By Roslyn Dundas
20th Pamela Denoon Lecture - 7 March 2008
Thank you for the invitation to be here, I am deeply honoured to be part of this year’s Pamela Denoon Lecture. I did not have the privilege to know Pamela, but I know her work and am grateful to her and other long-time WEL women for the incredible work they undertook and still undertake. I, too, add my thanks to the Committee for their work in running these events and maintaining Pamela’s memory.
Unlike Marian I am not an academic, currently I am a public servant, so I have to make the little disclaimer that this lecture does not necessarily reflect the views of my employer. I also note the irony of Marian talking about the past and I’m talking about the future – yet I don’t have a powerpoint.
I have been asked to talk about the future, from a young woman’s perspective and surprisingly enough I believe I am the youngest woman ever to deliver a Pamela Denoon Lecture. And it is quite fitting to look at the future with a new insight into the origin and history of WEL. Yet I have been quite apprehensive about this lecture; I think Marian got off easy, 20-20 hindsight is a lot more accurate than a crystal ball.
To look at the future I think we need to look at feminism today – the feminism of Gen X. Gen X is usually classified as those born 1965 to 1980ish (the dates on these things are rather flexible and depending on who you believe I personally could be Gen X, Gen Y or the altogether different MTV Generation). As I see it Generation X feminists are the women whose mothers stood on the barricades and really turned the tide for women’s engagement in the broader world. They worked hard, so the next generation could have it all.
But these young women also caught Girl Power. When the Spice Girls bounced on to the scene and Buffy started slaying the vampires in the mid 1990s, Generation X were aged 15 to 25. For many Gen X feminism was captured in the phrase – ‘girl power’ or as the Spice Girls put it – “I’ll tell you what I want, what I really really want…” I remember speaking at the Women’s Constitutional Convention in 2002 telling many of you that Barbie wasn’t evil (while she has some body image and racial issues Barbie was an astronaut, and a rockstar, vet, elite athlete, president and still got to go on family holidays – a role-model that showed us endless choices). I also noted that girl power – while a mass-marketed approach to female self-determination and self-worth – was overall a positive influence on young women. And I know many didn’t necessarily agree with me. Susan Hopkins in her 2002 book Girl Heroes noted that “girl was no longer just an age and gender category – it’s an attitude.” But as she goes on to say, “what girl power has delivered is a kind of superficial, artful simulation of feminism. Politics here is only another image to be manipulated in the service of celebrity and media power.”
I had a friend, the daughter of a leading feminist – I remember talking to her as I was exploring the concept of what feminism meant to me, of how we were going to use our feminism and take over the world… her response to feminism was a little less optimistic. Her mother told her she could have it all, could do it all. But the world had not changed sufficiently to meet her, or her mother’s, expectations. She felt let down, lied to – set up for failure if you will. We have heard this argument repeated again and again, that feminism failed women… even this year an article at OnLineOpinion was criticising the ‘feminist movement’ for failing to support women… remember the recent clamour over feminism resulting in careers being prioritised over children. Just this week a report from Victoria noted “while younger women said they were told to be whatever they wanted, many described juggling work and children as hectic and stressful.”
But a positive pop song, and some strong leading women in the mass media (yes with a number of issues – Xena in her leather, Buffy and the underlying theme of sex equals death and a pop gum approach to equality but strong none the less) and a whole lot more women in the workforce, put women very squarely in the picture – you might not have agreed with what they were doing or wearing, but they were there. They showed us that attitude is everything, and allowed us to easily identify that our place in the world, as women, is an unquestionable right. They took the jobs and recognition that our foremothers fought so hard for and solidified it. Gen X benefited from that work, there was no fight for us to attend university, enter the workforce or contribute through unpaid work as mothers –while we might still debate the details on these things, the underlying ‘rightness’ of them is left in little doubt.
And this leads us to our younger sisters… Generation Y, are those who are around 15 to 25 at the moment so at the ripe old age of nearly 30 I also feel both young and old… certainly younger than WEL, but being nearly 30 means that the young women starting University this year have been through an educational and life experience that is comparatively very different to mine. Today’s 18 year old was born in 1990, in their lifetime there has always been McDonalds in Russia, Nelson Mandela has always been free, the Hubble has always been up there, Seinfeld has come and gone, the Sex Discrimination Act has always been law, the ACT has always had self-government. It was in 1989 Rosemary Follet became our Chief Minister, the first female head of Government in Australia, and Joan Kirner became deputy Premier of Victoria. Mary Robinson was elected President of Ireland in 1990.
