barrier to women’s jury franchise cited by justice ministers was that courts lacked female toilets and it would cost too much money to build them.

Of course, governments were having no problem financing high-grade arterial roads, the Snowy Mountains Hydro Scheme, tramways, railways and entire new suburbs. As one “well-known Labour woman” told a NSW deputation in the 1940s: “A lot of rot! The minister is only pulling your association’s leg. Accommodation!… [T]he government can put an extra lavatory and a bit of a wooden partition in other departments quick enough, why not in the courts?”

Those courts had been built during the Victorian era, when nobody imagined a role for women in legal adjudication. Women were seen to be too irrational, too burdened by suckling infants, too sexually ignorant or too easily corrupted by sexual knowledge. Men spoke the language of the law. Women spoke the language of morality.

What comes as a surprise is that these attitudes persisted for a large part of the twentieth century. “Jurors become the judges of the facts, and so they should be worldly, impartial, logical, consistent and, in theory at least, sexless,” one commentator declared when South Australian women entered jury boxes for the first time in 1966. “Many male lawyers contend that women jurors not only lack such qualities but are often petty, moody (by nature), unpredictable and in sex cases revengeful in the cause of womanhood.”

Newspapers commented constantly on the problem of men in courtrooms being distracted by attractive women. Sheriffs worried that the state would be encumbered with the substantial costs of remunerating them for their labours of care. Inadvertently, the debate over juries raised the awkward fact that supposed labours of love, such as housework and childcare, for which women were said to be most suited were in fact unpaid work that saved government significant amounts of money.

Many of these historical injustices persist today. Rather than providing funding for female jurors with caring obligations, courts simply exempt them from service. Women continue to be targeted by peremptory challenges, quite likely leading to skewed results in a range of matters, particularly sexual assault. The cliché that women are harder on each other when judging these matters has not been borne out by research; instead, women’s shared experiences of the fear or actuality of sexual violence makes them far more capable of understanding the arguments of claimants like the woman in the de Belin case.

But the greatest continuing injustice of the jury system lies in its treatment of Indigenous people. Their criminalisation means that they are vastly over-represented among defendants and yet woefully under-represented among jurors. When the NSW Law Reform Commission last did the figures in 2009, Indigenous people represented less than 0.5 per cent of jurors. If Australia is to offer defendants “a jury of one’s peers” as a symbol of our democracy and the sovereignty of the people, then it needs to include all people and all experiences. •

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Nor did last year’s budget fix the gender problems created by the government’s Covid-19 stimulus policies: the JobKeeper guidelines that excluded many women in low-paid casual work, for instance, and the emergency access to superannuation that substantially reduced or wiped out some women’s superannuation accounts. While the government claimed that  women’s employment  was recovering more quickly than men’s, in fact women’s jobs and work hours had been hit particularly hard by the Covid recession.

The government reacted angrily to feminist critiques of its budget strategy. In one case, the prime minister’s department reportedly contacted a high-profile critic to argue that there was nothing gendered in the budget.

What a difference a year makes! With Brittany Higgins’s revelations, the allegations against Christian Porter, a series of prime ministerial missteps and widespread reports of sexism in Coalition ranks, polls have shown the government’s support among women dropping significantly. In response, Scott Morrison announced ministerial changes designed to bring “a fresh lens, in particular to achieving the outcomes, the results that we all want for Australian women across the country.” This year’s budget needed to tackle women’s issues explicitly.

Overall, the government pledged around $3.4 billion for women’s economic security, safety and health. The aged care royal commission’s call for an increase in the aged care workforce gave the government the opportunity to increase employment and training in a female-dominated industry, although it still doesn’t seem to fully recognise the economic benefits of funding more jobs in care services. The budget still favours some male-dominated industries that yield relatively few new jobs.

Extra funding for social housing was a step too far for a Coalition government, despite high levels of homelessness among older women. Instead, the government is going to make it easier for single parents, predominantly women, to take out mortgages, a policy consistent with the Liberals’ emphasis on property ownership. While that move will benefit some women, it risks encouraging those who are less well-off to take out mortgages, with as little as a 2 per cent deposit, that they may eventually be unable to pay. And with just 10,000 places  spread out over four years, the scheme has been criticised for its limited scope.

Increased funding for childcare is always welcome, even though it can be argued that the budget allocation is still insufficient. The budget also funds training programs to encourage women into non-traditional trades but will cover only 5000 places, as well as financing STEM scholarships for women. The government’s policies to support “sovereign” manufacturing could have put more emphasis on supporting those businesses that pursue gender-equity measures.

In keeping with its theme of security in uncertain times, the budget increases funding to counter domestic violence, a welcome outcome at any time but particularly now, with the pandemic having brought an increase in family violence.

Measures to prevent domestic violence can be ideologically acceptable to conservative governments because they don’t involve economic redistribution and are compatible with the view that it is men’s traditional role to protect women. But the government has gone a little further by suggesting it may reconsider the Coalition’s  preference for unpaid rather than paid domestic violence leave. It hasn’t committed to recommending paid leave to the pending Fair Work Commission review of the issue, however, let alone pre-emptively legislating for it.

Other Coalition positions seem unlikely to be reviewed. Although the Women’s Budget Statement mentions that women’s work is frequently undervalued, the government seems not to have taken a fresh look at the Abbott government’s decision to oppose Labor-inspired pay-equity measures that could have facilitated a revaluation of women’s work. Nor does it appear to have repented of its undermining of Labor legislation designed to strengthen equal-pay reporting requirements in the private sector.

Women who are lucky enough to return to work will often find themselves back in the same low-paid, often precarious jobs they had before the pandemic. While the government claims its industrial relations legislation will reduce the precariousness of women’s work, the ACTU has argued that the legislation will actually increase it.

This raises the question of how fundamental the government’s change of heart, and more importantly mind, really is. When it comes to gender and economic policy, Coalition governments have long operated on the assumption that the market is gender-neutral. All too often, Coalition governments seem to believe that simply making the business case that gender equity will benefit the bottom line will be sufficient to convince private enterprise to stop discriminating against women.

The government’s rejection of “identity politics” stops it from recognising the existence of socially disadvantaged groups. It also stops it from acknowledging those constructions of masculinity and femininity that may disadvantage women, including by undervaluing their work.

Nonetheless — as Annabel Crabb, among others, has pointed out — this budget is a major improvement on last year’s. Funding has been increased not only in the spheres I’ve already mentioned but also in women’s health and other areas. More women will be eligible for superannuation. A detailed Women’s Budget Statement has returned, even though it doesn’t provide the full gender analysis of the government’s budget settings that it used to offer.

But while the government is getting better at providing financial incentives to improve women’s position, it is still loath to use more regulatory, interventionist and redistributive measures to tackle structural gender inequality in the labour market. And while the Women’s Budget Statement talks vaguely about the need to change the culture, and the budget funds worthwhile measures against domestic violence and sexual harassment, the government is still unwilling to acknowledge a major cultural problem, namely that more traditional forms of gendered identity politics reinforce women’s disadvantaged position in Australian society. Consequently, the gender lens brought to the budget is welcome but still not wide enough. •

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But much of the debate about how to close this gap misses the bigger point. By focusing on retirement income policy — especially superannuation — it focuses on the symptom, not the cause.

The gender gap in retirement can only be fully understood in the context of the gender gap in lifetime earnings. The size of that gap is even more striking: an average woman with children, for example, earns $2 million less over her lifetime than an average man with children. Women are financially vulnerable even before they retire, and tinkering with super rules won’t fix that fundamental problem.

But the government has some tools to close the gap at its source, starting with the biggest economic reform available: cheaper childcare. High out-of-pocket childcare costs are the single biggest barrier to secondary earners, most of whom are women, taking on more work. The barrier is so high that in a household where both parents have a full-time earning capacity of $60,000, the second earner would be working for about $2 per hour on her fourth day in a week, and for free on her fifth day.

Raising the childcare subsidy from 85 per cent to 95 per cent for low-income families, flattening the taper, and removing the annual cap, as Grattan Institute has recommended, would ensure 60 per cent of families would pay less than $20 per day for childcare. We estimate these changes would cost an extra $5 billion a year and deliver a GDP boost of about $11 billion a year — and, crucially, an extra $150,000 of lifetime earnings for the typical mother.

If the government were looking for a smaller step in the right direction, it could consider making childcare free for second and subsequent children, recognising that childcare is especially expensive for families with multiple children in care.

A more equal government-funded paid parental leave scheme would also help. We recommend six weeks reserved for each parent plus twelve weeks to share between them, paid at the current rate of the minimum wage. Overseas experience shows that more equal sharing of care early on establishes habits for life.

By supporting women who would like to do more paid work, these reforms would go a long way to closing the gender gap. KPMG estimates that 39 per cent of the gap is the result of caring responsibilities, including career interruptions, part-time employment and unpaid care.

But the gap exists even for women and men who spend the same amount of time in paid work. This problem is harder for governments to fix, since much of it plays out in the private sector and is a result of prevailing norms. KPMG finds that 39 per cent of the gap can be attributed to explicit or implicit discrimination, since it can’t be explained by either the type or the amount of work.

But another 18 per cent of the gap reflects the difference in pay for male- and female-dominated occupations and the undervaluing of traditionally “female” jobs. This is something the government does have some power to change, because it is either directly or indirectly responsible for a large share of wages in the female-dominated care sectors. Care jobs historically have had very low remuneration despite their importance and complexity. We have recommended a review of pay and conditions in care sectors, including how to finance higher pay.

Other changes to retirement income policies can make a difference downstream. A case exists for paying super contributions on government-funded paid parental leave, for example, as already applies to other forms of remuneration. But a Grattan analysis shows that these payments would yield only modest income gains because they would be offset by lower pension payments after retirement. A high-earning woman who takes two stints of leave in her early thirties would get an extra $356 a year in retirement, a low-earning woman $164 a year, and an average-earning woman just $73 a year.

