Dangerous Ideas: Women’s Liberation – Women’s Studies – Around the World

Front matter

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Part I — Women's Liberation

‘The sexual revolution as big flop: Women's Liberation Lesson One Sisterhood and Women's Liberation in Australia

"Holding the Horrors of the World at Bay': "The Feminist Food Guide', 1972-75

And now we are six: a plea for Women's Liberation Feminism as cultural renaissance

Does the family have a future?

Women and technological change

Dreams and desires: four 1970s feminist visions of utopia

The tampon

Part II — Women's Studies: Introduction Women's Studies — towards transdisciplinary learning?

Are we changing paradigms? The impact of feminism upon the world of scholarship

Setting up the first Research Centre for Women's Studies in Australia, 1983-86 vii

107 121 147 159 175

13 The role of a Women's Studies Centre in the university

14 Outsiders inside? Women's Studies in Australia at the end of the twentieth century Part I — Around the World 15 The position of women in China: 1978 16 Amilkrun in the United States of America: 1986 17 ‘Perestroika has been bad for women’: Russia 1991 18 Scholarship for a cause: San José, Costa Rica, 1993 19 'Gender Studies: Towards the Year 2000': Greece 1993

20 Looking at the world through women's eyes: United Nations in Beijing, 1995

References vi

229 235 245 253 263 267

Acknowledgements

To everyone involved in Women's Liberation and Women's Studies — in Australia, and around the world — a thousand thanks for all that you taught me. Especially I offer my profound gratitude to all the people who contributed to the tales told here: friends, colleagues, sisters, comrades, intellectual and political inspirations. I learned much from you all. My debt to some will shout from these pages: to Daphne Gollan, Julia Ryan, Kay Daniels, Margaret Power, Anna Davin, Marian Quartly, Drusilla Modjeska; to Genevieve Lloyd, Carole Pateman, Marilyn Strathern, Terry Threadgold; to Sara Dowse, Elizabeth Reid; to Raewyn Connell, to Marion Halligan — I owe most of my intellectual and political formation and all that followed from it. I must thank, too, people who have worked with me as students for insights, argument and opposition enough to prove an important goad.

Some of the pieces reproduced here are preliminary efforts towards the history of the Women's Liberation Movement in Australia. A few quote from interviews recorded during the early days of research for that project, the interviews carried out by splendid Research Assistants Kate Borrett, Liz Dimmock, Ruth Ford, Ann Genovese, Judith Ion, Tristan Slade, Lizzie Summerfield, Inara Waldron, Deborah Worsley-Pine, and Sarah Zetlein who — to our enduring sorrow — took her own life at the end of 1996. That history has not yet been written. I had designed it as a collaboration with Ann Curthoys and Marilyn Lake, whose influence also shapes these pages. We did take a trio of papers to the Berkshire Conference on Women's History in North Carolina in 1996; Ann used them in her highly praised article for the Oxford Companion to Australian Feminism, ‘Cosmopolitan Radicals’. And Marilyn says that without the research for that project she could not have written the relevant chapters in her wonderfully encompassing and incisive work, Getting Equal: The History of Australian Feminism (published by Allen & Unwin in 1999). I vii want to thank those splendid historians — colleagues all, these days — and the many people who agreed to be interviewed, to check the transcripts of their interviews and to correct them. Mary Lyons deserves an avalanche of thanks; she transcribed all of the interviews. I promise, now that I have put this present collection together, I will return to that project. It has been waiting for attention since the late 1990s; it is time it became a book which could perhaps be called A History of the Women's Liberation Movement in Australia's World.

For their contributions to this book I must thank the brilliant Mary Leunig for allowing the University of Adelaide Press to reproduce the cartoon on the cover, and John Emerson for an array of assistances that he has provided as Director of the

To my partner, Susan Sheridan, who helped me invent the title of this collection, I am also grateful for quality control — among many other things.

Figure 1: Ann Curthoys and Marilyn Lake, Sydney University, c. 1996 Photograph by Susan Magarey viii

Preface

I used to describe my life as 'ambivalent, ambidextrous, ambiguous, androgynous, ironic’. This book is similarly unorthodox: plural, haphazard and conjectural. It is a memoir, a — highly selective — curriculum vitae, and a history. However, there is some order in it. Each element is focused on the history and politics of the Women's Liberation Movement in Australia, on some of what we learned and thought in Women's Studies, and on some of what I learned about women and the conditions of their lives around the world during the last thirty years or so, partly in the course of editing a feminist journal. These are serious matters; they are about how people's lives and ideas changed, too little remembered or understood any longer, worth recalling for that reason alone. These ideas might well not seem dangerous any longer, but they certainly did when we first formulated them. They can be great fun, too — as I hope you will agree.

