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| ISBN-13: | 9781742242361 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | UNSW Press |
| Publication date: | 06/10/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 600 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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Damned Whores and God's Police
The Colonisation of Women in Australia
By Anne Summers
University of New South Wales Press Ltd
Copyright © 2016 Anne SummersAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74224-236-1
CHAPTER 1
A sexist culture
The very concept of a 'female' culture is a bewildering and problematic one. Once we have extended our idea of culture beyond the conventional conception of it as a deposit of intellectual and artistic artefacts, we can see that women can legitimately claim a 'culture' of our own – an experience of living which is, in some respects, characterized by wholeness where the male culture is not, which has always been an important ingredient of human life, and which has never been acknowledged in any intellectual tradition. On the other hand, the female condition has never been a self-determined state, so there is nothing we can lay claim to as our own.
Eileen Haley, 'Crossing the sexual frontier', Refractory Girl, no. 1, Summer 1972/73.
The experiences of women in Australia are closely tied to family life. More so than with men, the lives of most women are defined by their family relationships, and these relationships, and the conventions and prescriptions they give rise to, need to be explored if we wish to try and understand the position of women in this country. Family relationships differ for individual women and are governed by objective factors such as class and race, and by various subjective forces. However, the convention among social scientists and other analysts has been to obscure varieties of family relationships under an embracing institutionalised label: 'the family'. This label disguises differences between individuals and between the sexes in their experiences and perceptions of family relationships. Yet it is probably the illusion of uniformity produced by this label that has enabled 'the family' to assume its paramount place in the assembly of revered Australian institutions and has ensured that it receives at least a perfunctory reference in every piece of writing about contemporary Australian culture. Donald Home, for instance, writes, 'The "home" occupies as central a position in Australian life as land in a peasant community except that it is disposable after death; there can be an equally strong sense of family, except that as children become adult the family group dissolves, the children go their own way'. An almost identical view is presented by Craig McGregor: 'Australians are a very family-minded people. The family forms a very tight social unit and its members often count for more than close friends even after the original family circle has broken up and its younger members have set up homes of their own'.
This ostensible family-centredness is so taken for granted that no commentator feels obliged to do more than pay token homage to its existence. Rarely has a writer about Australian mores attempted to probe behind this shared assumption, to investigate the actual shape and texture of the image, to spell out just what this fact, if indeed it is a fact, implies for the cultural life of the nation.
This is largely because, for men, family life is part of an assumed background. It is just one stopping place in their landscape of experience. Rarely are a man's familial roles the sole motivating fact of his existence and even if many men at times feel, like Paula's husband in Elizabeth Harrower's The Long Prospect, that 'A man was just a machine to make money', to keep his wife and family well-heeled, they still have their socially approved escape routes. Sport, the pub and clubs, and a variety of other pursuits enable men to find at least temporary relief from the irritations, the tensions and the petty trivialities of domestic life.
For most women, things are very different. It is paramount that we know a woman's marital and maternal status, and whatever else she may aspire to or have already achieved will be assessed against this basic barometer. To be a Mother of Two would seem to be a more important status for an Australian woman than any other conceivable accolade, and if a woman does chance to succeed in other spheres but has not distinguished herself in the maternal stakes, or at least expressed a desire to, her deservedness and even her psychological stability are likely to be called into question. This insistence on evaluating women in terms of their familial roles is certainly maintained by most Australian writers and commentators, but in doing so, they are simply reflecting what is a constant reality for most women. Childhood socialisation directs a woman's ambitions into narrowly circumscribed marital goals and girls learn early that success in this sphere is necessary to achieve womanhood and that any other goals they may harbour must be tailored to accommodate this primary end.
Successive generations of women, it will be argued later, have collaborated in perpetuating this existential straitjacket, but these women have been victims of circumstances that provided them with a fixed choice. Denied economic independence, unable to control their fertility adequately, and always aware of the reprobation that awaits the rebel, none but a handful of Australian women has had the opportunity to do any more than submit to living out their lives as dutiful wives and bountiful mothers; and having no alternatives and wanting some share of human happiness, they have accepted and enjoyed this as best they could.