Today’s younger women have always known women leaders, CDs, the Internet and mobile phones – these are not new phenomenon for them, it is part of the fabric of their world. But people aged 18 to 24 years today have the highest prevalence of mental health problems of any age group . In the younger age group of 7 to 16 the rate of obesity has increased from just 11% in 1985 to 25% in 2004 . Despite our advances there is still considerable concern about the welfare of young people.
So how does feminism fit in?
Apparently we are still having a debate about feminism full stop: “I’m not a feminist but”, “feminism is dead because we don’t need it anymore”, “why don’t we have a Minister for Men” etcetra etcetra. I know you would have heard many examples. How do these debates impact on young women today – when they see female political candidates lambasted in ways that men never are, what does that mean to them?
Rebecca Hunter, author of The World According to Y puts it thus:
“Young men and women have internalised feminism to such an extent that many of them question its relevance as a social movement.”
Where as my friend was disillusioned by a world not ready for her, Hunter is claiming that it maybe the world is a little bit more ready now. However, I’m not about to hang up my feminist badge just yet. The NATSEM Income and Wealth Report of July 2007 tells us that “Women are still earning around 15 per cent less on average, in the same occupation and working the same number of hours, as men. For Gen Y this varies from a difference of $34 a week for professionals to $135 per week average shortfall for women in the clerical, sales and services industries.” The Report goes on “Single Gen Y men have on average 30 percent, or $25 thousand, more in assets than single Gen Y women.” And most media today talk about young women as though we should just give up on them as completely different species set on a path of self-destruction: binge drinking, drug taking, public brawls…
Fay Wheldon so unhelpfully states that she is embarrassed for the feminists, clinging on to the dream of a proud, equal, serious society, where justice ruled and lasses didn’t throw away their hard-won equality in the pubs and clubs, puking up their resentments on the shoes of paramedics helping them out of the gutter.”
I think Pink put it a little more helpfully in her song ‘Stupid Girls’:
What happened to the dreams of a girl president
She's dancing in the video next to 50 Cent
They travel in packs of two or three
With their itsy bitsy doggies and their teeny-weeny tees
Where, oh where, have the smart people gone?
Oh where, oh where could they be?
Young women today are not the first to drink or try drugs. Premier Anna Bligh was publicly declaring her dalliances with the wacky weed just this week. Young women today aren’t the first to scandalize their elders with raunchy behaviour.
However, young women today have a significantly different understanding of their place in the world compared to their 70s sisters and a range of different media and tools at their disposal.
When I got to university I learnt about this thing called feminism and I learnt about this thing called patriarchy. I had my spark moment, where I could put a name to the oppression and wrongness I could sense in the world, and I had a great moment where I was able to join with others, men and women, to work to overcome this oppression and wrongness. As Marion discussed many of our elder sisters had this moment reading Germanine Greer for the first time.
What we need to support women, young and old, to have the spark moment… And if feminism is having its relevancy questioned we need to get that spark out there – not just in university, not just in books. So when Pink asks ‘where have the smart people gone?’ we can answer “we are here – you are here”.
We cannot be afraid of FaceBook, MySpace, Instant Messaging and the mobile phone. But we also need to recognize that these can be isolating forms of communication. Your FaceBook friends are people you already know, and the people on MySpace are generally anonymous.
We, as older feminists, must take our knowledge and experience and find real and creative ways to share it. Feminism didn’t just happen all on its own, and we can’t expect it to keep going all on its own. We need to give what we can, when we can… we have different things to give at different times and that’s okay. We need to be welcoming.
The future of feminism is what we will make it.
So what of the future? I for one know that I will wake-up tomorrow still out-raged:
- that cunt is the worst possible word imaginable, yet you can say dick and cock much as you like and not get censured;
- that my newspaper will have pages and pages of men’s sport – as it did today, as it did yesterday – with only a token mention of female athletes;
- that a female minister is criticised for not being up to the job after adding to her brood, yet no-one questions male political leaders based on the size of their families;
- that there are federal government restrictions on the use of our international aid funds so they can’t be used to provide access to reproductive choice through safe abortions in those countries we support. Also we can’t provide information, education, communication and post care related to the unsafe abortions that then take place;
- that Australia is one of only two OECD countries without a global paid maternity scheme;
- that same sex couples are still considered legally different to non-same sex couples; and
- that the average life span of young indigenous person born today is 16 years less than that of a non-indigenous baby.
I will take my outrage and work with you to turn it into joy. We will take the tools we have at hand: organisations like the Women’s Electoral Lobby; our sisters of all ages; and the internet – and we will use them.
We will continue to work to make sure that we do reach that reality where the world rises to the challenge of feminism and embraces us all.
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