Another long-overdue change — abolishing the $450-a-month threshold for paying compulsory super, which can’t be justified in a world of electronic payrolls — affects almost twice as many women as men. Abolishing it would increase retirement incomes for affected workers by between $100 and $300 a year — another modest improvement.

Both those reforms would help, but only at the margins. Instead, the real priority when it comes to the gender gap in retirement is closing the holes in the social safety net for older women who are approaching retirement or already retired.

Single women who don’t own their home are at greatest risk of poverty in retirement and are the fastest-growing group of homeless Australians. Raising the rate of Commonwealth Rent Assistance by at least 40 per cent would lift the incomes of those women by at least $1300 a year, or about 5 per cent.

These changes to retirement income policy would tackle some of the most acute symptoms of the retirement gender gap. But the economic gaps between men and women begin much earlier.

The problem has no quick fix. It will require ambitious and often expensive changes. But unless we drastically reduce the lifetime earnings gap, we can expect to be papering over the retirement income gap for many decades to come. •

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Despite the lack of fanfare, the message could not have been plainer. “Urgent” action was needed to deal with workplace sexual harassment. A national survey in 2018 had found 23 per cent of women and 16 per cent of men had been sexually harassed at work in the past twelve months.

“It occurs in every industry and at every level across Australia,” sex discrimination commissioner Kate Jenkins warned. “This is not simply the story of ‘a few bad apples.’” Having spent eighteen months looking at the issue, she had fifty-five recommendations ready to fix it, including changing the Sex Discrimination Act, simplifying the complaints system and putting more onus on employers to eliminate harassment.

Porter and women’s minister Marise Payne said they would “carefully consider” the report. And then thirteen months went by. Granted, things have been happening elsewhere for the government (and, more lately, for Porter). But this excuse only travels so far. Most of Australia has been out of lockdown since mid 2020 and parliament has been back since August. And the pandemic hasn’t stopped the government pursuing non-Covid issues like industrial relations and university fee reforms.

All this blurred into the background on Thursday when Scott Morrison and new attorney-general Michaelia Cash held a sombre press conference in the prime minister’s courtyard to announce their “roadmap” response to Respect@Work. Morrison said the government was “embracing” the report, describing it as a “game-changer.”

New legislation will be drafted to make it easier for employers to fire sexual harassers. MPs, public servants and judges will no longer be exempt from the Sex Discrimination Act. More funding will come in the May budget.

Jenkins praised the response as “constructive,” but it’s hard not to be cynical about how Respect@Work is being used. It’s a small thing, perhaps, but the government is now taking the credit for establishing the review, when it was very much a joint initiative with Jenkins.

The government’s headline message is it is either agreeing to — “in full, in part or in principle” — or noting all the recommendations. Sound confusing? Well, the detail of its response to the fifty-five recommendations didn’t reach journalists until more than an hour after the press conference, and the chance to ask informed questions, had ended.

Indeed, despite its embrace of the report, the government has only “noted” one of its key recommendations — that a “positive duty” be imposed on all employers to take “reasonable and proportionate measures” to eliminate sex discrimination. For UTS law academic Karen O’Connell, who provided advice to the Respect@Work inquiry, this is a “significant missed opportunity to genuinely prevent sexual harassment.”

Then there is the pre-emptive finger-pointing. Cash is talking about how the states need to get involved and has written them a letter asking about their plans. Morrison says “issues” with the draft legislation still remain to be worked through, and is ominously pleading for “bipartisanship.”

There’s nothing shocking about a government sitting on a report and then trying to avoid being pinned down. Or trying to claim more credit than it deserves. But this is no ordinary report and this is not an ordinary political time. It comes as the government scrambles to regain a sense of authority (and, dare we suggest, empathy) over the “women’s issue” and arrest the anger and frustration felt both within the walls of Parliament House and well beyond it.

It is difficult to believe we would be seeing this response at this time had it not been for Brittany Higgins. Respect@Work was hidden away at the back of the political freezer until advocates and non-government MPs started to call for a response in the wake of her story.

Polling suggests the government really does have a problem. Between last November and 29 March, according to the latest Essential Report, women’s approval of Morrison dropped from 67 per cent to 49 per cent. Men, though, haven’t budged from 65 per cent. Labor’s internal research is showing a similar gender gap. Women are disappointed and angry with Morrison’s response to both individual survivors and issues of harassment and inequality more broadly.

Liberal strategists are similarly aware that women have been moving away from the party for years, and this ties in with a broader international trend regarding female voters and conservative parties. But they also know they have a specific problem among women under forty. Or not so much a problem, as one Liberal MP notes, as “a horror show.”

Within the Liberal camp, there are those who think the government is taking sensible, concrete steps (setting up a women’s cabinet, changing laws, holding summits) and needs to be patient. According to this reasoning, the climate at the moment is unforgiving and the Coalition will be damned for whatever it does. As long as there is demonstrable change, it can ride this out.

But there are also those who think their party leadership doesn’t “get it” and (still) sees the issue as a purely political problem. And this means the current response won’t be good enough. Many might find it hard to reconcile the prime minister’s stated commitment to eliminating bad behaviour with Andrew Laming’s remaining on the government benches.

But Labor strategists aren’t celebrating either. As one told me, male voters are “staring at the floor, waiting for the conversation to move on.” Morrison may have taken an enduring hit to his standing among women, but at least one half of the electorate won’t bust him for it.

Meanwhile, Jenkins is busy with another inquiry. And this is one the government really did commission. Due to report in November, she is examining what it’s like to work at Parliament House. The Human Rights Commission is recruiting more staff to help her, hopes to open submissions next month and will provide an update in July.

Staff around the building — both Liberal and Labor — are being encouraged to contribute and the government sees this as one of its key planks for a gender reset. So long as Jenkins doesn’t come up with anything too ambitious or impractical (such as a mechanism to sack MPs), the government will be able to show some evidence it is sorting out “toxic” parliament, ahead of the election, earlyish next year.

Provided it doesn’t sit on the report for fifteen months. •

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In France itself, of course, the reality was more complex — as was the Le Monde letter itself, which in its less inflammatory sections raised important questions about sex and censorship and the limits of personal testimony. #MeToo is an adaptive phenomenon, moulding itself to local conditions. The French movement against sexual violence continued to grow, extending to high-profile actions against the film and music industries, and to the gay community, with #MeTooGay gathering the testimonials of gay men who had been abused. “New” feminisms emerged, sometimes dismissed along crude generational lines or as American imports. Some issues cut right through the debates, however, namely incest and child sexual abuse, prompting widespread calls for action and a cultural reckoning.

It was against this charged backdrop that Pauline Harmange’s I Hate Men and Vanessa Springora’s Consent: A Memoir were published last year in France. Indeed, Springora’s finely calibrated account of the sexual relationship she’d had when she was fourteen, some thirty-five years earlier, with the fifty-year-old French writer Gabriel Matzneff marked a tipping point. What had once been tacitly accepted now needed to be named for what it was and is, and punished accordingly. Springora was hardly Matzneff’s only victim — he groomed many teenaged girls and boys, and wrote openly about his sexual desire for them. He will be tried in September this year for promoting the sexual abuse of children.

The genesis of I Hate Men is less confronting, but also newsworthy. Harmange, a twentysomething aspiring writer, wrote a blog post flirting with the idea of misandry as a response to feminist burnout. Republished as an essay by a small press, it caught the attention of France’s gender equality minister, Ralph Zurmély. Without having read the book, Zurmély declared it a “sex-based incitement to hatred” and called for it to be banned. Not surprisingly, a mainstream publisher picked up the essay and it became a bestseller, launching Harmange’s career and provoking predictable online harassment and death threats. Zurmély, meanwhile, is no longer gender equality minister.

Both books have now been published in English, each crisply and effectively translated by Natasha Lehrer. They arrive as “French literary sensations,” but beyond a shared historical moment and cultural context, and beyond sharing a translator, these are very different books. Harmange’s polemic is essentially an extended hot take, written in the spirit of the times and the blog format. Easily read in one sitting, the palpably provocative I Hate Men is good fun but hardly incendiary. Its title may bring to the minds of some readers Valerie Solanas’s searing SCUM Manifesto (1967), but while Solanas called for the elimination of men altogether, Harmange is married to one, a situation that allows her to reflect on how loving a man or some men need not preclude “hating men as a social group, and sometimes individual men too.”

Here and there, Harmange dutifully provides statistics about gendered violence and gender inequality at home and at work, but she harbours no pretensions about the depth of her research. The strengths of I Hate Men are in the observations of lived and shared experience and the clarity with which Harmange defines, defends and expands on misandry, as distinct from misogyny and as a potentially galvanising force. She gives short shrift to men who moan about #MeToo and “all this feminist bullshit” and to men who claim to be feminists.

Like many popular feminist books written from the first-person perspective, Harmange doesn’t offer much in the way of feminist strategy other than praising the value of female friendships, including in “book clubs, pyjama parties and girls’ nights out.” I Hate Men, in-your-face title aside, is gateway feminism. As an insight into French feminism, it could come from any vaguely approximate society with a history of white woman–centred feminism.

Springora’s memoir, on the other hand, is a mature work, and marks the literary debut of a talented writer who grew up loving books but turned her back on them in the aftermath of her relationship (for want of a better word) with the famous author, whom she refers to as G.M. when discussing the public figure and G. when describing the controlling and abusive man she came to know. Opening with a reflection on the power and purpose of fairytales, Springora launches her book as an act of revenge and reclamation. The prey will now “ambush” and “ensnare the hunter in his own trap,” the trap being words and books. Like Carmen Maria Machado’s virtuosic memoir of an abusive relationship, In the Dream House (2019), Springora’s book reads as though it has gestated for exactly the right amount of time to produce an instant classic.