The major impediment to female rebellion, and that which keeps women physically and psychologically bound to their family-centred roles, has been the absence of any cultural tradition that approved of women being anything else. At every level of what we call culture, the dominant ideas and the forms in which expression is given to them have been devised by men and have reflected what they considered to be worthy of identification and perpetuation. This has been the case in that body of organised expression we generally call 'the Arts', in the theories and interpretations marshalled by intellectuals to describe what they see as distinctive features of our way of life, in the recreational activities of ordinary Australians, and in the ideas and actions that govern everyday life. And so it is somewhat ironic to realise that those people who have written about Australian culture – and in recent years they have, without exception, been men – have not attempted to examine in any way the implications of what they have all identified as the family-centredness of Australian life. The one exception has been Ronald Conway who tries to examine our history and current social mores in terms of a Jungian psychohistorical framework. He identifies dominant ethics prevailing at particular periods and catego-rises them according to whether what he sees as 'male' ('patrist') or 'female' ('matrist') qualities determined ideas and events. This leads him to consider family life and sexual mores in some detail and he is thus forced to consider the role of women in Australian society. No other recent book has thought it necessary to do this and the result has been constantly reiterated analyses of those areas of Australian life that involve the public activities of men. This has meant not only that women have been omitted from consideration, but that the qualities and attributes of Australian society identified as important have been ones that were germane to male interests and ambitions. This has thus ensured that there was no possible way in which women could, within these frameworks, be considered. It has been a closed shop: Australian society has been written about by men as if it consisted only of men.
Where women have participated in Australian culture it has had to be with due acquiescence to a game whose rules were drawn up without their consent. They have had to conform to what men assured them was important. Occasionally a few brave women have been especially refractory, have defied the prevailing orthodoxies and have struck out where their hearts and minds drove them. They went unrewarded, and they were often labelled eccentric because they could not be accommodated within the current mode. For at no level in our culture is there a rallying point, a legitimating tradition or even a socially valued metaphor that begins to explore, much less fully articulates, the experiences of women. Such a tradition would necessarily be distinct from the present dominant male one, at least until men began to recognise and to cherish the validity of female experiences in the way women have had to value men's expressions of their experiences. Such recognition might pave the way to a reunion, to a genuine reciprocity, to a mutual awareness that human experience is varied and perverse, not merely along lines of age or class or nation, but also along lines of sex. At present we are light years away from this dissolution of sex differences and sexism is as powerful a national cleavage as any of these other acknowledged divisive forces.
The system of dualism in Western philosophy as a method of organising ideas has produced numerous theories attempting to describe and validate separate and opposing sexual characteristics. The distinctions of mind/body, good/evil, Logos/Eros have all at times been utilised in the spurious quest to give male supremacy a philosophical justification. By defining woman as separate and as radically different (not just in biological capacity but, as theorists as diverse as Nietzsche and Jung have argued, in essence from man) the realities of power and exploitation and cultural apartheid have been obscured or even justified. The bludgeoning of the female psyche by Western philosophy and by religious and cultural myths and shibboleths has been exposed in numerous books; but it has not been widely recognised in this country where it seems that divisions between people based on sex are among the foundations of our culture.
For the purposes of this discussion, four 'levels' of culture will be identified and examined throughout the next four chapters. These levels are distilled for descriptive and analytical purposes only and are not to be seen as purporting to present a new interpretative framework for analysing Australian culture; that can be left to the social scientists. My present concern is simply to illustrate the original contention that women are denied an explicit and socially valued place in what is generally identified as our culture; and to trace some of the consequences of this.
The first 'level', the organised body of expression called 'the Arts' and here including literature, painting and music, obviously contains its own hierarchies of artistic ambition and critical acclaim, but it would take an entire book to plough through the 'popular' and 'high' levels of each area. My argument will have to rest on a selection of works and themes. The major points to be made are in any case independent of current fashions because I am arguing that there has existed throughout Australian history a systematic omission of women from what have been judged the highest achievements in any field. This disbarment has been of two kinds. First, a rigid physical exclusion. Women have not been completely denied the opportunity to become practitioners of any art form although, as will be described later, it is doubly difficult for a woman artist simply to practise her art, let alone have the leisure and the freedom from domestic responsibilities to enable her to aspire to excellence. What has occurred has been a more subtle and more damaging form of ostracism. Female art forms have simply been adjudged to occupy a distinct universe, one which is apart from and inferior to the male, which is unselfconsciously upheld as the universal model. This cultural apartheid has, like its political form, achieved the predictable result of ensuring that men forgot that it existed: women who conformed to its boundaries were usually ignored and the only time a woman achieved notice – and generally it was better called notoriety – was when she tried to crash through the barriers into the male world.