Looking into the rear-vision mirror at the roads that my life has travelled, I think I can spot the crossroads where I first encountered the possibility of such changes. I was walking along a corridor at the Australian National University past the offices that housed the people who taught history. I met Daphne Gollan, coming towards me. I had been so inspired by her teaching of Russian history, to say nothing of her wit and charm, that I had undertaken a research paper on the collapse of the western front during the First World War, a subject that allowed me to read about the Russian revolutions of 1917 in English-language sources. Subsequently, though, I had embarked on research on an Australian subject, the nineteenth-century Scottish South Australian, Catherine Helen Spence. I wasn't liking Miss Spence very much, at that time, and doing Australian historical research did not bring me into contact with Mrs Gollan much, either. So, that day in the passage in the middle of 1970, I greeted her enthusiastically. (Daphne was to say that I was like a big waggy dog who would bound up to you saying pat me, pat me.) She said, "There's a meeting that I think you should come to’.

It was a gathering in a student house in Canning Street in the northern suburbs of Canberra: the first meeting of what became the Canberra Women's Liberation group and its dream of an entirely reordered world. To appropriate the words of North American political philosopher Wendy Brown, it was a dream of transformation that would bring into being 'a radical reconfiguration of kinship, sexuality, desire, psyche and the relation of private to public’.' It was a dream of an entirely new and different politics. It was a dream of friendships. It was a dream that also taught me to understand Catherine Spence better, to admire her, even to like her. I dubbed her

"Australia's first feminist’.

! Wendy Brown, ‘Feminism unbound, revolution, mourning, politics’, in Wendy Brown,

Edgework: critical essays on knowledge and politics, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2005, p. 106.

Part |

Women's Liberation

‘The first section of this book is concerned with the history of the Women's Liberation Movement in Australia. These chapters are about sex, politics, joy and anguish. They are not in the order in which I wrote them, but, instead, in an order approximating a chronology of the Women's Liberation Movement. Chapter One is concerned with the pre-history of the upsurge of activist feminism at the beginning of the 1970s, and argues against the widespread contention that its single cause was the appearance of the contraceptive pill on the mass market. Causes are, I would argue, usually plural. What about Ann Curthoys's conviction that the new movement originated in ‘radical New Left politics’? "The early Women's Liberation Movement’, she contended,

while in part a revolt against New Left men, was nevertheless imbued with

New Left politics. It was concerned with imperialism, socialism, and the

oppression of Third World and minority groups, with ideologies sustaining an

evil capitalist system, with revolutionary strategy and tactics.’

Others’ experiences brought other explanations to the fore. One focused on the women of the post-World War II baby boom gaining access to tertiary education in far greater numbers than ever before, learning about societies absolutely different in time, place or kinds of relationships from our own, and thence being able to

? Ann Curthoys, "Ihe Women's Movement and social justice’, in Dorothy H. Broom (ed.),

Unfinished business: social justice for women in Australia, George Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1984, pp. 161-2, reprinted in Ann Curthoys, For and against feminism: a personal journey into feminist theory and history, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1988, pp. 79-80.

contemplate changes to our own. Sara Dowse begins the memoir of her marriage titled 'Bride Price — 1958' with brief accounts of the marriage of a young Gogo woman of central Tanzania, and of Princess Sophie Augusta Frederika Anhalt-Zerbst of Stettin, married to the unlovely and incapable Grand Duke Peter Feodorovich, who would eventually sit at her side as she occupied the throne of All the Russias as Catherine the Great. Sara learned about these two, she tells us, in tiered lecture theatres at the University of Sydney, ‘enrolling in the last stages of pregnancy and taking night classes for the first year while my mother-in-law looked after my baby boy in her pub’. That mother-in-law, Sara decided, was her father-in-law's slave: 'She still did most of the cleaning, much of the cooking, and most of the accounts; my father-in-law went out every morning to one of his buildings, came back for his lunch, and spent the rest of the afternoon either at bowls or with his cronies at the bar’. Her own situation was 'on a minor scale' much the same, and she was bothered by not having any money of her own.