Clocking in at less than 200 pages, Consent is both economical and evocative. Springora inducts the reader into her world, aged thirteen, on the precipice of her life-altering first meeting with “G.” at a dinner party. Her parents have split, her father neglectful and mostly absent, her mother loving but distracted. Springora’s sexuality is developing, but she is insecure about her looks and her friendship with her best friend Julien. “All the necessary elements,” she writes, “were now in place.”

Other “necessary elements” included the intellectual circle in which her mother, “a feminist of the May ’68 generation,” moved, if only peripherally, and in which Springora grew up during the 1980s. In this world, G.M. was not only tolerated but venerated. His 1974 essay, Under Sixteen, “a manifesto of sorts calling for the sexual liberation of minors” boosted, rather than undermined, his literary career. A few years later it was G.M. who initiated an open letter in support of the decriminalisation of sexual relations between minors and adults that was published in Le Monde (of course) and signed by intellectual luminaries including Simone de Beauvoir, Gilles Deleuze and Roland Barthes. His public and private writings overflowed with details of obsessive love affairs with young girls and sexual encounters with teenage boys in the Philippines. Springora indicts G.’s generation and its version of sexual revolution, as well as the special privileges afforded to writers, noting that apart from artists only Catholic priests have historically been “bestowed such a level of impunity.”

She is unflinching when describing what it was like to be involved with G., including sexually, and she does so with the impeccable pacing of the most gripping fairytales. Eventually the “spell” began to lift, but “no Prince Charming came to my aid to slash through the jungle of creepers that bound me to this kingdom of darkness.” Trying to disentangle herself from G., Springora was a girl alone.

This part of the book is the most haunting. What comes in the aftermath of G. — “the imprint” — is essential to the memoir’s impact, though the force of the narrative in the final sections, mercifully perhaps, dissipates somewhat. Springora’s life eventually moves in a positive direction, but it’s also indelibly marked. A whole other book could have focused on her mother, who endorsed her relationship with G.

Unlike Harmange’s polemic, Springora’s memoir is emphatically French and immediately addressed to that context. On that front, there are signs of change. In the past week, French MPs have voted to back a new law that will set the age of consent at fifteen, a first for the country. Springora’s memoir is an acknowledged influence, but it also has wider resonance. “Silence” has been taken to equal “consent,” she writes in the closing pages, but it is “at last, the turn of the victims to speak out” and break it. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

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As things turned out, I didn’t make it to that one either. Though I’m spry enough, age has beset me with a host of devilish susceptibilities, one of them being severe hay fever, which had laid me rather low. It heartened me no end, however, to learn that my savvy fifteen-year-old granddaughter was there, marching in my stead.

Now for a plug — but a highly relevant one. Just over a week ago, for International Women’s Day, the documentary Brazen Hussies was released on ABC iView, as well as in venues around the country. Having a small part in it, I’ve watched it several times. It’s a startling, illuminating film, and it’s been great to watch all my brave sisters speak about that time and see their younger selves in action.

It’s relevant because there I am among them, one minute a bride, the next a mother, and then, totally transformed, sitting on the floor in jeans listening to speakers at a women’s liberation conference. It’s hard to believe it was half a century ago. The times were, in a word, incendiary: the huge Vietnam moratorium marches; the campaigns against censorship and in favour of decriminalising homosexuality; the fight against racism; and then, at the tail end and mixed up in all of it, there was us.

At one of my first women’s lib meetings a woman whose name I didn’t know, but who became a close friend, argued that the women’s movement was even more important than the protest against Australia’s involvement in Vietnam. At the time, as the mother of four children under six with scarcely a minute to spare, I felt I had to choose, and she convinced me. From that moment I was not merely an angry woman — if more than justifiably so — but a committed feminist.

Fifty years later, there I was at home watching the day unfold on my laptop. First were the female MPs, beginning with Anne Aly, honouring the hundredth anniversary of Edith Cowan’s taking her seat in the House, our first female parliamentarian. Aly made history herself by being the first woman of Muslim descent to do so. It’s an emblematic reflection on where we are today that the electorate of Cowan, which Aly represents, is one of two WA seats considered for abolition in the proposed redistribution of electorates. The other is the seat of Pearce, which is Christian Porter’s.

Several moments stood out for me. The first was protest organiser Janine Hendry’s stroll through Parliament House, where she buttonholed the hapless deputy prime minister Michael McCormack, who distinguished himself by agreeing to look at the sex discrimination commissioner’s report on sexual harassment that had been sitting around from the year before, and claiming that he’d meet the protesters outside if he found the time. Equally memorable was her encounter with the ever-ebullient senator Jane Hume, who took her to task for having rejected the invitation for a delegation of women to meet with the prime minister and the minister for women in Scott Morrison’s office. Why refuse such an exciting opportunity? Because, as Hendry so cogently put it, she had read the room: the women outside wanted the prime minister to hear what they had to say, out in the open. And, reaching for the impossible perhaps, they wanted him to listen.

Then came one of the day’s most inspiring moments. The original plan was for The Project’s Lisa Wilkinson to read out a speech Brittany Higgins had prepared for the event. But Higgins had decided she wanted to give the speech herself. And what a speech it was, and what a delivery. The words that have stayed with me — “these people were my idols” — cut to the very heart of the Coalition’s problems. As with so many of us, her employers had lost her trust.

From Higgins the coverage moved to Grace Tame speaking in Hobart — again, brilliant, eloquent and fiery. The irony is that these young women are dignified in ways that the men and women in power are not. And if yet more proof of this were needed, we had the prime minister in question time reciting the paltry sums of money we women have managed to squeeze out of him, then topping it off with a gratuitous lesson in civics.

As for Marise Payne, our minister for women, who tried on 7.30, and again in question time, to defend the indefensible, I can only contrast these chilling, prefect-like performances with those of an earlier minister for women. The late Susan Ryan would have immediately gone out on the lawn to be with the women — arguing with them if she needed to, but at least she’d be listening.

It’s been almost half a century since I first went to work in parliament’s far less imposing, much more crowded, but arguably more congenial old building. And the revelations over the past weeks have set me wondering, as it has others, whether it was better or worse there for women back in the day.

The women’s movement took off while William McMahon’s Liberal government was still in office, and was instrumental in voting it out. With the Whitlam government came many significant changes, but there was still much to do, so many demands to meet. We focused mainly on getting childcare up and running, but equal pay, legalised abortion, equal education opportunity and anti-discrimination measures were also sought. We began funding health centres and refuges. The canvas was so wide because our status as women had been so very limited before. A couple of women sat in the Senate, but none in the House of Representatives.

What happened in the years since then? After Whitlam came a backlash; and even after Hawke was elected and Labor was in office again, Ryan had to fight long and hard for sex discrimination legislation. These were the “post-feminist” years, when the feminism that remained was all about middle-class career advancement, and so many of the services that had made even that attainable were privatised and priced out of reach.

For all that, so many women aspire to lives that we had scarcely dreamt of. Progress is undeniable, yet significant barriers remain — and they help explain the fury unleashed. And that fury is more focused on the horrific violence women can be subjected to, physical and sexual, in the domestic sphere and in the workplace, and even at the very centre of our democracy.

After cogitating on whether things are better or worse, I’ve also come up with disturbing remembrances of my own. Yes, I was groped by a cabinet minister once and never said anything about it — largely because I could scarcely believe it was happening, but also because I sensed there wasn’t much point. Who was going to believe me? I was also stalked by a highly respected man who worked in the building, and I did say something about that and wasn’t believed. Years later the man in question apologised. Fortunately I wasn’t raped, because in a dangerous moment a decent guy accepted without question my final rebuff of his advances. Thank you, I say to the wonderful young women who have made this the serious issue it always should have been.

I can’t see how a government that has lied so much so often, that has lost the trust of so many, can survive. When report after report about life-threatening shortfalls in funding for programs and services has been ignored, and Zali Steggall’s bill to make sexual harassment illegal has been summarily dismissed by the prime minister on the very day women all over the country were telling their stories and taking to the streets. When rampant patronage has been encouraged, and money spent unwisely and corruptly, and the threat of climate change has been minimised. When lives have been ruined by programs like Robodebt, and people like Bernard Collaery are targeted by punitive lawsuits and cover-ups.

I could be wrong. I often am. But for what it’s worth, here’s my advice to our parliamentary masters: it’s never a good idea to infuriate the people — maybe half the population or more — who happen to be paying your salaries. •

The post Then and now appeared first on Inside Story.

By the time McManus took the podium, the crowd on the lawn before Parliament House was well primed. If it was anger that brought them together, a sense of common purpose was to the fore. Host Julia Zemiro kept the mood buoyant, emphasising the diversity of the assembly and the fact that this was in every sense a “safe” gathering, albeit one too risky for the prime minister to front up to.

After a gracious welcome to country from Aunty Violet Sheridan, Tjanara Goreng Goreng, a Traditional Owner from Central Queensland, spoke further about the importance of Capital Hill as ancient ceremonial ground and called for attention to “the quiet stillness of our country.” She evoked the principle of deep listening, and as they listened to her, those who had come for a protest march more closely resembled a mob in the Aboriginal sense of the term, a collective bonded by fundamental commonalities.

Not that anger was left out of the equation. According to march organiser Janine Hendry, the rollout of protests across forty cities was “an outpouring of rage about gendered violence.” Saxon Mullins, who heads a sexual assault and advocacy centre, spoke of lives stolen by years of trauma. Ballarat lawyer Ingrid Irwin appeared in a gown and wig to denounce a criminal justice system that fails to give sexual assault victims the right to a lawyer. Madhumitha Janagaraja, president of the ANU Students’ Association, introduced herself as an abuse survivor and emphasised the increased risk for those with disabilities in a system that is “not on our side.”

Canberra journalist Virginia Haussegger appeared with Biff Ward, founding member of the Canberra women’s liberation movement, whose proclamation, “It feels like a tidal wave of rage out there,” appeared in headlines a few hours later. Katharine Murphy, writing in the Guardian, declared that “voices raised in anger are echoing through the land.” The rage factor commands attention, and has certainly captured the imagination of journalists.

