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Meera Atkinson  Early last century the suffragettes fought for women’s right to vote. During the 60s and 70s, the 'second wave' of feminism emerged, demanding a great deal more from equal pay to sexual autonomy.
In the 1970s, many young women identified as feminist and feminism was generally accepted as a bonafide social justice movement, yet in 2008 Australia the movement seems all but dead, as the majority of young women refuse to be identified with it. So, has feminism become a dirty word?
Unpack the issues...
Chilla Bulbeck is a visiting research fellow in the area of Gender, Work and Social Inquiry, in the University of Adelaide’s School of Social Sciences. According to Chilla, the 1970s movement of on-the-street feminism became a 1980s “femocrat” institutional and legal incarnation, now more or less confined to the Women’s Studies units at universities.
Chilla, who conducted an analysis of young people’s attitudes toward feminism across four states (NSW, VIC, SA, and WA) says only 25% agreed they were feminist.
The reasons, it seems, are varied. One problem is that no-body is quite clear what is meant by the term. There is no one universal feminism; rather, there are multiple brands, just as there are multiple manifestations of oppression. There are liberal, socialist, radical, woman-centred/separatist, post-analytic, and post-structural feminisms, and some young people have formed negative views based on impressions from one or another branch.
But, says Chilla, the main reason 75% don’t identify as feminist is that they believe the war is won.
“If I had to summarise why the majority of young people think the way they do about feminism, it is that they think it was terrific in the dark ages — when their mothers were young or 100 years ago when women didn’t have the vote. But now women and men are equal so we don’t need the women’s movement anymore; therefore I don’t need to be a feminist. Or we can’t get any further than we’ve got. We’ve gone as far as we can go.”
As columnist Helen Razer quipped in The Age following the death of the “original Humourless Feminist” Andrew Dworkin in 2005, “Feminism’s history and lived experience has been stripped. No single battle has been resolutely won. Yet a cosy cultural consensus seems to have formed: girls, stop whining, it’s so unladylike!”
Chilla says the belief of young women that equality has been won is both inaccurate and the mark of the success of feminism. “I like it that young women were full of energy and belief in themselves that they were as good as any man in a way I wasn’t raised. On the other hand, I know they aren’t living in an equal society.”
Behind closed doors, the old guard who ponder this current trend have come up with some interesting ideas about what’s going on, including the theory that from generation to generation the women’s movement gets lost and therefore gets reclaimed in different waves and ways.
Chilla puts it down to the swing toward “neo-liberalism”, making a case that the rise of individualism has blinded people to structural inequality and the reality of cultural conditions.
During the 70s, many young women questioned or challenged women’s traditional role as sexual objects by refusing to wear make-up or shave their legs. Now seems as if young women, even those as young as tweens, are embracing a highly sexualised image, willing to offer themselves up for objectification under the name of “girl power”. Chilla sees the sexualisation of our society as a trend that has gained power and speed and spread.
“One of the first battles in feminism was around sexuality and desire. There was a backlash to bring women back into situations where they were consuming and did want to be objects of the male gaze and dress it up in this new thing: this is your empowerment as women.”
Glenda Blakefield, associate general secretary of the Uniting Church National Assembly, says feminism remains a pressing social justice issue.
“Even though in terms of equal opportunity and affirmative action, western women are better off than they ever have been, domestic violence is growing and that’s a prime indicator that the work of feminism as it relates to justice has a long way to go.”
So, does Chilla think we’ll see a swing back to feminism in Australia? Yes, but not as we know it.
“I think we will see a renewed expression of interest in gender issues. There are a group of younger feminists in the United States who call themselves third way feminists. They’ve said that for them it’s not just about gender, it’s about all of the social justice issues. I think that’s where the activism will go.”
Unpack the issuesDiscussion points: What is Christian Feminism? Can idealising women in the name of God be called feminism? Could any of the women in the Bible be called feminists?
Further reading:
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