How could you put a value on my services anyway? On dusting, or shopping,

or motherhood? I would think about the Gogo woman's bride price, about

Sophie-Catherine's jewels. It was as though I had entered a cage, but how could I call it that??

Of course the story that ends with Sara Dowse leaving that marriage is more complicated than the version that I am offering here. But it shows how learning about women in other societies offered her a mirror that refracted, rather than simply reflecting, the conditions of her own life.

Others suggested explanations that emphasised what we were, suddenly, reading. Susan Ryan, in New York with her diplomat husband and two children, was already restless with her marriage. She seized upon The Female Eunuch, written in a brilliant explosion of frustration by Germaine Greer, our old acquaintance from St Joseph's Camperdown. Betty Friedan, Kate Millett and Gloria Steinem provided more grist to my new mill. All the intelligent women I met — my new neighbour, other Australians in town, university women, even some other wives of diplomats — were on fire with enthusiasm.‘

Sara Dowse, ‘Bride Price — 1958', Chapter One of an unpublished autobiography, personal communication, email March 2014. 4

Susan Ryan, Catching the waves: life in and out of politics, HarperCollins Publishers, Sydney, 1999, p. 115.

(Some of the works she was finding so exhilarating appear briefly, here, in Chapter Nine.) Yet other women explained the eruption of Women's Liberation by speaking of the exhilaration of discovering friendships with women, and even, sometimes, love: the bonding which brought solidarity to such a diverse array of women — at least now and again.

That is the subject of Chapter

Two, on 'sisterhood'. There are three notes to add to the discussion

Figure 2: Daphne Gollan, late 1970s presented there. The concept of sisterhood can also expand from

Photograph by Susan Magarey a focus on individual growth and pleasure to an attempt to describe what bound the whole diverse Women's Liberation Movement together. At the first Women & Labour Conference, held in Sydney in 1978, Daphne Gollan — here she is again — suggested that it was ‘women's universal role as life-givers' that provided the basis for 'the simple concept of sisterhood’, though the context of that comment suggests that she didn't consider this a particularly strong source for the solidarity that was needed to bind such a variety of individual women into an ‘imagined community’. I have appropriated the term ‘imagined community’ from Benedict Anderson's important and influential book, Imagined Communities, for two elements in his gloss on 'an imagined political community’: 'imagined' because we would never actually know everyone involved, and 'community'’ implying that however different we might be, we would share 'a deep, horizontal comradeship'.’

However — the second note — that comradeship suffered an erosion fuelled by recognition of precisely those differences among us all. Initially, questions about difference arose in relation to differences between women and men. One strand of

> Benedict Anderson, Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism,

Women's Liberation insisted that those differences were not based in biology; there is more about this in Chapter Nine. Those differences were, rather, socially and historically constituted. Another strand held that women are, in essence, entirely different from men, not merely biologically but also ethically, politically, culturally and spiritually. Such questions were, for a time, subject to intense and often theoretically sophisticated analysis. Discussions ranged from the North American feminist Carol Gilligan's essentialist account of difference in moral reasoning between women and men to post-modernist French feminist Luce Irigaray's poetic exploration of bodily and psychic sexual difference in the formation of subjectivity.

By the late 1970s, questions raised within the Women's Movement about its capacity to speak for, or about, or to relate to, the conditions of life of women who were anything but white, heterosexual in preference, and middle-class, were prompting increasing attention to differences between women. In the language of personal experience, which is always political, but never as unproblematically so as many seem to assume, this meant that the Women's Movement's horizontal comradeship was overwhelmed by a variety of voices, speaking of experiences of class-based, homophobic, racist or ethnocentric discrimination that had no place in Women's Liberation's political and theoretical analyses. The fourth Women & Labour Conference in Brisbane in 1984 was witness to encounters over precisely those kinds of difference. No claim for universal sisterhood could be sustained after that, it seemed.

The third note is to give emphasis to the point made towards the end of this second chapter, about the changing economic and cultural context of the Women's Movement in the 1990s and 2000s, a point that offers a different angle on discussions of sisterhood and difference. This context has made us all familiar with a neo-liberal social ideology emphasising the individual; with profound economic conservatism emphasising the primacy of market freedom; and with a moral vacuity in which advertisements tell each of us to 'put yourself first’. They foster the concept of 'retail therapy’, even ‘retail fun', blamed for a greed-is-good culture and its consequential tectonic global shocks. As one academic observed in 2009, "The personal pronoun has taken dominion in our period: there is the iPod and the iPhone; one spends time on MySpace or YouTube; universities simulate small group interactions using i-peer; you can even buy MyDog food'.° In a context like this, the feminisms of the Women's

€ Mark Furlong, 'i-dolatry'’, Arena: The Australian Magazine of Left Political, Social and Cultural Commentary, no. 101, 8 September 2009, pp. 12-13.