Soon after Ward finished speaking, Nine correspondent Chris Uhlmann took up a position at the upper end of the lawn, overlooking the march, and commenced a report to camera with the words, “Rage outside parliament is washing over politics.” The camera operator stopped him. “There’s no rage,” he said, gesturing towards the crowd which, shortly before, was illustrating Ward’s pronouncement very effectively. “Got to wait for the rage,” he added. And so they waited. The crowd, however, didn’t oblige. Those gathered were listening in deep silence to Brittany Higgins, who, battling to maintain her composure, had made an unscheduled appearance “out of necessity.”

Brief bursts of clapping and other sounds of encouragement punctuated her speech, but these were quiet moments, and the quietness itself was perhaps the most important message of the day. Sometimes you have to just listen. The three generations brought together in this crowd harboured reserves not just of rage, but also of generosity, social maturity and moral intelligence.

Little of that was on display inside Parliament House when, as the marchers dispersed, the government assembled for question time. Forced to acknowledge what was happening outside, prime minister Scott Morrison embarked on a waffling address full of double negatives (“this is not to suggest that good faith and genuine efforts are not being made”) and vacuous parentheses (“I would hope”; “… as it has, until now, and I hope into the future”). This was ready ammunition for opposition leader Anthony Albanese, who remarked that Morrison was displaying “not so much a tin ear as a wall of concrete.” There followed a succession of opposition questions drawn from statements made by Brittany Higgins.

Those on the government frontbench may have looked somewhat uncomfortable, but not acutely so. Here they were, in their place of greater safety, and for every challenge from across the floor there came a question from its own ranks about the marvels of the current economic recovery, to which Morrison and Josh Frydenberg responded with all the impassioned conviction that was entirely missing from the government’s responses to the urgent and fundamental demands for social justice delivered on its doorstep.

So what are we left with, after this extraordinary day of reckoning? Not much, if those at the rallies walk away carrying the burden of what is now a tired old adage about maintaining the rage. In an insightful article about rage and the rise of the women’s movement, Haussegger quotes American writer Soraya Chemaly confronting the question of “what to do with all this rage?” When properly understood, she says, it is “an outstandingly clarifying emotion.”

Some of the turning points of political history are marked by the surging of rage as a clarifying moral force, others by the blind rage of mob violence, as evoked in A Place of Greater Safety, Hilary Mantel’s chronicle of the French Revolution. It’s doubtful whether fear of the latter really lurks in the hearts of our leading federal politicians. They know they are safe at work, and they know the women gathered outside Parliament House acted in a spirit at the opposite end of the spectrum from the sentiments that prompted Trump supporters to storm the US Capitol on 6 January.

The image of Uhlmann standing on a wall outside Parliament House waiting for the rage is strangely appropriate. Rage is not the heart of the story here. The new generation of protesters is asking, first and foremost, for safety. But their sense of being under threat is caused, as Grace Tame so cogently insists, by a chronic imbalance of power. Rather than maintain the rage, perhaps we should adopt another old adage: “Don’t get mad, get even.” That might be done effectively if half a dozen of the impressive speakers who fronted the marches around the country ran for federal seats, swelling the ranks of brilliantly effective female independents in parliament so as to hold the balance of power. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

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The reports tell us there is a problem, and that there has been for years. They tell managers they have good reason to be concerned, and counsel them to ensure they run training programs, establish complaints procedures and keep data about progress. The statistics are unassailable: the rates of harassment and the level of non-reporting have remained stubbornly at around the same level in workplaces generally and in the legal sector in particular.

Since 2003, the Australian Human Rights Commission has conducted four periodic surveys on the national experience of sexual harassment. Its 2018 survey, Everyone’s Business, confirmed that sexual harassment in Australian workplaces was widespread, with one in three people (39 per cent of women and 26 per cent of men) having experienced sexual harassment at work in the previous five years. Four out of five were sexually harassed by a male. The majority of workplace sexual harassment took place within Australia’s four largest industries.

The AHRC’s Respect@Work report, which runs to over 900 pages, bleakly noted that the rate of change has been disappointingly slow for more than thirty-five years, and that Australia now lags behind other countries in preventing and responding to sexual harassment. The situation in the legal profession — my profession — is no better; in fact, on the whole it’s worse. Recent reports have confirmed that more than 30 per cent of women in the Australian legal profession have experienced sexual harassment at work.

Who are the harassers? Big reveal: most are male. Beyond this, it is difficult to identify any typical characteristics. Sexual harassers are to be found in all age groups, industries and social backgrounds. The AHRC survey provided some additional insights. Of the respondents who had been sexually harassed in the preceding five years, 79 per cent said that one or more of their harassers was male. Where the most recent incident involved a single harasser, more than half (54 per cent) indicated that the harasser was aged forty or older.

And, of course, harassers often strike again. The survey found that 41 per cent of those who said they had been sexually harassed in the workplace in the last five years were aware that others in their workplace had also been sexually harassed, most often at the hands of the same person. This data confirms that one of the big problems any attempt to tackle harassment must face is recidivism.

But why do they do it? My initial glib response to this question was: because they can. Following lengthy and mature reflection, I can now confirm that the answer is: because they can.

Power is important. In the case of the law, it matters that the profession is very hierarchical, with the ranks — clerk, graduate, lawyer, associate, senior associate, partner — clearly designated. Barristers progress through the roles of reader, junior counsel and senior counsel — and ultimately, perhaps, judge. At each stage, a reasonable period must be served (and high proficiency generally displayed) in order to move to the next level. As a result, age is a good indicator of seniority and status. It is not determinative — for example, I have had junior counsels working with me who are older than I am — but it is a fair proxy for one’s position in the hierarchy. The power dynamic is overt. The partner of the firm who will determine whether you get a promotion or a pay increase wields power over you every day. It is obvious to junior barristers that senior counsel possess the power to affect their reputation and workflow at the Bar.

It is very likely that this power structure has contributed to a culture of silence in the law. The same can no doubt be said of medicine, the military and many other fields where the hierarchy is obvious. But sexual harassment is clearly not confined to situations where a harasser is in a position of explicit seniority. The AHRC report found that harassers and victims were most commonly co-workers employed at the same level (27 per cent for single harassers and 35 per cent for multiple harassers).

Feminist scholars argue that broader gender inequality helps to explain the prevalence of sexual harassment in circumstances where the imbalance in power between the harasser and victim doesn’t fit a commonly recognised pattern, like a disparity in age, seniority or authority. Understood this way, sexual harassment by men of women who are their peers is the manifestation of an attempt to gain power over them. The feminist analysis is that the maintenance of a workplace atmosphere in which women’s contributions are routinely devalued, and in which they are sexualised and degraded, serves to undermine all women, and to reduce their potential advancement. Elizabeth Shi and Freeman Zhong argue that the conception of sexual harassment as individualised, aberrant behaviour entirely fails to address these structural and systemic issues.

Women in powerful positions are sometimes harassed by men who hold less powerful positions. This “harassing up” is often in the nature of derogatory gender-based comments or sexist jokes. Again, feminists posit that the harassment in these cases is aimed at undermining women by focusing on stereotypical characteristics attributed to them.

To find out what men say about this, I consulted the website of Male Champions of Change. Yes, that’s their name. The Male Champions of Change describe themselves as proponents of a “disruptive strategy to accelerate the advancement of women in leadership and to achieve gender equality.” You may wonder why it is that a group of men calling on other men to adhere to existing laws prohibiting discrimination has been awarded the label champions. When women talk about sexual harassment, they are humourless feminists. When men form a club to talk about sexual harassment, they award themselves medals for their efforts. Sigh.

In any event, the Male Champions of Change released a report in 2019 in which they proclaimed, from their position on the winners’ podium, that “sexual harassment, in all its forms, is an abuse of power… [and] represents behaviours that are beneath the standards we expect from every one of us and across our organisations.” Here, the Champions nail it. At its core, sexual harassment is indeed an abuse of power. That power usually comes from and is strengthened by a man’s position in the workplace hierarchy. But it may also be the personal rather than institutional power, which comes simply from being male rather than female. That subtle form of power may derive from working in an environment where, no matter how hardworking or intelligent your female co-worker is, she can be brought down instantly by being described or judged by reference to her looks, and, despite her wishes, she can be talked about, touched and propositioned because she is a woman.

Should we bother trying to fix this? Yes, we must. One does not need to care about the hurt feelings of women or their position in society to know things have to change. Even if you care only about the bottom line, you will want to stamp it out. Sexual harassment represents a cost to Australian employers through lost productivity, sick leave, staff turnover, negative impact on workplace culture, low morale, diversion of resources associated with responding to complaints, litigation and workers’ compensation, and reputational damage. A report by Deloitte estimated that, in 2018, workplace sexual harassment cost the Australian economy approximately $2.6 billion in lost productivity and $900 million in other costs. •

This is an extract from Power & Consent, by Rachel Doyle, released this month by Monash University Publishing in its In the National Interest series.

The post Status and consent appeared first on Inside Story.

As we celebrate International Women’s Day, we should recognise the economic pain women have borne through this crisis. They were more likely to lose their jobs, more likely to pick up extra unpaid work, and less likely to get government support.

It isn’t too late to right the wrongs. In a new Grattan Institute report we argue that federal and state governments should boost support for women’s employment to build a broader recovery and avoid exacerbating economic inequalities between women and men.

Women were more likely to lose paid work during the pandemic because they are more likely to work in the “social consumption” businesses that were forced to scale down operations or close entirely during lockdowns. About two-thirds of hospitality and personal service workers, for example, are women.

Women are also more likely to have part-time or casual jobs, which were much more vulnerable than full-time jobs. And that meant they were much more likely to lose jobs and hours than men, and less likely to be eligible for JobKeeper.