The second form of exclusion has been that of critical neglect. Since the majority of critics are men, they have not considered that they have any obligation to inquire as to what is happening on the other side of the cultural fence. Or, when the male critics have ventured over, they have applied the same norms that pertain in the male art world and have found either that women did not measure up (not suspecting that women artists might be trying for something different) or they have been scornful or patronising. In a recent review of a first novel by a woman, a Sydney Morning Herald reviewer wrote, 'I will no doubt be condemned for suggesting that this excellent but to me somewhat intense novel is a woman's book: but I must add by way of penance that it is very intelligent ...' Such a view assumes, not merely that there are two kinds of literature, one for men and one for women, but that the former is intrinsically superior and if the latter exhibits any qualities usually attributed to the male model, this is an occasion for surprise. It ignores the differing aspirations of male and female artists, aspirations that are connected with their differing experiences of the world.
When a man delineates the dimensions and the excruciating complexities of his existential situation, he situates these within the experiences that have shaped his consciousness. This is considered a proper and commendable thing to do. But the experiences that bring similar realisations to women are very different. They necessarily revolve around the expectations of domestic responsibility and maternal fulfilment, which women are socialised to desire and to find satisfying. Yet to write about these experiences is judged to be trivial, to make the work of no interest to men and, even if the work is considered to be 'intelligent' – how insidious a put-down, implying that such a quality is rare in women's writing – it is still primarily a 'women's book'. The message to men is clear: you'll find this boring, stay well clear. It is rather like attacking the Blacks for being dirty while conveniently forgetting that we have neglected to provide them with bathrooms, or even with running water. If women's experience of the world is so different from men's, how else can they be true to themselves except by writing about it? Male critics, and those women who court their favour, cling to an ethnocentric view of reality, which erects its own standards, in this case those devised by and for men for their creations, as the only possible standards by which to evaluate a work.
These judgements apply especially to literature, the one art form in Australia to which the contribution of women has been, in quantitative terms, as great as that of men. For this reason and also because literature even more than painting is the major source of powerful cultural symbols – characters and decisive experiences – which have an enduring and often a determining effect on the image a country has of itself, this discussion of the first 'level' of culture will confine itself to literature.
There were two major themes of what we can term 'colonial literature'. First was the evolution of the Australian Man of the Bush, that brash, rugged, sardonic individual (despite his dependence on his mates) who has been the hero of countless sagas from Clancy of the Overflow, through Ned Kelly to the various characters who inhabit the pages of Steele Rudd, Joseph Furphy and Henry Lawson. He might be a swaggie, a stockman or even a city larrikin; later he was a member of the AIF, an urban worker or an itinerant rural wanderer, but he always possessed at least some of those characteristics that a swarm of men writers detected in themselves or in the males they observed and which they were anxious to transpose into a living legend. Probably more written words have been devoted to creating, and then to analysing and extolling, this composite Australian male than to any other single facet of Australian life.
The second theme, which set itself up in opposition to the crude nationalism of the first, was that of the pristine intellectual, again always a male, who was repelled by the barbarism of colonial, especially rural or small-town colonial, mores. His cultural affinities were invariably with England although he was strongly drawn to the physical immediacy of the Australian continent, a land that fascinated him and gripped his imagination while it stultified his intellect, and as a result he suffered from what Martin Boyd has labelled 'geographic schizophrenia' and was destined to wander relentlessly between the two countries, a spiritual exile in search of an ineluctable and remote fulfilment. Richard Mahony is of course the prototype for this second theme although the men of the Langton family in Martin Boyd's quartet pursue the theme and add to it the further dimension of how it persisted through several generations of the one family.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Damned Whores and God's Police by Anne Summers. Copyright © 2016 Anne Summers. Excerpted by permission of University of New South Wales Press Ltd.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgements,Introduction to the 2016 edition,
Author's note to the second revised edition [2002],
Author's note to the new edition [1994],
Introduction to the new edition [1994],
Introduction [1975],
PART ONE | The nexus of oppression,
1 A sexist culture,
2 Manzone country,
3 The sporting wife,
4 The ravaged self,
5 The poverty of dependence,
6 The family of woman,
7 A colonised sex,
PART TWO | Sexist stereotypes past and present,
8 'Damned whores',
9 'God's police',
10 Education for motherhood,
11 Feminism and the suffragist,
12 The mobilisation of mum,
13 Suburban neurotics?,
14 Prospects for liberation,
Letter to the next generation [1994],
The march of women [2002],
Timeline of achievements by and for Australian women 1788–2015,
Notes,
Index,