Liberation Movement could be dismissed as having failed to provide to young women all that they wanted to have, while the market, if allowed free rein, would do just that. Memories of Women's Liberation talking about what women could or wanted to do, not /ave, are few and drowned out by advertising jingles. In this context, this chapter argues, the concept of sisterhood could readily become, instead of an assertion of solidarity, a claim that all women are the same — a claim only too vulnerable to contradiction. And with that contradiction, then, a splintering of solidarity.

Chapters Three and Five are about the exuberance, the joy for women in breaking the rules, behaving badly, in public — a feature of the Women's Liberation Movement that seems to have been entirely obliterated from memory and history. Chapter Five, in particular, asks if it is possible to adapt the brilliant argument of North American feminist historian, Natalie Zemon Davis, in 'Women on Top’, from her empirical source-base in early modern Europe to all advanced capitalist cultures in the mid-twentieth century.

Chapter Four is the earliest of these essays. I wrote it in the later months of 1976 as a protest against what I saw as a diminishing allegiance in Women's Liberation groups to the socialism that those groups had taught me. In 1976, to my distress, some women in those same groups were describing socialism as 'male pie-in-the-sky’. I was just gaining confidence in my knowledge about and commitment to socialism; within just a few more years, I would be able to accept invitations to present, for instance, a paper on ‘Women and Socialism’ to a conference of the Australian Labor Party on the party's socialist objective.’ How could my sisters sail off in a different direction, leaving me and my socialist-feminism marooned high and dry? And what about their commitment to eliminating differences of power between all people? I was distraught and angry. But I was not, as that fine scholar Margaret Henderson alleges, mourning the disappearance of the feminism that, by then, formed the central commitment of my life.’ Rather, I was merely trying to persuade my sisters to remember the ideals that we had forged together. Looking back at the moment I was protesting against, I'm now inclined to think that I was making too much fuss about

7 Susan Magarey, 'Women and socialism’, in Bruce O'Meagher (ed.), The socialist objective:

Labor & socialism, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1983, pp. 110-18.

8 Margaret Henderson, Marking feminist times: remembering the longest revolution in

Australia, Peter Lang, Bern 2006, pp. 138-40. Henderson refers to me by my married name, Susan Eade, the name under which I published that article.

it; my sisters in Women's Liberation are still, today, as critical of the imperatives of unbridled capitalism as they were in the early 1970s.

Rereading this chapter so many years later also causes me wry amusement. Its emphasis on ‘social’ revolution should have been on a revolution that was 'socio-political and cultural’. But I was, at the time when I wrote it, in the throes ofa messianic enthusiasm for 'the new social history’ that I had absorbed while doing research for a PhD in England. There I met the socialist and feminist History Workshop pioneers — Raphael Samuel, Anna Davin, Sally Alexander and Catherine Hall — and read not only Edward Thompson, but also, and crucially, Eric Hobsbawm's account of a new — and highly political — social history.? Deemed a 'maturing' in the United States, and a new and exciting growth in Britain where it prompted the establishment of a new journal, called Social History, in 1976, the 'new social history’ shared with the currently ascendant structuralist history a concern with theory and with, as the editorial to the inaugural issue of Social History put it, 'the essential task of explaining total social process and analysing the whole range of forces promoting change and transformation, stability and continuity in past societies’. The 'new social history’ was also profiting from a general historicisation of the social sciences in the 1950s and 1960s, impelling historians to attend to the methodologies devised by anthropologists, demographers, economists and sociologists for discovering information about the non-literate, those whose descendants did not donate their papers to the archives. I was to write enthusiastically about 'the new social history’, providing a survey of developments in Britain in an article published in the Australian journal, Labour History, and then, perhaps over-optimistically, I wrote another article about developments in Australia for the British journal, Social History. As the second observed, in Australia, Labour History was so impressed by the 'new social history’ it changed its sub-title to include 'social history’ in its brief. ° Afire with this enthusiasm,

I failed to see anything as not encompassed in a 'social' revolution.