Since lockdowns lifted, the employment bounce-back has been faster than expected. But it is still incomplete. In January, 55,000 fewer women were in work than before the crisis, and 9000 fewer men. Unemployment and underemployment remain too high for both women and men, and are expected to stay that way for years.

Most of the industries that continue to be affected by restrictions — higher education, tourism and hospitality, for instance — employ a majority of women. Prominent among the vulnerable groups that haven’t experienced a bounce-back are single parents, 80 per cent of whom are women.

The divergence between men and women at work has been compounded by a divergence at home. Women already did the lion’s share of housework, caring and other unpaid work. With many adults working from home during the crisis, and children learning from home, that load only grew. Everyone did more, but women, and especially mothers, took on a bigger share of the extra work.

More unpaid work means less time for employment and education. Many women reduced their paid hours, left the workforce altogether or stopped studying. These choices, made out of short-term need, have long-term ramifications for women’s earnings, careers and economic security.

For many women who lost jobs or reduced their paid hours, 2020 will be another interruption in a stop–start career. And that means a wider earnings gap between men and women: even six months out of work can add another $100,000 to the $2 million average lifetime earnings gap between men and women.

What can be done? In the short term, governments must give priority to reducing unemployment and underemployment as quickly as possible. More stimulus is likely to be needed, and governments should take this opportunity to build a broader recovery.

The extra spending should be targeted to the sectors that are still struggling, many of which are major employers of women. This could include vouchers to encourage spending on hospitality, tourism and entertainment, and temporary expansions of social programs and services.

The federal government should also strengthen support for people who are still out of work. It should expand the JobMaker hiring credit and, as has been widely advocated, further increase the JobSeeker payment and Commonwealth Rent Assistance. This would boost economic activity, help unemployed people to look for work, and improve the living standards of Australia’s most vulnerable people, including single mothers.

As they focus on rebuilding in the longer term, governments should invest in the care economy to boost economic growth and improve the living standards of all Australians, while reducing women’s economic disadvantage. Making childcare cheaper is the most significant thing the federal government can do to support women’s employment. Investment in aged care is also urgently needed and would create jobs for women while improving the living standards of older Australians.

So far, the federal government has failed to meaningfully tackle the economic costs borne by Australian women in the Covid-19 recession. It should use the next budget, due in May, to ensure Australia really does build back better. •

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It’s not like walking into a Centrelink office or a motor vehicle registry. If you work across the lake at the university, as I do, you’ll probably have heating in your office, but you’d be lucky to have air-conditioning. As an economy measure, they stopped providing office bins years ago.

The main cast on Capital Hill looks good, too. Politics might be show business for ugly people, but many staffers could pass muster on the red carpet. You’ll see women in pencil skirts and heels, men in snazzy dark suits with silk ties. The effect is a halfway house between nightclub and L.A. Law.

At the beginning of a sitting week, usually on Sunday, politicians and staffers descend on Canberra. Most pull long hours and everyone seems to be performing for everyone else. Many will have their eye on their next career step, and quite a few on the several steps after that. Some likely imagine a future victory speech thanking “the true believers” or proclaiming a surprise election triumph a “miracle.”

On Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, they have Wednesday on their minds. That night, they empty into the more glamorous of the restaurants and bars around Manuka, drinking, networking, hooking up. They’re still performing. They still have their eyes on the prize.

The parallels with the latter years of school for teenagers, and with university life, can be striking — a similar sense of newly gained freedoms being tested, of rules being stretched or broken, of jostling for attention and position in a pecking order up for grabs, and in which much is seen to be at stake. It’s no particular surprise that the rape accusation against the Coalition’s Christian Porter that shook Australian politics this week is a story of late school and early university. It’s no stretch to see connections and continuities here.

We are now being permitted to see with greater clarity the dangers in how this culture has evolved, especially its threat to women. The system rewards the kind of thrusting and unscrupulous behaviour that is now all too common in Australia’s decrepit political parties. And it validates a personal aggression that is especially valued when performed by men.

Some politicians themselves also roam this world, rather like feudal barons, as has become clear enough from the revelations of sexual relationships between them and their staffers. Some get right into the party atmosphere, sleeping it off on a couch the next day. Sexual relationships or occasional flings occur among politicians, staffers and journalists, occasionally leading to “and they lived happily ever after” — if not for abandoned spouses and aggrieved children — and sometimes to a less pleasant denouement.

When things go sour, it’s easy enough on this lawless workplace frontier to move those who cease to be flavour of the month — usually female staffers — sideways or even out the door. Some, finding their careers stalled after harsh experience, decide to leave.

Brittany Higgins’s testimony that she was raped by a fellow Liberal staffer has led many women who have worked at Parliament House to tell their own stories. Those that have so far made it into the public sphere have not usually been about rape, but they have covered workplace bullying, sexual harassment and gender discrimination. There appears to be a growing public acceptance of the view that Parliament House is not a safe place for women.

The experiences women recount are often harrowing in their details, but at their heart most come back to two points. One is unchecked power. The other is male domination.

Parliament House is more like Dodge City than a modern workplace. Under the Members of Parliament (Staff) Act, politicians exercise a level of arbitrary power that is increasingly anomalous. In essence, it’s an elaborate racket designed by politicians to serve the interests of politicians.

The arrangements provide those who take advantage of them with a vast pool of free labour — hours chalked up to experience, party service and favours to be conferred in the future. It’s also a system in which people with power are rewarded with the deference of young, impressionable and smart people who call them “the boss” and devote most of their waking hours to doing their bidding.

Everyone who achieves a position of even modest seniority or power in a profession is likely to experience deference. Those with integrity and maturity try to redirect that impulse into a mutual respect that empowers others. No doubt there are many among Australia’s 227 elected federal politicians and their senior staffers who behave responsibly and ethically. But we also know that among them — as well as among staffers who aspire to their jobs — there are the bullies, the foul-mouthed, the greedy, the drunks and the gropers. And there is sexual violence.

There was a time when parliamentary systems didn’t really bother to pretend that those inside the whale were like the rest of us. Take a look at any of the older chambers, such as Victoria’s splendid Legislative Council. It resembles the gentlemen’s club it has been for much of its history, an antechamber to other gentlemen’s clubs still to be found on Collins Street.

But politicians have increasingly sent out the message that they are just like us — only more committed to public service. Anyone with even a glancing acquaintance with modern politics knows this is rubbish. As one former staffer put it to me, they are more likely to be the “weirdo dorks” who flourished in university politics. Or they have had a solid career pumping out propaganda for a think tank. Or maybe they inhabited a union back office. If they worked for a bank, it wasn’t as a teller.

Unchecked power enables both male and female bullies. But Parliament House is a place where much more power is exercised by men than by women. Some carry a well-developed sense of entitlement, nurtured in wealthy families and expensive all-male private schools. It’s telling that at the very time the lecherous and abusive behaviour of adult “boys” on Capital Hill is in the spotlight, so is the sexual exploitation by private school boys of the girls in their social circles.

The most powerful inhabitants of the Potemkin village, immune to serious scrutiny of their singular arrangements in the past, might have given rather too little attention to what the public thinks of this self-indulgence. A little-noticed aspect of the Barnaby Joyce affair of a few years ago was the easy and mistaken assumption that a politician’s private life is his own business, and divorce a regrettable but unavoidable reality of modern life. Perhaps so: but this doesn’t mean that people are also willing to elect as president of the local parents’ and citizens’ association a man who leaves his wife and four daughters for a younger staffer, pregnant by him, at the same time as he opposes marriage equality.

The “anything goes” values of Manuka and Kingston at Wednesday drinks are not those of Australian suburbia. The enthusiastic moralisers of Capital Hill — so evident again in the brutal dealing with the unemployed last month — might be about to receive an overdue taste of their own medicine. One can only hope that the result is at least a safer workplace for women, who have every right to a career in and around politics — and maybe even some grappling with the unenviable task of helping to retrieve the place from the disturbing depths to which it has sunk. •

Also on this topic — Marian Sawer: Dealing with toxic parliaments

The post Sunday I’ve got Wednesday on my mind appeared first on Inside Story.

Workplace bullying and harassment have become endemic in a workplace characterised by precarious employment, high pressure, long hours and the demands of party loyalty. Unlike other employers, politicians can’t generally be dismissed for behaving badly towards their staff. Complainants find that partisan interests trump commitment to any kind of equality, and often echo a response recorded in a European survey: “I didn’t want to make the incident public. I didn’t want to damage my party.” And with political employment now the most common pathway to elected office, the perceived hostility of the parliamentary workplace has obvious implications for women’s political careers.

For the past twenty years the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, joined more recently by the Inter-Parliamentary Union, has sought to set standards for what the two organisations call gender-sensitive parliaments. Inter-Parliamentary Union members, including Australia, endorsed a plan of action for gender-sensitive parliaments in 2012, and individual parliaments have responded in different ways.

In the Canada, Iceland and European parliaments, MPs must sign a commitment to help create a work environment free of sexual harassment. A failure to do so in the European Parliament disqualifies an MEP from being appointed as a rapporteur — responsible for steering a piece of legislation — or participating in official delegations. The European Parliament also provides training for parliamentarians in managing and staffing their offices.

Most relevant to Australia are the policies, codes of conduct and complaints mechanisms recently adopted in Canada and Britain. In both countries staffers are publicly funded but directly employed by MPs with the power to hire and fire, creating the same structural problem as exists here.

Canada’s House of Commons led the way in 2014 with a policy to prevent harassment of political staffers. But it was criticised for lacking a fully independent grievance process, with staffers required to raise matters first with their employing MP, despite their employment being largely dependent on the MP’s goodwill.

Under the latest version of the policy, approved in January, the office of the Chief Human Resources Officer has primary responsibility for training all new MPs and employees within three months of their arrival, and again every three years. The office also handles complaints and publishes an annual report on the parliamentary website. In 2019–20 it handled two complaints of abuse of authority, two of harassment and one of sexual harassment. A separate code of conduct is designed to eliminate sexual harassment among MPs.