Questions of the extent, the size, of the Women's Liberation Movement surface in this chapter, too. I exclaim at the ‘overwhelming’ numbers of one Women's

? See, for example, Raphael Samuel (ed.), History workshop: a collectanea 1967-1991, History Workshop 25, Oxford, 1991; E.J. Hobsbawm, 'From social history to the history of society’, first published in Daedalus, vol. 100, no. 1, Winter 1971, republished in M.W. Flinn and T.C. Smout (eds), Essays in social history, Clarendon Press, Oxford, pp. 1-22.

10 Susan Eade [Magarey], ‘Social history in Britain in 1976 — a survey’, Labour History, no.

31, November 1976, pp. 38-52; Susan Magarey, 'Labour History's new sub-title: social history in Australia in 1981', Social History, vol. 8, no. 2, May 1983, pp. 211-28.

Liberation conference which had brought together some 600 women — a reminder of how touchingly modest were our early expectations.

By the late 1970s and early 1980s, I was employed in teaching and developing Women's Studies in universities, and on occasion I was invited to give a public lecture. Chapters Six and Seven were public lectures, one to a conference on the future, the other in a series offered to the general public. They are, accordingly, cautious in their arguments while still focusing on subjects central to Women's Liberation at the time. My concern with the future revolved around our identification of the family as the principal agent of women's oppression; later, we defined it more precisely as 'the bourgeois nuclear family’. 'Smash the family’, we had chorused, marching down the leafy avenues of Canberra. This was an idea that many thought very dangerous. From this distance in time, though, it is not difficult to see 'the family’ in Australia, at least in white Australia, as already in the process of profound change. No doubt the objections fuelling our protests assisted, as did the Family Law Act of the government of Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, but they were not the only drivers of those changes. We would learn, too, how limited, both historically and culturally, was our definition of 'the family’, excluding most particularly our Indigenous neighbours for whom families could be a refuge from the state. By the time it reaches a conclusion, my sixth chapter hints at a different, if more abstract, agent of women's oppression — patriarchy.

The concept of patriarchy was not new to feminist debate in the mid-to-late 1970s. Kate Millett had used it in Sexual Politics, as early as 1971. But, as Hester Eisenstein was to observe, 'the word, although widely adopted, was something of a "Sleeper"'.'! It was not until the second half of the 1970s that it was used so frequently that feminists were prompted to debate its meaning.” These debates may well have signalled a continuing effort to recapture some kind of unity in the Women's Movement. I think they indicated a strenuous engagement among feminists whose work was primarily theoretical and feminists who were primarily activists to

1! Hester Eisenstein, 'Comment on the Women's Movement and social justice’, in Broom

2 Women's Publishing Collective, Papers on patriarchy: conference, London 76, Women's

Publishing Collective, London, 1976; Sheila Rowbotham, "The trouble with "patriarchy"', New Statesman, December 1979, Sally Alexander and Barbara Taylor, 'In defence of "patriarchy"’, New Statesman, February 1980, both reprinted in Raphael Samuel (ed.), People's history and socialist theory, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1981; Susan Magarey, ‘Questions about wr

"Patriarchy"’, in Broom (ed.), op. cit.

find common ground. They certainly signalled a continuing desire to find a single, all-encompassing explanation for the persisting oppression of women. But, as they developed, they demonstrated an increasing diversity in feminism.

For feminists reading such works by North American feminists as Susan Brownmiller's Against Our Will, or, later, Susan Griffin's book on rape or Andrea Dworkin's on pornography, or Mary Daly's Gyn/Ecology'’, or working in a women's refuge or shelter, or a rape crisis centre, or, perhaps, a women's health centre, the term ‘patriarchy’ was relatively straightforward. It stood for all the ways in which men oppressed women, degraded them symbolically, damaged them physically and psychologically. 'Patriarchy' was what the North American Redstockings Manifesto had called 'male supremacy’: 'the oldest, most basic form of domination. All other forms of exploitation and oppression (racism, capitalism, imperialism, etc.) are extensions of male supremacy’.'4 For feminists endeavouring to integrate analyses of women's disadvantages in the labour market with their Marxist understanding of the workings of capitalism, however, the concept 'patriarchy' was more complex. Was it a function of capitalist relations? Was it an independent system of relations? Was it, as English feminist Juliet Mitchell suggests at the end of her monumental book, Psychoanalysis and Feminism, primarily ideological? Was it, as another English feminist, Sheila Rowbotham, objected, a trans-historical and therefore static notion which ignored differences in the relations between women and men, femininity and masculinity, at different periods of time?!’ How could the sexual politics of contemporary Sicily and contemporary Sweden be described by the same term?