In Britain an independent inquiry into the bullying and harassment of staff, headed by Dame Laura Cox, was established in the wake of the 2017 “Pestminster” scandal. Even before the inquiry reported, the House of Commons adopted a Behaviour Code, with accompanying policies on bullying, harassment and sexual misconduct. These were to be implemented through an independent complaints and grievance scheme, a process in which Cox recommended MPs should play no part. Since last year an independent expert panel has had the power to recommend an MP be suspended or expelled, or face other serious sanctions. Such recommendations need to be approved by the House of Commons, but without debate, in the interests of the complainant’s confidentiality.

Another independent inquiry, this one by Gemma White QC, heard from many staffers and emphasised their uniquely vulnerable position. Many considered that complaining about bullying and harassment was career suicide. The UK grievance scheme has now been extended to former staffers — the group most likely to take advantage of it, White noted — which it is hoped will influence MPs’ behaviour. In Britain, as in Canada, all newly elected MPs are required to attend training sessions.

Despite staffers being employed centrally in New Zealand, many of the same dynamics are in play. In 2018 the parliamentary speaker, Trevor Mallard, initiated a review by independent consultant Debbie Francis that found evidence of serious bullying of staff and other unacceptable behaviour, including sexual harassment and even sexual assault. A new code of conduct, drafted by a cross-party group of MPs, has been signed by all parties on a voluntary basis, leaving the speaker and party whips to enforce it. Although no agreement has been reached on the creation of an independent complaints commissioner, Mallard said last year that he had begun requiring “the worst-behaving MPs” to undergo workplace training before being allowed staff in their office.

What can Australia learn from these initiatives? First we need to acknowledge the problem. Then we need an independent inquiry to assess the extent of bullying and harassment, including sexual harassment, and make recommendations informed by the views of staffers themselves — particularly former staffers, who are freer to speak. Out of that inquiry must come a code of conduct and an independent body to take responsibility for implementing the code and handling complaints, which would require amendment of the Members of Parliament (Staff) Act. Finally, as in comparable parliaments, training in office management and harassment prevention must be mandatory.

Those working in parliaments need the same rights as employees in other workplaces. Those employing staffers need to be accountable for their behaviour. Parliaments need to model good behaviour, not bad, if they are to earn respect. Above all, now that women are present in sizeable numbers as both parliamentarians and staffers, they need to be given an equal opportunity to perform well without the career-limiting constraints imposed by bullying and harassment. Let us hope this is parliament’s #MeToo moment. •

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Sydney MP Jason Falinski echoed many within the Liberal party room when he tweeted: “Assault of any sort, but sexual assault in particular is just unbelievable. Ms Higgins is incredible [sic] brave for speaking out and we should all respect that.” As another government MP noted midweek, “it has genuinely shocked people.”

Unsurprisingly, it has also shaken people outside the building. Some MPs are reporting a similar level of community correspondence and outrage to early 2018, when Barnaby Joyce’s affair with staffer Vikki Campion was made public.

Of course, the alleged perpetrator, not the government or the building, is responsible here. But you can’t blame voters for thinking Parliament House is a terrible place to work.

Higgins’s story, and her claim she was not adequately supported by her bosses, has produced a confusing flurry of reviews into working conditions and political staffing in Parliament House. Coalition MPs say there is a genuine desire to make the place safer for women and make sure no one else has a similar experience. But the government also needs to be seen to be doing something and doing something fast. So far, it’s unclear how the reviews will be coordinated and turned into something real.

Doubtless, there is also a reasonable expectation within Liberal ranks that any parliament-wide investigation will turn the spotlight on other parties as well.

As the details of who knew exactly what and when are thrashed out, one of the major disappointments (in a week of many) has been Reynolds’s performance. We know it took Reynolds several days to talk to Higgins after her acting chief of staff, Fiona Brown, learned of the alleged rape. And we know the meeting happened in front of the very couch where Higgins says the assault happened. (Reynolds says she was not aware of this at the time.)

Reynolds’s parliamentary apology to Higgins on Tuesday also raised eyebrows because it came in response to a question from Labor during question time, not as a statement on her own initiative. In the procedure-driven world of the Senate, this speaks volumes. Her tears in the Senate on Thursday, on the other hand, highlighted the emotional impact of this week’s revelations.

Reynolds’s missteps are also seen against her background as one of the Liberals’ most prominent advocates for women in politics. As a backbencher, she was arguably best known for pushing the party’s federal executive to adopt gender-equality targets. Whenever the issue was about “women in the Coalition,” Reynolds was at the top of journalists’ lists to call for comment.

Even since her appointment to the ministry in 2018, and amid the distractions of the defence portfolio since 2019, Reynolds still promoted her work with women. Her website carries a whole section titled “empowering women.” “Senator Reynolds is a passionate champion for gender equality and female empowerment in politics and in society more generally,” it begins. “Senator Reynolds continues to work hard to effect genuine organisational change within the Liberal Party.”

And while much is made of Reynolds’s pre-parliament military career, a significant chunk of her CV is taken up by political staffing roles. She was former customs minister Chris Ellison’s chief of staff in the early 2000s and, before that, an electorate officer for former Western Australian MPs Fred Chaney and Judi Moylan. She knows what it’s like to be a female Liberal staffer, even a relatively junior one.

Some Coalition colleagues this week put Reynolds’s bungled response (to an admittedly difficult situation) down to her relative inexperience as a minister. There were dark mutterings about how she was elevated too quickly to cabinet to make the party look more female-friendly ahead of the 2019 election.

In all this, though, she was being advised by a political operative of considerable standing and experience in the party. Fiona Brown was a long-time adviser to Arthur Sinodinos before working for Reynolds, via the prime minister’s office.

Other Liberal members said any discussion of Higgins’s story needs to concentrate on the broader workplace culture — an observation that comes off the back of increasing concern about the safety of women and the treatment of political staff at parliament. Beyond Four Corners’s recent investigation into allegations of harassment and bullying by ministers, ANU political scientist Maria Maley has been researching the experience of political staffers at state and federal levels.

Maley has interviewed former staffers who describe examples of sexual harassment and bullying by other staffers and their bosses. She notes that their job security is also extremely precarious. According to their terms of employment, they can be sacked at any time if the MP or senator loses “trust or confidence” in them.

It’s also a job that involves late nights, high stress and plenty of booze. While this is the case in many industries, parliament is a bit different because so many people fly into Canberra for sitting weeks, and fly out again straight after. If not a bubble, it certainly leads to a “what happens on tour, stays on tour” atmosphere for those who participate enthusiastically in the many functions, dinners and drinks that crowd sitting-week evenings.

Former Liberal MP Fiona Scott also points to a “persistent upstairs/downstairs class system” in parliament, which involves everyone who works in the building. “This creates a power imbalance between MPs and all employees at Parliament House,” she told me this week. “And that’s just not in line with wider Australian workplaces.”

Australia may see itself as egalitarian, but inside parliament, MPs are treated as somewhere between gods and celebrities — with separate entrances, separate security processes and separate dining areas. They are chauffeured around in Comcars and brought glasses of water by attendants, and can have lifts especially vacated for them. They are called not by their names but by titles like Mr Speaker, Minister and Senator. Even colloquially, they are known as “the boss.” This special status can also trickle down to their senior staff.

It is not hard to imagine Higgins feeling her allegiance should be to her boss and the political optics ahead of an imminent election, rather than to her own personal situation. It’s also not hard to see how she felt she had little choice about what to do, even if she was told she would be supported to go to the police.

When the #MeToo movement hit the entertainment and media industries several years ago, many within federal parliament wondered when it would reach politics. Given the response among politicians, staff and the public, they don’t need to wonder any more. •

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The revival of the governess and the accompanying debate about privilege and educational advantage gives historian Patricia Clarke’s new book more contemporary resonance than its 1985 edition, The Governesses: Letters from the Colonies 1862–1882. This revised version of that book is also exquisitely illustrated with nineteenth-century landscapes, lithographs and cartoons that further enliven a forgotten yet suddenly relevant subject.

Beyond governesses, Clarke’s oeuvre has pushed Australian female writers into the biographical canon, especially her invaluable history of women’s journalism in the nineteenth century, Pen Portraits (1988); biographies of novelists Rosa Praed (1999) and Jessie Couvreur (1994), journalist Louisa Atkinson (1990) and feminist Eilean Giblin (2013); her edition of Judith Wright’s memoir, Half a Lifetime (1999); and the book she co-edited with Dale Spender, Life Lines: Australian Women’s Letters and Diaries 1788–1840 (1992). Her eye for archival life writing that reveals hidden histories is similarly evident in Great Expectations, which is drawn from governesses’ letters to the Female Middle Class Emigration Society, or FMCES, the organisation that funded their passage to Australia between 1861 to 1886.

While today’s governesses (or the male equivalent, “governors”) presumably have a teaching degree, Clarke’s young women were characters straight from Bridgerton who offered their students little more than basic literacy and numeracy, possibly with art, French and music, and a posh accent that hid their genteel poverty. Along with their books and other luggage, they packed the rigid English class system, and before they even embarked they were complaining about travelling second-class, an early warning of the trouble ahead.

Those who found work with a family complained about the colonial children: “[They are] wild and impetuous,” wrote one. “The floor is the place for everything and it is no use making yourself unhappy because they will not acquire English manners for they do not like them.” They also struggled with the colonial mothers, who, they opined, were far too interested in their children, “do not like to be made to feel inferior” and were “indolent and untidy.”

Clarke responds empathetically to the entitled but naive women who arrived in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, blinded by the southern light and the reality of their new situation. She argues that they were lured down the colonial garden path by promises that were clearly at odds with news reaching the FMCES’s founder, Maria Rye, that the colonies didn’t need more governesses.

By the 1860s, in a colonial version of the skilled occupation list, colonial governments assisted only those whose skills were in demand: artisans, labourers and domestic servants. To overcome this hurdle the FMCES offered loans that covered a governess’s expenses, to be repaid once she secured employment as a governess in the colonies. But getting a job was becoming increasingly difficult as school systems created expectations of education outside the home. In this respect, Great Expectations offers a history of the efforts — at the governesses’ cost — to establish formal private and public schooling in Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland.

Despite warnings, Rye believed that dumping more of England’s problems on the colonies was a good idea — if no longer convicts, why not single women? In Clarke’s telling, she is a tunnel-visioned, anti-Catholic evangelist who wilfully ignores her scheme’s problematic premise to the detriment of more than 300 young women. Great Expectations is as much about Rye’s great illusions as the governesses who experienced her scheme’s great disillusionment.

Through extracts from their letters to the FMCES, Clarke gives voice to the governesses’ culture shock and isolation. They expected to be met by FMCES contacts, but most found little help. As late as 1874 — a decade after the scheme began — Ellen Ollard wrote to the FMCES that “never while I live, shall I forget the feeling of despair that took possession of me” on arriving alone in Melbourne. They competed for the few available governess jobs and by and large found themselves to be no more than glamorised servants, especially if they couldn’t teach music. Those who were willing — or more often compelled by a lack of work in the city — travelled hundreds of kilometres to remote stations.

Some of the more resilient, adventurous governesses adapted; some of the entrepreneurial began their own schools; a few married, which was another lure of the scheme that had been nicknamed the Export Wife Trade by the Saturday Review back in London. Clarke quotes Rye — “Teach your protégées to emigrate; send them where the men want wives, the mothers want governesses” — and then, like a Twitter moderator, flags another false promise: the colonies were already fine on the marriage front.

Placed in Clarke’s wider context, the governesses’ struggle to adjust reveals the women to be more than haughty and hapless snobs. Great Expectations is written in a clear if brisk style that will appeal to a wide, non-specialist readership. Where possible, Clarke provides brief details of the governesses’ lives and employers using archival information beyond their letters, but sometimes I wanted to linger with some of these women and more fully understand, as much as factually possible, the situations they found themselves in and the people they found themselves among.

After recurring references to her “friendlessness,” we do learn more about the miserable Rosa Phayne, begging for help to return to England from her rural station post. Her last letter to the FMCES is in 1872: an appeal for help finding work in London, written as she was about to board a ship home. It’s to be hoped that present-day pandemic “governesses” and “governors” are writing about their lived experiences for a future historian to continue Clarke’s work. •

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Still, #MeToo goes on, not least as a publishing phenomenon. Into this crowded and eclectic field comes a genuinely thought-provoking collection of essays by New York–based writer, editor and journalist JoAnn Wypijewski. Some of these pieces were published or written before the emergence of #MeToo, but are offered as freshly meaningful in its wake. Two come from the 1990s — one on Nushawn Williams, a young, Black man who caused a nationwide scandal when it was revealed he’d infected thirteen young women, some of them white, with HIV; another on the killing of Matthew Shepard, a twenty-year-old student, by two other young men in Laramie, Wyoming, in 1998, since memorialised as a tragic gay-hate crime.

In the 2000s, Wypijewski covered the case of gay Catholic priest Paul Shanley, convicted and imprisoned in 2004 for raping a child back in 1980, based on the “recovered memories” of one accuser — a story with so many layers that Wypijewski dedicates two essays to it. In another piece, she focuses on the court martial of Lynndie England, the young US army reserve soldier at the centre of the Abu Ghraib scandal. There are other essays too, not all of them as substantial (Wypijewski musters an astute appreciation of Madonna’s Sex book) but each of them animated by a “principled humanity” in which every person — whether labelled victim or suspect — is represented as “one of us, whether ultimately found guilty or not.”

Across a career that spans more than four decades — including as editor of the Nation magazine from 1982 to 2000 — Wypijewski has clearly been around. From this vantage point, she calls out #MeToo, or the American version of it, as a “sex panic.” It’s a term that also applies to the cases above, and in the rousing title essay Wypijewski dissects them as such. She defines a sex, or moral, panic as a “social eruption fanned by the media and characterised by alarm over innocence imperiled,” stereotypically that of white women and children.

Taking her cues from Sex Panic and the Punitive State (2011), in which anthropologist Roger Lancaster links these “mass convulsions” with the “expansion of state violence,” Wypijewski takes seriously their effects while rallying against them. When a panic takes hold, unwanted caresses are conflated with serious crimes like rape, and “all the stories are true, and the accused are guilty by default.” Conservatives, liberals and feminists have all stirred sex panics, deploying their “inflammatory language” and seeking retribution via the law-and-order mechanisms of what Wypijewski calls the “biggest prison state” in the world.

In these terms, #MeToo is nothing new, but rather the latest iteration of a recurring phenomenon bound up with carceral politics from which no one is exempt, including children. And some people, of course, such as Black boys and men, are much more likely to experience the full force of the police state, to take the wrongful imprisonment of the Central Park Five in 1989 as a stark case in point. Wypijewski is not the first to make these arguments — including in relation to #MeToo — but she makes them with bracing clarity and urgency.

Crucially, Wypijewski moves beyond the sex panic frame in each essay to the “causes and complications” beneath “the stories we think we all know.” Where she truly hits her stride is when she delivers the detail and analysis that the impoverished discourse of moral panic leaves no space for. Against the tabloid account, the hot take or even the fact-checked exposé, she offers both the long view and the close inspection. She is no fan of avenging #MeToo reporters like Ronan Farrow (also featured as a bit player in a sharp and compassionate essay on his father, the disgraced filmmaker Woody Allen) and not above jabs at what she sees as the sensationalist coverage of highly regarded publications including the Boston Globe, which broke the story of “paedophile priests” in the Catholic Church back in 2002, and Vanity Fair. She models a different way of telling a story, to get to what she calls the “mess of life.”

Occasionally, the essays lose shape — there’s a penchant for digression, including childhood recollections. A handy afterword ties up the narrative threads, but several essays would have benefited from their own explanatory notes. And if it’s not obvious by now, these are also very American stories, with limits to their wider applications. In late January alone, #MeToo was trending again in Greece, the Balkans and India.

Readers looking for an in-depth account of #MeToo may be disappointed by What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About #MeToo. Within the terms Wypijewski sets herself, though, this is a remarkably coherent collection, provocative in the best sense. In an era in which #MeToo’s most high-profile convict, Harvey Weinstein, can’t seem to be punished enough — news of his Covid-19 infection was widely and gleefully shared on social media — Wypijewski questions a wider culture that makes monsters out of men. •

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Now, in the dying days of the one-term Trump presidency, two authors — British activist and writer Laura Bates and Australian-born, US-based feminist philosopher Kate Manne — offer a different way of comprehending all that has happened in recent years. In their arrestingly titled new books, Bates and Manne switch their focus to men, or rather patriarchy and its many manifestations. These range from extreme and disturbing misogyny — “incel” Elliot Rodger’s murderous shooting spree in California in 2014 — through to the seemingly intractable everyday patterns that mean men do far less housework, for instance, than women. Inevitably, given flashpoints like Harvey Weinstein and Brett Kavanaugh, Bates and Manne sometimes cover similar ground, but their projects are also distinctive — reading one should not preclude reading the other.

Manne, building on her first and more academic book Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (2018), examines how male entitlement works, and explores its effects, including how women’s bodies are policed but harms against them aren’t taken seriously. As per Down Girl, Manne advances her own vocabulary and theoretical framework, with misogyny described as the “law enforcement branch” of patriarchy, and sexism its “theoretical and ideological branch.” “Himpathy,” first introduced in Down Girl to explain the pervasive but under-examined sympathy sometimes shown towards male perpetrators of sexual violence, returns in tandem with “herasure,” whereby victims and targets of misogyny are blamed for what happened to them, or ignored.

These remain useful terms, but between books Manne has also discovered intersectionality and Entitled accordingly “tackles a range of ways in which misogyny, himpathy and male entitlement work in tandem with a range of other oppressions.” Manne’s analysis of misogyny now takes in transmisogyny and misogynoir — not her own terms — and draws on more scholarship and insights from Black women, non-binary people and women of colour. The book’s strongest chapters — on bodily control and medical care — benefit most from her new intersectional approach.

Manne’s enlarged focus justifies a new book that elsewhere recycles some of the same arguments and case studies as Down Girl. It’s also pleasing to read a book by a feminist academic aimed at a wide audience. Manne moves smoothly from examples of male entitlement in pop culture to cogent analysis of anti-abortion rhetoric and legislation. She pokes holes in complicit and complacent media rhetoric about whether women are “electable” to the highest office, and research that purportedly shows men to be more stoic about pain than women. Her concluding chapter, in which she cautiously hopes for a more justly entitled future for her daughter and other girls, is sufficiently galvanising.

Yet for all its obvious strengths, Entitled is a somewhat uneven book, and some sections appear to have been written in haste. Pages and pages are dedicated to labouring an example or case study — say, the play Gas Light or the podcast series Dirty John — creating a padding effect. Elsewhere, in paying tribute to Black feminist writers like Tressie McMillan Cottom, Manne seems to assume her readership would not already be aware of this work. For a writer who skilfully scrutinises the practice of “mansplaining,” Manne doesn’t seem aware of her own occasional tendency to tip over into an adjacent explanatory style, though she does dutifully acknowledge her privilege and subjectivity.

Manne’s book is mostly focused on American examples, though the odd Australian reference — including to Julia Gillard, Alan Jones and Geoffrey Rush — pops up. By contrast, I lost count of the Australian examples in Laura Bates’s more substantial and ambitious investigation of contemporary misogyny, which makes for bracing reading. In Men Who Hate Women, Bates convincingly argues that the so-called fringe online world of the “manosphere” has a ripple effect way beyond the online subcultures of “incels” (short for involuntary celibates), pickup artists and men’s rights activists who gather on platforms like Reddit and 4chan.