And for those women who had taken up jobs in the federal and state government

‘5 Susan Brownmiller, Against our will: men, women and rape, Simon & Schuster, New York,

1975; Susan Griffin, Rape: the power of consciousness, Harper & Row, San Francisco, 1981; Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: men possessing women, The Women's Press, London, 1981; Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: the Meta-ethics of radical feminism, The Women's Press, London, 1979.

‘4 'Redstocking manifesto’, 1969, in Leslie B. Tanner (ed.), Voices from women's liberation,

Mentor, New York, 1970, p. 109.

15 E.g. Michèle Barret, Women's oppression today: problems in Marxist feminist analysis, Verso,

London, 1980; Ann Game and Rosemary Pringle, Gender at work, George Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1983; Iris Young, ‘Beyond the unhappy marriage: a critique of dual systems theory’, in Lydia Sargent (ed.), Women and revolution, South End Press, Boston, 1981; Sylvia Walby, Patriarchy at work: patriarchal and capitalist relations in employment, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1986; Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and feminism, Allen Lane, London, 1974; Rowbotham, "The trouble with "patriarchy".

bureaucracies, the pioneering 'femocrats', did ‘patriarchy’ mean anything more specific than the overwhelming masculinism of the cultures and structures within which they had to work?’®

Part of the difficulty was that the term was too specific for the variety of uses to which it was put. What was needed was a superordinate term that was empty of specific content, just as, in Marxism, the terms 'mode of production’ or ‘relations of production' do not specify whether they are feudal, or capitalist. North American feminist Gayle Rubin had escaped the problems associated with 'patriarchy' by using the term 'the sex/gender system’, almost before the debate got under way.” Australian feminist historian Jill Matthews contributed importantly to the debate when she formulated the term ‘gender order’, which then allowed for some gender orders to be characterised as patriarchal, some, perhaps, as egalitarian, and some, like ours in Australia, as downright misogynist (a term that gained worldwide attention in 2013 when uttered by Prime Minister Julia Gillard about the leader of the conservative — and deeply masculinist, not to say misogynist — opposition).'* However, even as this solution presented itself, so that the term 'patriarchal' — adjective rather than noun — gained increasing acceptance, the Women's Movement was becoming less certain of the sisterhood of all women and therefore less inclined to seek totalising causes for the oppression of women.

‘The analysis presented in Chapter Seven is concerned with changing conditions of women's work, and it cheerily includes reproduction as one of the forms of women's work. Both the conditions of technologically assisted reproduction and the shape and character of the labour market have changed, almost beyond recognition, since I wrote that chapter. Indeed, feminist issues around women's work have added to a focus on the struggle for equal pay and conditions — first, anxieties around a

‘work-life balance’ and more recently, analyses of how women work and live in new

‘6 E.g. Sara Dowse, "The bureaucrat as usurer', in Broom (ed.), op. cit.; Sara Dowse, "The

Women's Movement's fandango with the state: the movement's role in public policy since 1972', in Cora V. Baldock and Bettina Cass (eds), Women, social welfare and the state in Australia, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1983; Suzanne Franzway, "With problems of their own: femocrats and the welfare state’, Australian Feminist Studies, vol. 1, no. 3, Summer 1986, pp. 45-57.

17 Gayle Rubin, '"The traffic in women": notes on the "political economy" of sex’, in Rayna

R. Reita (ed.), Toward an anthropology of women, Monthly Review Press, New York, 1975.

18 Jill Julius Matthews, Good and mad women: the historical construction of femininity in twentieth century Australia, George Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1984, pp. 13-15.

economies characterised by shifts away from manufacturing to the production of services and knowledge in which any boundary between work and home is being obliterated.'? Nevertheless, a distinction between primary and secondary labour markets is still pertinent, and the importance of technological change to even more aspects of women's lives than their paid employment prompts reconsideration of what it was like a generation ago. In an era which foresees the possibility of medical technicians digitally ‘printing’ organs to replace those that might have failed, the early stages of the development of in vitro fertilisation might appear distinctly ho-hum. But the ethical debates in each period of time echo each other closely, and women still have reason for complaint about their conditions of work — in relation to reproduction and in households, as well as in the quite desperately casualised labour market, for it is still women who provide most of the unpaid, usually unrecognised,