Bates’s entry point is personal: as a public feminist and educator, she has been a frequent target of trolls and men’s rights activists, and subject to death threats. In recent years, she’s also noticed how some teenage boys she works with in schools have begun to sprout the rhetoric and false statistics of the manosphere. Now, in an exhaustively researched and carefully argued fashion, she joins the dots between the manosphere, the alt-right and mainstream media and politics.

Readers will be familiar with at least some examples of the mainstreaming of misogynist and sexist views — the language used by the outgoing American president being a case in point — but Bates’s skill is in drawing familiar and new material together in freshly revealing and insightful ways, including by historicising these male communities and putting them in a transnational frame. Men’s rights activists, for instance, emerged from a “devastating schism” in the men’s liberation movement in the United States, and now its most prominent organisations and spokespeople are virulently anti-feminist, retailing false statistics and claims about rates of false rape allegations and men as victims of domestic violence. In Australia, prominent men’s rights activists have been given airtime on Seven’s Sunrise and have directly influenced politics, most recently Pauline Hanson’s successful call for an inquiry into family violence. Hanson, without producing evidence, claimed women routinely lie about abuse to gain advantage in court.

The size of these online communities — some of which overlap and all of which exhibit consistent and virulent misogyny, as well as racism and homophobia — is almost impossible to estimate with “any great accuracy,” writes Bates, but she succeeds in capturing a strong sense of their outsize and real-world influence. At the same time, she refutes the standard arguments used to dismiss or minimise what is evidently a globally interconnected phenomenon. She routinely and powerfully condemns the media for reductively polarised representations of incels (for example) as either “darkly violent and misogynist” or “a mischaracterised and disadvantaged group of lonely men.” The reality, writes Bates, “is that both these stories are true,” and herein lies the value of her book.

Bates pays attention to a whole spectrum of engagements with, and effects of, the manosphere. These include young boys who venture onto online platforms looking for advice or a sense of community and are gradually radicalised; “respectable” representatives of misogynist views, such as Jordan Peterson, who create and capitalise on what has become a booming market; and the Australian white supremacist Brenton Tarrant, who carried out the horrific Christchurch massacre in March 2019. Tarrant had links to “the troll culture of the chans, the alt-right and the manosphere,” but even more than this, argues Bates, “his entire act of hatred was planned, framed and performed within that world.”

The impact of Bates’s book is cumulative: by the end I was in no doubt that Bates had exhaustively identified and reckoned with a real and urgent problem. She wants “extremist misogyny” to be taken at least as seriously as other contemporary forms of radicalism and extremism: indeed, she contends, misogyny is typically a constitutive element, but not recognised as such because hatred against women is so normalised. I’m still mulling over some of her more specific solutions and strategies — which range from more youth social workers through to legislating online misogyny as hate speech — but it’s a credit to Bates that she offers so many of them. In the final pages, she confesses her fear about potential reactions to the book but declares it is “also an act of resistance.” Men Who Hate Women is a brave book, and it deserves a wide readership. •

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It’s not just theory. Recessions in the United States have come in all shapes and sizes since the end of the second world war, but most have been V-shaped. Australia’s few recessions have generally followed the same pattern.

But as financial wonks like to say, past performance is not a sure guide to the future. There are many reasons to think that Australia’s Covid-19 recession won’t follow the pattern. The government’s reliance on the shaky V-shaped assumption has resulted in a budget that’s big on spending but small on stimulus.

Covid-19 has not created a normal recession. While some recessions affect demand (like the 9/11 attacks, which kept US consumers at home) and others affect supply (earthquakes and tsunamis that cripple businesses), Covid-19 affects both. Government lockdowns and the fear of getting sick have kept consumers at home, while the shutdown of supply chains, shortages of workers, the inability to source inputs, and the sudden fall in international tourism, students and migrants have devastated businesses.

More than 900,000 businesses are on JobKeeper. The sad reality is that many will collapse once supports are removed, and that will reduce the economy’s capacity to produce goods and services. The speed of the recovery will hinge on the economy’s flexibility — how quickly workers can shift into new jobs, how quickly new businesses can be created and how quickly capital can be redeployed. Australia’s reduced labour mobility and high barriers to entry for new businesses suggest a slow process awaits.

International developments throw more cold water on a V-shaped recovery. It’s quite a list: Australia’s deteriorating relationship with China, our biggest trading partner; America’s unpredictability; growing calls around the world to reduce dependence on overseas suppliers; the collapse of the World Trade Organization’s dispute settlement system; the tightening of Australia’s foreign investment regime; an exchange rate already back at pre-crisis levels; and that collapse in tourists, immigrants and the international tertiary students who make up our third-biggest export sector.

All these conditions suggest less international support for the Australian economy after Covid-19 than we had before. This is a big problem for a country that gets a fifth of its gross domestic product from exports, $4 trillion of its capital stock from foreign investment and most of its GDP growth from immigration.

Then there’s the health crisis itself. The budget’s V-shaped recovery assumes not only no more outbreaks — a bold assumption when we look around the world today — but also the widespread availability of a vaccine by 2021. As the budget itself notes, the timing and efficacy of a vaccine is highly uncertain. Even if it eventuates, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has sought to moderate hopes that it will mean an instant return to life as normal, noting that face masks are more guaranteed to protect against Covid than a vaccine.

Yet a V-shaped recovery is the budget’s baseline — and the flaws in that assumption have significant consequences for the government’s planning.

The budget’s income tax cuts, for instance, are liable to be saved, not spent. While an investment allowance is worth a try, it assumes that cost is stopping businesses investing, rather than an absence of customers. (The poor take-up of similar measures in the past may suggest it’s the latter.) The budget has no plan for substantive structural reform to boost confidence, and some of the areas where stimulus would be most effective are conspicuously absent — infrastructure investment and the construction and repair of public housing represent an unusually small share of a big-spending budget.

There is also the question of where money is being directed. Covid-19 has hit the services sector the hardest, but it’s manufacturing that’s singled out for support. Covid-19 has disproportionately affected women, but most budget measures favour men and male-dominated industries. Covid-19 has caused massive unemployment, but it’s the employed who get the tax relief. Covid-19 has caused huge challenges for young people, but funding changes and a lack of support for universities threaten to make things worse for many.

The new JobMaker wage subsidy program, an improved NBN and investments in apprenticeships are the bright spots in the budget. But the risk is that Australia’s recovery more closely resembles a K than a V, with some industries booming (digital, manufacturing) while others go bust (universities, tourism), and with some cohorts of people benefiting (men, the middle-aged, the employed) while others aren’t (women, young people, the unemployed).

A V-shaped recovery is the goal, but it won’t be achieved if large segments of the population and the economy are left behind. The need to make growth more inclusive has never been stronger. •

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Tuesday night’s budget included several broad measures to support business and jobs, including its tax write-off for business investments and wage subsidy for employing young people. These look like sensible measures, albeit ones that bet heavily on business to lead the recovery. But when it comes to targeted policies for job creation, the 2020 budget is a sea of hard hats.

The three sectors with the most targeted support are all bloke-heavy: construction (more than $10 billion so far through the crisis), energy ($4 billion) and manufacturing ($3 billion). An extra $10 billion goes to transport projects, another boost to construction jobs in the building phase.

The problem? That doesn’t fit the story of this crisis. Unlike past recessions, the worst fallout in the Covid-19 recession has been in services sectors. Hospitality, the arts and administrative services have all been hit hard. These sectors are dominated by women, which is one reason women’s employment has taken a bigger hit this year.

Yet these sectors received next to nothing in the budget. They are also less likely to benefit from economy-wide supports such as instant asset write-offs because they are the least capital-intensive sectors.

The federal government could have helped these sectors in many ways. Overseas governments, and some state and local governments, have funded vouchers and discounts to encourage people back to restaurants, cafes and regional tourist destinations. Grants or direct support to help the arts sector revive could provide a desperately needed boost to our creative recovery.

The government could also have created many more jobs by directly investing in government services. Services create more jobs than infrastructure per dollar spent, and they have especially high economic multipliers right now.

The budget initiatives in education, aged care and mental health are welcome, but very small in the scheme of new spending. Major investments in aged care and education would be a jobs boon and could have provided a more rounded vision for the recovery.

“This government recognises that women have been significantly impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic,” the federal minister for women, Marise Payne, said just before the budget, “and it is critical that we focus on rebuilding their economic security as a priority.” Yet the government has left the biggest opportunity on the table. Making childcare more affordable is the most effective way to reduce the gender gap in working life and retirement — directly supporting jobs and the economic recovery.

The Grattan Institute has recommended a $5-billion-a-year package that would make childcare significantly cheaper and improve the workforce-participation incentives for primary carers (still mainly women). Instead, women seem to have been relegated in this budget to an afterthought in the form of a $240 million “support package” that offers no meaningful economic support.

All of these omissions are even more glaring given the spending on other areas and groups with far less need for support. Sizeable measures are targeted at energy, agriculture and defence. Yet all of these sectors have increased their total work hours since March. Another $3 billion is slated for manufacturing, a sector that has shed jobs during the crisis but should bounce back more quickly than “social consumption” businesses such as hospitality, retail and personal services.

Construction spending is needed because a crunch is expected as housing construction slows. But the focus on major transport infrastructure for job creation doesn’t make so much sense. These projects are less jobs-intensive. And states such as Victoria already have a big pipeline of large projects, so have little capacity to deliver more.

The $3 billion for shovel-ready projects focusing on road safety and local roads is better targeted to create jobs. But the government has missed the opportunity to deliver a major social housing spend to provide something desperately needed that would also help mitigate the downturn in housing construction.

To achieve its stated objective of getting unemployment well below 6 per cent as quickly as possible, the government should be focusing on stimulating sectors where activity has fallen the most — especially services sectors.

But this budget overlooks the hard hit in favour of the hard hat. The government should check this blind spot quickly.

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